Learning About Smart Content at the Chicago HubSpot User Group

This week, three members of WSOL’s Marketing team attended the Chicago HubSpot User Group (#CHIHUG) and came away with some valuable insights (and also full stomachs from the pizza and beer that was provided!). The speaker for this meetup was HubSpot’s Isaac Moche, and he gave a great presentation about using HubSpot’s Smart Content capabilities for contextual marketing.

We had a great time at this month’s HUG, so we wanted to share our thoughts about the experience:

Matt Brady:

Despite a thunderstorm that rocked the building a bit during the meetup, I thought the experience was well worth the trek into the city. And even though we got a bit wet, we also got to see a beautiful double rainbow out the window of our train on the ride back home:

However, the real value of the HUG was evident in the potential for networking with other HubSpot users, discussing the challenges that we face as marketers, learning how to address them, and gaining inspiration from success stories.

Isaac Moche’s presentation about Smart Content was very valuable, looking at the importance of contextual marketing and personalization, discussing how to use these capabilities to create a great experience for your site’s users, and describing best practices for using personalization to meet your customers’ needs. I especially liked hearing the examples that people suggested of companies who do personalization well, as well as the discussions that resulted from people asking how they could make use of HubSpot Smart Content in their own marketing efforts.

Here a few takeaways that I found helpful:

• Don’t go overboard. Finding the right level of personalization can be tricky, but you don’t want to freak people out by displaying information that should be private. It’s also best to answer one question at a time rather than trying to insert a bunch of smart calls-to-action (CTAs) in hopes of meeting multiple goals.
• Set default values. It’s important to make sure a non-personalized version of your content is available for both first-time visitors and search engines.
• Decide what content you want to personalize. It’s often a good idea to start with high-performing content and tailor it to better meet the needs of specific personas, but low-performing content that you want to optimize and get more value out of is another good opportunity for using Smart Content.

Overall, this was a great presentation that gave me a lot of ideas about how we can continue to make use of HubSpot’s capabilities. I’m excited for the next Chicago HUG in September!

Katelyn Ahern:

This month’s Chicago HubSpot User Group was a great chance to learn more about Smart Content from HubSpot’s very own Isaac Moche. It’s always great to get some in-depth training with a HubSpot employee and hear from them about the Inbound Marketing methodologies that their users can take advantage of. Isaac shared some great examples of smart content and instances when Smart Content can help enhance users’ experience on a website.

As usual, my favorite part of this month’s HUG was getting to hear the use cases and examples from other HubSpot users. This helps bring smart content to life, and it got my wheels turning on new ways to implement smart copy, smart forms, and a true personalized experience in our current projects here at WSOL. Thanks to “the Erins” for hosting, and a special thanks to Isaac for visiting us in Chicago!

Sarah Corley:

I thoroughly enjoyed my first time to the Chicago HubSpot User Group. Since I’m still new(ish) to the marketing industry, it was a fantastic learning opportunity to have Isaac Moche, a Principal Inbound Professor with HubSpot Academy, as the guest speaker. It was also really neat to be surrounded by other professionals in my industry who use HubSpot software on a daily basis.

In his presentation, Isaac did a great job of taking the idea of contextual marketing and Smart Content and giving real world examples of how it can be effectively incorporated into an organization's marketing strategy. I enjoyed the exercise where he gave us an example of a company who wasn’t using Smart Content on their website and asked us to brainstorm ideas of how they could leverage the use of explicit and implicit data to further personalize the customer experience. The whole session was completely collaborative, allowing for other marketers to share their experiences and recommendations, along with Isaac asking follow-up questions.

I’m excited to attend the next Chicago HUG. Thank you to both Erins who hosted this meetup, TechNexus for hosting the venue, and Isaac for taking time out of a busy schedule to share his knowledge.

Need Help With Personalization?

As we learned at the Chicago HUG, the topic of contextual marketing and content personalization will continue to be relevant to any organization looking to make use of the tools available for reaching their customers. If you’re looking for a great solution to bring additional personalization capabilities to your organization, WSOL’s HubSpot-Episerver Connector provides some valuable features that aren’t available anywhere else. If you have any questions about the Connector or want to learn more about how to implement personalization in your marketing efforts, please contact us. We hope to see you at the next Chicago HUG!