The Anatomy of a Lead-Generating Website

Your website is the most important tool you have for turning prospects into customers.

There are plenty of ways to increase the number of people visiting your site, but unless you convert these visitors into leads, you won't be able to ultimately get new customers. As a result, your business won't be able to grow at a healthy rate.

That's why it's so important to design your website with lead generation top-of-mind.

Think about what your website looks like in its current state. Do each of your webpages clearly guide visitors to take action, or does they leave them wondering what to do next? Do you use a tool that automatically pulls the submissions from your forms and puts them into your contact database? Are you creating custom landing pages for every single campaign that you run? Do you have lead generation CTAs on each of your blog posts? (Do you have a blog at all?)

If you're starting to think hard about the opportunities you have to increase conversion on your site, you've come to the right place.

In this post, we'll cover the most critical components of a website optimized for lead generation. You'll find useful tips in here whether you're coming from a startup generating leads from scratch, or from a well-established business looking to tighten up your website to increase conversions.

The Anatomy of a Lead-Generating Website

1) Lead generation forms

Forms are the crux of any business' lead generation efforts. Without them, you won't be able to get contact information that your site visitors actually opt in to give you. The opting in part is important: When people voluntarily hand over their information by filling out a form, they're actively showing interest in your business, your products, or your content. These leads are valuable because they're more likely to turn into customers down the road.

Embedding lead generation forms directly on your website makes it easy for visitors to convert into leads. If you're a HubSpot customer, you can create forms right in HubSpot and either add them to your webpages or embed them elsewhere. Non-HubSpot customers can turn to form-embedding tools like Contact Form 7, JetPack, or Google Forms.

Although landing pages are the most popular places to put lead generation forms, you can embed them anywhere you'd like on your site. Here are a few examples of forms from different businesses that have with different goals, starting with OfficeVibe's homepage:

On AdmitHub's homepage, they've embedded a form for a demo request:

The folks at American Songwriter embedded a subscribe form in the footer of their website:

Below is the form on ChoiceScreening's "Contact Us" page. You'll notice it's relatively long, but for a business that runs background checks of all kinds, the form fields are likely necessary to help organize inquiries.

When you're thinking about how long your forms should be, consider whether you'd rather have more inquiries coming in, or higher quality inquiries coming in. As long as you have other, easier avenues for folks to contact you, a longer form can be okay for some businesses.

2) A form scraping tool

Once you've created and embedded your forms, how are you going to collect and track submissions? You'll need a tool that scrapes your forms, meaning it automatically captures the form submissions on your website and puts them into your contact database.

By consolidating your leads in one place, it'll be much easier for you to follow up with those leads -- whether it's by sending them lead nurturing emails, tracking their future behavior on your website, or some other action.

We recommend using our free Collected Forms tool, part of HubSpot Marketing Free. Collected Forms enables you to detect form submissions on your website as they come in -- even if the forms are not built with HubSpot. Then, it'll put those submissions right into your contacts database.

3) Primary and secondary calls-to-action on every page

When people go to a website, they're usually trying to take some action. Sometimes, they know what that action is -- like when you're looking for a coffee grinder to buy for your spouse's birthday and you plan to make a purchase as soon as you find one that's good enough. Other times, visitors simply don't know what they want to do on a website and they're just there to browse or research.

It's your job to guide these people forward in their research and/or buying process through calls-to-action (CTAs). Remember, your website exists to compel visitors to dig deeper into your business and offerings and move them further down the funnel. CTAs tell them what to do next so they don't feel lost or overwhelmed. In this way, CTAs turn your homepage into a lead-generating machine.

You'll want to create multiple CTAs for your site that speak to different parts of the buying funnel. But it's important to have a primary CTA -- one that exists above the fold of your site pages, sticks out from the others, and leads people to do the #1 thing you want them to do on each page.

What that CTA leads to will depend on your end goal. What do you want your site visitors to do most -- do you want them to sign up? Create an account? Request a demo? Defining what a "lead" means to you will make your analytics goals much clearer and will help you build a more intuitive funnel.

Here are two examples of webpages that effectively use primary CTAs to direct visitors to the next logical step. The first is Mint's homepage, where you'll notice the free sign-up CTA immediately draws your eye:

Here's another example from FreshBooks' homepage:

Common CTA examples include "Free Trial," "Schedule a Demo," "Buy Now," or "Learn More." (Here are 30 examples of great CTAs for more inspiration.)

4) Gated offers on landing pages

We already went over the importance of embedding forms on your website in a more general sense, but landing pages deserve a section of their own. Landing pages are the hub of your lead generation efforts -- which is why every marketing campaign you run and every offer you create should be tied to a custom landing page.

The more landing pages you have, the more opportunities you have to convert site visitors into leads. There's also a huge SEO benefit to having more landing pages, which can have an impact even before visitors land on your site.

There are many elements that a top-notch landing page needs, from design to form length to navigation, share buttons, social proof, and so on. If you're looking for detailed information on building well-designed landing pages that are optimized for lead conversion, here are a few helpful resources:

• 7 Key Design Tips for High-Converting Landing Pages (blog post)


• How to Optimize Landing Pages for Conversions (free ebook)


• 16 of the Best Landing Page Examples You Need to See (blog post)


• How Long Should Your Landing Page Forms Be? (blog post)

Below is a great example of a landing page from WebDAM. While it's a solid example overall, the form might be the best part -- especially the little icons in front of the text that refer to the information needed to complete it.

If you're looking for ideas for valuable content to put behind those landing pages, read this list of 23 lead generation content ideas to start you off.

5) Pop-up forms

I know, I know. "Pop-ups" can sound like a dirty word nowadays. Inbound marketers everywhere are asking themselves whether they should be using pop-up forms -- and the short answer is yes, as long as you use them in an inbound-y way.

To do that, you'll want to make sure you're:

• Offering something valuable and relevant so they add to your website visitors' experience, rather than interrupting it;


• Timing their appearance so they're triggered by certain actions or time spent on a page in a way that feels natural and not interruptive;


• Using language that's actionable and human;


• Not ruining the mobile experience.

In addition to embedded forms and traditional call-to-action buttons, you'll also want to pick and choose pages on your website where you can place pop-up forms, which we call lead flows here at HubSpot. There are a few different types of lead flows you can choose from: welcome mats, overlay modals (which is what most people think of when they hear the term "pop-up"), banners, and slide-in boxes:

Here's an example of a banner on Basecamp's homepage, which appears when you scroll a certain percentage of the way down the page:

This overlay modal from Aquaspresso's blog offers blog readers an avenue toward their paid products in a way that's helpful (providing a discount):

If you're looking for a good free tool to get started with pop-up forms, we'd recommend you try HubSpot Marketing Free. We built the Lead Flows feature within this free tool to help marketers generate more leads across their entire website without sacrificing the user experience.

6) Intuitive design and thoughtful CTA placement

The point of your website is to guide site visitors toward the actions you want them to take. Your conversion efforts will be far more compelling when assets are easy to find and are built with a reader-centric mindset. Think about how you can use layout, CTA placement, whitespace, colors, fonts, and other supporting elements to clearly communicate your value proposition, help visitors find specific information easily, and build trust.

Most importantly, you'll want to make sure your webpages -- especially your most popular ones, like your homepage -- are designed beautifully, intuitively, and with lead generation in mind. In other words, you'll want to direct your visitors' attention to the areas of the page that will convert them into leads.

For example, according to an eye tracking study, a website reader's natural eye path starts in the upper left-hand corner of a website and moves on from there in an F-pattern. To take advantage of this pattern, you may want to place your most important calls-to-action somewhere within that F-pattern. (Read this blog post to learn more about designing webpages for lead generation.)

In the example below, the business' name is in the top left, followed by the horizontal navigation bar placed on the top, and a primary call-to-action (by #4) in the second row.

Image Credit: Envato Studio

7) A blog with lead-generating CTAs

If you don't have a business blog or aren't using it consistently, then you're missing out on a huge traffic- and lead-driving engine. There are many business benefits to blogging, which not only include helping drive traffic to your website, but also converting traffic into leads for your business. Just like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads. And thanks to the compounding value of blog posts over time, every post you write will drive value for you in the form of traffic and leads not just when you first publish it, but for years to come.

Here at HubSpot, our blog is responsible for a significant percentage of our marketing team's incoming leads -- and 76% of our monthly blog views come from posts published prior to the current month.

But in order to generate leads from your blog, you can't just write, hit "publish," and call it a day. You'll need to add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post that points to free content gated behind a landing page (see #4). To help you create these long-form offers more easily without worrying about the design component, try downloading these 386+ free content creation templates for ebooks, infographics, and other offers.

Once you create lead-generating offers, promote them by blogging about subject matters related to them, and then put CTAs that lead to the asset's landing page on every one of those blog posts.

8) Social proof and other trust-builders

In order for a site visitor to turn into a lead, they need to hand over some personal information -- their name, their email address, and maybe even their phone number or company name. Why would they give that information to you unless they felt some sort of trust in your brand and what you're offering them?

That's where establishing credibility comes in. If you want to earn people's trust enough to compel them to opt in to your emails or otherwise put their personal information into your database, you're going to need to prove yourself somehow -- especially to people who don't know who you are quite yet. The most meaningful form of advertising is recommendations from others, and it can have a big impact on conversion rates.

There are many ways to establish credibility on your website. One effective way to show trustworthiness is by adding social proof -- like customer testimonials, case studies, and prominent client logos -- as well as trust seals to your site.

• Customer testimonials are quotes from real customers you can place on landing pages, your homepage, and anywhere else on your website. Place these quotes below forms, and be sure to include a photo, name, company, and job title. Here's a great example from Codecademy's homepage:

• Case studies are full-fledged customer stories, either written or in video. They're longer and more detailed than customer testimonials, and often include success metrics and positive results. You can learn more on how to create compelling case studies here.


• Prominent client logos are when a business places the logos of some of their more well-known clients on their homepage or elsewhere on their website to show them off. According to ConversionXL, logos from prominent clients tend to be memorable to site visitors.


• Trust seals are symbols that reassure site visitors that their sensitive information is secure with the company they're giving it to. (Read this post to learn more about adding trust seals to your website.)

There you have it. Now, these are by no means the only components of a website that can or should be optimized for lead generation. But this guide will help you get started with the fundamental components you'll need to generate more and higher quality leads.

And although we've gone over some overarching best practices, remember that you'll need to continuously test and tweak your site to optimize it for leads based on your own, unique audience. If you aren't doing that already or want to learn more about optimization, read this post to learn about A/B testing your website in more detail.

What else makes up a lead-generating website? Share with us in the comments.

How to Create a Growth Hacking Framework

Have you heard about the Fake It Hack? How about the Exclusivity Hack? The Aha Moment Hack?

These are a few of the tactics you'll read if you Google “growth hacking.” Don't worry if you haven't heard of them before. You don't need to know about them yet.

The only thing you need to know right now is how to create a scalable and repeatable process so you can efficiently execute, test and learn from these growth hacks. At least that's what HubSpot's former VP of Growth Brian Balfour would say.

According to Balfour's Slideshare, when it comes to growth hacking, focus on process first, tactics second.

This makes sense because what works for one company will not automagically work for you. Your business model is probably different. Your audience may be different. Your customer journey – you guessed it – is different.

Because Googling for growth hacks is so much more fun than actually carving out yet another process, there's a million and one mega lists of tactics and virtually no articles on how to create a repeatable system for testing your ideas. In this post, you'll learn the latter.

First, I'll discuss why you need a growth process and detail the key documents you'll need to create. And finally, I'll outline a step-by-step system for testing your growth hacking ideas.

Shall we?

Why Create a Process?

People + Process = Growth Hacking

Assuming you have good people, you need to give them autonomy to decide what to work on and goals to hold them accountable to.

By establishing a process, you establish a rhythm, allowing your team to efficiently execute experiments and then learn from those experiments. As you run more experiments, you'll have more learnings to document in your playbook.

Why compile your learnings?

Because what if a key team member leaves, and they weren't documenting their experiments? Then they leave with key intel, and all those experiments were useless.

The 7-step Process

So you know you want to grow, but you need to be more specific than that.

1. Define Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

OKRs is a method of defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. Its main goal is to connect company, team and personal objectives to measurable results, making people move together in the right direction.

Objectives

“It's like goals served in a fractal manner.” - Eric, founder of Pebble

What do you hope to accomplish?

According to Google, objectives, sometimes referred to as “stretch goals,” should be fairly uncomfortable and quite ambitious. Objectives should be granular enough that you'll easily know if it has been achieved or not. Here's a few tips for setting objectives.

• Pick three to five objectives.


• Push for new achievements.


• Make it specific enough to be able to see the end in sight, meaning it should be obvious if a result was achieved or not.

Key results

Key results are the specific numbers, based on objectives, you aim to meet in a specific period of time. Here's a few tips for picking key results.

• Define three key results for every objective.


• Key results are measurable milestones that will directly inch nearer to reaching the objective.


• Describe outcomes, not activities.


• There must be proof you reached your key result. Evidence should be easily accessible.

OKR example

Here's an OKR example of Uber.

2. Brainstorm ideas

Next, you need to brainstorm all of the possible avenues to reaching your objectives. If Uber wants to increase its driver base in each region by 20 percent then it needs to brainstorm ways to achieve this key result.

Uber could generate ideas by researching how its competitors are securing more drivers.

Once ideas are generated, its team could try to poke holes in them by asking questions like, why, what if… and what about….

Its team could even look outside its industry and look at how other marketplaces are increasing its supply side because the more dots you have the more ideas you have.

Last but not least, make sure you're talking with other growth teams to see what's working for them that might work for you.

To do:

Record a backlog of your ideas.

You don't want to lose any of your ideas so make sure to record them in a safe place. I prefer to use Trello myself, but a spreadsheet works too.

3. Prioritize

Now, it's time to decide which ideas you'll focus on and test. Here's a few elements to consider during the prioritization process.

• What's the probability that it will work? Is it a low chance (20 percent), medium (50 percent) or high (80 percent)?


• What's the potential impact? This comes from your hypothesis, and you should take into account long-lasting effects versus one-hit wonders.


• How much (and what) resources will this require? You must consider teams that will be needed – marketing, design, engineering – and the amount of time that will be required – one hour , half a day, one day, one week.

4. Test

This is where your experiment doc comes in handy.

First and foremost, what's your hypothesis? Here's what a hypothesis reads like.

If successful, [variable] will increase by [impact], because [assumptions].

Make sure to justify your assumptions with quantitative (previous experiments, surrounding data, funnel data), qualitative (surveys, support emails, user testing, recordings) and secondary information (networking, blogs, competitor observations, case studies).

To do:

Create an experiment doc.

Google Docs works nicely for this because it allows you to easily collaborate with your team. Your experiment doc should have the following information:

• Objective: Qualitative statement


• Timeframe: Between 30 and 90 days


• KR1: Measurable goal one (hit 90 percent of the time)


• KR2: Measurable goal two (hit 50 percent of the time)


• KR3: Measurable goal three (hit 10 percent of the time)

Here's a link to an experiment doc in Google Docs I created for you. Feel free to make a copy and use it.

5. Implement

Execute your experiments between 30 and 90 days, and measure weekly results.

6. Analyze

What did you learn? Here's a few questions to help you analyze your experiment.

• What was the impact of this experiment?


• How accurate were your predictions?


• Why did you see the results you saw?

Once you answer these questions, document your findings at the end of your experiment doc so you can go back and review in the future.

Upgrade your analytics with Kissmetrics Understand more than just what's happening on your site. Kissmetrics Analyze shows you where you're losing customers, which segments are sending you the most revenue, and how to get the most out of your marketing dollar.

7. Systemize

If your experiment was successful, document your step-by-step process into a “playbook” so you can turn this into a streamlined, repeatable process.

Uber created a playbook for sabotaging Lyft, for example, and it also has a playbook for launching in new cities, since this is something the popular app does all the time.

What Tools Can Help?

I'm so glad you asked. There's a lot of tools you can use to simplify this process.

GrowthHackers Projects

For $9 per month, you can use Sean Ellis' GrowthHackers Projects, which is a full-fledged growth hacker system in the form of a web app.

A nice benefit of GrowthHackers projects is it's connected to GrowthHackers network, which means you can save ideas from the community with the click of a button.

Trello + Google Docs

There's a lot of Trello growth hacking templates you can copy, such as this one and this one.

Airtable

Airtable is a new, good-looking spreadsheet software. It's pretty neat. Here's a growth hacking template for it.

Asana

If you already use Asana, you could just create another project, and use it for your growth hacks. Templana even offers an Asana template with 40 growth hacking tactics to get you started. Also, a few of these free templates by Asana might help you as well.

Growth Hacking is About the Process, Not the Tactics

Woohoo! You've carved out a process for growth hacking, which means you're way ahead of your competitors, since most marketers don't even have a documented content strategy in place.

Now, you can go wild researching growth hacking tactics. You're welcome.

About the Author: Lauren Holliday is the founder of Freelanship, which offers 31 pre-packaged marketing gigs, and she's the creator of the Full Stack Marketer, a full-stack marketing course that helps people learn by doing freelance projects. She's also the managing editor at Toptal, an an exclusive network of the top freelance software developers and designers in the world.

SearchCap: Bing Ads app installs, Google link penalties & Veterans Day

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

The post SearchCap: Bing Ads app installs, Google link penalties & Veterans Day appeared first on Search Engine Land.



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

How to Beat Your Competitor's Rankings with More *Comprehensive* Content - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Longer, more thorough documents tend to do better in the search results. We know that's true, but why? And is there a way we can use that knowledge to our advantage? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how Google may be weighting content comprehensiveness and outlines his three-step methodology for gaining an edge over your competitors when it comes to meeting searchers' needs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about, well, something I've noticed, something we've noticed here at Moz, which is that there seems to be this extra weight that Google is putting right now on what I'm going to call content comprehensiveness, the degree to which a piece of content answers all of a searcher's potential questions. I think this is one of the reasons that we keep seeing statistics like word length and document length is well-correlated with higher rankings and why it tends to be the case that longer documents tend to do better in search results. I'm going to break this down.

Broad ranking inputs

On the broad ranking inputs, when Googlebot is over here and sort of considering like: Which URL should I rank? Someone searched for best time to apply for jobs, and what am I going to put in here? They tend to look at a bunch of stuff. Domain authority and page-level link authority and keyword targeting, for sure. Topic authority, the domain, and load speed and freshness and da, da, da.

But these four, all of which are sort of related:

1. Searcher engagement and satisfaction, so the degree to which when people land on that page they have a good experience, they don't bounce back to the search results and click another result.
2. The diversity and uniqueness of that content compared to everything else in the results.
3. The raw content quality, which I think Google has probably lots of things they use to measure content quality, including engagement and satisfaction, so these might overlap.
4. And then comprehensiveness.

It's sort of this right mix of these three things, like the depth, the trustworthiness, and the value that the content provides seems to really speak to this. It's something we've been seeing like Google kind of overweighting right now, especially over the last 12 to 18 months. There seems to be this confluence of queries, where this very comprehensive content comes up in ranking positions that we wouldn't ordinarily expect. It throws off things around link metrics and keyword targeting metrics, and sometimes SEOs go, "What is going on there?"

So, in particular, we see this happening with informational- and research-focused queries, with product and brand comparison type queries, like "best stereo" or "best noise cancelling headphones," so those types of things. Broad questions, implicit or explicit questions that have complex or multifaceted answers to them. So probably, yes, you would see this type of very comprehensive content ranking better, and, in fact, I did some of these queries. So for things like "job application best practices," "gender bias in hiring," "résumé examples," these are broad questions, informational/research focus, product comparison stuff.

Then, not so much, you would not see these in things like "job application for Walmart," which literally just takes you to Walmart's job application page, which is not a particularly comprehensive format. The comprehensive stuff ranks vastly below that. "Gender bias definition," which takes you to a short page with the definition, and "résumé template Google Docs," which takes you to Google Docs' résumé template. These are almost more navigational or more short-format answer in what they're doing. I didn't actually mean to replace that.

How to be more comprehensive than the competition

So if you want to nail this, if you identify that your queries are not in this bucket, but they are in this bucket, you probably want to try and aim for some of this content comprehensiveness. To do that, I've got kind of a three-step methodology. It is not easy, it is hard, and it is going to take a lot of work. I don't mean to oversimplify. But if you do this, you tend to be able to beat out even much more powerful websites for the queries you're going after.

1. Identify ALL the questions inherent in the search query term/phrase:

First off, you need to identify all the questions that are inherent in the searcher's query. Those could be explicit or implicit, meaning they're implied or they're obvious. They could be dependent on the person's background, the searcher's background, which means you need to identify: Who are all the types of people searching for this, and what differences do they have? We may need different types of content to serve different folks, and there needs to be some bifurcation or segmentation on the page to help them get there.

Same thing on their purpose. So some people who are searching for "job application best practices" may be employers. Some people may be job applicants. Some may be employees. Some may be people who are starting companies. Some may be HR directors. You need to provide that background for all of them.

One of the ways to do this, to get all the questions, truly all the questions is to survey. You can do that to your users or your community, or you can do it through some sort of third-party system. For example, Oli Gardner from Unbounce was very kind and did this for Moz recently, where he was asking about customer confusion and objections and issues. He used UsabilityHub's tests. UsabilityHub, you can use this there as well. You can also use Q and A sites, things like Quora. You can use social media sites, like Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, if you're trying to gather some of this data informally.

2. Gather information your competition cannot/would not get:

Once you have all these questions, you need to assemble the information that answers all of these types of questions, hopefully in a way that your competition cannot or would not get. So that means things like:

• Proprietary data


• Competitive landscape information, which many folks are only willing to talk about themselves and not how they relate to others.


• It means industry and community opinions, which most folks are not willing to go out and get, especially if they're bigger.


• Aggregated or uniquely processed metrics, obviously one of the most salient recent examples from the election that's just passed is sites like FiveThirtyEight or the Upshot or Huffington Post, who build these models based on other people's data that they've aggregated and included.


• It also could mean that you are putting together information in visual or audio or interactive mediums.

3. Assemble in formats others don't/can't/won't use:

Now that you have this competitive advantage, in terms of the content, and you have all of the questions, you can assemble this stuff in formats that other people don't or won't create or use.

• That could be things like guides that require extraordinary amounts of work. "The Beginners Guide to SEO" is a good example from Moz, but there are many, many others in all sorts of fields.


• Highly customized formats that have these interactive or visual components that other people are generally unwilling to invest the effort in to create.


• Free to download or access to reports and data that other people would charge for or they put behind pay walls.


• Non-transactional or non-call-to-action-focused formats. For example, a lot of the times when you do stuff in this job search arena, you see folks who are trying to promote their service or their product, and therefore they want to have you input something before they give you anything back. If you do that for free, you can often overwhelm the comprehensiveness of what anyone else in the space is doing.

This process, like I said, not easy, but can be a true competitive advantage, especially if you're willing to take on these individual key phrases and terms in a way that your competition just can't or won't.

I'd love to hear if you've got any examples of these, if you've tried it before. If you do use this process, please feel free to post the results in the comments. We'd love to check it out. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How Amazon Uses Twitter to Drive Website Traffic: Bad Jokes Ahead

Thinking about all of the great retailers online, there is perhaps no bigger name in the industry than Amazon. They have created an incredible sales system that is centered around a website that is second to none, with an inventory that includes …everything from A → Z!

With so much going on from their website alone you'd think they'd slack off on Twitter. Look through it careful and you'll plainly see that they do not. Amazon use a very unique approach to customer acquisition on Twitter which:

• Keeps their followers engaged.


• Uses a wide variety of content.


• Creates customer-acquiring contests.


• Uses multiple accounts.


• Participates in trends.

Everything that Amazon does to get clicks to their landing pages is out there for us to look at. Let's take the time them to learn from them so we can apply it to our own Twitter marketing, and customer acquisition efforts.

How Amazon Uses Twitter to Acquire Customers

Content style: Keeping it light and breezy

Before you get too caught up in terms like customer acquisition, click through rates, and return on investment, you need to first see Twitter for what it is: Social. There is still a 'social' in 'social media,' after all.

Amazon has taken the social aspect of Twitter and really ran with it. Their conversational tone and informal content presentation style have made sure that their followers know that they're part of a conversation. Amazon's followers don't feel like they're being advertised to:

Shhhhhhh. https://t.co/MsHmx3NAnN pic.twitter.com/m0ukmmdKhF

- Amazon (@amazon) October 18, 2016

Are they actually being advertised to though? Of course! Click that link to see that this silly joke is a direct customer acquisition tactic that's masked by their conversational, almost too silly, style.

Dogs in costumes. Repeat: dogs in costumes. https://t.co/Mq4lTDOx9v pic.twitter.com/XJhuteYW4K pic.twitter.com/8i9LvVW2Wb

- Amazon (@amazon) October 14, 2016

Even dogs in costumes are a topic they'll touch on, and sell with, when the opportunity comes. It's just a fun account, and having some fun should be a goal of any Twitter marketing plan.

How They Acquire Customers via Contests and Hashtags

Running a Twitter contest is a right of passage for anyone trying to acquire customers via Twitter. While there are many ways to get this right, and wrong, Amazon is currently running one which helps them:

• Spread their Twitter account around


• Tell a story


• Get people on their website

Here's the one that they're making a big push for right now for Halloween:

Prime rib. Get it?Join the #AmazonPrime box costume challenge and share your photos for a chance to be featured: https://t.co/bmHVtHuYfx pic.twitter.com/Iyh9vDkQzo

- Amazon (@amazon) October 18, 2016

Yes, it's goofy. Yes, they make a pretty bad pun. But look at what they're really doing with this one tweet for their contest:

• They remind their followers once again of the paid 'Amazon Prime' service.


• They create a hashtag for anyone to click on to see not only more about this contest, but more about Amazon Prime in general.


• They prompt their followers to create user-generated content as another one of their promotional tools.

And that user-generated content isn't just a theory. It's in practice already as fans send in pictures which Amazon then uses:

With a few #AmazonPrime boxes & a little creativity, just imagine the costume possibilities. Join the challenge https://t.co/UdkUGwhXXd pic.twitter.com/SuJkZ9Tz5b

- Amazon (@amazon) October 17, 2016

Every time one of their followers tweet out this user generated content related to their hashtag they have another chance to draw in new customers from the followers of that user. This is the great strength of user generated content. Contests which incorporate user generated content may just be your best bet at truly creating a contest which goes somewhere, and goes a long way to helping you find new customers.

Clever Use of Media

We all need images, videos and GIFs to survive on Twitter. Amazon use some of the user-generated content discussed above, but the vast majority of it is produced in-house by their team.

When they do create content, it is always with a distinct goal in mind, and that goal is always to drive traffic to a very focused landing page on their website. Here are two examples:

With eight spooky stories come eight good reasons to sleep with the lights on: https://t.co/1yNJfAZkmr pic.twitter.com/9fE2TwVilH

- Amazon (@amazon) October 7, 2016

Because it only happens once a year. https://t.co/oTbDWgISTg #NationalTacoDay pic.twitter.com/u2qjWWAWMR

- Amazon (@amazon) October 4, 2016

Click on either of those links and you'll be sent to a custom landing page packed full of products that are 100% relevant to the media used in the tweet. This is the type of content which can catch your eye as you scroll through your Timeline, and get you to stop on the most perfect link that you're clearly interested in.

The other interesting thing they do with content is keep it varied. They seem to have every type of content which Twitter allows at some point. Be it plain images:

When you tell all your friends you're going as Bigfoot. https://t.co/g1CYmaLQHG #Halloween pic.twitter.com/i8wkFYkF2h

- Amazon (@amazon) October 18, 2016

Live Periscope events:

LIVE on #Periscope: 3D printing: Is it a trick or treat? Watch for hidden giveaways! Thanks @monoprice for making… https://t.co/FQpX6JpFJ4

- Amazon (@amazon) October 13, 2016

Pre-shot video:

“If you make a good product, you'll be successful.” pic.twitter.com/QCiR5D8TBC

- Amazon (@amazon) October 18, 2016

Looping Vine video:

Dressed to impress, because it's #NationalTacoDay. https://t.co/ClRGOUdq98

- Amazon (@amazon) October 5, 2016

Not to mention their interesting 'can you find it' images:

Somewhere, among this pile o' candy corn, is a yellow M&M. Can you spot it? pic.twitter.com/YNzfx5TEXR

- Amazon (@amazon) October 1, 2016

This wide variety of content keeps them from becoming stale, and makes their Timeline something very interesting to scroll through. This wide variety of content keeping interest high makes their links all the more clickable, and their content all the better at driving customers that will convert.

If you don't personally have a team that can create this wide of variety of content, don't worry. You can always tweet out the videos, GIFs, Vines, and images you find online. I, for one, would like to see them start using GIFs on Twitter.

Using multiple accounts to better appeal to specific customers

A trend that more and more corporations are picking up on is the use of multiple accounts. With Amazon offering so much content they knew that some audience segmentation would do a lot to help them reach different groups of people, and connect with them deeply.

I did a count of how many different accounts are directly associated with Amazon, and are verified, and that number was 39. This doesn't include Twitter accounts for their Amazon TV shows either.

This means they can create content which appeals directly to music fans:

.@GreenDay are back with more anthems to rock your world! Turn up 'Revolution Radio" https://t.co/XtMFMcV0Hf pic.twitter.com/XMIYpTvxQ5

- Amazon Music (@amazonmusic) October 14, 2016

Without annoying their book fans:

6 new Star Wars books hitting shelves before "Rogue One": https://t.co/VF6WuxbOVu #starwars pic.twitter.com/YlJU6Bp0Oa

- Amazon Books (@amazonbooks) September 7, 2016

Or spamming their video game lovers:

Follow and RT for your chance to win the Amazon #Battlefield 1 CE and the new #XboxOneS. #BF1CESweepstakes https://t.co/ZJojg9ARRX pic.twitter.com/c42wzNtrrq

- Amazon Video Games (@amazongames) October 1, 2016

If you don't have a Kindle, you don't have to see tweets about the Kindle. If you don't live in the UK, you don't have to see tweets about, you know, British things:

Everybody needs a hero. Our super toys will save the day https://t.co/2LPuVfym6h pic.twitter.com/DPjC30h1fM

- Amazon.co.uk (@AmazonUK) September 14, 2016

When has Superman ever called someone 'mate'? Do they add those British-isms in when they ship DC Comics over to the UK? Regardless, they make little tweaks to their content to better appeal to the specific audiences attracted by all of these accounts. This helps them find, attract, and drive more specific customer groups and lead to more conversions.

Your company may not need a minimum of 39 different accounts, but it can do some audience segmentation to reach different audiences on a deeper level. This can be content and product segmentation, regional segmentation, or just the development of a support account.

@PastaSC2 That's not what we want to hear. Are you having a current issue with a delivery? If so, what was the delivery date quoted? ^JA

- Amazon Help (@AmazonHelp) July 4, 2016

Participating in Trending Hashtags, and 'National' Holidays

We're all clearly obsessed with having some sort of silly national 'holiday' to 'celebrate' online almost daily, especially on Twitter where fresh content is King, Queen, and the court jester. Since Amazon seems to sell nearly everything, they also have content for nearly everything, and link with that content that drives customers.

They get content out there for #ForceFriday:

The Force is strong in this family. #ForceFriday https://t.co/utlD73lFWE pic.twitter.com/hlciW3m2pm

- Amazon (@amazon) October 1, 2016

Wake up for #NationalCoffeeDay:

Prime members, buy a select coffee maker or accessory & get a FREE bag of Happy Belly coffee: https://t.co/sUWZ3BT9KB #NationalCoffeeDay pic.twitter.com/mQv6k589Ah

- Amazon (@amazon) September 29, 2016

Sing along without irony on #NationalOneHitWonderDay:

Finish this lyric… #NationalOneHitWonderDay HINT: you'll find it in this playlist. https://t.co/1EgnqZa2tz pic.twitter.com/0eljVCh7Eu

- Amazon (@amazon) September 25, 2016

And they went absolutely crazy about #NationalTacoDay, with 5 tweets about it on the day:

Because it only happens once a year. https://t.co/oTbDWgISTg #NationalTacoDay pic.twitter.com/u2qjWWAWMR

- Amazon (@amazon) October 4, 2016

Is this content all really, really silly? Yep. Is it going to show up in the Timeline of those looking through these trending hashtags for silly content. Yep! That's the whole point of using trending hashtags: To reach people you may not otherwise reach.

Amazon stretches as far as they can to incorporate customer acquisition, via the highly relevant landing pages they link to in each tweet, into their trending tweets. You always have to be cautious when using trending topics in your customer acquisition strategy as you can quickly become spam, or even worse do something which leads to you sending a tweet like this:

A million apologies. Did not read what the hashtag was about before posting.

- DiGiorno Pizza (@DiGiornoPizza) September 9, 2014

Know what the hashtag is about, and know whether or not your should use it for customer acquisition, before you tweet! Goofy 'national' holiday are usually safe. Force Friday and Taco Tuesday? Safe. DiGiorno used #WhyIStayed, which was about domestic violence: Not safe at all. Choose the right trends carefully and you'll gain customers, pick up a few more retweets, and entertain your followers.

Is Twitter helping you acquire customers? With Kissmetrics, you can track social media ROI using our analytics platform. Learn more with this infographic.

Amazon's Imitable Customer Acquisition Strategy

Amazon exists entirely in an online environment. You can't find them on Twitter and then take a drive over to their store (yet). Their storefront is online. Their 'driveway', or 'parking lot', exists in every possible online platform. Twitter is just another one of those platforms, and they must use it to acquire customers as they have no other way of obtaining them besides online.

We saw 5 key strategies they use to drive traffic from Twitter to their website. These tactics include:

1. Engagement style: They keep things informal, leading to more conversations and shares which attract potential clicks.


2. Contests and hashtag: They use contests as a way to drive people to their website, and associate these contests with hashtags connected to a larger story.


3. Media usage: The majority of their eye-catching media is associated with a link to a dedicated landing page.


4. Multiple accounts: They create accounts which appeal to specific segments of potential customers in a direct way.


5. Trending topics: They have something for sale that matches every trend. They're sure to jump in when it's appropriate with something fun, and link to a landing page with highly-relevant products for sale.

There is no great secret to any of this. All you have to do is see it for what it is, come up with ways that these customer acquisition tactics can apply to your account, and put that plan in action.

Are you thinking about using any of these customer acquisition tactics on Twitter? Comment below, and let's start perfecting your ideas!

About the Author: Matthew is the writer and social media analyst for the Devumi.com blog. Stop by the blog every week for the latest tactics in social media marketing. He covers everything from Twitter, to YouTube, to SoundCloud and even LinkedIn! For those who like to tweet, join the @Devumi Gorilla right now for some gorilla-sized tweets!

The Free Growth Tools I Recommend For Modern Businesses to Grow & Scale

If you're growing a company, chances are you're challenged with choosing the right tools to help you grow.

Both at HubSpot and at other businesses I've helped advise, I've seen marketing and sales teams experiment with all sorts of different tools they've hoped would drive growth. Some of these tools did help the team grow. Others slowed growth down or blocked it altogether. At HubSpot, we've seen opportunities to build new growth tools for marketing and sales teams and we've worked hard to fill those gaps.

One of the most important lessons I've taken away from growing businesses is that most growth problems come not from ideas, but from execution. You might have a growth-driven team, a great vision, and the dedication to achieve your lofty goals. But having those things isn't enough to actually grow.

To execute on your strategy, you're going to need a powerful set of tools that leverage every stage of the customer experience, from the first point of contact, through the sales and marketing process, and over the lifetime of the customer.

The foundation of a strong growth stack starts with the following:

• A CRM system that serves as the foundation for all the other growth tools you're using, which is where all of your customer data is stored.


• A marketing platform to attract the right people, convert them as leads, and communicate with them through the purchase process and once they're a customer.


• A sales platform that helps your sales team identify the right people, connect with them, and close them as customers.

Some companies are in the position to implement a growth stack right off the bat and then enhance and customize it with the right collection of integrated tools. Others need to start with free tools and build to a full growth stack over time. (Note: There is a free version of the HubSpot Growth Stack.)

For those companies just getting started, here is my shortlist of the best free growth tools for modern businesses. The list comprises a blend of free HubSpot tools and those from other companies that we've used and recommend.

The 11 Free Growth Tools I Recommend

A Free CRM

1) HubSpot CRM

You can't build a skyscraper without a solid foundation. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management tool) is just that -- it acts as the base layer of growth where all your business functions' information is organized and can be easily analyzed. In all honesty, it's impossible to grow and scale your business without a CRM.

Your CRM is the software that sits at the core of your digital system. It tracks every interaction your sales team has, stores all your marketing leads and customer data, and improves communication across your organization. The more you grow, the more important this becomes.

The problem is, most traditional CRM systems are hard to implement and use -- especially for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with limited time and resources. Sales teams have trouble adopting them internally, and you can bet that doesn't help your business grow whatsoever. If you're looking for a clean and intuitive CRM that'll make your sales reps more efficient -- regardless of their experience levels -- I'm very proud of the free CRM our team at HubSpot has built.

Free Growth Tools for Marketing

2) Trello

I'm a big fan of visualizing progress. Growth teams tend to have a lot of ideas, a lot of projects, and a lot of experiments going on at the same time. We've found Trello to be the best tool for tracking that progress. Each idea, project, and experiment can live on its own card, which teams can use to take notes, assign tasks, set due dates, and so on.

Here's a real example: Our VP of Marketing Kieran Flanagan uses it to track, from start to finish, all the experiments his growth team runs. What's especially remarkable is that his team members are located in various parts of the US and Europe, but with Trello they're able to stay organized and effective, and make a big impact on business growth.

The folks at Trello put together their own list of business growth apps, inspired by ours. Check it out here.

3) Hotjar Heat Maps & Visitor Recordings

Data beats intuition. You can't really know what your audience wants without getting inside the heads of the people who already regularly visit your site to find out why they visit your site, and Hotjar's tools are perfect for just that.

These guys are on the cutting edge of helping people figure out what drives people to different parts of their website. They're making it possible for people to build and grow their website in a way that actually resonates with people. We actually just launched an integration with Hotjar that shows Hotjar poll responses in HubSpot users' contact timelines.

The Heat Maps and Visitor Recordings are my favorite parts of the tool, though, and here's why: They visualize what people are doing when they get to your site by showing clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior. This is so important for a business because each of these actions shows what people do and care about on your site. It'll also help you find the biggest opportunities for improvement and testing. (And you should always be testing.)

Image Credit: Hotjar

4) Google Keyword Planner

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to growing traffic, which is a big driver of business growth in the online age. Simply put, you need to do it, and you need to do it well. If you want more people to find you on Google, you'll need a keyword tool to help you prioritize which keywords to focus on.

There are a few good keyword tools out there, but Google Keyword Planner is a great starting point for narrowing down the right keywords, gauging competition around each one, and learning how many people are searching for them.

5) GrowthBot

Bots are pretty freaking cool, and there's business value to them too -- they can make simple processes more efficient, giving your team time back in your day and helping you intelligently answer questions around your business. I could not be more excited about bots. That's why I spent a lot of time this year building a chatbot for growth professionals called GrowthBot. I originally started building it because I wanted it myself, but others have told me they find it helpful, too.

So how does it work? By connecting to a variety of marketing systems (like HubSpot, Google Analytics, and more), GrowthBot is able to give you more convenient access to information you already otherwise have, and give you access to information you didn't know you had. In the first case, you could ask it the question, "How was organic traffic last month?" and it'll tell you. In the second case, you might ask it, "Which public SaaS companies are using HubSpot?" or "Which PPC keywords is uber.com buying?" and it'll spit back the answer in just a few seconds.

6) HubSpot Marketing Free's Lead Flows

A big mistake I see growing marketing teams making is spending all their time driving traffic to their website, but not turning that traffic into leads. Problem is, if you're not learning about the people who are showing interest in your business, you're leaving critical lead and sales numbers on the table.

To help you take a page that gets a good amount of traffic and turn that traffic into leads, some really smart folks created a feature within HubSpot's new free marketing tool called Lead Flows. Lead Flows are unobtrusive widgets -- pop-ups, dropdown banners, slide-ins -- that you can add to any of your website pages. Best part is that they involve no technical setup or coding whatsoever, so you can set them up in minutes (seriously, minutes) without having to make changes to your existing site. Let us know what you think of Lead Flows on Product Hunt.

7) Buffer

There's a lot you can do with social without spending any money. Social media is an amplifier. It takes time, but if you build a following, it is a great way to take that awesome content you're producing and spreading it further and wider.

For social media marketing on all the major networks, Buffer is a great place to start. It connects your business' Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+ accounts in a single platform and lets you share text, links, photos, and videos, either immediately or to schedule for later.

Image Credit: Buffer

8) Canva

Tools that make creating visual content easier are important for growth, especially for a business with limited design resources. Being able to create great images in a short amount of time will help make your website, your emails, your social media posts, and every other marketing asset more engaging and attractive to your audience. Simply put, better visuals = more engagement = more traffic = business growth.

Canva makes it easy and fast for people who aren't designers by trade (like me, as my team knows well) to create visual content quickly.

Image Credit: Entrepreneur's Organization

Free Growth Tools for Sales

9) join.me Free Conference Calls & Screen Sharing

The easier you make it for your sales team to interact with leads and prospects, the better they'll be at closing customers, which you most definitely need if you want to grow your business. join.me isn't software -- all your reps have to do to start a call is open up the desktop or mobile app or log in online.

There are a lot of meetings tools out there, but this one is one of the fastest, most reliable, most intuitive, and easiest to use. And if you use HubSpot's free CRM, you can start a join.me meeting directly from your contact timeline.

Image Credit: join.me

10) HubSpot Sales Templates

Your sales reps are probably wasting a lot of time writing the same emails over, and over, and over again. There's a lot of value in streamlining the emailing process while still making sure sales reps are sending high-quality emails. If your sales reps can get their hands on personalized email templates, that'll save hundreds of hours over the long term. Templates, a feature of HubSpot Sales, lets you access personalized email templates for free from within your inbox.

What makes this tool particularly powerful for sales teams is that you can build a shared library of templates everyone can use. You can also aggregate data on how often emails with certain templates get opened or clicked, which helps you hone in on the approaches worth sharing.

11) HubSpot Sales Email Open Tracking & Notifications

This is one of my favorite email tools, not just for sales teams, but for personal use. It sends instant desktop notifications when the emails you send get opened. You'll see who opened the email, at what time, on which device, and where they were located when they opened it. If you want to look at all your notifications, or all your notifications on a specific email, then you can view the full history in a stream.

This list of free tools is a starting point for those looking to grow from startup into sustainable. Down the road, you'll want to integrate your growth tools together into a true growth stack. For those looking to take the next step, we've mapped out our version of a complete growth stack over on Product Hunt. Take a look and let our engineers know what you think.