How we use Live Video to Fuel Inbound Marketing
Written by Paul Richards on February 4, 2018
This week in Episode 25, the StreamGeeks pop the hood on their inbound marketing engine and share insights on how live video is fueling their lead generation system. The team is joined by Morgan Jacobson, HubSpot Principal Manager, to discuss how businesses small and large are using live video in every stage of the inbound marketing funnel. The StreamGeeks Chief Streaming Officer, Paul Richards, explains how the team uses HubSpot as a central marketing management platform to organize the company’s efforts surrounding live video as a tool to attract, convert, close and delight customers. The company has been using HubSpot for over 5 years building an audience of over 45,000 contacts using a mixture of traditional inbound marketing and live streaming as a driving force for lead generation.
The StreamGeeks live streaming workflow has been designed to optimize show attendance, deliver value via video and scale using social media advertising. The team uses HubSpot to organize inbound leads and notify targeted personas with tailored email notifications when content is specifically interesting. The process leverages the massive audiences available on Facebook and YouTube in order to take advantage of platforms prioritization of live content. “We have a loyal following who we know will tune in regularly,” says Social Media Manager, Tess Protesto. “But we also email target personas in HubSpot depending on the content we are covering.” Tess is HubSpot certified marketer who uses the platform to schedule live show emails that are sent just 5 minutes before the show. Tess also uses Lead Flows, Topic Clusters, Social Media Monitor among other HubSpot tools to derive value from the teams live show content. For example, Lead Flow popup ads are enabled just hours before the live show to generate leads with a live giveaway offer on the StreamGeeks Homepage and turned off just after the show.
Like all good marketers, the StreamGeeks always start campaigns with the best possible content, made for their target customer demographics and personas. The team will routinely brainstorm, using the latest the core inbound marketing strategy as a guiding principle for content creation. “One thing we have started to think about more in our marketing strategy is where the content fits into an overall sales funnel,” says Chief Streaming Officer, Paul Richards. The StreamGeeks team tries to create live video content to support each stage of the inbound marketing sales funnel. “It’s too easy to get caught up in the attract stage when you are focusing on generating new leads. We now spend much more time converting and closing existing leads already in our CRM.”
The StreamGeeks also strategize on content creation from an SEO standpoint using the latest HubSpot Topic Cluster Strategy. Topic Clusters focus on search engine optimization through a hub and spoke strategy, linking related content to build authority on a given subject. “As we determine what our live show topic will be for a given week, we will consider the Topic Clusters we are focusing on and where the content could support a larger SEO effort,” says Richards. “Live Streaming is one of the most effective ways to increase watch time since viewers will spend 3-8 times as long watching live video versus on demand. Since accumulating watch time is the most important factor for YouTube video ranking we have found our video perform quite well on YouTube search.” (Learn more about Hacking the YouTube Algorithm in this StreamGeeks blog post)
In Conclusion, HubSpot helps us organize our marketing efforts and streamline our process of reaping the benefits of social media advertising via live streaming. Using a tool like HubSpot which brings together email, landing pages, forms, our blog, the lead flows and analytics helps our team be more productive. Our business has grown from just 4 million in revenue to over 16 million in just four years! Without a backbone like HubSpot, this type of growth would unsustainable. The StreamGeeks have a free guide outlining their process for “Fueling Inbound Marketing w/ Live Streaming” available for download at https://streamgeeks.us/marketing
STREAMGEEKS Feature topic of the week – Using Live Video to Fuel Inbound Marketing w/ Special Guest Morgan Jacobson of HubSpot
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