Peanut butter and jelly. Batman and Robin. Eggs and ham. You’ve probably heard of these famous pairs (or, in some cases, noshed on them), but for inbound marketers, there’s one pair in particular that goes hand-in-hand: content and marketing.

Ninety-one percent of business-to-business (B2B) professionals use content marketing as part of their strategy. Still, that doesn’t mean all the content they create is top-notch, compelling, or valuable content.

But what does it take to become a good content creator? How do I become one that peers in my industry would look to for advice and opinions?

It all starts with what you do before you put your fingers to a keyboard.

Whether you work on a content marketing team at your company or you’re riding solo, there are some tried-and-true habits you can adopt that will put you on the path to being a truly successful content creator.

Fair warning: Like all good things, it’s not going to happen overnight. And it shouldn’t, because you’re trying to get good at it, not just simply do it. But the sooner you start working these five habits into your routine, the sooner you’ll be well on your way to becoming a high-quality content creator.

1. Read news about your industry every day.

Creating great content that really resonates with your target audience requires you to know what’s going on in your industry. And the best content creators scour — not just read, but scour — the internet for industry news and trends. This sets them up nicely to understand the context behind what’s happened historically in their industry and how that shapes their target audience’s mindset in the present.

Get in the habit of reading by putting everything you read in one place. You can set up an RSS feed with an app like Feedly for blogs you know that contain relevant industry news. Also, ask a few colleagues what they’re reading these days and follow suit. Discover where your buyer persona spends time online and snag those blogs, too. Ahead of the game and have a few favorites already? Add ’em to the list.

2. Write on the regular.

If you don’t use it, you lose it. Successful content creators understand the importance of constantly flexing their writing muscles. Doing so helps them work through ideas that might be jumbled in their head and identify nuggets that could turn into fully realized ideas later. Successful content creators may not always be inspired to write, but they know something inspiring can come from their writing.

Get in the habit of writing by doing it daily or every other day. I’m not saying you need to write a polished, 1500-word essay on an industry-relevant topic daily. Rather, I’m talking about setting aside 10 or 15 minutes to jot down some thoughts and ideas. Figure out when your mind is the clearest — for most people, that’s after or during a cup of coffee — and just free-form write. What did you read yesterday that stuck with you? What didn’t you understand? Asking yourself those questions should start the flow.

3. Study your industry’s audience.

One of the hardest pills to swallow as a creative professional is that you are at the mercy of your audience — and the needs of that audience can sap your creativity.

But, at the end of the day, your audience pays your bills. And if you study your audience deeply enough, you’ll find interests and creative opportunities you wouldn’t have found without them.

The third quality of all successful content creators: They know their audience inside and out. Examine your own readers and viewers: What do they want that you’re not yet giving them? What problems do they have that you can solve for them? Here are some other characteristics of your audience you can identify for yourself or for your employer:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Family size
• Job title
• Salary

4. Establish your own voice.

Quick reality check: You’re not the only content creator in your industry. That means you’re not the only one offering the advice, observations, and thought leadership your industry is asking for. There are lots of things you can do to stand out from the other content creators in your field: diversifying into a new content medium, promoting your content on different channels, and naturally gaining experience and trust over time. But even then, the content producers with whom you’re competing for attention are doing the same thing.

What you can bring to your content, that nobody else can, is your own personal voice.

Readers click on your content for the information, but they come back for the personality. Writing about cybersecurity? Don’t just offer fresh insight on today’s malware; offer analogies and personal stories of data breaches that justify your insights and that only you can offer. The brand you write for might restrict you from opinionated or overly informal content, but that doesn’t mean you can’t indulge in the unique perspective that inspired you to join this business in the first place.

Learn how to blend your employer’s content guidelines with your own creativity, and you’ll become a much more valuable content creator in the long run.

5. Curate other people’s content (when it makes sense to).

here’s no shortage of people curating content these days. In fact, anyone on the internet can take someone else’s content and retweet it, share it on Facebook, pin it — the list goes on. But successful content creators know it’s not enough to take relevant industry news and spit it back out to your fans and followers.

“You must also position yourself as an expert and genuinely interact with your communities,” says Guy Kawasaki, the New York Times best-selling author. Sharing content isn’t enough. Engaging with the content you’re sharing now makes it unique to you.

Get in the habit of curating content when you have something valuable to add. Now that you’ve started scouring the internet on a regular basis for industry news, you probably have a wider depth of knowledge than you think. So be confident, and give your readers additional, useful information or even a thought or opinion when sharing others’ content. Your networks will appreciate it, and the author probably will too (or it could at least spark a debate — bonus!).

6. Understand your KPIs.

The internet is a big place (obviously). In fact, it’s safe to say it’s too big for your content to be discovered by your audience all by itself. In 2018, 61% of professionals stated that generating traffic and leads was their top marketing challenge.

Just because you publish content online doesn’t mean you’ll get the traffic your insight deserves. To get your content discovered, you first need to focus in on a key performance indicator (KPI), and optimize your content for it. A KPI is a specific metric you’ve chosen to measure how well your content is doing against your expectations. Modern KPIs include:

• Social media traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content from a social media post.
• Direct traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content by entering your website’s URL directly into their browser’s address bar.
• Organic traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content from a search engine result link.
• Submissions, the number of people who visit your website and leave having submitted their contact information in exchange for a resource you offered them (a form of lead generation).

If you or your employer chooses to focus on organic traffic, for example, it’s a good idea to study Google’s search algorithm to find out how it ranks content. Then, optimize your content so that it performs well under the organic traffic KPI. The more knowledge you have of the KPIs available to content creators now, the more successful you’ll be as a marketer.

7. Network at every opportunity.

Successful content creators know their success is due not only to their passion, but also to those who taught them, inspired them, and pushed them to think in different ways.

This is one way content creators grow into successful content creators. They’ve accepted the fact there’s more to learn than what they already know, and they’re open to new ways of thinking. Networking forces you to do just that. It’s a time to listen to others’ ideas and take them into consideration alongside your own.

Get in the habit of networking by seizing the countless opportunities you have to do it. They aren’t called social networks for nothing! Spend some time on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to check out who the thought leaders are in your industry and follow them.

Once you do that, you can ease into in-person networking. If you’re not a natural extrovert, the thought of networking can make you cringe. Make it easy on yourself and start small with colleagues. You already have something in common, so striking up a conversation in the kitchen or at your desks shouldn’t be too scary.

8. Offer solutions, not just commentary.

When you’re just getting started as a content creator, you might already have the knowledge your market is looking for. For successful content creators, however, expertise isn’t everything.

Want your audience to remember your content? Don’t just recite the things you know — explain why they’re important and what your audience can take away from it. The people consuming your content aren’t interested in just hearing you talk. They come looking to satisfy specific needs. Whether those needs are to solve a problem to simply increase their confidence in your industry, it’s your job to put your market observations into terms they can understand and find lessons in.

9. Question everything.

Polished content creators are curious by nature. They’ve learned to be curious about the internal knowledge they already have and the external information that’s being promoted out in the world. It’s the insights that come from this inherent curiosity that makes great content.

“You need to be curious to identify problems worth solving,” says Lorraine Twohill, head of marketing at Google, “and then come up with new solutions.” It’s these proposed solutions to age-old problems that gets content creators on the radar.

Get in the habit of questioning the status quo by constantly playing devil’s advocate. Taking the contrarian view of a piece of content can be difficult at first, but if you start to question why the author thinks this way and what happened in the industry that triggered this viewpoint, you’ll begin to think more critically about the content you’re consuming. And if you didn’t know, critical thinkers make great content creators.

There’s a lot of pressure on content creators — and every inbound marketer, for that matter — to churn out great content as part of their marketing strategy. Just know that being a successful content creator starts with the habits you form, as they’ll set you up to produce some seriously valuable content for your target audience.

As recently as a decade ago, inbound marketing was a brand new idea. Marketers were learning that they couldn’t just publish a high volume of content — it also had to be high-quality and optimized in ways that made it as discoverable as possible through search engines.

That content was once largely limited to the written word. Today, that’s no longer the case.

Today, a comprehensive content strategy includes written work like blogs and ebooks, as well as media like podcasts, visual assets, and videos.

That last part — video — continues to be on the rise. According to the 2018 State of Inbound report, 45% of marketers are investing more in YouTube over the course of this year — more than any other marketing channel available to them.

And with the rise of other content formats comes the need to optimize them for search. One increasingly important place to do that is on YouTube, a video distribution website used by the masses — HubSpot included.

But how does YouTube SEO work? What are the steps you need to take to optimize your YouTube channel for search? We’ve outlined some major tips and tools below.

1. Rename your video file using a target keyword.

Just like you would when optimizing written content, you’ll use an SEO tool to first identify keywords you’d like your video to focus on (you can browse popular YouTube SEO tools below these tips, or just click that link earlier in this sentence).

With a keyword identified, the first place you should put it is your video file — before you even upload it to YouTube. Why? YouTube can’t actually “watch” your video to see how relevant it is to your target keyword, and as you’ll learn in the tips below, there are only so many places you can safely insert this keyword on your video’s viewing page once it’s published. But, YouTube can read your video’s file name and all the code that comes with it when it’s uploaded.

With that in mind, replace the “business_ad_003FINAL.mov” file name (don’t be embarrassed … we’ve all been there during post-production) with your desired keyword. If your keyword is “house painting tips,” for example, your video’s file name should be “house-painting-tips” followed by your preferred video file type (MOV, MP4, and WMV are some of the most common that are compatible with YouTube).

2. Insert your keyword naturally in the video title.

When we search for videos, one of the first things that our eyes are drawn to is the title. That’s often what determines whether or not the viewer will click to watch your video, so the title should not only be compelling, but also clear and concise.

Although your keyword plays a big part in your video title, it also helps if the title closely matches what the viewer is searching for. Research conducted by Backlinko found that videos with an exact keyword match in the title have only a slight advantage over those that don’t. Here’s a linear representation of those findings:

Source: Backlinko

So, while “using your target keyword in your title may help you rank for that term,” report author Brian Dean explains, “the relationship between keyword-rich video titles and rankings” isn’t always a strong one. Nonetheless, it’s a good idea to optimize your title for this keyword so long as it fits naturally into a title that tells viewers exactly what they’re about to see.

Lastly, make sure to keep your title fairly short — HubSpot campaigns manager Alicia Collins recommends limiting it to 60 characters to help keep it from getting cut off in results pages.

3. Optimize your video description.

First things first: According to Google, the official character limit for YouTube video descriptions is 1,000 characters. And while it’s okay to use all of that space, remember that your viewer most likely came here to watch a video, not to read an essay.

If you do choose to write a longer description, keep in mind that YouTube only displays the first two or three lines of text — that amounts to about 100 characters. After that point, viewers have to click “show more” to see the full description. That’s why we suggest front-loading the description with the most important information, like CTAs or crucial links.

As for optimizing the video itself, it doesn’t hurt to add a transcript of the video, especially for those who have to watch it without volume. That said, Backlinko’s research also found no correlation between descriptions that were optimized for a certain keyword and the rankings for that term.

Source: Backlinko

Dean is careful not to encourage ditching an optimized description altogether, though. “An optimized description helps you show up in the suggested videos sidebar,” he writes, “which is a significant source of views for most channels.”

4. Tag your video with popular keywords that relate to your topic.

YouTube’s official Creator Academy suggests using tags to let viewers know what your video is about. But you’re not just informing your viewers — you’re also informing YouTube itself. Dean explains that the platform uses tags “to understand the content and context of your video.”

That way, YouTube figures out how to associate your video with similar videos, which can broaden your content’s reach. But choose your tags wisely. Don’t use an irrelevant tag because you think it’ll get you more views — in fact, Google might penalize you for that. And similar to your description, lead with the most important keywords, including a good mix of those that are common and more long-tail (as in, those that answer a question like “how do I?”).

5. Categorize your video.

Once you upload a video, you can categorize it under “Advanced settings.” Choosing a category is another way to group your video with similar content on YouTube so it winds up in different playlists and gains exposure to more viewers who identify with your audience.

It might not be as simple as it looks. In fact, YouTube’s Creator Academy suggests marketers go through a comprehensive process to determine which category each video belongs in. It’s helpful, the guide writes, “to think about what is working well for each category” you’re considering by answering questions like:

• Who are the top creators within the category? What are they known for and what do they do well?
• Are there any patterns between the audiences of similar channels within a given category?
• Do the videos within a similar category have share qualities like production value, length, or format?

6. Upload a custom thumbnail image for your video’s result link.

Your video thumbnail is the main image viewers see when scrolling through a list of video results. Along with the video’s title, that thumbnail sends a signal to the viewer about the video’s content, so it can impact the number of clicks and views your video receives.

While you can always pick one of the thumbnail options auto-generated by YouTube, we highly recommend uploading a custom thumbnail. The Creator Academy reports that “90% of the best performing videos on YouTube have custom thumbnails,” recommending the use of images that are 1280×720 pixels — representing a 16:9 ratio — that are saved as 2MB or smaller .jpg, .gif, .bmp, or .png files. If you follow those parameters, it can help to ensure that your thumbnail appears with equally high quality across multiple viewing platforms.

It’s important to note that your YouTube account has to be verified in order to upload a custom thumbnail image. To do that, visit youtube.com/verify and follow the instructions listed there.

7. Use an SRT File to add subtitles & closed captions.

Like much of the other text we’ve discussed here, subtitles and closed captions can boost YouTube search optimization by highlighting important keywords.

In order to add subtitles or closed captions to your video, you’ll have to upload a supported text transcript or timed subtitles file. For the former, you can also directly enter transcript text for a video so that it auto-syncs with the video.

Adding subtitles follows a similar process, however, you can limit the amount of text you want displayed. For either, head to your video manager then click on “Videos” under “Video Manager.” Find the video you want to add subtitles or closed captioning to, and click the drop-down arrow next to the edit button. Then, choose “Subtitles/CC.” You can then select how you’d like to add subtitles or closed captioning.

Find out how to add closed captions to your YouTube video in the video below.

8. Add Cards and End Screens to increase your YouTube channel’s viewership.

Cards

When you’re watching a video, have you ever seen a small white, circular icon with an “i” in the center appear in the corner, or a translucent bar of text asking you to subscribe? Those are Cards, which Creator Academy describes as “preformatted notifications that appear on desktop and mobile which you can set up to promote your brand and other videos on your channel.”

Source: Google

You can add up to five cards to a single video, and there are six types:

1. Channel cards that direct viewers to another channel.
2. Donation cards to encourage fundraising on behalf of U.S. nonprofit organizations.
3. Fan funding to ask your viewers to help support the creation of your video content.
4. Link cards, which direct viewers to an external site, approved crowdfunding platform, or an approved merchandise selling platform.
5. Poll cards, which pose a question to viewers and allow them to vote for a response.
6. Video or playlist cards, which link to other YouTube content of this kind.

For detailed steps on adding a card to your video, follow these official steps from Google, or check out the video below.

End Screens

End screens display similar information as cards, but as you may have guessed, they don’t display until a video is over, and are a bit more visually detailed in nature. A good example is the overlay with a book image and a visual link to view more on the video below:

Source: Jamie Oliver on YouTube

There are a number of detailed instructions for adding end screens depending on what kind of platform you want to design them for, as well as different types of content allowed for them by YouTube. Google outlines the details for how to optimize for all of those considerations here.

It’s important to note that YouTube is always testing end screens to try to optimize the viewer experience, so there are times when “your end screen, as designated by you, may not appear.” Take these factors into account as you decide between using either cards or end screens.

These factors may seem a bit complicated and time-consuming, but remember: The time people spend watching YouTube on their TV has more than doubled year over year. There’s an audience to be discovered there, and when you optimize for YouTube, your chances of being discovered increase.

Now, most of the SEO tips above rely on you identifying a keyword and promoting your video correctly. And not all of those tips can be carried out through YouTube alone. To get the most bang for your videography buck, consider some of the tools below to optimize your video for search.

1. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO platform that allows you to monitor a website’s ranking, estimate the organic traffic you’d get from each keyword, and research keywords for which you might want to create new content.

One popular feature of Ahrefs is Keywords Explorer, which allows you to look up numerous details related to a keyword you’re interested in. And as you can see in the screenshot above, you can filter your keyword results by search engine — including YouTube.

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer gives you a keyword’s monthly search volume, how many clicks received by videos ranking for that keyword, related keywords, and more.

2. Canva

You might know Canva as a design template for creating all kinds of cards, photos, logos, and more. It just so happens this popular product has a Thumbnail Creator just for YouTube videos.

As stated in the tips above, thumbnail images are critical to promoting your content in YouTube search results and enticing users to click on your video. Using Canva’s Thumbnail Creator, you can create the perfect preview image for your video in 1280 x 720 pixels — the thumbnail dimensions YouTube requires.

3. HubSpot Content Strategy

Our content strategy tool, developed here at HubSpot, allows you to find popular keywords for which to create content and then organize these keywords into groupings — what we call “topic clusters.” By sorting your content into topic clusters, you can oversee which pieces of content are related to one another, which types of content you have planned, and what you’ve already created.

While the keywords you discover in HubSpot reflect their popularity in a standard Google search, many of these topics will also produce videos on Google’s search engine results pages. In those cases, you can create topic clusters that have both blog and YouTube content belonging to them.

Clustering your content — and linking from videos to blog posts, and vice-versa — can give you more authority in the eyes of Google and YouTube, while giving you more ways to capture traffic from the people searching your topic.

4. vidIQ Vision

This is a Chrome extension, available through Chrome’s web store in the link above, that helps you analyze how and why certain YouTube videos perform so well. This includes the tags a video has been optimized for, its average watch time, and even how quickly that video might be gaining traffic.

The vidIQ tool then provides an SEO “score” you can use to create content that performs (or outperforms) the results you already see on YouTube.

5. TubeBuddy

TubeBuddy is an all-in-one video platform that helps you manage the production, optimization, and promotion of your YouTube content. Its features include an automatic language translator (which helps you rank for non-English keywords), a keyword explorer, tag suggestions, a rank tracker for your published videos, and more.

6. Cyfe

Cyfe is a large software suite that offers, among other things, a web analytics platform. On this platform, you can track page performance across every website property you have content on — including YouTube — and where each page’s traffic is coming from.

In addition to traffic analytics, Cyfe can show you which keywords you’re ranking for and which ones are most popular across various search engines. Sounds a lot like Google Analytics or Moz, right? That’s because Cyfe has data from both of those tools, and more, built into it.

No matter what SEO tip or tool you start with, a successful YouTube channel begins with good content. Make sure your viewers have something high-quality and relevant to watch when they find you. Want step-by-step help? Download our free guide on YouTube for Business below.

Choosing a new place to live can be tricky. Whether you’re a new college graduate, buying your first house, or just short on cash, affordability is crucial when considering a location.

Luckily, not everywhere in the United States is experiencing skyrocketing rent prices. Cities and states across the country are incentivizing incoming residents with everything from discounted rent and forgivable home loans to free college tuition.

Here are the amazing communities that will pay you to live there.

1. Vermont

Details: A new policy is designed to help fill the state’s open jobs by giving people an incentive to relocate. If you move to Vermont after January 1, 2020, the program will pay as much as $5,000 in some areas, like Burlington, that have larger populations, and as much as $7,500 in most other smaller towns. It’s a variation on another program, launched earlier this year, that reimburses remote workers up to $10,000 when they move to the state.

Number of Open Jobs: 12,806

Companies Hiring: Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital, Piedmont Airlines, HCRS, Marathon Health, State of Vermont, BioTek Instruments, Edward Jones & more.

2. New Haven, Connecticut

Details: The city’s Re:New Haven program is making New Haven look like your new home. The city offers up to $10,000 in interest-free loans to new homeowners in the area, along with $30,000 to make energy-saving upgrades. The deals don’t stop there: if you live in the house for a long enough period, the loans are 100% forgivable. New Haven also attracts new residents with families by promising to cover in-state college tuition for students who graduate from New Haven public schools.

Number of Open Jobs: 5,053

Companies Hiring: T-Mobile, Edward Jones, Great Clips, Intuit, Synagro & more.

3. Harmony, Minnesota

Details: Harmony, Minnesota lives up to its name with its residential home construction rebate. The city offers residents interested in building new homes up to $12,000 in cash rebates, depending on the estimated market value of the house, to encourage construction. And participants in the program won’t run into a bunch of red tape – there are no restrictions on age, income level or residency. Time to break out the blueprints for your dream home!

Number of Open Jobs: 665

Companies Hiring: Kwik Trip, American Consumer Panels, Cadence Design Systems, Platinum Supplemental Insurance, C.R. England & more.

4. Maine

Details: Are you still paying off your student loans? Decrease your debt while decreasing your taxes by moving to Maine. Through the Opportunity Maine Tax Credit, the state helps workers who are recent college graduates by subtracting the amount an individual pays in student loans from what they owe in state income tax. For example, if you owe $2,000 in state taxes, and pay off $1,800 in student loans, then you’ll only have $200 in taxes.  

Number of Open Jobs: 20,284

Companies Hiring: Apple, Great Schools Partnership, WTB Law, Shipt, Fastaff & more.

5. Tulsa, Oklahoma

Details: Calling all remote workers! Tulsa, Oklahoma is incentivizing employees to move to the city through the Tulsa Remote program. Participants can access furnished housing with discounted rent and free utilities for the first three months. When they’re on the clock, workers can take advantage of coworking spaces (snacks included!) as well as networking and workshop opportunities. We haven’t even gotten to the biggest perk: individuals who stay in the program for one year are eligible to receive a $10,000 cash stipend.

Number of Open Jobs: 13,101

Companies Hiring: CBRE, 360 Payments, ConsumerAffairs, Macy’s, Midfirst Bank, Massage Envy & more.

6. Curtis, Nebraska

Details: You’re probably planning in the future to buy a house. But what if you could be a homeowner and a landowner? Nebraska’s “Easter City” is offering free plots of land to newcomers where they can construct a single-family homes. And the land isn’t in the middle of nowhere – all plots are already located on paved streets with access to utilities.

Number of Open Jobs: 27

Companies Hiring: UPS, BSB Construction, Acosta, Crete Carrier Corporation, H&M Trucking & more.

7. St. Clair, Michigan

Details: You may have received scholarships from your hometown in order to go to college. But what if a city paid you to move back after graduation? St. Clair is attracting recent grads by providing up to $15,000 in student loan repayments to newcomers. The “come home” award is available for future residents with degrees in science, technology, engineering, arts or math. Talk about an unforgettable welcome home!

Number of Open Jobs: 3,103

Companies Hiring: L&W Supply, Morrison Healthcare, Kohl’s, Super Service, Triumph Group & more.

8. Baltimore, Maryland

Details: Baltimore is eliminating property abandonment by making it easier for you to become a homeowner. The city is encouraging buyers to invest in homesthat have been marked vacant for one year or more through the Vacants to Value Booster incentive. The program contributes $10,000 loans to the downpayment and closing costs of distressed and formerly distressed properties. The best part? The loans are forgivable over a five year period.

Number of Open Jobs: 78,323

Companies Hiring: Bank of America, Baltimore City Health Department, Medifast, VIPKID International, Target & more.

This article was originally published on Glassdoor, one of the world’s largest job and recruiting sites. Glassdoor combines all the jobs with valuable data to make it easy for people to find a job that fits their life, while also helping employers hire quality talent at scale. Are you hiring? Post jobs for free with a 7-day trial.

According to HubSpot’s social media team, the video-based social app TikTok is “leaking” with brand opportunities.

The one-year-old platform, which allows users to make short, looping videos with special effects and musical overlays, is booming with more than 500 million monthly active users — most of them young= adults.

While Gen-Z has begun using the platform to show their creative side, some brands are also beginning to experiment. But, because TikTok is still such a young app, many marketers might be wondering, “Is getting on this app even worth it?”

This question is understandable, considering that TikTok only recently launched an advertising process and hyperlinking capabilities for brands.

However, TikTok’s current big brands have done a great job of using it for brand awareness rather than generating traffic or leads. They’re also using it to engage younger audiences and show off a lighter side of themselves through funny videos, challenges, and other strategies that you’d only see on the platform specifically.

Since TikTok is so quirky by nature, brands need to be creative to truly gain attention from their audience. A simple ad or sponsored influencer endorsement might not cut it on this creative and fast-paced app.

While it’s too early to create a list of best practices around TikTok marketing, it’s a great time to start getting inspired by the brands who’ve already thought outside the box and succeeded on the app.

In this post, we’ll discuss seven companies and organizations that have already gone viral or achieved success on TikTok. We’ll also offer takeaways that even smaller companies can use to build a scalable, fun, and creative strategy.

Chipotle

Chipotle, a popular Mexican restaurant chain, has over 55,000 fans on TikTok. They publish a variety of posts that use music, memes, and other references to highlight menu items. Here are two examples:

Here, to celebrate #oneyearofTikTok, a video shows tortilla chips propped around a bowl of guac with the Adele song, “Someone Like You” overlaying the clip. Because the sound bite features Adele’s audience singing back to her, it feels like the chips are actually singing to the guac.

This is a funny way to work a well-known song into a video that creatively shows off menu items.

In this next video, posted on National Avocado Day, Chipotle nails a popular meme reference by posting The Guacamole Song’s music video with the caption, “TFW guac is free. Online/in-app only 7/31 #GuacDance Terms: chip.tl/avoday.”

Not only was the video fitting for the meme-friendly app, but it also sparked a viral #GuacDance Challenge. In just a week, it became the highest-performing branded challenge on TikTok to date.

As part of the challenge, people posted videos of themselves dancing with avocados. Here’s just one:

Although the original video is a pretty obvious plug for free guacamole, the content feels perfect for TikTok because it is musical, silly, and embraces pop culture. This is a great example of how a brand can use a beloved song or reference to promote their own product.

While it can be hard to get a challenge to go viral, posting or encouraging one — especially if it involves one of your products — can help your company spread brand awareness. It also allows you to engage with potential new fans in an interesting way.

People who didn’t know much about the restaurant deals or menu might follow this challenge, participate in it, and learn more about the brand indirectly in the process. If you need a creative way to spread brand awareness quickly, taking a note from Chipotle, and starting a challenge on any social media platform might be a great experiment.

NBA

With a whopping 5.1 million fans, the NBA’s account mixes game highlights with music montages and inspirational quotes.

Unlike its Instagram channel, which focuses purely on basketball games and highlights, the NBA’s TikTok posts show a lighter side of the organization. For example, they’ll often post videos of players working out dramatically to music, dancing on the court, or adventures of team mascots.

In this video, the NBA shows off a highlight reel of a gorilla mascot doing tricks and slam dunks:

Occasionally the NBA will post motivational posts, like this one where basketball player RJ Barrett talks about being drafted by the New York Knicks:

While you might expect the NBA to focus more seriously on stats and games, it uses the app’s musical features to lighten up the branding and make its athletes look more relatable. While the videos still promote basketball, they also fit in well with other funny or musical posts on TikTok feeds.

When a brand or company shows off a more personal side, audiences might start to relate to it a bit more. Even if a viewer isn’t a basketball fan, they might still consider following NBA players or rooting for certain teams if they saw a funny or motivational video about them.

In other business settings, making your brand feel more personal can have the same effect. For example, if your restaurant’s TikTok account posts funny videos of waiters dancing, viewers might think the restaurant has a pleasant and happy staff. This might make them want to eat there because they think they’ll have a dining experience with a fun waiter and positive vibes.

United Nations IFAD

When you think of how agriculture or government groups market themselves, the last place you’d expect them to be is on an app like TikTok.

But the United Nations’ IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) is challenging that misconception with its fascinating account.

The group, which aims to fight world hunger by promoting rural agriculture, is using TikTok to spread awareness of their cause to new audiences. While most accounts on this list are using humor to engage fans, IFAD has taken an approach that embraces informative posts and motivational videos that optimistically encourage viewers to change the world.

In the more informative posts, IFAD publishes high-quality short films of people farming around the world. This allows viewers to learn how agriculture works and why supporting it might solve world hunger.

Recently, IFAD got creative by launching the #danceforchange challenge. As part of the challenge, the organization encouraged audiences to film themselves dancing while using the #danceforchange hashtag in captions.

Here’s the post that IFAD published to launch the challenge:

This is a great example of how getting creative can help you or your brand spread awareness about dryer topics, like agriculture or world hunger. Although the organization is trying to spread knowledge about a serious topic, it uses beautifully shot videos, peppy music, and challenges to engage, motivate, and entertain audiences at the same time.

Looking at IFAD’s strategy could be helpful for companies or organizations with a serious mission, like those in government, legal, or financial industries. While it might feel inappropriate or unnatural to make funny videos about a tough topic.

You can take a more informative route, like IFAD, by filming short narratives or starting a challenge that encourages people to learn about something related to your mission.

The Washington Post

The Washington Post was one of TikTok’s earliest brand adopters. Those who haven’t seen their videos, but follow them on other social networks, might be anticipating investigative or serious content. But in reality, The Washington Post operates differently on TikTok.

Surprisingly, the newspaper actually uses its account to post comedic behind-the-scenes videos and skits about the newsroom. These videos fit in perfectly with the platform because they;re funny, musical, and embrace some of TikTok’s weirdest special effects.

Here’s one great example where the news team discusses The Bachelorette instead of the Democratic Debates:

While this account is far from a breaking news page, posts occasionally infuse news and quotes into their videos. Here’s an example where they hilariously highlight a slip up made by Sen. Kamala Harris during a recent debate:

The Washington Post displays how brands can succeed on a given social platform by talking directly to its specific audience.

The prestigious newspaper is not trying to pose itself as that on the platform. Most people already know and respect the publication. Its marketers are also not trying to post investigative videos that might be more interesting for older crowds.

Instead, the team is tailoring content to the young viewers who want to laugh and be entertained.

And although they post edgy content, it isn’t totally off-brand. Their posts are still pleasant, appropriately funny, and show you the real people behind the hard journalism.

Young viewers might see these cheeky videos and trust the journalists in them because they seem like relatable people. For that reason, fans might go to The Washington Post as a trusted news source when they want to read something written by sources they identify with.

Because The Post has a long history of groundbreaking, award-winning, and intellectual journalism, this humble and comedic social media approach might also attract young readers who want to follow the news but used to worry that content from a newspaper would be too advanced or out of touch for them.

If your brand is in publishing, academia, or similar industries, testing out a video strategy that shows off your lighter side could be an interesting experiment. It might make your content and brand feel less intimidating and help you gain attention from newer audiences.

Guess

While Guess only has 35,000 fans and just three posts, the high-fashion company is included on this list because they were the first to launch a challenge on TikTok.

Shortly after the app launched, TikTok partnered with Guess for the #InMyDenim challenge, which encouraged users to film themselves in interesting places while wearing Guess’ new denim line. They also had to overlay Bebe Rexha’s “I’m A Mess.”

This is was the first branded challenge to go viral on TikTok. Here’s a clip of one of the responses:

While they haven’t done much experimentation with videos, Guess demonstrated how a challenge on a highly-visual platform like TikTok could quickly spread product-based awareness.

A challenge like this, that directly shows off clothing worn by real people, could also entice customers who might see an outfit and want to buy it for themselves.

This is a strategy that could easily be used by other fashion companies or businesses that sell visually interesting products.

For example, say an ecommerce company wants to sell a new line of spinning chairs. It might launch a challenge called “#SpinnyChairChallenge” where participants have to spin in one of the brand’s chairs to a specific song.

People who watch these videos might want to learn more about a brand that started such an odd challenge, or they might see the chairs and want to buy one for their office.

San Diego Zoo

Everyone loves a cute animal video once in a while. And the San Diego Zoo’s TikTok account pleasantly takes advantage of this well-known fact.

The zoo’s strategy is simple: Post videos of cute animals with fun music. And with over 50,000 fans, it seems to be working. How could anyone not want to follow them after seeing this video of a lounging meerkat?

If that cuteness wasn’t enough, the zoo has also dueted with other animal-friendly accounts, like the Monterey Aquarium:

Not only is this appealing to penguin lovers, but it’s also a great example of how two similar brands can cross-promote using TikTok features. Because of the zoo’s tagging strategy, this video might be seen by fans of the aquarium and the zoo. This way, zoo followers might gain more interest in the aquarium and vice versa.

Sometimes, your brand might be a perfect fit for a new social media app. When that happens, it can be important to get yourself on it and start experimenting. The San Diego Zoo is a great example of a brand that quickly identified a fitting platform and fully embraced it. At the end of the day, this can be much more productive than spending valuable time on platforms that make no sense for your industry or fan-base.

NBC’s Stay Tuned

Stay Tuned was originally an NBC-produced Snapchat news show targeted at Gen-Z. After gaining success on that platform, the network started making content for TikTok. The account, which has nearly one million fans, offers a mix of behind-the-scenes videos and quick news bites that touch on weird events and pop culture.

In this example, they report on a survey of the top fast-food chains:

In another post, a Stay Tuned host does a good job of explaining complicated AI news in a short amount of time:

Like The Washington Post, Stay Tuned creates content that is much lighter than NBC News’ usual journalistic work. When they report on stories, their videos are quickly paced, well-edited and focused on stories that might seem more interesting to the younger audiences on the app.

Although Stay Tuned has had huge success on Snapchat, they aren’t repurposing content or putting similar content on both channels. The news team tailors each piece of content to the app it will be published on.

While smaller companies may need to repurpose content to save resources, Stay Tuned demonstrates how creating specific content for different platforms can give you big wins for brand awareness and engagement.

Because they’ve done so well at curating and tailoring news stories for emerging platforms, Stay Tuned’s strategy might be helpful to publishers, entertainers, bloggers, or academics who are looking to post about news, studies, or other interesting topics on different platforms.

Tips for Brands on TikTok

While it might be challenging to get your content to go viral like the bigger brands, TikTok could be a great tool for getting into sync with younger audiences. And since the app is so new, you can pretty much experiment with any strategy you want to see if it works.

If you think TikTok might be part of your marketing strategy soon or in the future, now would be a great time to get ahead of your competitors by downloading the app and investigating what similar brands or potential audiences are doing there.

If you’re raring to go on a TikTok strategy, here are a few tips and takeaways that we’ve gained from looking at the brands who have already done well on the app.

• Show a different side of your company. The app is a hub for creativity and humor. Embracing a more personal tone or a behind-the-scenes approach could make your company appear more relatable or trustworthy to potential customers.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment. As mentioned above, the app is incredibly new. Unlike platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, there aren’t as many norms, best practices, or rules about what works and what doesn’t. If you think something might be interesting or funny, try it and see if it gets any likes, comments, or shares.
• Engage with your audience. Between challenges, duets, likes, comments, and shares, there are plenty of ways to engage with other TikTok users — even if you don’t know them. Try to come up with videos, challenges, or duets that aim to interact with others. As with other platforms, the more you engage with people, the more your fan base could grow.

Even if you aren’t interested in TikTok right now, we highly recommend checking out the app. Although it might be too niche for you right now, its branded videos could help your brainstorm content ideas for your current social platforms, or give you insight on how other companies are experimenting with new platforms.

If you want to learn more about TikTok, check out this how-to guide or read about its backstory here. Interested in researching other new social platforms? We’ve also got a great guide for that.

Welcome to The Science Behind Success — a blog series that explores the best ways to help our brains perform better at work. With psychological research and interviews with leaders in the field, we’re showing you how psychology can help you overcome workplace obstacles and excel in your career. Because a little mindset change could go a long way.

Let’s start with a seemingly easy question — why do some workplace teams perform better than others?

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably thinking, “A good team consists of people who feel their work is purposeful, and are motivated by similar rewards.”

Alternatively, perhaps you’re thinking, “A good team consists of people who are, simply put, good at their jobs.“

In 2012, to answer this very question, Google launched an initiative known as “Project Aristotle”. They gathered Google’s top organizational psychologists, statisticians, and engineers, and asked them to study hundreds of teams at Google to figure out why some teams did remarkably better than others.

They considered the question from every angle — were the best teams made up of people with similar interests, motivations, or personalities? Or, maybe the best teams were a mix of introverts and extraverts? Alternatively, perhaps the best teams were simply a collection of people with the most impressive educational backgrounds?

Ultimately, Google found one norm was more critical than anything else for making a team work: a concept known as “psychological safety”.

You might’ve heard this term before. A simple Google search of “psychological safety” yields results from major publications, including The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.

However, it’s relatively new rise in popularity is credited, in part, to Amy Edmondson, who coined the term in her 1999 research study on workplace teams.

Here, I sat down with Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School and author of the new book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, to learn more about why psychological safety matters for business innovation, the risks involved in not having psychological safety, and how teams can increase psychological safety in their own workplaces, today.

But first, let’s explore how Edmondson discovered psychological safety in the first place.

Edmondson’s Accidental Encounter with Psychological Safety

In the mid-1990s, as a first-year doctoral student, Amy Edmondson set out to investigate whether high-performing medical teams made more or fewer mistakes than low-performing teams.

To conduct her research, Edmondson collected survey data to indicate whether teams were high-performing or low-performing, and then compared that data to statistics on which teams made the most mistakes. Simple, right?

However, when she put the data side-by-side, she noticed something puzzling: her highest-performing teams weren’t make the fewest mistakes, they were making the most.

How could that be possible?

Why were the best hospital teams messing up consistently, while the less powerful teams were making considerably less errors?

In her book, Edmondson describes one moment as a ‘eureka’ moment. “What if the better teams had a climate of openness,” she writes, “that made it easier to report and discuss error? The good teams, I suddenly thought, don’t make more mistakes; they report more.”

Since her initial findings, Edmondson has studied psychological safety across numerous companies, organizations, hospitals, and even government agencies. She’s a Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, and her TED Talk, “Building a psychologically safe workplace” has been watched over 350,000 times.

Before diving into my interview with Edmondson, it’s critical to note — psychological safety isn’t equivalent with kindness, as I’d originally suspected.

For instance, you might feel like your coworkers are incredibly nice to you. They ask about your weekend, remember your birthday, and even invite you for after-work drinks.

And yet, at meetings, maybe you still find it difficult to speak up. Perhaps you’re nervous you’ll look stupid or you’ve seen how closed-off your manager is to new ideas, so you figure, What’s the point?

When speaking with me, Edmondson described a psychologically safe work environment as “one in which people absolutely take seriously and believe that it will be without punishment, without negative consequences. That they’re able to speak up with work-relevant ideas, questions, concerns, mistakes, and problems.”

“Simply put, it’s an interpersonal environment where people believe their voice is welcome.”

Psychological safety is about creating a space where new ideas are both encouraged and expected. It’s about leaders who ask each of their employees for feedback and are truly receptive to the feedback they receive; and it’s about any employee, whether entry-level or senior executive, feeling supported to voice when they’ve made mistakes, knowing those mistakes could lead to innovation, not embarrassment.

Ultimately, psychological safety isn’t just a “nice to have” for team bonding and workplace culture — it’s a necessity for company growth and long-term success.

Next, let’s dive into Edmondson’s take on how you can enact psychological safety in the workplace, why it matters, and what might happen if you don’t.

Amy Edmondson’s Tips on Cultivating Psychological Safety

1. Recognize its importance to both innovation and growth.

There are some risks to not having psychological safety that are relatively obvious. For instance, your company might have a high turnover rate if employees are unhappy or don’t feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to the office.

But even more importantly, psychological safety is critical to innovation. As Edmondson told me, “Innovation happens in a psychologically safe environment, full stop. Without it, you’re at risk for failing to innovate, which won’t just jump out at you like, ‘Oh, there was a big failure.’ You know? It’s the innovation that didn’t happen that’s hard to see at the time.”

“But over time, the company becomes less relevant, less vital, in the marketplace because it didn’t innovate.”

Pixar is a prime example.

As Edmondson writes in her book, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull “credits the studio’s success, in part, to candor … when candor is a part of workplace culture, people don’t feel silenced.”

But Catmull did more than encourage candor — he institutionalized it. For instance, he created a process called “Braintrust”, in which a small group meets every few months to assess a movie and provide feedback to the director. The iterative process forces employees to speak openly about what’s working in a movie, and what isn’t.

The Braintrust has rules — for instance, feedback must be about the project, not the person. The filmmaker can’t become defensive, or take criticism personally. And comments are merely suggestions — not prescriptions — and must come from a place of empathy.

Creating a safe space to iterate, share ideas, and brainstorm is critical, but it’s equally vital that the leader demonstrate psychologically safe behavior themselves. For instance, Catmull demonstrates honesty and humility in his own language, admitting, ” … early on, all our movies suck.”

By openly showing his employees he believes there’s plenty of room for improvement, Catmull makes it feel ridiculous not to share ideas.

In the early 1990’s, Pixar implemented a Braintrust during the creation of Toy Story. Due in part to the Braintrust, Toy Story became the highest grossing film of 1995.

2. Create structures and systems to encourage psychological safety, and show leaders how to model psychologically safe behavior.

I asked Edmondson whether she believed creating a psychologically safe environment requires structure and systems — like Pixar’s Braintrust — or whether it can be cultivated simply by encouraging leaders to remain open, receptive, and honest.

Edmondson told me your company needs both. “Leadership has the job of modeling behaviors that work, that matter, but also putting in place structures and systems that make it easier for people to bring their ideas forward, to bring their concerns forward. Ultimately, it’s really both. There’s the behavioral dimension of leadership that is very important and powerful in shaping others’ behaviors, but there’s also the wonderful structures and systems that make it just a little bit easier.”

Here are a few tips for leaders looking to adopt psychologically safe behavior:

• Replace criticism with curiosity. If you believe your employee messed up, don’t assume you know why. State the negative behavior as an observation, and then ask them to explain to you why it happened. For instance, you might say, “I noticed you haven’t been hitting your deadlines over the past two weeks. I assume there are a few factors that are inhibiting your ability to get your work done. Can you walk me through what those are?” Additionally, don’t spend too much time on fault — instead, focus on resolution. Say something like, “I’d like to brainstorm a few solutions with you, if that’s okay. How can I best support you?”
• Admit when you make a mistake. An employee is never going to speak up in meetings if he/she feels everyone else in the room is perfect. By admitting when you’ve made a mistake or misspoken, you’re allowing others in the room to do the same.
• Ask for feedback from employees, and remain thankful for any feedback you receive. One of the easiest ways to create a psychologically safe environment is to ask your employees what you could be doing better to support them or make them feel open to sharing ideas and opinions — but if you shut them down when they try to give feedback, you’ll never create a psychologically safe space. Instead, take their feedback seriously. Write it down in a notebook or on your computer, consider strategies that might help you strengthen your leadership skills for the team, and respond, “Thank you so much for your feedback. I really appreciate it.”

Additionally, you might create structures and systems by providing rules and regulations to your meetings. For instance, if you’re conducting a brainstorm, there are various opportunities for you to mix up the format to achieve honesty and openness.

For example, you might ask your employees to write down their suggestions ahead-of-time, anonymously. Alternatively, maybe you pose a question before the meeting — “In today’s meeting, I’d like everyone to come with the answer to this question: ‘What’s one way we can improve our Facebook campaign before launch?'”

Ultimately, it’s critical you create a space in which employees feel safe sharing new ideas, even if those ideas go against your team’s status quo. If you don’t, you truly risk losing out on long-term growth for your team, and your company.

3. Measure psychological safety.

Psychological safety can vary team-to-team within an organization. In fact, Edmondson found the teams she studied in the hospital back in 1999 varied drastically in terms of their levels of psychological safety.

If you’re a senior executive, it might be difficult to determine where strengths and weaknesses lie in your organization in terms of psychological safety. It’s best, then, to measure it objectively.

To measure a team’s psychological safety, you might ask team members to take Edmondson’s survey, with questions like the following:

1. When someone makes a mistake in this team, it is often held against him or her.
2. In this team, it is easy to discuss difficult issues and problems.
3. In this team, people are sometimes rejected for being different.
4. It is completely safe to take a risk on this team.
5. It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.

To measure her responses, Edmondson uses a seven-point Likert scale (from strongly agree to strongly disagree). For additional tools and resources, check out Edmondson’s tool kit, Is Yours a Learning Organization?

4. Make psychological safety a priority for your entire organization.

Now that we’ve explored the importance of psychological safety, and a few different methods to increase psychological safety in your own workplace, let’s dive into one final scenario: what might happen if you don’t practice psychological safety.

In Edmondson’s book, she describes a real-life scenario with Wells Fargo as a prime example of the risks you run as a company by not implementing psychological safety measures.

Here’s the gist: in 2015, Wells Fargo, a U.S. bank, encouraged employees to cross-sell a minimum of eight different financial service products to existing customers — they even had a slogan, “Going for GR8”.

While a great idea in theory, it was impractical — most Wells Fargo customers couldn’t afford the eight different products. However, leadership continued to push their employees. There was no space for openness or candor — leadership didn’t encourage or welcome feedback from their employees.

Instead, as Edmondson writes, people believed they’d be fired if they didn’t hit their quota.

So, ultimately, employees felt they needed to cross an ethical line. They began creating fake customers, or lying to customers to trick them into signing up for new products.

All of which is to say — having psychological safety isn’t just advantageous for long-term company growth. It’s also an absolutely critical component for ensuring you don’t run into major business failure.

Your boots-on-the-ground employees know your customers. They have perspectives and opinions you might not. Ultimately, it’s vital your leadership team create a space in which these employees feel safe and encouraged to bring forward their opinions, suggestions, and disagreements.

You’ll have a happier, healthier, more productive company as a result.

At INBOUND this week, over 24,000 people have come together to learn how to deliver remarkable customer experiences in today’s digital environment. How do you coordinate marketing, sales, and service teams across your company to attract, engage, and delight your audience? How do you accelerate that virtuous cycle of word-of-mouth — or, word-of-keyboard, as the case may be — to win more customers and make them happier customers?

Increasingly, a key part of the answer is: an integrated ecosystem for your tech stack.

Software has eaten the world, as Marc Andreessen predicted eight years ago. Every company now uses a collection of cloud-based apps to run nearly every facet of their business. The term “tech stack” has entered everyday business conversations to describe these collections of tools.

And these stacks are growing, even in the SMB space. According to data from Blissfully, businesses with 101-250 employees have an average of 99 SaaS app subscriptions.

 

It’s not enough to have the wondrous capabilities all these different apps offer, especially if each is locked in their own silo. To run your business effectively and to give customers a coherent and compelling experience across all the different touchpoints they have with you, all these different apps need to work together.

This is why HubSpot is committed to building an open platform that can serve as a “hub” for the myriad apps across your business that all contribute to improving the customer experience. We want to make it easy for you to orchestrate these apps, to better serve your customers, and to help you grow better.

At the beginning of the year, we shared our progress on this mission from 2018 and celebrated the many new and growing partners in our app ecosystem. We’re excited to give you an update on our platform ecosystem so far this year…

Growth in App Partners and App Adoption

We now have over 300 app partners, based in over 30 countries, providing an incredible range of capabilities that you can plug into your HubSpot portal. Here is just a sample of the categories our partner ecosystem powers:

• Event management
• Employee advocacy programs
• Account-based marketing tools
• Call system integrations
• Webinar production
• SMS messaging
• Accounting integrations
• Interactive content
• Loyalty program management
• Influencer management
• RFP response management
• Content translation
• Videoconferencing
• Revenue forecasting
• Data cleaning and de-duplication
• Reputation and reviews management
• Direct mail automation
• Gift card delivery
• Affiliate program management
• … and so much more.

Even within these categories, our ecosystem includes a wide range of apps to provide choice and depth in these capabilities. For example, if you’re looking to implement world-class account-based marketing (ABM), you can leverage buyer intent data from G2, account-based ad targeting from Metadata.io, collaborative account mapping with OrgChartHub, coordinated account promotions in individual emails via Opensense and Sigstr, and dedicated ABM management solutions such as Engagio, Triblio, and Calibermind. All these apps can be integrated with the HubSpot platform as the common system of record.

App adoption is on the rise, as we’re seeing our customers taking advantage of the range of capabilities available in our ecosystem. Of our 64,000+ customers, 93% have installed at least one app or integration. On average, customers install five apps each, and some customers have more than 10 integrations. Across our entire user base, including those working with our free products, 700,000 apps have been installed.

A Brand New App Marketplace Built for Scale

We launched a brand new App Marketplace at INBOUND this week that makes it easier for HubSpot customers to find, understand, and install apps. (Read the announcement here.) With hundreds of app partners to choose from and rising customer appetite for integrations, the marketplace will be a powerful tool to help our customers optimize their processes and improve their customer experiences.

We want to make it easier for customers to find the right apps to grow their businesses and support “informed choice” — understanding the different features and pricing of several alternative products. Here’s what’s new:

1. We’ve organized apps into more granular categories and subcategories, so it’s easier to find what you’re looking for.

2. Want to discover new apps that can help you grow better? We’ve added more collections of apps that are hand-curated for different types of business and users, such as:

• Popular apps
• New apps
• Free apps
• Apps for marketing teams
• Apps for sales teams
• Apps for customer success teams
• Apps for startups
• Apps for agencies
• Made by HubSpot

3. We leveraged user feedback to help make app listings more helpful. App listing pages are now more robust, significantly expanding the information that app developers can publish in our marketplace. This means you can conveniently see all the important details about an app in one spot, like subscription requirements, shared data protocols, pricing, and demo videos.

4. For developers, the new app listing flow makes it easier than ever to create and list an app with HubSpot. If you’re an existing app partner, making updates to your app’s listing page has never been more frictionless. And now, your whole team can now access your tier status, install progress, and app listings all from one account — no more waiting for monthly emails.

The Most Popular Apps in Our Ecosystem Today

The advantage of a growing number of app partners is that you are more likely to find the one that meets your requirements, even if you’re looking for a solution that’s highly specialized. However, we also find it’s useful and interesting to see which apps are being widely adopted by HubSpot users, revealing trends about the capabilities many businesses are adding to their tech stacks.

Through July 2019, these were the top 20 most popular integrations in the HubSpot ecosystem:

1. Gmail — email service
2. Outlook Calendar — book meetings
3. Zapier — integrations automation
4. Facebook Ads — targeted social ads
5. Google Calendar — time-management and scheduling
6. Twitter — microblogging and social networking
7. Mailchimp — email and marketing automation
8. WordPress — free content management system
9. LinkedIn — social network for professionals
10. Facebook — social media and networking
11. Slack — collaboration hub for work
12. Google Search Console — website indexing and optimization
13. HubSpot Video powered by Vidyard– create and manage videos
14. Google Ads — online advertising
15. SurveyMonkey — survey collection
16. Databox — KPI dashboards
17. Eventbrite — event management and ticketing
18. Salesforce — CRM
19. LinkedIn Ads — targeted social ads
20. GoToWebinar — video conferencing

Many of those integrations were built by HubSpot to connect with apps that are already widely adopted, such as Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter. We also want to recognize the top 20 most popular integrations built by our app partners to highlight the broader set of capabilities in our ecosystem:

1. Databox — KPI dashboards
2. MagneticOne  — business card reader
3. Automate.io — integrations automation
4. Typeform — online form and survey-building
5. Hotjar — heat mapping
6. PandaDoc — docusigning
7. Zendesk — support ticketing and customer service software
8. Unbounce — landing page building
9. Import2 Data Migration — data migration tool
10. PieSync — integrations automation
11. Intercom — customer messaging
12. HelloSign — docusigning
13. ManyChat — Facebook bot creation
14. Klipfolio — business dashboards
15. AdRoll — ecommerce marketing
16. Teamwork Projects — team collaboration
17. Instapage — landing pages
18. Drift — chat software
19. Wistia — video hosting
20. Import2 Wizard — seamless data sync

There’s also our “rising stars” — the fastest growing apps by total net installs since January 1, 2018:

1. Import2 Data Migration — data migration tool
2. ManyChat — Facebook bot creation
3. Typeform — online form and survey-building
4. CRM Perks WordPress Plugin — form building
5. Integromat — integrations automation
6. Intercom — customer messaging
7. OptinMonster — lead generation
8. Leadfeeder — visitor tracking
9. JotForm — form building
10. Import2 Wizard — seamless data sync
11. Better Proposals — proposal creation
12. G-Accon — Google Sheets connector
13. Insycle — data management
14. OrgChartHub — organizational chart building
15. Asana — project management
16. Salesmsg — SMS and MMS messaging
17. Neverbounce — Email data cleanup
18. WooCommerce — ecommerce connector
19. Setmore — appointment booking
20. Autopilot — marketing automation

Congratulations to these app partners on their growing success. We’re happy that so many HubSpot customers are getting value from their solutions.

Want to Build Your Own App With HubSpot?

If you’re an app developer — or aspire to become one — we warmly invite you to join our platform ecosystem. Tens of thousands of HubSpot customers around the world are eager for new and innovative solutions that will help them manage, streamline, and integrate their business activities. And we’re committed to doing our very best to deliver an excellent experience to developers and customers to help them connect and grow better together.

As our CEO Brian Halligan said in our public earnings call last month:

“This year we’re adding fuel to the platform fire… Through our partners we’ll be able to do more and, our customers themselves will be able to do more. We’re just getting started here.”

Learn more at developers.hubspot.com.

We’ve all been through it. You know: the moment you’re about to dig into the best darn pile of spaghetti and meatballs you’ve ever seen.

Just as you twist your fork in the pasta, spear a mouth-watering meatball, and go in for the first savory bite … the phone rings. “May I speak to Lindsay Kow-low-witch?” asks the telemarketer on the other end. “This is an important message regarding your oven preferences.”

This frustrating interruption is exactly why we’re here to discuss inbound lead generation. What is inbound lead generation? It’s a solution that can save your business or organization from being that annoying, disruptive cold caller who is ruining spaghetti nights for pasta lovers all over the world.

Let’s start with defining a lead, and then we’ll cover what online lead generation is, why you need lead generation, how you qualify someone as a lead, how you generate leads, and why inbound lead generation is much more effective than simply buying leads.

What is a lead?

A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form.

Leads typically hear from a business or organization after opening communication (by submitting personal information for an offer, trial, or subscription) … instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased their contact information.

Let’s say you take an online survey to learn more about how to take care of your car. A day or so later, you receive an email from the auto company that created the survey about how they could help you take care of your car. This process would be far less intrusive than if they’d just called you out of the blue with no knowledge of whether you even care about car maintenance, right? This is what it’s like to be a lead.

And from a business perspective, the information the auto company collects about you from your survey responses helps them personalize that opening communication to address your existing problems — and not waste time calling leads who aren’t at all interested in auto services.

Leads are part of the broader lifecycle that consumers follow when they transition from visitor to customer. Not all leads are created equal (nor are they qualified the same). There are different types of leads based on how they are qualified and what lifecycle stage they’re in.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

Marketing qualified leads are contacts who’ve engaged with your marketing team’s efforts but aren’t ready to receive a sales call. An example of an MQL is a contact who fills out a landing page form for an offer (like in our lead generation process scenario below).

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

Sales qualified leads are contacts who’ve taken actions that expressly indicate their interest in becoming a paying customer. An example of an SQL is a contact who fills out a form to ask a question about your product or service.

Product Qualified Lead (PQL)

Product qualified leads are contacts who’ve used your product and taken actions that indicate interest in becoming a paying customer. PQLs typically exist for companies who offer a product trial or a free or limited version of their product (like HubSpot!) with options to upgrade, which is where your sales team comes in. An example of a PQL is a customer who uses your free version but engages or asks about features that are only available upon payment.

Service Qualified Lead

Service qualified leads are contacts or customers who’ve indicated to your service team that they’re interested in becoming a paying customer. An example of an service qualified lead is a customer who tells their customer service representative that they’d like to upgrade their product subscription; at this time, the customer service representative would up-level this customer to the appropriate sales team or representative.

These lead generators are just a few examples of lead generation strategies you can use to attract potential customers and guide them towards your offers. (We talk about more strategies later.)

Whenever someone outside the marketing world asks me what I do, I can’t simply say, “I create content for lead generation.” It’d be totally lost on them, and I’d get some really confused looks.

So instead, I say, “I work on finding unique ways to attract people to my business. I want to provide them with enough goodies to get them naturally interested in my company so they eventually warm up to the brand enough to want to hear from us!”

That usually resonates better, and that’s exactly what lead generation is: It’s a way of warming up potential customers to your business and getting them on the path to eventually making a purchase.

Why do you need lead generation?

When a stranger initiates a relationship with you by showing an organic interest in your business, the transition from stranger to customer is much more natural.

Lead generation falls within the second stage of the inbound marketing methodology. It occurs after you’ve attracted an audience and are ready to convert those visitors into leads for your sales team (namely sales-qualified leads).

As you can see in the diagram below, generating leads is a fundamental point in an individual’s journey to becoming a delighted customer.

Lead Generation Process

Now that we understand how lead generation fits into the inbound marketing methodology, let’s walk through the steps of the lead generation process.

1. First, a visitor discovers your business through one of your marketing channels, such as your website, blog, or social media page.
2. That visitor then clicks on your call-to-action (CTA) — an image, button, or message that encourages website visitors to take some sort of action.
3. That CTA takes your visitor to a landing page, which is a web page that is designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer.

   Note: An offer is the content or something of value that’s being “offered” on the landing page, like an ebook, a course, or a template. The offer must have enough perceived value to a visitor for them to provide their personal information in exchange for access to it.)

4. Once on the landing page, your visitor fills out a form in exchange for the offer. (Forms are typically hosted on landing pages, although they can technically be embedded anywhere on your site.) Voila! You have a new lead. That is, as long as you’re following lead-capture form best practices.

See how everything fits together?

To sum it up: Visitor clicks a CTA that takes them to a landing page where they fill out a form to get an offer, at which point they become a lead.

By the way, you should check out our free lead generation tool. It helps you create lead capture forms directly on your website. Plus, it’s really easy to set up.

Lead Generation Marketing

Once you put all of these elements together, you can use your various promotional channels to drive traffic to your landing page to start generating leads.

But what channels should you use to promote your landing page? Let’s talk about the front-end of lead generation — lead gen marketing.

If you’re a visual learner, this chart shows the flow from promotional marketing channels to a generated lead.

There are even more channels you can use to get visitors to become leads. Let’s go into depth on these and talk about a few others.

Content

Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content — inline, bottom-of-post, in the hero, or even on the side panel. The more delighted a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your call-to-action and move onto your landing page.

Featured Resource

• HubSpot Ebook Templates

Email

Email is a great place to reach the people who already know your brand and product or service. It’s much easier to ask them to take an action since they’ve previously subscribed to your list. Emails tend to be a bit cluttered, so use CTAs that have compelling copy and an eye-catching design to grab your subscriber’s attention.

Featured Resource

• The Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing

Ads and Retargeting

The sole purpose of an ad is to get people to take an action. Otherwise, why spend the money? If you want people to convert, be sure that your landing page and offer match exactly what is promised in the ad, and that the action you want users to take is crystal clear.

Blog

The great thing about using your blog posts to promote an offer is that you can tailor the entire piece to the end goal. So, if your offer is an instructional video on setting up Google Search Console, then you can write a blog post about how to select your marketing metrics … which would make your CTA highly relevant and easy to click.

Featured Resource

• 6 Free Blog Post Templates

Social Media

Social media platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action, from the swipe up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links to bitly URLs on Twitter. You can also promote your offerings on your social posts and include a call-to-action in your caption. Learn more about social media campaigns in this post.

Product Trials

You can break down a lot of barriers to a sale by offering trials of your product or service. Once a prospect is using your product, you can entice them with additional offers or resources to encourage them to buy. Another good practice is to include your branding in your free versions so you can capture other potential customers, too.

Referral Marketing

Referral, or word-of-mouth, marketing is useful for lead generation in a different way. That is, it gets your brand in front of more people, which, in turn, increases your chances of generating more leads.

Whatever channel you use to generate leads, you’ll want to guide users to your landing page. As long as you’ve built a landing page that converts, the rest will handle itself.

Why not just buy leads?

Marketers and salespeople alike want to fill their sales funnel — and they want to fill it quickly. Enter: The temptation to buy leads.

Buying leads, as opposed to organically generating them, is much easier and takes far less time and effort, despite being more expensive. But, you might be paying for advertising anyway … so, why not just buy leads?

First and foremost, any leads you’ve purchased don’t actually know you. Typically, they’ve “opted in” at some other site when signing up for something, and didn’t actually opt into receiving anything from your company.

The messages you send them are therefore unwanted messages, and sending unwanted messages is intrusive. (Remember that disruptive call I got when I was trying to eat my spaghetti? That’s how people feel when they receive emails and other messages from people they didn’t ask to hear from.)

If the prospect has never been to your website and indicated an interest in your, products or services, then you’re interrupting them … plain and simple.

If they never opted in to receive messages specifically from you, then there’s a high chance they could flag your messages as spam, which is quite dangerous for you. Not only does this train to filter out emails from you, but it also indicates to their email provider which emails to filter out.

Once enough people flag your messages as spam, you go on a “blacklist,” which is then shared with other email providers. Once you get on the blacklist, it’s really, really hard to get back off of it. In addition, your email deliverability and IP reputation will likely be harmed.

It’s always, always, always better to generate leads organically rather than buy them. Read this blog post to learn how to grow an opt-in email list instead of buying one.

How to Qualify a Lead

As we covered in the first section, a lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. Now, let’s talk about the ways in which someone can actually show that interest.

Essentially, a sales lead is generated through information collection. That information collection could come as the result of a job seeker showing interest in a position by completing an application, a shopper sharing contact information in exchange for a coupon, or a person filling out a form to download an educational piece of content.

Gauging a Lead’s Level of Interest

Below are just a few of the many ways in which you could qualify someone as a lead. Each of these examples shows that the amount of collected information used to qualify a lead, as well as their level of interest, can vary.

Let’s assess each scenario:

• Job Application: An individual that fills out an application form is willing to share a lot of personal information because he/she wants to be considered for a position. Filling out that application shows their true interest in the job, therefore qualifying the person as a lead for the company’s recruiting team — not marketing or sales teams.
• Coupon: Unlike the job application, you probably know very little about someone who has stumbled upon one of your online coupons. But if they find the coupon valuable enough, they may be willing to provide their name and email address in exchange for it. Although it’s not a lot of information, it’s enough for a business to know that someone has interest in their company.
• Content: While the download of a coupon shows an individual has a direct interest in your product or service, content (like an educational ebook or webinar) does not. Therefore, to truly understand the nature of the person’s interest in your business, you’ll probably need to collect more information to determine whether the person is interested in your product or service and whether they’re a good fit.

These three general examples highlight how lead generation differs from company to company, and from person to person. You’ll need to collect enough information to gauge whether someone has a true, valid interest in your product or service — how much information is enough information will vary depending on your business.

Let’s look at Episerver, for example. They use web content reports for lead generation, collecting six pieces of information from prospective leads.

Episerver provides a great example for what to ask for in a lead gen form:

• Full Name: The most fundamental information needed to personalize your communication with each lead.
• Email: This serves as a unique identifier and is how you will contact your lead.
• Company: This will give you the ability to research your lead’s industry and company and how the lead might benefit from your product or service (mainly for B2B).
• Role: Understanding an individual’s role will help you understand how to communicate with them. Every brand stakeholder will have a different take and perspective on your offering (mainly for B2B).
• Country: Location information can help you segment your contact by region and time zone, and help you qualify the lead depending on your service.
• State: The more detailed information you can obtain without sacrificing conversions, the better. Knowing your leads state can help you further qualify them.

If you’d like to learn more intermediate-level tips on information collection and what you should ask for on your lead gen forms, read our post about it here.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a way to qualify leads quantitatively. Using this technique, leads are assigned a numerical value (or score) to determine where they fall on the scale from “interested” to “ready for a sale”. The criteria for these actions is completely up to you, but it must be uniform across your marketing and sales department so that everyone is working on the same scale.

A lead’s score can be based on actions they’ve taken, information they’ve provided, their level of engagement with your brand, or other criteria that your sales team determines. For instance, you may score someone higher if they regularly engage with you on social media or if their demographic information matches your target audience.

Borrowing from the examples above, you might give a lead a higher score if they used one of your coupons — an action that would signify this person is interested in your product.

The higher a lead’s score, the closer they are to becoming a sales-qualified lead (SQL), which is only a step away from becoming a customer. The score and criteria is something you may need to tweak along the way until you find the formula that works, but once you do, you’ll transform your lead generation into customer generation.

Lead Generation Strategies

Online lead generation encompasses a wide range of tactics, campaigns, and strategies depending on the platform on which you wish to capture leads. We talked about lead capture best practices once you have a visitor on your site … but how can you get them there in the first place?

Let’s dive into lead generation strategies for a few popular platforms.

Facebook Lead Generation

Facebook has been a method for lead generation since its inception. Originally, companies could use outbound links in their posts and information in their bios to attract strangers to their websites. However, when Facebook Ads was launched in 2007, and its algorithm began to favor accounts that used paid advertising, there was a major shift in how businesses used the platform to capture leads. Facebook created Lead Ads for this purpose. Facebook also has a feature that lets you put a simple call-to-action button at the top of your Facebook Page, helping you send Facebook followers directly to your website.

Get some lead generation tips for Facebook.

Featured Resource

• 50 Facebook Ad Examples We Actually Clicked

Twitter Lead Generation

Twitter has Twitter Lead Gen Cards, which let you generate leads directly within a tweet without having to leave the site. A user’s name, email address, and Twitter username are automatically pulled into the card, and all they have to do is click “Submit” to become a lead. (Hint for HubSpot users: You can connect Twitter Lead Gen Cards to your HubSpot Forms. Learn how to do that here).

Learn some lead generation tips for Twitter.

Featured Resource

• How to Use Twitter for Business (+ Follower Tracking Template)

LinkedIn Lead Generation

LinkedIn has been increasing its stake in the advertising space since its early days. When it comes to lead generation, LinkedIn created Lead Gen Forms, which auto-populate with a users profile data when they click a CTA, making it easy to capture information.

Get tips from our experience using LinkedIn ads.

PPC Lead Generation

When we say pay-per-click (PPC), we’re referring to ads on search engine result pages (SERPs). Google gets 3.5 billion searches a day, making it prime real estate for any ad campaign, especially lead gen. The effectiveness of your PPC campaign relies heavily on a seamless user flow, as well as your budget, target keywords, and a few other factors.

Learn more about how to setup successful PPC ads.

B2B Lead Generation

B2B is a particular business model that requires a particular approach to lead generation. HubSpot found that SEO is the top resource for capturing business leads, followed closely by email marketing and social media. Not to mention, effectiveness varies by channel.

Learn the B2B lead generation techniques for every channel.

Tips for Lead Generation Campaigns

In any given lead generation campaign, there can be a lot of moving parts. It can be difficult to tell which parts of your campaign are working and which need some fine-tuning. What exactly goes into a best-in-class lead generation engine? Here are a few tips when building lead gen campaigns.

Use the right lead generation tools.

As you saw in our data, the most successful marketing teams use a formal system to organize and store their leads. That’s where lead generation tools and lead generation software come into play.

How much do you know about the people visiting your website? Do you know their names or their email addresses? How about which pages they visited, how they’re navigating around, and what they do before and after filling out a lead conversion form?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, chances are you’re having a hard time connecting with the people who are visiting your site. These are questions you should be able to answer — and you can with the right lead generation tools.

There are a few different tools and templates out there that’ll help you create different lead gen assets to use on your site:

• CTA Templates: 50+ free, customizable call-to-action (CTA) templates in PowerPoint that you can use to create clickable CTA buttons to use on your blog, landing pages, and elsewhere on your site.
• Lead Generation Software Tools: This free tool from HubSpot includes lead capture and contact insights features, which will scrape any pre-existing forms you have on your website and add those contacts to your existing contact database. It also lets you create pop-ups, hello bars, or slide-ins — called “lead flows” — that’ll help you turn website visitors into leads immediately.

Example of a slide-in lead flow.

• Visitor Tracking: Hotjar has a heatmap tool — a virtual tool which creates a color-coded representation of how a user navigates your site — that helps you understand what users want, care about, and do on your site. It records visitors and tells you where they spend the most time on your site. You can use it to gather information on your lead generation forms, feedback forms and surveys, and more.
• Form-Scraping Tool: A form scraping tool that collects submissions on your website’s existing forms helps you automatically consolidate all your leads into your contact database, regardless of which form visitors submitted on your website. HubSpot customers can create and embed forms using HubSpot, which automatically populate into your CMS. Non-HubSpot customers can use a form creation tool like Contact Form 7, JetPack, or Google Forms, and then use HubSpot’s free collected forms feature to automatically capture form submissions and input them to a contact database.

Create amazing offers for all different stages of the buying cycle.

Not all of your site visitors are ready to talk to your sales team or see a demo of your product. Someone at the beginning of the buyer’s journey might be interested in an informational piece like an ebook or a guide, whereas someone who’s more familiar with your company and near the bottom of the journey might be more interested in a free trial or demo.

Make sure you’re creating offers for each phase and offering CTAs for these offers throughout your site.

Yes, it takes time to create valuable content that teaches and nurtures your leads down the funnel, but if you don’t offer anything for visitors who aren’t ready to buy, then they may never come back to your website. From checklists to templates to free tools, here are 23 ideas for lead generation content to get you started.

If you want to take personalization a step further — which will help boost your conversion rate — try using smart CTAs. Smart CTAs detect where a person is in the buyer’s journey, whether they’re a new visitor, a lead, or a customer, and display CTAs accordingly. Personalized CTAs convert a whopping 42% more visitors than basic calls-to-action.

Keep your messaging consistent and deliver on your promise.

The highest-converting lead gen campaigns are the ones that deliver on what they promise and create a seamless transition from ad copy and design to the deliverable itself. Make sure that you’re presenting a consistent message throughout the process and providing value to everyone that engages with your lead capture.

The aspects of your lead gen campaign should mirror everything else on your website, on your blog, and within the product that you will eventually try to sell. If not, you’ll have a difficult time getting your lead to the next lifecycle stage. Your campaign should be about more than just obtaining an email address — it should be about developing a new customer.

Link your CTA to a dedicated landing page.

This may seem obvious to you, but you’d be surprised how many marketers don’t create dedicated landing pages for their offers. CTAs are meant to send visitors to a landing page where they can receive a specific offer.

Don’t use CTAs to drive people to your homepage, for instance. Even if your CTA is about your brand or product (and perhaps not an offer like a download), you should still be sending them to a targeted landing page that’s relevant to what they are looking for and includes an opt-in form. If you have the opportunity to use a CTA, send them to a page that will convert them into a lead.

If you want to learn more about how to build and promote high-converting landing pages, then download our ebook on optimizing landing pages for conversions.

Get your sales team involved.

Remember when we talked about lead scoring? Well, it isn’t exactly doable without your sales team’s input. How will you know what qualifies a lead for sales without knowing if your defined SQLs are successfully sold? Your marketing and sales teams need to be aligned on the definitions and the process of moving a lead from MQL to SQL to opportunity before you even begin to capture leads.

Also, be open to evolving your relationship with sales and how you guide leads along your funnel. Your definitions will likely need to be refined over time; just make sure to keep everyone involved up-to-date.

Use social media strategically.

While marketers typically think of social media as best for top-of-the-funnel marketing, it can still be a helpful and low-cost source for lead generation as shared in the lead gen strategies above. The key is using social media strategically for lead generation.

Start by adding links directly to the landing pages of high-performing offers within your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media posts. Tell visitors that you’re sending them to a landing page. That way, you’re setting expectations. Here’s an example from one of our Facebook posts:

You can also do a lead generation analysis of your blog to figure out which posts generate the most leads, and then make a point of regularly linking social media posts to them.

Another way to generate leads from social media is to run a contest. Contests are fun and engaging for your followers, and they can also teach you a ton about your audience. It’s a win-win. Read our step-by-step guide for growing your email list using social media contests, which covers everything from choosing a platform, to picking a winner, all the way to analyzing your results.

Remain flexible and constantly iterate.

Your lead generation strategy needs to be as dynamic as the people you’re targeting. Trends change, behaviors shift, opinions morph … so should your lead gen marketing. Use A/B split testing to see what CTAs perform best, which landing pages convert better, and which copy captures your target audience. Experiment with layout changes, design, UX, content, and advertising channels until you find what works.

Lead Generation Trends & Benchmarks

So … you’re getting web traffic and generating leads. But how are you doing compared to other companies in your industry? How many leads should you really be generating?

It’s tough to figure out if your lead generation strategy is working if you aren’t looking at industry data. That’s why we partnered with Qualtrics to survey more than 900 marketers from all different industries in North America and Europe to create a demand generation report with data on website visitors, leads, opportunities, customers, and revenue.

Did you know that 74% of companies that weren’t exceeding revenue goals didn’t know their visitor, lead, MQL, or sales opportunities numbers? How about that over 70% of companies not achieving their revenue goals generate fewer than 100 leads per month, and only 5% generate more than 2,500 leads per month? These are just a few examples of what you’ll find in the report.

For in-depth reports, download our Demand Generation Benchmarks Report. Below are some useful highlights.

Cost per Lead, by Industry

The media and publishing industries report the lowest cost per lead at $11 to $25. Software, information technology and services, marketing agencies, and financial services companies all report the highest average cost per lead at $51 to $100.

Leads Generated per Month, by Annual Revenue

Unsurprisingly, the more revenue a company has, the more leads they generate. The differences are most drastic at the highest and lowest end of the spectrum: 82% of companies with $250,000 or less in annual revenue report generating less than 100 leads per month, whereas only 8% of companies generating $1 billion in annual revenue report less than 100 leads per month.

Leads per Month

We found that 58% of companies generated 500 leads per month or fewer, and 71% generated 1,000 or fewer. However, as we saw previously, the companies having the most success are also the ones generating the most leads.

Here’s how the data broke down by company size:

Lead Generation Software

We found that the most successful teams use a formal system to organize and store leads: 46% use Google Docs, 41% use marketing automation software, and 37% use CRM software. (Hint for HubSpot customers: Google Drive integrates with both HubSpot Marketing Hub and HubSpot CRM.)

Grow Better with Lead Generation

There you have it, folks. Now that you know more about how to generate leads for your business, we recommend you try HubSpot’s free lead generation tool. Use it to add simple conversion assets to your site (or scrape your existing forms) to help you learn more about your site visitors and what content prompts them to convert.

The basics we’ve gone over in this blog post are just the beginning. Keep creating great offers, CTAs, landing pages, and forms — and promote them in multi-channel environments. Be in close touch with your sales team to make sure you’re handing off high-quality leads on a regular basis. Last but not least, never stop testing. The more you tweak and test every step of your inbound lead generation process, the more you’ll improve lead quality and increase revenue.

I’ve been doing a lot of research and thinking this year about how consumer behavior has changed, and how businesses can take advantage of these shifts to grow better and faster. So often, sweeping shifts in business strategy begin with subtle shifts in our own lives.

To explain what I mean, let me tell you about a typical night in my house.

HubSpot is dog friendly, so everyday I bring my dog Romeo to the office and then, at day’s end, we ride home together in a Lyft. At home, we fire up the Grateful Dead on Spotify. I head to the kitchen and Romeo goes directly to where he keeps his stuffed dog toys and the new treats he got in from Chewy. We put our paws up and order some Thai food from DoorDash. We fire our favorite movie up on Netflix. Then we crawl into our Casper bed and catch up on some reading. In the morning, we wake up, and I shower and shave with a razor from Dollar Shave Club. Then we begin the cycle again.

I list all of these companies not to brand-drop, but to make a point. What do all these companies have in common? They make it incredibly easy on the customer to do business with them. You can’t find a speck of friction in their customer experience. My daily and nightly routine is seamless in large part due to these companies.

It’s not just consumer companies. In the B2B space, I’ve noticed a similar sea change of companies with the most frictionless and customer-focused experience taking over from incumbents because they provide a much better customer and user experience.

It’s not just a better experience — they’re disrupting our very notion of what we as consumers should be able to expect from companies.

The Changing Nature of Disruption

The word disruption is ranked #3 on my list of most overused and under-understood words in business (wedged right between machine learning and blockchain).

“Disruption” is typically used to describe technology disruptions that turn industries upside down. When I first started in this industry these were the great tech leaders: Netscape’s browser, Google’s search engine, Intel’s chip, the iPhone, Tesla’s car. One thing they all have in common is the fact that there is some pretty deep and fundamental technology underpinning their business. In most of these cases, this technology was a real competitive advantage that was hard to overcome.

If you add up all the patents of these five companies, there are over 56,000.

But something has shifted, because the companies overthrowing incumbents today do not have deep technological advantages. For the most part, these companies’ competitive advantage isn’t due to technology innovation at all.

If you add up all of the patents for the companies I mentioned above that are infused in my daily routine, there are only about 500 between them.

So, if these companies aren’t technology disruptors, what are they?

I call them experience disruptors. These companies represent a new breed of growth leader that gets ahead by completely disrupting and reinventing the treatment we’ve come to expect out of companies as consumers.

Over the last six months I’ve dug into each of these so-called experience disruptors in my regular routine both in my home and business life. I used all their products, read all their terms and conditions, interviewed many of their founders and senior executives, and talked with their investors. All to understand what’s really happening here. What I found was really telling.

They come from hospitality roots.

The first thing you’ll notice about these companies is none of them really behave like traditional tech companies. They are genetically more similar to a great hospitality company like the Four Seasons or the Ritz-Carlton than to Oracle or Cisco.

In fact, I was surprised to hear that a lot of the founders have backgrounds in the hospitality industry. These roots create the foundation of how these leaders view the customer experience they’re trying to create, and that foundation shapes the culture of their teams and angle of their approaches.

They measure the experience, not just the product.

Most companies use metrics to understand how their products are working: purchases, uptime, usage, etc. But even in measuring the product, experience disruptors look to the experience of the product rather than just the feature functionality.

For example, payments software company Square doesn’t just measure the number of transactions it’s processing, it measures something it calls “the perfect swipe.” This is a blended metric that captures measures like time to complete transaction, percentage of successful swipes, and the time it takes for a receipt to arrive after the purchase is made. This is a far better reflection of what the end user experiences during the transaction.

They are secret shoppers of their own products.

Many Lyft executives sign up as drivers to understand the driver experience. Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom is one of its heaviest users and feedback providers. In fact, he ran his entire IPO roadshow from an office using Zoom. He quite literally bet the success of his initial public offering on the strength, reliability, and experience of the product.

Using your own product in a broad and sweeping fashion inside your company gives you an empathy for the customer experience that no level of user research or persona-building can match.

They have moved from personas to people.

Speaking of personas, experience disruptors seem to put less stake in them than in the immense diversity of their audience. Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake has stopped using personas and instead uses data “clusters.” These clusters aren’t based on a limited collection of variables like age and size — instead, they’re based on a living, endless set of data.

Similarly, Spotify stopped using personas and switched to use cases like “summer barbecue,” “PRIDE,” and “focus.” This setup enables them to adapt to the myriad of ways that people change and evolve their tastes in music.

They only charge for what you use.

The experience disruptors I studied all had ways to delight users by only charging them for what they use. They build trust by creating a one-for-one exchange and not letting packaging over-prescribe pricing. For example, Stitch Fix sends me a box with about $500 worth of clothes in it every month. I pick the stuff I want and the rest goes back to Stitch Fix. They charge me $20/box as a base fee, but any charge on top of that is only for what I keep.

Similarly, we use Slack in our offices at HubSpot. When we signed that contract, we estimated what we were going to need in terms of seats, but we found that if we didn’t use them, Slack would credit us the difference. This setup aligns incentives masterfully and makes renewals an easy decision.

They lean into cancellations and returns.

Pet product company Chewy is renowned for the grace and intelligence with which they handle returns and cancellations. Stories have spread around the internet of Chewy customers who have cancelled orders when their beloved pets passed away and found that not only was Chewy immediate in processing the cancellation, the company actually sent them flowers and heartfelt sympathy notes for their loss.

Additionally, when customers call to return items that don’t fit, Chewy sends them a replacement, but instead of processing the return, Chewy often encourages the customer to give the unwanted item to a friend. This is smart on multiple levels. First, it could cost more to process the return, and second, the item out in the wild might introduce a new prospective customer to the company.

They drop the middleman.

Part of making a better experience relies on being able to influence all of it. When you add in a distributor or retail channel, oftentimes you lose that control. So a number of experience disruptors have opted to skip the middleman and sell direct-to-consumer.

Away.com, Chewy, and Glossier all have built their businesses by cutting out the retail store and selling directly to people. We see this on the B2B side, too. You don’t sign up with WeWork through a commercial real estate broker. You get WeWork from WeWork. Experience disruptors own both the customer relationship and the channel that delivers it.

They see support as an opportunity.

The old view on customer support was to see it as a cost center — an obligation the company needed to fill that didn’t really lead to business growth. Experience disruptors come at support from the opposite direction.

A great example of this is Tesla, which shifted its approach to support to align business goals and customer goals. Tesla noticed that customers were spending a lot of time waiting for repairs to be completed in their repair rooms. This is a bad experience for everyone. Most of the wait time was due to limited bay openings in the support center. They had two options: build more bays, or change their model. Looking at the common causes of repair requests, they realized that 80% of the cars coming in only needed 5-10 minute repairs. So, Tesla came up with a new approach — send a mechanic to go fix the 5-10 minute problems in the car owner’s driveway. This led to a greater efficiency in the company’s use of bays and a better experience for owners.

There is one more observation I want to spend some time on. This is really more of an underpinning of all of the experience disruptors we talked to in our research. Most companies fall victim to what I call the Tyranny of “Or.” They feel they have to choose between growing fast or growing well. Between pleasing investors or pleasing customers. Between investing in the product or investing in customer experience.

After talking with many of today’s leading companies, it’s clear to me how short-sighted this thinking is.

Rather than focus on the tyranny of “or,” experience disruptors lean into the audacity of “and.” The more you invest in customers, the more investors will be rewarded. The better you grow, the faster you’ll grow. The more you create a good customer experience, the better the product will get. They create a flywheel effect by focusing on the decisions they need to make to create the greatest customer experience, and that makes all the difference.

This is how we hope to grow as a business, today and in the years and decades to come. Today at INBOUND, HubSpot announced a slew of features and enhancements sourced directly from the customer base. Take a look, perhaps see something that you’ve requested, and keep sending feedback to make us better. Thank you.