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Although Twitter’s growth rate has slowed down over the past year, it’s still one of the most popular — and powerful — social media networks around. It has 313 million active users, 79% of accounts outside of the United States.

With reach like that, businesses around the world are smart to continue using and innovating on Twitter — and adapting to the way people use it. Nowadays, 82% of active Twitter users log on using the mobile app rather than logging on via desktop. Just under 63% of U.S. Twitter users get their news on Twitter. And, impressively, Twitter’s paid ad engagement grew 208% from 2015 to 2016.

How else are people using Twitter nowadays? How are businesses using Twitter? How does the network impact people’s purchasing decisions, and how do promoted tweets boost offline sales? And does it change how connected people feel to a brand?

For answers to these questions and more, check out the infographic below from WebpageFX. It includes some great research and insights into user behavior and how Twitter affects businesses. Keep scrolling, and you’ll find some great, practical tips on the best times to tweet, what to tweet, and how to optimize your Twitter profile. (And for more ideas on how and what to tweet — including 12 tweet templates to get you started — check out this post.)

According to 2016 data from Econsultancy, only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their lead to customer conversion rates.

That’s bad news for a marketing agencies with retainer clients. How many times has your agency generated the agreed amount of high quality leads, but still lost clients because the client’s sales team didn’t close those leads?

When your clients don’t see a visible revenue return on marketing efforts, they might begin to view agency retainers as unnecessary spend. 

Offering sales support services in addition to more traditional content strategy helps agencies deliver tangible ROI to their clients throughout the sales funnel. In fact, sales enablement services are often so effective, agencies are able to increase client retainers.

To improve client retention and ROI, there are three core sales support packages every agency can offer: sales and marketing alignment, CRM implementation, and sales enablement. Read on to learn how to start implementing these services at your agency.

3 Sales Support Services to Offer Clients

1) Sales & Marketing Alignment

Businesses with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams generate on average 208% more revenue from marketing than companies with disjointed teams. But if strong relationships between sales and marketing departments are so important, why are they so hard to achieve?

Here two service offerings that agencies can implement to better align their clients’ marketing and sales departments:

Define a Common Language

The first step to aligning any sales and marketing organization is to develop a common understanding of the client’s ideal customers: buyer personas. Marketing needs to target the same individuals that sales wants to prioritize.

When developing a client’s buyer personas, conduct interviews with key stakeholders on both marketing and sales as well as the client’s current customers.  Make sure both teams agree on the target demographics, pain points, values and goals for every persona.  

Once sales and marketing agree on a set of ideal buyer personas, take time to clarify — and revise, if necessary — the client’s marketing and sales funnels. Establish a definition for marketing qualified leads (MQLs) — leads that are ready to pass from marketing to sales — and specify a clear handoff plan for these contacts.  

Create an SLA Between Marketing and Sales

Once both teams are speaking the same language, it’s time to create a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA). An SLA is an agreement between marketing and sales where marketing commits to generating a specific number of leads (or MQLs), and sales agrees to specific follow-up procedures for those leads.

Crafting a meaningful SLA requires an understanding the historic lead-to-customer ratios, the current sales team’s capacity, and the percentage of total revenue for which marketing will be held responsible. More details on calculating a SLA agreement between marketing and sales can be found here.

To remain relevant, SLAs should be revised at least every 6 months. By regularly updating your client’s SLA, you can account for factors like new product offerings, time of year, and new sales headcount. From a technology standpoint, agencies can also build custom SLA reports and dashboards in a client’s CRM.

2) CRM Implementation

A 2014 study by Nucleus Research found that for every $1 spent on customer relationship management (CRM) software, a company saw a $8.76 increase in revenue. Yet, less than half the 140K respondents to the 2016 State of Inbound report use any CRM software. That means agencies have a major opportunity to increase their value proposition by offering CRM implementation services. 

Technical complexity and a lack of resources (employees and time) for the initial setup are common blockers to CRM adoption — this is where your agency comes in.

Initial CRM Setup

Setting up a CRM for a client requires a complete understanding of their sales process. Conduct interviews with individuals at every level of the sales organization to clarify what information is important to each cohort, and then customize the CRM’s contacts, companies, and deals stages/objects to fit these needs.

Perhaps the biggest anxiety for clients is losing important historical data during the transfer to a new CRM. You can ease these concerns by being transparent with clients about the steps to importing their data into the new system.

Once a client’s historical information has been successfully uploaded into the CRM, the final step is making this information relevant and accessible to every individual in the sales organization. To do this your agency should build:

• Custom lead views for sales reps.
• Pipeline forecasting dashboards that help managers anticipate monthly revenue.
• Rep productivity reports for that show managers:
• Lead work rate – The percent of marketing leads touched by sales.
• Lead response time – The time it takes a sales rep to reachout to new leads. 
• Total volume of leads worked per rap – The total number of leads worked.
• Opportunity to customer rate – The percent of deals that close into customers.

Building these custom features into your client’s CRM leads perfectly into an ongoing retainer-based offering of CRM maintenance. If you’re looking for a free CRM to get clients started, you can try out HubSpot’s free CRM here.

Ongoing CRM Maintenance

With so many sales reps and managers working within the CRM daily, it’s easy for things to get cluttered — fast. Custom objects, new deal stages, and a slew of unique reports can clog the system and make it difficult for employees to find exactly what they are looking for, quickly.

At large corporations, CRM audits are typically run in-house by a sales operations team. However, many small and medium size businesses don’t have dedicated operations departments. This a huge opportunity for marketing agencies to swoop in for a retainer-based service offering for CRM maintenance.

3) Sales Enablement

Imagine a world where a marketer creates a landing page on Monday. On Tuesday morning, a sales rep walks into work with four calls already booked on their calendar from prospects who viewed that landing page. That world is today.

Automate Sales Prospecting with Meetings Links

Numerous applications now enable prospects to book time directly on sales reps’ calendars. Your agency can easily run a content audit of the client’s well-trafficked, bottom-of-funnel existing web pages, and find opportunities to allow direct bookings with sales.

On pages likely to attract eager buyers — for example, the pricing page or a ‘Contact Us’ page (see the example screen shot below) — replace existing CTA buttons with a link to a sales reps calendar.

Meetings booked through a landing page cut down a sales rep’s prospecting time, and links direct ROI to your agency’s efforts. It’s a win-win. 

Prospecting Email Template Creation & Optimization

It’s a common assumption that the marketing team produces the majority of content at a business. It turns out this simply isn’t true: According to Ducurated’s 2016 State of Sales Enablement report, marketing typically produces about 30% of company content, while Sales is responsible for about 40%.

So what kind of content is Sales creating? Sales reps produce hundreds of email templates each year, including emails for these use cases:

• Connect email
• Bringing a decision maker into the conversation
• Scheduling a demo
• Asking for a referral

Good templates radically improve prospecting speed, while poorly crafted templates quickly destroy credibility. Chances are, your client has both good and bad email templates floating around their sales teams.

Conducting a review of sales email templates and surfacing the highest performing content to all team members can quickly improve the efficiency of a sales organization. 

When creating and auditing sales templates, use a software that provides open and click-through rates data of individual emails.  Look for copy trends among the highest performing content.

Email trends change significantly over time. Agencies should set up a retainer-based service with clients to review email template performance every quarter.

What sales services does your agency offer? Let us know in the comment section below.

When Dharmesh Shah and I started HubSpot 10 years ago, we had a clear goal: We wanted to make it easier for marketers to adapt to a changing world. Inbound marketing was the vehicle, and our mission was to bring all the tools you need to attract, convert, and close new customers together in one place.

But here’s the thing — change is constant when it comes to people. The places buyers spend their time, the expectations they have, and the things marketers and sellers need to do to be successful in 2016 are totally different than just a decade before. I’ve actually spent the last couple of months channeling my “inner anthropologist” to better grok how people live, work, shop, and buy, talking to people in all sorts of roles and with all sorts of backgrounds in the process.

However, it isn’t just the buyer who has changed. Smart marketers and smart sellers are a lot different than they were back when we started HubSpot. And this is what’s been driving our product direction over the past year.

Marketers and Salespeople Are Evolving

Ten years ago, we started out building for marketers who needed help getting the right tools matched up with the right strategy, because it was darned tough to do, and few people had the skills to do it.

But the marketer of today has evolved. Many of the folks I encounter are a lot savvier. They are digital natives who lean in on technology whereas 10 years ago they were often more timid. This idea of building a software “stack” — a connected set of tools that helps you do your marketing — is a more integral part of marketers’ day-to-day.

And this shift isn’t exclusive to marketers. Ten years ago, the VP of Sales made the call on a CRM system, their only piece of technology. Today, sales teams are also getting in on the same game of building their “stack.” When I watch savvy reps at work, they are testing new prospecting tools, tweaking their approach with tracked email templates, and using a bunch of additional point tools to be more effective. What it takes to be successful at sales is changing, and tech-savvy sales teams are winning the day.

The Challenges of Building Your Stack

Of course, this shift brings a new set of challenges along with it. When every team that touches the customer is out building their own stack, and there are new tools every day to kick the tires on, the familiar challenge of connecting the dots between all these pieces is actually getting harder.

There are two ways this usually plays out. In some companies, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service have gone down different roads, building their own “stacks” that exist separately. Each team gets the gratification of doing what they want, but the customer loses in the end — with little continuity between touch points, it often feels like the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

The second scenario is one of technical integrations. Someone on the team recognizes how important it is to integrate, and sets out to tie all the disparate tools and systems together. This is a noble pursuit, and one that makes sense for companies of a certain size and scale.

The trouble with this approach is that it literally never ends. Each new tool adds a new integration into the mix, and integrations come in all shapes, sizes, and degrees of quality. Some are great, some are superficial, and some require constant babysitting. Before long, managing integrations is the full time job of a growing ops team, or the worst nightmare of a small team with better things to spend their time on.

Building Your “Growth Stack”

Seeing these shifts in marketers, salespeople, and how each group uses and adopts technology has been fascinating. I experience these shifts firsthand with many of the folks I see getting started with HubSpot today.

One thing I’ve noticed is that more and more of these folks have “seen the movie” before. They’ve felt the pain of ignoring integration, or they’ve been on a team that ended up in an ops nightmare trying to do it themselves. This time around, they want to avoid that outcome at all costs.

I also see more and more teams that recognize the importance of Sales and Marketing working together. Even five years ago, the idea of Sales and Marketing alignment was a distant ideal for most people. Today, more teams seek opportunities to work together as a larger growth team.

And when these teams consider tools, they don’t build a sales stack and a marketing stack. They build a growth stack: an interconnected set of tools used to drive growth that share a common foundation.

Grow Your Business with HubSpot as the Foundation

Over the past few years, we’ve been hammering away to make our CRM, sales tools, and marketing platform an awesome triad to help our customers power their growth. In the years to come, our priorities won’t change. We’ll be aiming to build the best possible growth stack in the world — a foundation that supports and accelerates any business’ growth — and working to make it easier for you to add on other pieces if and when you need them through powerful integrations in our HubSpot Connect platform.

However, making our tools better is only one part of the equation. They also need to be accessible to as many people as possible — from sophisticated teams all the way down to companies that are just getting started. This was the driving force behind our announcement of HubSpot Marketing Free, a dynamic set of tools to help you collect leads and context from your website. Together with our free CRM and free sales tools, it’s possible for any team to start building their business on our growth stack without spending a penny.

We truly believe that we can give millions of companies back the time, the money, and the mental bandwidth they used to spend on worrying about their tools, and this will free them up to focus on growth. If this sounds like a shift your team could benefit from, learn more about building your growth stack with HubSpot using our free marketing, sales, or CRM tools, or see some of the dozens of other tools we announced today.

Content marketing has seen a lot of changes over the past few years, in particular around the way that marketers have went about actually developing their content. A lot of this has come down to the rapidly evolving search engine landscape, as well as a huge shift in the way that people are discovering content.

All that said, I still hear the same pain points coming from content producers that I did over five years ago:

“I struggle to measure the ROI of the content I create.”

“We create great content but we still don’t seem to rank high in Google for our target keywords.”

“So, I’ve done my keyword research. Now what?”

As a response to these problems — in particular the second one — a lot of marketers will respond with increased content output. Unfortunately, creating larger volumes of the same underperforming content will often result in the same underwhelming results — just at a greater expense.

The answer to these problems spans way beyond the number of blog posts being pushed out each week; the real problem lies in the way that most content strategies are being developed.

The Search Engines Are Changing

Updates to the way that the search engines are processing and evaluating content have been tied heavily to the approaches that content publishers have been taking to get results.

One of the ways in which content producers will evaluate the performance of content is by looking at keyword rankings within the search engines. There’s been a lot of debate around the actual credibility of keyword rankings as a metric, and the reason for this largely stems from the fact that rank changes depending on context.

To put it simply, depending on how and where you’re searching from, you’ll see different search results.

A simple search for the term, “where to eat pizza” illustrates this perfectly. If you’re searching for this query from Boston then you’ll receive a completely different set results compared to someone searching in San Francisco. In fact, the results page for this query probably has thousands of different variations at any one moment in time.

With this in mind, how do you accurately determine your ranking for this keyword?

Outside of keyword ranking problems, the search engines have also been dictating how content should be structured, most notably with the increased appearance of featured snippets.

Google has been rolling out more and more featured snippets within the search results that try to answer the question that the searcher has without needing to navigate through to the content.

The reality is that content ranking within the featured snippet section often gets a much greater share of the traffic for the given query when compared to non-featured snippet SERPs.

Publishers now have to restructure their content to try and appear within these featured snippets, of which Wikipedia reigns supreme — owning an estimated 17.2% of all featured snippets.

On a more general level, Google in particular has been making big investments in machine learning and has introduced ‘RankBrain’ into the core algorithm it uses to index and rank content. Ultimately, RankBrain enables Google to better understand the intent behind specific queries without the search query explicitly stating them — all with the goal of providing more relevant results to the searcher.

This leads nicely onto the next big change in search: the searcher.

The Searcher is Changing

More significant than the way in which the search engines themselves are evolving is the way that the searcher is communicating with the search engines.

Amplified by the rise of mobile and voice search, queries have become more and more conversational. Google’s updates over the past 2-3 years have focused on understanding these types of queries better through natural language processing, most notably with the rollout of Hummingbird.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced in May that that 20% of queries on its mobile app and on Android devices are voice searches.

The takeaway here for marketers? The traditional view of ‘keywords’ in search has changed. Where there were maybe 10-20 ‘big keywords’ that would be sought after for ranking within a topic, there are now hundreds or thousands of long-tail variations that are regularly searched within a topic.

Content Strategy in 2017 and Beyond

Considering the advancements in the ways that both the search engines are evolving and the way that searchers are communicating with them, there needs to be a shift in the way we align our content strategies — especially if organic search is a channel you’re focused on.

The way that we approach this at HubSpot is to look at our visibility across a topic, as opposed to a specific keyword. Through building content within topic clusters, we’re able to capture a large amount of search traffic across an ever-increasing pool of relevant keywords/phrases, as well as creating a strong affinity of a topic against our brand.

A great example of this is around “inbound sales,” an area that we’ve been covering a lot. You can see from Google’s autocomplete section that there’s a number of big links into HubSpot — our Inbound Sales Day, Certification, and Methodology being the top three, as well as a direct mention of the HubSpot brand.

We’ve managed to align our brand against huge volumes of topics that directly relate to our buyer personas, and as a result we generate millions of relevant visits to our web properties.

What is a Topic Cluster?

The basic premise behind building a content program in topic clusters is to enable a deeper coverage across a range of core topic areas, whilst creating an efficient information architecture in the process.

That sounds more complex than it is in reality.

What I’m saying here is that through aligning sets of webpages into topic clusters, you can manage the internal linking between each more efficiently and also provide a better user experience for visitors.

Building a solid information architecture is incredibly important for ranking well in organic search across a broad topic area. Creating hyper-focused clusters of content geared around a specific topic will not only help solve for that, but it’ll enable you to keep focused on creating content that your buyer persona actually cares about.

The typical way that I structure a topic cluster of content is with one larger piece of content that focuses around broadly covering the core topic, otherwise known as pillar content. Linking into the pillar content is a range of content that covers individual, more specific subtopics, otherwise known as cluster content. The cluster content will link back to the core pillar and often in between other cluster content within the same topic.

Here’s an example to illustrate this:

In the above example, the core topic is “workout routines.” Each of the surrounding subtopics focuses on a more specific branch of the core topic, for example, “workout routines to build lean muscle”.

The role of the pillar content is to cover the core topic broadly and also perform well at converting visitors into leads (or whatever your conversion goal is). The cluster content that is built for each of the subtopics will focus on gaining greater topic visibility and funneling traffic through to the pillar content in order for them to convert.

The beauty of this model is that you can spend a lot more time optimizing your pillar content for conversions and your cluster content for traffic. This saves a lot of time on the traditional model of optimizing each individual post. It also makes it easier for you to give a positive user experience whilst sending a bunch of positive signals to the search engines.

More time and resources are often spent on pillar content than on the supporting cluster content. Due to the fact that they’re all interlinked, all of the content within any given topic cluster will receive a boost when one page performs well.

An example of pillar content that we’ve produced at HubSpot would be our Blog Topic Generator tool.

This pillar content brings in a substantial amount of new leads every month and gets a heap load of traffic. Tools work particularly well for pillar content because they’re often evergreen content and get shared a lot.

We’ve built out a wide range of cluster content that ties into specific subtopics. An example of this would be our blog post titled, “How to Think Up a Year’s Worth of Blog Post Topics in an Hour,” which has an internal link pointing to the Blog Topic Generator tool.

This content will drive traffic to the pillar content and push positive link signals to the search engines in the process, increasing both the organic search visibility and leads generated from the overall topic cluster.

The Process for Creating a Topic Cluster

When it comes to actually mapping out topic clusters, there’s a general process that I’ve found to work particularly well. I’ve simplified it down and listed it below so that you can get started:

1. Map out 5-10 of the core problems that your buyer persona has (use surveys, run interviews, and do some secondary research within online communities).
2. Group each of the problems into broad topic areas.
3. Build out each of the core topic with subtopics using keyword research.
4. Map out content ideas that align with each of the core topics and corresponding subtopics.
5. Validate each idea with industry and competitive research.
6. Create, measure, and refine.

This is a very simplistic overview but can work as a light framework for prioritizing content ideation and production. I tend to find that actually visualizing each topic group into topic clusters works particularly well.

How to Measure the Success of Your Topic Cluster

One of the most common content marketing questions that I’m asked is, “how do I measure the success of a piece of content?”

The answer to this question is complicated because for the most part it’s not a great idea to evaluate the success of your campaign on a content-by-content basis. Just looking at the success of one blog post is difficult at the best of times, but more often than not the definition of success is too narrow to account for indirect benefits that it has.

A good example of this would be with more brand-driven content. The focus here isn’t around generating sales or even capturing email addresses, but instead it can be around elevating the brand, attracting new talent, or even earning backlinks/press coverage.

If we based the success of our “Our Story” page on the number of leads it generated, it would be performing terribly. On the flip side, this page has over 5,000 backlinks from external websites and gets a huge amount of traffic from potential hires looking to join our company.

Luckily, this problem can be solved by evaluating success on a topic cluster level instead.

Measuring the entire topic cluster against all of your core business metrics will enable you to include residual benefits coming from content that doesn’t align with direct conversion goals. Let’s say one of your blog posts is a study with a bunch of original data that gets thousands of backlinks — this page will pass on authority across all the pages in the topic cluster and grow the search visibility across the whole topic cluster. That’s difficult to measure in isolation, but can be done on a topic cluster level.

Using this framework for measurement, you’ll be able to understand the following:

• Which topics perform better at driving traffic to your web properties
• Which topics earn you the most leads
• Which topics drive the most revenue to the business
• Which topics earn the most backlinks/coverage

Search Engines Aren’t Searching for Your Content, People Are

What this all works towards is ensuring that you’re actually creating content that people want to see, as opposed to content that’s designed specifically for the search engines. Don’t forget, search engines are pretty smart. In most cases, they don’t require you to ever mention a specific keyword in the copy of your content to understand that it’s relevant.

Shifting your focus to building content on a keyword-by-keyword basis and moving to owning topics is going to help you create better content, increase your visibility in the search engines and provide a much more positive experience for visitors.

What questions do you have about this framework? Share them in the comments below.