VIDEO 1: WHY IS SEGMENTATION IMPORTANT WITH SMART CONTENT?

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1 VIDEO 1: WHY IS SEGMENTATION IMPORTANT WITH SMART CONTENT? Hi there! I m Angela with HubSpot Academy. This class is going to teach you all about planning content for different segmentations of users. Segmentation is going to help you better personalize your content and in the end, better targeting results and better conversion rates. Showing the most relevant information to your users creates a great experience for them. Segmentation is what makes contextual marketing possible. HubSpot evaluated over 93,000 calls-to-action from HubSpot users and found that CTAs targeted to the user had a 42% higher view-to-submission rate than if the CTA was generic and the same for all visitors. (Source: HubSpot) You ll be able to target specific groups of users through smart tools in HubSpot. Segmentation is going to be happening in real-time when a user is on your website. If you segment by country, device type, referral source or preferred language, you will not need to set those segments up. There are two segments that you will need to set up beforehand, however. You ll need to set up your lifecycle stages and lists of contacts in HubSpot, if you wish to use contextual marketing to reach those groups with personalized content. So before you try to use the lifecycle stage segment or the list membership segment, make sure that you have your lifecycle stages and lists set up properly. If you haven t created lifecycle stages yet, check out the Lifecycle Stages User Guide found in the Resources section of this class page. It s important to keep in mind that you ll only use one segment at a time. If you wanted to create a form that s specific to leads from Japan, coming from Facebook, and on a mobile device, that s too specific. To get the most out of your contextual marketing efforts, your segmentation needs to be broad enough for you to engage a group of people. Keep in mind that you re targeting a group of users, not individuals. Segmentation is the key to creating contextual marketing. Setting up segmentation is what will trigger smart content to display different content to different people. 1

2 Segmenting your audience should be very familiar to you, since you ve segmented your contacts in order to have lists for workflows and s. When it comes to your smart content however, you want to make sure you have the right segments set up. In the next videos, you ll learn how to approach content creation for certain user segments and how to use the user s context in creating targeted messaging. One segmentation type might be better suited than another in some cases. Through observation and user research, you ll determine which is right for you in each scenario. This class is designed to show you some of the segmentation possibilities. Let s go ahead and learn about different ways to segment your users in order to show them targeted and personalized content. VIDEO 2: HOW DO YOU CREATE CONTENT FOR A SEGMENT OF CONTACTS? When creating smart content, you have the ability to segment a list of contacts and provide them with content that is different from the average visitor. This means any time a member of that list visits, you can provide content that is specifically tailored to them. Don t forget that you can be most efficient with your contextual marketing efforts by targeting the largest group of similar users as possible. Let s take a look at a couple of contact lists that you may want to target. One contact list that you may want to create specialized content for, is one of your buyer personas. Now, you ve probably defined buyer personas for your business already and conducted some good research on the various qualities that those personas have. Since most companies serve a number of different buyer personas, pick one or two personas to focus on. Create a customized experience for your highest-value personas at first and you can expand to other personas later on. In order to target your personas, you ll need two things. First, you need to have the list set up. The buyer persona smart list is set up for you after you create your personas in HubSpot. Not much to do there. However, you ll need to decide which list - Customers, Leads, MQLs, or All Contacts of that persona. Second, you ll need to make sure that you have assigned contacts to that particular persona! If your persona smart list is empty, then you won t be targeting that persona and you won t show those personas that unique content. If you are unsure how to do this, check out the resources on this page to get caught up. 2

3 Another contact list that you may want to segment and target in order to provide unique content is a smart list based on the user s activity. For this type of segmenting, examine the past online behavior of your users to dictate how to build these smart list segments. Maybe one group of users have watched your product video and another is for any users that have downloaded an ebook and yet another group that requested a live demo. You might have noticed that those smart list examples are closely tied to the buyer s journey -- the user s activity and content needs infers what buyer stage the user is in. The beauty, and difficulty, in this segmentation based on user activity is that there s really no limit to how you can approach it building those smart lists. Don t forget that there are a number of other ways to target different users. You aren t limited to using lists of contacts. Let s keep learning about other segmentation types. VIDEO 3: HOW DO YOU CREATE CONTENT FOR A LIFECYCLE STAGE? Next, you can create smart content for lifecycle stage segments. Lifecycle stages allow you to categorize your users by how far along in their decision-making process they are. Is this a user s first visit? Are they talking to your sales team? Have they been a customer for a while? This type of segmenting is most likely already in your contacts tool, and you ve probably been using it in your s already. In HubSpot, the lifecycle segments are: Subscriber (that is, to your blog), Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity, Customer, Evangelist. Use the resources on the page if you aren t sure how to set up lifecycle stages, or if you need a quick review on HubSpot s lifecycle definitions. Otherwise, consider what kind of content you d want to show customers compared to a first-time visitor. How about content for a lead compared to a customer? Targeting users based on their lifecycle stage is one of the simplest ways to segment your contacts and provide customized content. Stay tuned for more options 3

4 VIDEO 4: HOW DO YOU USE CONTEXT BY COUNTRY? On website pages and landing pages hosted in HubSpot, you can target a user based on their country. This is suitable not only for your customers and leads, but also first-time visitors. This can be especially useful if you want to provide content that is specific to a country. For example, if you are a European-based company and conduct a lot of business with users in the US, you can use the country context to show US users the right currency on your pricing page. Or, let s say your company has a booth at a tradeshow in Canada next month. Show all of your Canadian visitors a CTA on the homepage so they can get all the details about the tradeshow and where to find your booth. As another example, let s say that this travel company gets a lot of leads from Ireland. On their contact us page, they want to make sure that their Irish visitors are able to get in touch with the right person in the sales department. Rather than talking to Ted in the US, all Ireland-based users would see Emily s information so they could get in touch with her directly. How is this possible? Well, a visitor s location is determined by their IP address. While no IP lookup is perfect, three data sources are evaluated to improve the data quality. When the three data sources cannot agree on accurate location data, HubSpot will default to not show the smart rule rather than using inaccurate data to power the context. On a related note, it s important to remember that search engines are only looking at the default content. With those two caveats in mind, you won t want to change the entire language of your website based on IP address. Instead, you ll find specific high-traffic areas across your website and landing pages that can benefit from country-specific content. For some businesses, understanding a user s country may not provide that much context and in turn, those companies may choose to segment their visitors in different ways. You ll determine the best segmentation mix for your contextual marketing. 4

5 VIDEO 5: HOW DO YOU USE CONTEXT BY DEVICE TYPE? The next segmentation option is based on the type of device that the user is browsing on. This segment type allows you to display variations of your landing page or website page content that s optimized for mobile, tablet or desktop device. For instance, you can add useful instructions like "Turn your tablet horizontal to see this better. Or you can change the copy entirely. If you are a parking ticket company, you may want to give mobile users a direct link to pay their tickets, since they're likely looking at your website, standing next to their car with a new ticket. You can also use the device type segment to provide a better experience for your users. Mobile users focus their browsing energy in short bursts and typically don t commit extended periods of time to reading on this device type. Therefore, shorter-form, simplified content is vital to driving engagement with your mobile users. There s a chance that a mobile user is splitting their focus with walking, riding, eating a meal and hopefully not driving, all while they are looking at your content. Consider the user s intentions and think through why a person is accessing your content on their mobile, rather than a computer. To guide you in creating shorter-form content for this group, ask yourself What kinds of time-restraints might a mobile user have? What are their surroundings and distractions like? What questions are they trying to answer? And am I able to address those questions in the user s time-frame? By asking yourself those questions, you ll be able to recognize the particular needs of this segmented group. A good way to start to tailor your content based on the context of the user s device type, is to evaluate the form length on your landing pages. You can ask different questions to your mobile users or even omit some questions so the mobile user doesn t have tons for form fields to fill out. Again, one landing page, but different content based on the user s context. Lastly, for your web designer or if you know a little HTML, know that you can use the device type segment to display HTML content based on device type. Let s say you want to show desktop users a live chat option that you ve integrated on your website and encourage mobile users to call you instead. Or if you want to display a map to your office location and directions only to mobile users on your contact us page, this is the segment to use. There are many possibilities with HTML content, but 5

6 don t feel like you have to use custom HTML and the device type segment. Put the user s needs and context first to help you determine what to display based on their device type. VIDEO 6: HOW DO YOU USE CONTEXT BY REFERRAL SOURCE? Another way to use context to present the right content to your users is by referral source. You can use the referral source context on website pages and landing pages hosted in HubSpot. Referral sources refers to the way in which a user reached your website. The segmentation options by referral source are: by organic source, referrals, social media, marketing, paid search, direct traffic, or by other campaigns. Let s break these down. First, by organic search. You can segment visitors that have found your website through a search engine result based on a keyword that you ve used on your website. As an example, a marketing agency has been monitoring their long tail keywords and generates a significant amount of traffic based on the keyword copywriting services for small businesses. What the company would like to do is shorten the amount of time that visitors have to look around and find their copywriting services. And so, for visitors that search for copywriting services for small businesses the company can show content on their homepage or landing pages that aligns with this visitor. This can be a powerful way to segment your traffic. If you know what keyword the visitor search for, show them content that aligns with what they need! Next, you can segment based on a referral link, which is another website. You ll be able to show content to website visitors that arrive from any other website or you can indicate a specific website. This is a great way to align your content with what the user was browsing before they got to your website. For example, if a marketing company wrote a guest blog post on another company s site, they can use the referral source to show visitors from that website exclusive content and even a special promotion if they wanted. Another way to use the context of referral source is by social media. You can target all users that arrive from social or from a specific social media network such as: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+. 6

7 You can show exclusive content or a shorter form of the content. Considering that the user was previously on a social media network which generally has shorter form content, you can use this segmentation to provide a good experience to the user that is concise and more aligned with the content they were browsing on social media. You can also segment users based on an marketing referral source. For visitors that arrive on a certain website page or landing page from a link in an , you can provide content that is tailored to them. To continue the example, a marketing company that has sent an to their leads about SEO copywriting can tailor a landing page to these leads. Rather than building a separate landing page, the company can use smart content to make the landing page content reference the , which only the leads from the see. Next, you can segment the paid search referral source specific to a campaign you ve created. Through using this segmentation option, you ll be able to display content that aligns with the larger marketing campaign that you ve created and ensure that these users are seeing the messaging that is consistent with your paid search campaign. This is yet another outstanding option to segment visitors based on what they are looking for and what they need. You also have the option to create context for the user that has a direct source. There s one thing that all direct traffic has in common: they proactively seek you out! These visitors have either typed in a URL directly or visited from a bookmark. They might be existing customers or new users through word-of-mouth. At the very least, users that reach your website directly are familiar with your brand. These users need a solution and your company came to mind. You can use the direct source segmentation to provide offers that will help the user move through their buyer s journey. And lastly, you can segment based based on the other campaigns referral source. Other campaigns is a good option for campaigns that have a tracking URL set up. If you have a marketing campaign that needed a tracking URL to be set in HubSpot, then you may want to continue targeting this group of visitors as they navigate your website. Those are all of the segmentation options by referral source: organic source, referrals, social media, marketing, paid search, direct traffic, or other campaigns. Referral source is yet another option for segmenting and targeting your users. Stay tuned for another way to use context for segmentation. 7

8 VIDEO 7: HOW DO YOU USE CONTEXT BY PREFERRED LANGUAGE? And last but not least, you can display specific content on your HubSpot-hosted website pages and landing pages to users based on their preferred language. The language of the user s choice is set in their browser. This segmentation option can be very powerful if you conduct a lot of business with people that speak different languages. As an example, a company based in Switzerland may use the user s preferred language and display different content in German, French, Italian or Romansh. Now, you ll need to do research on your customers and consider how much international business you re planning on in the future. Companies that need a multilingual website will want to build that out in a different way. Don t forget that search engines only look at default content, so search engines will not see the smart content that s in another language in this case. So a company based in Montreal may have the need to create a website in French and an English version as well. In order to take advantage of the context by preferred language, it s recommended to use it to display messaging and a CTA that prominently directs a user to the website version that you ve created in their language. You can also use the context of preferred language to direct traffic to specific landing pages that you have created in the user s preferred language. By providing content in a user s preferred language, you re creating a better website experience for them and making it easier for them to navigate to the information they are seeking. Now you ve learned all of the different ways that you can use context to segment your website users. You can segment and present different content to users based on the user s: list membership, lifecycle stage, country, device type, referral source, or preferred language. Across your website, you ll use a mixture of all of these segmentations. Experiment with each of these segmentation types in order to target users based on their preferences and needs. 8