Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, […]
from WordPress http://bit.ly/1SlEmDz
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, […]
from WordPress http://bit.ly/1PKyT2i
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, […]
from WordPress http://bit.ly/1SlEljd
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, […]
from WordPress http://bit.ly/1PKySLN
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, […]
from WordPress http://bit.ly/1SlEmnk
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, […]
from WordPress http://bit.ly/1SlElj9
This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.
Research has shown sleep might be the most important factor influencing our productivity. In fact, not getting enough sleep is similar to being drunk, according to studies.
Every so often, though, you’ll have a counterproductive day at work and need to pick up the slack before bed. But this situation raises an important question: If you’re going to stay up late working, how do you stay productive?
Below are 21 tips to help keep you productive into the early hours of the morning.
Practicing yoga helps alleviate both stress and mental fatigue, resulting in improved productivity and a relaxed mindset. Studies have shown that stress can make us less productive. In light of the data, spending a mere 15 minutes meditating can make an immediate difference in nighttime productivity.
Research has revealed that taking regular breaks prior to starting a new project can result in improved productivity. After the work day is over, a small 20-minute relaxation period can play a major role in your productivity during the next few hours.
According to Contently, working on large goals with a tight deadline results in our best work. For example, starting a project at 7 p.m. and establishing a hard deadline of 1 a.m. will improve productivity versus saying, “I’ll get this done tomorrow.”
Writing down our goals, according to research, immediately makes us more likely to achieve those goals. Prior to your long night, jot down the two to three most important tasks ahead of you for improved productivity.
While caffeine can give us a mental boost, it’s food that has a direct impact on our cognitive abilities during the last stretch of a day, according to studies. Not eating can set us back cognitively, resulting in less-than-excellent work due to lack of energy.
(Here is a list of foods to eat for max productivity.)
Several studies have found that music can play a direct role in our productivity as it makes repetitive tasks less annoying, and drowns out the distracting noises of our offices and homes. There are several options for a playlist, but classical music is most likely to improve cognitive functions.
(Check out our six productivity playlists here.)
Working in your bed can make your brain associate your bedroom as a place for work, not sleep, according to Lifehack. This association can result in lost sleep in the future and an inability to turn off when we go to bed.
Watching television while we work requires our brain to multitask, which can lead to decreased performance and an underwhelming project. Our brains work best when we’re focused on one thing at a time and giving the task at hand our complete attention.
Not a yoga person? Studies have shown that all forms of exercise can increase our cognitive abilities and overall energy. With more energy and a clear mind, we’re likely to produce better results and be more productive.
While caffeine might be tempting, a recent study found that drinking water can increase our productivity by as much as 14%. The study found that drinking water helps expand the grey matter in our brains which is key to being more productive.
Instead of trying to accomplish an extremely challenging task at night, focus instead on knocking out small goals as you build up momentum for the day ahead. Prior to your day, run your tasks though an impact versus effort analysis to determine which tasks require little energy but add up in value.
Setting overly ambitious goals can put us on a path for failure, which results in lost productivity and drained willpower. Setting realistic goals allows us to accomplish the tasks, resulting in improved morale and enhanced productivity. In short, don’t bite off more than you can chew at night.
While the internet can be enticing after a long day, blocking it will allow you to tune out distractions like social media and hone in on what matters. If you’re struggling with this, extensions like StayFocused and BlockSite can help.
Several studies have found that standing while working results in better concentration, more energy, and fewer headaches. By finding a place to stand and work at home, you can knock off your evening to-do list with ease.
Pajamas might be tempting, but studies have revealed that dressing for work actually heightens our attention and makes us more focused on the task at hand. Instead of sweatpants, try some business attire for max nighttime productivity.
Although it can be difficult, it’s important to stay in a work mindset to produce the best results. By avoiding the regular things we do at home for the night – i.e laundry, cleaning the bathroom, watching TV with family – we’re able to stay in the right mindset to be successful.
If you’re working late at night, it’s important to have an established work space so you don’t confuse home space with work space. Having a dedicated workspace allows our brains to associate the space with work, according to Wix, which makes us more productive.
Studies have found that our circadian rhythm can be triggered by blue light, increasing our awareness and giving us more energy. The circadian rhythm is what determines our body’s natural energy level. By looking at a blue light, we can give ourselves an energy boost.
Although scary at first, a cold shower, according to research, can improve energy levels, help our body rebuild key muscles, and make us feel renewed and fresh. If you can’t bring yourself to take a cold shower right off the bat, try the 911 challenge.
A study from Cornell University discovered that warmer temperatures decrease the amount of mistakes employees make while improving their output. Cold temperature is mostly associated with sleep, so by turning the heat up, you’re more likely to be alert at night.
If all else fails and life hands you lemons, make lemonade (or lemon tea). Studies have shown that the aroma of lemon improves our mood, and stimulates our bodies.
Every once in awhile we can have a slow or distracted day, requiring us to work late. While this isn’t ideal, there are a multitude of strategies we can use to ensure we retain our productivity even after the work day is over.
Have you tried any of these out? Tell us about what keeps you productive when you’re working late in the comments.
This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.
Communication is the lifeblood of sales and marketing. Successfully closing deals, providing value, explaining complexities – they all rely on your ability to express yourself clearly and persuasively.
The outreach email is a special breed of writing. You only have a very small window of opportunity to capture your reader’s attention and convince them to move one step closer toward a purchase or intended action. Use these writing techniques to ensure your emails pack the most punch.
Okay, so this isn’t exactly a writing tip. But it’s the foundation upon which your email’s effectiveness is built. If you don’t understand your audience – whether it’s someone who’s hesitant to buy, or a happy customer you’d like to upsell – you won’t be able to write persuasively.
Why it works: Social proof describes the tendency to make choices based on other people’s decisions, because we believe those decisions reflect the right choices. You're already leveraging the concept of social proof through customer case studies and social proof, why not extend these efforts into your emails?
How to use it: Reference high-profile customers or the size of your customer base. If you’re trying to move a potential customer towards a purchase, try pointing out how many of their competitors and peers use your product.
Examples:
Why it works: Once someone says “yes” to a small ask – the proverbial foot in the door – they’re more likely to agree to future requests.
How to use it: Ask your recipient a question that they are unlikely to say no to.
Examples:
Why it works: When we make eye contact with people, we feel a subconscious sense of connection. In one Cornell University study, researchers edited images of the Trix rabbit mascot, then asked adults to pick between several cereal boxes bearing different versions of the image. Participants most often chose the box where the rabbit was directly looking at them.
How to use it: You can’t make actual eye contact through email, and by no means should you include a massive photo of yourself in the body of an email – that’ll just make people uncomfortable. But it can be easy to forget that there’s a person on the other end of your emails. Including a small headshot of yourself in an email signature is a subtle way to remind people that you’re human, too.
Why it works: Even if the person you’re emailing is already aware they have a problem in one area or another, it doesn’t mean they’re prepared to solve it. But emotion is a powerful thing. Whether it’s subconscious attachment to the old way of doing things causing inertia, or fear of making the wrong decision, your prospect won’t always warm to your product immediately.
To convince them, you’ll often have to talk about the problem in emotional terms, then swoop in with a solution to demonstrate how you can help.
How to use it: While you should never attempt to over-exaggerate a business pain or spin one out of thin air, use the agitate-and-solve technique when it’s clear they haven’t fully conceptualized the cost of inaction.
Find out what matters to them. Is it personal professional achievement that drives them forward? A desire to grow the business’ bottom line? Then show how inaction will only worsen their current situation, and demonstrate why your product would help.
Example:
Why it works: Giving people a reason why you need something – no matter how ridiculous – makes it far more likely they’ll do what you ask.
Psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a study in which experimenters asked to skip ahead in line at a Xerox machine. When they asked, “I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?“, they were allowed to skip the line 60% of the time – not a bad outcome.
But when they asked, “I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?”, 93% were allowed to skip the line.
Despite the fact that everyone else in the Xerox machine line needed to make copies, they complied with the request simply because the experimenters provided a reason.
How to use it: We wouldn’t recommend making up ridiculous excuses to get your prospects to sign a contract – that’s not good for anybody. But even providing a simple explanation – “I’d like to set up a meeting with you because I can help with X strategy” – could pay huge dividends.
Example:
Why it works: Nobody likes to be told what to do. And even if you’re not being pushy or aggressive, many people will still chafe at the suggestion that you know what’s best for them.
A simple reassurance that you’re not attempting to push your preferences or worldview onto them is powerful. Across 42 psychology studies involving 22,000 subjects, it’s been demonstrated that using a phrase like “But the decision is yours” could double the chances that someone would say yes to a request.
How to use it: You don’t want to overuse this one – tempering every recommendation you make by reminding prospects they have no obligation to listen to you isn’t a great idea. But when you’re asking for a larger commitment or are dealing with a jumpy prospect, dropping in a reminder that you’re not here to force them into anything can be a powerful technique.
Example:
When we last spoke, you mentioned that you were worried about migrating your system from your current tool to ours. Sales Engineer Sally put together this this high-level overview of the process, which is designed to be as easy on our customers as possible – we can discuss this on our call tomorrow. In the meantime, based on our previous conversations I strongly believe this switch is the best long-term solution for your company – but of course, the decision ultimately rests with you. Let me know what you think.“
How do you make your sales emails more persuasive? Let us know in the comments below.
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week Snapchat Makes Adding People Easier With Profile URLs: Users can copy their “unique URL or instantly share it […]
This post Snapchat Rolls Out Add Me URLs: This Week in Social Media first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
So, we’re firm believers that your buyers should have several different options when it’s time to pay for their purchases. You don’t want to lose a sale just because you only take credit cards and your buyer only uses PayPal. What happens when buyers have way too many options for mobile and online payments?
No, really, Walmart decided to release their own mobile payment program called Walmart Pay. Who wants to play second fiddle to Apple forever? Not Walmart, that’s for sure. And with a retail app that boasts 22 million active users, a mobile payment option seems like the right way to go, right? If buyers are on board enough to download and use your app, then they’re probably all in on the payment options, too.
Well, buyers weren’t quite so impressed with the Walmart Pay option. It’s not that it didn’t work or that it didn’t offer a viable payment solution. Buyers simply had their payment plans worked out already. Why make the switch from the payment option they’d always used just because Walmart introduced something new?
We know that 4.9% of Apple Pay eligible sales were actually paid with Apple Pay during the holiday shopping period of 2014. It was new technology, and surely the idea would eventually catch on. That optimism should have led to a higher number of Apple Pay purchases on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but it didn’t.
This year, during the holiday shopping period, Apple Pay eligible transactions actually almost halved. Instead of growing, only 2.7% of eligible sales were completed through Apple Pay. Isn’t this supposed to be the answer to all online sales? Seems consumers disagree.
With over half of online purchases made this past year on mobile devices, it’s obvious buyers love the convenience of mobile shopping. Of those buyers, 52% only recently realized that their phones could be used as a payment device. Did they jump immediately into using Apple Pay or another mobile payment option?
Nope.
Since its introduction, the use of mobile payment has only increased by 1% year over year. That’s a pretty clear sign that consumers just aren’t that into it. What’s not entirely clear is why buyers have been slow to adopt mobile payment options.
In the face of overwhelming proof that consumers need to feel safe when making online purchases, mobile payment options consistently take that secure feeling out of the payment process. Yes, sellers need to remove as much friction as possible between the “want” and “own” stages, but some friction is necessary. When buyers don’t need to enter passwords or PINs, they may feel as though the payment process is too easy. And if it’s too easy for them, it’s easy for someone who might attempt to steal their financial information.
Then again, maybe the market is just too saturated as it is. Those who enjoy using online wallets may just stick with their years-old PayPal account, while the rest are fine entering their credit card information any time they want to make a purchase. To interrupt the status quo may require a great deal more innovation than we’ve seen so far.
What are your thoughts about the slow adoption of mobile wallets?
We’ve got a confession to make: We’ve been making a few rookie SEO mistakes within our own website.
For a company that is supposed to be at the forefront of inbound marketing and SEO, this isn’t something that we’re entirely proud of. But even experts make mistakes, right?
Instead of shying away from these oversights, we thought we’d show you where we went wrong so that you don’t make the same mistakes. More importantly, we’ll show you what we did to fix them and how these solutions resulted in us growing our organic traffic by more than 50% in just one month.
Technical SEO is often something that’s thought about when you first put your website together. It’s typically based on best practices that include things like:
While these factors are all fairly simple, you’d be surprised how many websites get this stuff wrong. For example, making on-going technical tweaks can do wonders for your organic traffic growth, yet a lot of companies only look at technical issues once and then never look at them again.
When I joined HubSpot last year, I had the chance to take a fresh look at everything that we’d been doing to date and to start asking more and more questions about our strategy. Were we making any of these little mistakes? I set out to find out.
One of the first things that I started to look into were the factors contributing to the success of some of our best content. From here it lead me to run a detailed audit of our website to identify potential problems and areas where there were opportunities for growth. I soon started to realise that we weren’t as perfect as we thought …
Whenever someone tried to visit a URL that didn’t exist on our website, it redirected them through to our 404 page. For example, when you visited http://bit.ly/1ZYjmBF, it would 301 redirect you to this page.
This is usually a good thing because it says to Google, “This page doesn’t exist so don’t crawl the page." If Google were to crawl all of these incorrect URLs then they would waste a huge amount of time, and ultimately spend less time crawling the pages we want them to.
Unfortunately our 404 page wasn’t actually resolving a 404 server response. Instead, it resolved a 200 response. In other words, it said to Google, "Hey, I’m a real page so come and crawl and index me!”
This was an enormous problem because Google was wasting a ton of its time crawling and indexing non-existent content on our site. But that was just one of the issues …
The other (bigger) issue was the fact that a lot of these incorrect URLs have come about because people had linked to us incorrectly from other websites. Take this URL, for example: http://bit.ly/1PJxzTC. It has 370 links from 84 domains pointing to it, including a .gov link – and it doesn’t exist.
What we were doing by redirecting all of these pages to our “/not-found” page that resolves a 200 response, is pass through all of the PageRank to that “/not-found” page instead of directing it through to the correct URL or a relevant page. Yikes.
Here’s a crazy stat: The “/not-found” page had over 8,000 backlinks from over 2,000 different domains. If only we were trying to rank that page …
The first thing that we’ve done is remove the 301 redirect pointing any page on the offer.hubspot.com or www.hubspot.com subdomain through to the “/not-found” page. This means that if the incorrect URL hasn’t had a 301 redirect set up to the correct page then it will go to a 404 and tell Google to not include it within their index.
The second thing that we’ve done is remove the “/not-found page” so that it goes through to a 404 page and isn’t treated as a site page on our website.
The third and final thing that we’ve done is set up 301 redirects for all of the incorrect URLs that have been linked to so that they point to a relevant or correct URL.
The number of pages indexed by Google should drop dramatically and Googlebot will focus on crawling the pages more important to us more frequently, rather than larger volumes of URLs less frequently.
On top of this, all that lovely PageRank will be pushed into the content we want to rank for and give it a huge boost from the influx of new links pointing correctly to it.
One of the things that was directly affecting the blog content on our website was the way that pagination was being handled within the listing pages. There had been issues with the way that we linked through to the listing pages in the blog, i.e. http://bit.ly/1ZYjnpt, http://bit.ly/1PJxDTu, etc.
All we had was a ‘Next’ and 'Previous’ button and these hadn’t even been styled properly. It wasn’t so much of a UX issue because it’s very rare that our visitors were clicking on them – where it was a problem was within the search engines.
When Google crawls our site to find content, it has to follow links on our webpages until it can find the page it’s looking for. To find a page that was written say, a year ago, it had to navigate to the blog and then follow each 'Next’ link until it reached the blog listing page with a link to that article.
Every time Googlebot (and any other search bot for that matter) follows a link, it’s digging one level deeper in the website’s architecture. The deeper it goes, the less authoritative the webpage is in the eyes of the search engines and the less it is crawled. In some cases, if a page is very deep in the architecture, it may not be crawled at all.
We wanted to design the pagination navigation on the blog in a way that enabled Google to jump multiple pages at a time in its crawl and raise a large portion of our blog posts significantly higher in the website architecture.
To do this, we implemented the following navigation:
The inspiration for this solution came from my talented colleague, Pam Vaughan. Pam is heading up another project around republishing old content on the blog to push it higher in the architecture and ultimately rank better. (Click here to learn more about her historical optimization project.)
If this works well, we could see a number of blog posts all receive a ranking boost as a result. This is a simple and small change but it could add a ton of value. In any case, this is a big improvement to our blog content architecture and to the general UX of the blog.
To date, we hadn’t used any Schema.org markup across any of our blog content (or any of our content for that matter) so that Google can break down and understand the individual elements within our webpages. Whoops.
What’s that?
In layman's terms, Schema.org markup is used so that the search engines can understand what type of content is on your webpage(s).
In the case of our blog, we marked up the code on all of our blog posts to tell Google the following things:
1. This is a blog post.
2. This is the featured image of the blog post.
3. This is the date and time it was published.
4. This is the headline of the article.
5. This is the body content of the article.
6. This is the category which the article falls under.
7. This was published by HubSpot.
8. This is the name of the author of the post.
9. This is the URL of the author’s page.
10. This is an image of the author.
11. Here’s a brief description of the article.
You can actually check this out by using Google’s structured markup tool. Simply click on Fetch URL, enter a URL of one of our blog posts, and then click Fetch and Validate. Once you do that, the tool will show all of the data under the BlogPosting dropdown.
This is a good thing because Google will be able to better understand our content and can make more informed decisions on how to display it. Google often uses this data to help customise search result snippets and results within their Knowledge Graph.
It’s not going to make a revolutionary impact but it’s well worth doing.
Within our blog we recently set up a new and improved Topics page. When this was launched I started looking at some of the individual topic pages and noticed that there was nothing to really differentiate the way that they looked from one another. With this being the case, it was difficult to make a case to Google for why these pages should rank in the search engines.
For each of our blog topic pages we had a generic heading to the page that didn’t explain what it was. It would just say it was the HubSpot blog and give a feed of posts. We've now added in a custom H1 relevant to the topic, such as “CRM Blog Posts,” as well as a short custom description for the topic.
Here’s an example:
Alongside this, we’ve added a “/topics” page to each of our international websites to improve the blog architecture.
Each of these blog topic pages were the same and there wasn’t really any unique content that could help them rank in search engines at all. We’ve added this from both an SEO and a UX point of view.
Turns out, we had a pretty big HREFLANG tag mess on our hands.
What’s a HREFLANG tag? Well, HREFLANG tags are used to let Google know what alternative versions of a page exist in different countries/languages. For example, if we want to tell Google what the Spanish equivalent of our .com homepage is then we can use one of these tags to do this.
They work in a similar way as a canonical tag does to show when a duplicate version of a page exists. But in this case, it helps Google index local content easier within local search engines. (Click here to learn more about how they work.)
Previously, our HREFLANG tags were all over the place, and in most cases, implemented incorrectly. This wasn’t doing our international SEO efforts any favours.
After a lot of hard work, we’ve managed to set these up for all of the core pages that have country-specific variations – all the product pages, homepage, etc. An example is on the /products page:
<link rel="alternate" href="http://bit.ly/1Kzm9w5" hreflang="x-default">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://bit.ly/1Kzm9w5">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-DE" href="http://bit.ly/1PJxzTK">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://bit.ly/1ZYjnFK">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="http://bit.ly/1PJxzTL">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ja-JP" href="http://bit.ly/1ZYjnFL">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="pt-BR" href="http://bit.ly/1PJxE9M">
We’re now creating a solid link between our main site page content on the .com site and the content on our international domains. This will pass trust across our sites and improve the way Google crawls these pages.
Ever heard of Language meta tags? Well, it turns out we were missing those, too.
Language meta tags are slightly similar to HREFLANG tags in the sense that they tell search engines what language a piece of content is written in. The tags should be present on all webpages so that search engines can easily understand which country version of their search engine to index them into. In particular, Bing uses these tags a lot. (Yes, Bing is still a thing.)
Up until now we’d never had any language meta tags set up across any of our web properties, including our international sites. An example would be within our German site where we now have the following code implemented into each page:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="de-DE" />
Whilst this isn’t going to give us massive spikes in traffic, it will help search engines crawl, index, and rank our local content more efficiently.
On our offers.hubspot.com subdomain we house all of our offer content. In a nutshell, this is all of the content that we use to generate leads with – our ebooks, templates, webinars, etc. This is the content that we really want to rank well in the search engines.
Guess what? We didn’t even have an XML sitemap set up for this subdomain.
We went through and created a brand new XML sitemap for all of our offers content and have submitted this to Google. (Want to learn more about sitemaps? Read this.)
The architecture across this subdomain still needs quite a bit of work but this will do a good job in helping Google discover any new content that we publish and get it ranking quicker.
The above graph speaks for itself really. Moral of the story: Don’t underestimate the power technical SEO changes.
What technical SEO issues have you run into? Share your experiences in the comment section below.
In the depths of almost every internet community lives a troll. A snarky, quick-witted adversary waiting for an opportunity to insert an offbeat remark or uninvited comment.
With 5.6% of individuals admitting that they self-identify as trolls or enjoy trolling online, it’s likely that you or someone you know has had their feathers ruffled by one of these menacing online villains.
Known for displaying high levels of psychopathy, narcissism, and sadism, internet trolls get a rise out of distressing others. In fact, they typically feel no remorse for their actions. But why? What fuels them?
For answers to these questions, check out the video below from the folks at AsapSCIENCE on the anatomy of the modern internet troll.
Have you had an encounter with an internet troll? Share your experiences in the comments section below.
Do you have a great idea for a business? Is there a new product you want to create? To discover how to improve your chances for success, I interview Pat Flynn. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers […]
This post Building Business Ideas That Succeed: How to Preflight Your Ideas first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Creative work takes a tremendous amount of energy.
So much energy, in fact, that “turning off,” or forgetting about work for a period of time can feel counterproductive to a marketer who is set on creating something engaging and effective – especially if they’re under a deadline. That’s when it’s hardest to get past the guilt of tuning out and turning off.
Why? Because it seems like you’re wasting time. But are you really?
Are you doing yourself a disservice every time you step away – whether it’s for a short break or long retreat? Or are you investing in your work, and ensuring that it will be as fresh, creative, and persuasive as your potential allows?
Science says it’s the latter …
Basically, “turning off” means taking a break from work – and not thinking about it while you’re away. Of course, all breaks are not created equal.
How long you turn off for, where you go, and who you’re with during your time away are just a few variables that make every break unique. But regardless of the circumstances, studies continue to prove that you’ll return a better, stronger, and more aware version of yourself.
Specifically, a couple beneficial things will happen:
According to a study conducted at The University of Illinois, brief diversions from a task can trigger a dramatic improvement in one’s ability to remain focused on that task for a prolonged period of time.
In the study, 84 participants were divided into four groups and asked to focus on a repetitive computerized task. The control group worked on the task for 50 minutes with no breaks. The “switch” and “no switch” groups had to memorize four digits before taking on the task, and had to respond if they saw one of those digits. However, the “switch” group was presented with the digits twice. Finally, the “digit ignored” group was also shown four digits, but were asked to ignore them.
The group that saw no drop in performance? The switch group, as they were given two brief breaks to respond to the digits which allowed them to stay focused.
So if you’re feeling guilty about taking a break, keep in mind that intermittently leaving your work will refocus you, and can actually give you clarity. When it comes to writing, clarity is the mother of desire and action.
While it’s easy to assume that day dreaming or taking a break is a waste of time, a study conducted at The University of British Columbia revealed that our brains are actually highly active when we daydream – more so than we previously thought.
When we relax and take a break from challenging thinking, we allow our thoughts and ideas to incubate in our minds. And this ultimately sets us up to generate new, creative solutions.
For example, a study from the University of California, Santa Barbara revealed the benefits of daydreaming by tasking 145 undergraduate students to come up with uses for mundane objects such as toothpicks, bricks, etc. The students were assigned to one of four conditions. While one group received no breaks, three groups were given a 12-minute break to a) rest, b) perform a short-term memory task, and c) do something boring that would allow them to daydream.
As it turns out, the group of students left to daydream came up with 41% more possibilities than other students.
(Click here to read more about the hidden benefits of daydreaming.)
When you keep pushing through work without taking a break … it shows. Your energy levels slip. Your smile fades. And your overall demeanor takes a turn for the worst. Not to mention, it can lead to larger issues such as exhaustion or chronic stress.
While the fear of being seen as replaceable or not having the time to take time off will often keep you from taking the plunge, you won’t be doing anyone any favors when you’re burnt out.
According to an infographic from CityPass, almost nine out of ten American workers feel like time off increases their happiness, and 91% of business leaders admit that employees who take time off typically return feeling recharged and ready to work more effectively.
Moral of the story? Book that trip. Your work will be there when you get back.
Experiencing these benefits, of course, means you must turn off. And that’s not something we’re all good at.
To make it easier, check out these seven tips designed to help you take a break from the grind and recollect your thoughts. You’ll notice there are a variety of suggestions – from quick time management breaks to full-fledged sabbaticals – so you’re sure to find something that makes sense for you.
Known for being the go-to strategy to avoid straining your eyes and developing a repetitive stress injury (RSI), the 20-20-20 Rule also doubles as a nice, frequent break for people who sit in front of a computer all day.
Here’s what you do: Set a timer to go off every 20 minutes you’re at your desk. As soon as you get the alert, look away from your monitor and stare at something 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds.
This is a good opportunity to zone out and enter your “diffused” mode – where who knows what’ll happen next.
In the late 80s, a man named Francesco Cirillo invented an easy productivity method that people still use and love. (And he named it after that kitschy timer your mom used to let you twist.)
Here’s what you do: Set a 25-minute timer and start working. When it goes off, stop working for five minutes. Use your five minutes any way you like, and then promptly get back to work as soon as they’re up. Do that four times in a row, and then take a 30-minute break before starting your fifth session.
By locking you into a timeframe, the Pomodoro Technique incites urgency, which may inspire you to make quicker decisions and waste less time.
We sleep in cycles, alternating between two forms of sleep: REM (deep, dreamy, restful sleep) and non-REM (less deep, more superficial sleep). And while one may be more intense than the other, both forms must alternate in intervals of 90 minutes to achieve a truly restful night of sleep. It’s called the Ultradian Rhythm, and it just so happens that it’s present in our waking lives, too.
Here’s what you do: Set a timer for 90 minutes and begin working. Silence your phone. Block Facebook. Don’t even stop to edit your work. Just work. When your timer goes off, stop working and take a break for 15 minutes. While taking a break seems unproductive, the act will actually help you balance your energy and avoid burnout. When you’re done, try it again by focusing on a different project for 90 minutes.
By keeping with the ebb and flow of your body, you’ll maximize your productivity and creativity. Skeptical? Here’s the groundbreaking study that proves it’s true.
Hopefully, employing some of the more micro time-management methods above will help you clear your workload throughout the week, leaving you completely free over the weekend – which is what you want, right?
Here’s what you do: If years of workaholism have made “turning off” a difficult and unnatural task for you, divide your weekend into activity chunks (the way you would a work day). Doing so may help you become more comfortable with the idea of doing nothing.
Leaving your work computer switched “off” for two days in a row may feel weird at first – like a strange emptiness – but it’s a healthy mental exercise and it’ll help you write your best copy.
The U.S. Travel Association commissioned a study that found that American workers are using only 77% of their paid time off. That adds up to 169 million forfeited days, which amounts to a whopping $52.4 billion in benefits that were simply given up.
Don’t do this. It’s your time. And it’s there to help you make the most of your work.
Here’s what you do: If you have some spare days in the bank, give yourself a three-day weekend. Or schedule a Wednesday off and break up the week. Then use that time to do something other than work.
Go ahead. Use your time however you want. (Or look into one of these hobbies that are proven to make you smarter.) And if you’re not at peace with the idea of turning off for an entire day, find solace in the fact that employees who use more vacation days end up with better performance reviews (and higher salaries).
In 1997, Dan Pink left his job as Chief Speechwriter for then-VP, Al Gore, and began writing books about business, work, and human behavior. He’s since authored several best sellers, including To Sell Is Human, in which he references the concept of the “jolt,” which, I think, is particularly advantageous.
Pink writes:
Try a jolt of the unfamiliar. Clarity, we’ve learned, depends on comparison. But many times we become so rutted in our own ways that we scarcely notice what we’re doing or why we’re doing it – which can impair our ability to bring clarity to others. Sometimes, as Tufts University psychologist Sam Sommers says, “it takes a jolt of the unfamiliar to remind you just how blind you are to your regular surroundings.”
Here’s what you do: Take Dan’s advice. Give yourself one of the following “jolts.”
Remember: Clarity is the mother of desire and action. It’s the ultimate fuel for a marketer. And a Full Jolt is one way to clear your mind and renew your perspective.
If leaving the country is a Full Jolt, then taking a sabbatical would be a concussion – a derailing, crippling concussion for your career, that is. At least that’s how some people see it. But depending on your professional circumstances, that’s not always the case.
If you’re employed by a progressive company that appreciates the benefits of a sabbatical, then you’ll know that a leave like this has the potential to do wonders for your productivity.
Here’s what you do: If you get the opportunity to take a sabbatical, do it. It might just change the way you think, act, and create for the better. And at the end of the day, that’s the whole point.
What are your best tips for “turning off” and regaining focus? Share them in the comments section below.
Look, no one has a crystal ball at the ready to tell you who’s going to buy what, and how much, and when. Does that mean you have to wait around to see what a customer’s going to do? Of course not. You can learn a lot about your customers by studying their habits—past visits to your site—to predict what they’ll do next. It’s just a matter of knowing what information you need and when to use it.
One of your best friends when determining customer behavior predictions is your Google AdWords account. This program determines all the keywords your buyers searched, which of those searches resulted in clicks through to your site, and which of those clicks through resulted in a sale.
Once the buyers have clicked through from AdWords to a landing page on your site, you can use that information to lay a path from start to purchase. After all, you already know what they’re looking for. They told you when they searched Google for it. Should you slow them down in their search by leading them to a generic landing page? By creating more clicks instead of directing them right to the shopping cart and checkout? Of course not. When a buyer tells you what they want to buy, you remove all obstacles.
It’s harder to pin down a visitor’s reason to stopping by when they come through social channels. The hardest of all is a click to the address in your company profile. You can assume that social proof is important to that buyer and react accordingly, but you won’t get much more information than that.
Clicks through from specific social posts, however, can tell you a lot more about the buyers’ thought process. Did they visit to read a particular blog? You might surmise they’re looking for more information. Did they click through an image of your hottest products? Maybe they’re in the market for one of those products, or maybe they just like to know what the trends are.
Every action on social marketing channels will help you narrow down the information you need, so don’t give up. The more information you have about your visitors’ past behavior, the easier you can predict where they’ll go next.
Past purchases give you the greatest insight into buyer behavior, don’t they? That’s why you can’t consider the transaction complete once you’ve received payment. Now you know more about that buyer than you ever had, so you can’t just let them walk away forever.
The information you gather after this purchase will tell you what you need to know to move forward. Was the purchase a gift or something necessary to the buyer? Did he or she purchase accessories? Did the buyer spend a lot of time making a decision—evidenced by multiple visits to your site, comparisons between products, and perhaps even conversations with customer service?
What you learn will help you determine if you should continue providing gift ideas to the buyer or if they need more information about similar products for their own use. If they often buy the accessories needed to make your products bigger and better, then they’re probably going to appreciate upselling and cross-selling information.
You never want to make your use of past information creepy, so be careful when showing your hand. Buyers will appreciate a PPC click leading to a landing page, but they may not want to see ads for that exact product following them around for days after their initial search. They might enjoy their social media clicks leading to the right information on your website, but they may get a little freaked out if you strike up a Twitter conversation out of the blue. Your goal is to smooth the path between want and own, to provide the information buyers need as soon as they need it—not to be a stalker.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen content become more visual. Marketers have experimented with infographics, videos, and more – and they’ve made plans to keep it up this year.
In fact, 73% of content creators plan to prioritize creating more engaging content in 2016, and 55% plan to prioritize creating visual content.
While this certainly gives us a lot to look forward to, it also creates a bit of a challenge for marketers looking to stand out. To avoid your content getting lost, you’ve got to find a way to create something worthy of your audience’s time and attention. But how?
To help narrow your focus, check on the infographic from Canva below. From quote cards to infographics, this helpful list is designed to inspire your next visual project.
A great deal of inbound marketing for schools focuses on gaining the permission to market to someone via email. It’s your job as a marketer to make sure you’re offering content so on-target to your prospects’ needs, that they’re happy to share their information with you—and look forward to future communications.
Of course, getting a prospective student’s email is just the first step. Once that the lead is in your contact database, are you continuing to share content that addresses their concerns and interests? Content that moves each lead further on the journey to application and then to enrollment?
While other means of content distribution, such as social media, blogs, and more, are vitally important—email still has special status. First, sharing their email is often the first step a prospect takes to identify themselves to you, and let you know they’re interested. Second, people who share their email address and really do want you to send them additional content, need to you to earn their trust.
Before I get to the three emails your potential students and parents want you to send them, I want to take a short, but critical detour. Let’s talk about sign-up forms.
Effective email nurturing is all about sending the right emails to the right people. To do that, you need to know as much as you can about them to understand which persona they fit and where in their enrollment journey they are. Your sign-up forms are your collection plate for all this information.
At HubSpot, we recommend progressive profiling to make our forms easy for people to fill out, while gathering ever-more valuable intelligence about prospects at each and every conversion. We know that forms with fewer fields have higher conversion rates. So a form displayed to an unknown visitor on your website will only ask for a name and an email, perhaps also program area of interest. Using progressive profiling and Smart Forms, you can auto-populate future forms a prospect sees with the data you already have, and then ask for only one more piece of information.
For example, a 4 year college’s form might ask a parent to provide their student’s high school graduation date. Now that you know Parent Patty’s kid is a sophomore, you won’t email her reminders about application deadlines. Instead, you can send Patty an email about a Career Night event in her area featuring local alumni that she might want to attend with her son or daughter.
With every piece of information your forms collect, you can further segment your prospects into different lists to ensure they’re getting email content geared just for them.
The three types of emails your prospects want to get roughly align with the phases in the enrollment cycle. Educational resources that educate prospects about your school and programs are perfect during the awareness phase. For the consideration stage, remind them of important dates throughout the application and enrollment cycle. Once a potential parent and/or student is in the decision stage, it’s time to make offers to connect directly and in-person.
These category-phase pairs aren’t bright lines. There are relevant emails to send prospects from each category in every phase. I’ll share some examples below.
You already have a voluminous content collection you can share about your school or specific programs. You can draw material from existing course guides, course syllabi, and admissions collateral. Also take a look at descriptions of extra-curricular activities and student groups, and their activities. And, your blog content about program and alumni achievements are great sources.
Really, any content you already have about your school or its programs can be promoted by or shaped into an email. As always, the key is delivering the right school content to the right prospect. A private academy might send an excerpt with link to the blog post about the Ivy League college acceptance rate of its students to parent prospects. A student prospect who has shown interest in nursing will get a guide about the different types of nursing certifications and degrees offered. A student’s parent who spent a lot of time on your financial assistance web page will receive an email about financial aid sources.
Reminder emails are always useful. Dates relevant to the application and enrollment cycle should be sent to the right prospect segments. Early phase emails can cover open houses, open alumni events, and career fairs. Later on, application deadlines, including early decision deadlines, and financial aid submissions will be helpful. After acceptance, an email encouraging confirming their enrollment spot before the deadline can boost enrollment rates.
You may also want to create a list of important dates or time frames, for certain tasks that don’t necessarily have a firm deadline, but require a certain order and timeliness to be done right. Prospects identified while early in their research phase for a school could get emails about how soon to ask for written recommendations, or when to narrow their research to a short list of schools. You can also email information about when and where to research for scholarship opportunities.
Last, get copies of all program and student groups activities calendar, and scour them for other events and dates. Look for events that parents and students can attend that will give them a real taste of life at your school: parent-teacher nights, student performances, the Homecoming game, a faculty tea, open lectures sponsored by a program or student group.
Create a list of all the direct, person-to-person touch points you offer. Categorize them by journey phase. Start with the ways prospective students can interact with students, alumni or faculty, such as scheduled calls or meetings, or an invitation to a weekend program. You may want to promote signing up for a campus tour to early stage prospects to move them into the next phase of applying.
As they move further down the enrollment cycle, suggest a meeting with an admissions officer. Someone who’s downloaded an application may be invited to meet with an admissions officer. Accepted applicants should get emails about meet-ups with other potential enrollees.
Whatever the topic of your email, make sure it includes a call-to-action (CTA) that tightens the relationship between your institution and the prospect.
In some cases, like offer-to-connect emails, the CTA is obvious. You want the prospect to register for that tour or arrange that interview. But all your emails should have one CTA relevant to the email’s content. It may be the link back to the blog post or to download a new guide that provides more in-depth discussion of the email’s topic. For educational resource emails, always encourage the recipient to forward or share the email with people they think would also find it interesting.
Having a follow-up CTA in the email not only pulls the prospect forward in the journey, but also provides more intelligence about that prospect to you, so your next email to the prospect is even more welcome.
Do you have a local business page on Facebook? Want to reach more local customers? Facebook recently launched Professional Services, a directory that helps consumers find the best local businesses and services to fit their needs. In this article I’ll share how to use the Facebook Professional Services feature to boost visibility with local customers. […]
This post Facebook Professional Services: How Your Local Business Can Rank first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Wouldn’t it be great if creating infographics was as simple as writing regular ol’ text-based blog posts? Unfortunately, the reality is that making visual content like this usually takes a lot more time, effort, and let’s face it – skill – than the written word. Usually.
But considering the popularity and effectiveness of visual content in marketing today, you can’t just afford to throw in the towel.
That’s why we decided to take all the pain and suffering out of infographic creation. Seriously – don’t throw in the towel just yet. You, too, can create professional-looking, high-quality infographics, and quickly. I’m going to prove it. First things first:
Then, all you have to do is provide the content to use inside them. Easy as that! In fact, I’m going to show you just how easy it is by taking one of our 15 infographic templates in PowerPoint (pictured above) and creating my own, customized infographic with it. Then, I’ll explain exactly what I did so you get a sense of how easy it really is.
Would you rather watch this tutorial instead of read it? Check out the video below:
Your first step is to collect the data/content you’ll be using to populate your infographic, and choose an infographic template appropriate for representing that data. The important thing is to choose a template that specifically works for the type of data set/content you want to present. As you saw pictured above, you can download our 15 infographic templates in PowerPoint and choose whichever template you’d like. Some of your template options here include a timeline, flowchart, side-by-side comparison, and a data-driven infographic.
You can either collect third-party data or use your own original data. If you use third-party data, just be sure you properly cite your sources – just like in any other good piece of content.
To keep your infographic uncluttered by a ton of different source URLs, a great way to cite your sources is to include a simple URL at the bottom of your infographic that links to a page on your site listing the individual stats used in your infographic, and their sources – such as the blog post you’re using to publish your infographic. That way, your infographic looks clean and professional, yet people will still be able to access the sources no matter where the infographic gets shared or embedded. It may also even drive visitors back to your site.
For the sake of time (remember, our mission is to create an infographic in under an hour), for my infographic, I’m going to choose a compilation of social media stats, charts, and graphs we’ve already collected from our 2015 Social Media Benchmarks Report, and I’m going to pick the “Cold Hard Numbers” infographic from our collection of infographic templates, which is appropriate for my data set since it conveys statistics using charts and graphs. This template is pictured below:
Obviously, this is the most time-consuming part – but it’s also the most fun! Simply come up with a catchy title, plug in your data/content, and adjust your font sizes and formatting. Feel free to switch up the graphics, too, so they’re relevant to the data you’re citing. You can use the simple graphs and charts provided by PowerPoint to create things like the bar graph or the pie chart. (Note: Download our free infographic templates for a cheat sheet for using PowerPoint’s various features and tools.)
To customize the look of the infographic even more, you might add or change up the colors or font styles.
Finally, I included a link to my source (which can be found here), as well as the HubSpot logo so people know who created the infographic if it gets shared in social media or embedded on other websites – which is definitely something you want, since one of the main benefits of infographics is their shareability.
That’s it! This whole thing took me under an hour to put together – much shorter than it would’ve taken me if I’d started from scratch (not to mention more professional looking … and cheaper than hiring a designer). Here it is:
The only thing left to do is to publish and promote your awesome new infographic. As I mentioned earlier, we recommend using your blog to publish it (including your list of sources), including a “Pin It” button for visitors to easily share your infographic on Pinterest, and create and add an embed code for visitors to share it on their own websites and blogs, as we did above.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in August 2013 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
That question is, as HubSpot recruiter Emily MacIntyre puts it, “so boring."
But love ‘em or hate 'em, those tried-and-true interview questions still make their way into even seasoned interviewers’ candidate conversations.
And even if you’ve aced the question in past interviews, somehow you seem to black out the embarrassment of fumbling through your answers. So when it comes time to interview again, you’re left sweating and tripping over your words as you try to remember how you tied together your real passion of opening up a skydiving joint with your work optimizing paid search campaigns.
In an attempt at helping you stay dry and composed in your next interview, we’ve collected a lot of those popular interview questions – curated from Glassdoor’s list of the most popular interview questions in 2015 – and supplied you with some guidance on how to nail the answers. No sweat. No tears. Minimal stumbling.
Candidates typically struggle with this question because it forces them to awkwardly toe the line between bravado and confidence, self-defeat and self-assessment. This is why you sometimes get that urge to answer with fake-weaknesses – the folks over at Glassdoor say a popular one is the whole "I’m a perfectionist” routine. Oh woe is you.
This question may take the form of other questions, too, so listen carefully. "You may hear a recruiter say 'What’s one thing you want to learn more about?’ when trying to get at a weakness,“ MacIntyre says.
What interviewers are getting at here is an honest skills assessment – in terms of both competencies and gaps. The way I stopped getting tripped up on this question is by remembering that a poor skill match in a role is just as bad for the company as it is for me. (If you’ve never slipped through the cracks in a hiring process and ended up in a role for which you’re not suited, just take my word on this one.)
From there, it’s simply a matter of having taken the time to reflect on what your strengths and weaknesses are relative to the position for which you’re interviewing.
For example, if you’re interviewing for an SEO position, a relevant strength to tout might be your analytical abilities. Start with that, and be prepared to explain some real-life scenarios in which you get to flex that muscle. For the same position, a perfectly reasonable weakness might be your writing. You could then go on to explain that while writing is part of your job, it takes you a while to get new pieces of content out the door. Glassdoor also recommends following up with how you’re addressing that weakness – so perhaps you could talk about how you’re taking a class in business writing, or working with a colleague who’s a skilled editor.
Again, you may find that there are gaps in the skill sets or qualities needed in the role – but it’s better you find out now than six months later when you’re back on the job market.
If you’re focusing on candidate-centric things – work-life balance, benefits, compensation, better commute – you’re thinking about this question wrong.
Glassdoor’s advice? "Do your research on the job and company so you can give a few solid examples on why you’re good for the company, and how you can add value to them.” Your interests should lie at the intersection of company needs, responsibilities of the role, and candidate competencies.
That being said, it’s fine to show a little bit of your personal motivation. For example, if you’re interviewing for a podcasting position, here’s how you might break down the answer to this question:
Company Needs: We need to keep better company in terms of who we partner with and create content with.
Responsibilities of the Role: Source talent, come up with episode topics, prep guests, and edit episodes.
Candidate Competencies: Skilled with Audition, finger on the pulse of the industry, deadline-oriented, able to sell people on ideas.
Personal Motivation: I want to work with high profile people so I can learn from them and get some good connections.
So, what’s the intersection of company needs, role responsibilities, candidate competencies, and personal motivation? You might talk about how you’ve learned a lot over the years by interacting with, reading, or listening to the heavy-hitters in your industry, and you’ve seen firsthand the impact exposure to them can have on a company as well as an individual. Not only does an answer like that relate to the needs of the role and the company, but it ties in your abilities and shows that you’re personally motivated by the mission.
This is always a fun balancing act, particularly when you’re running away from a job rather than to one. (Not the ideal situation to be in, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.)
The right way to answer this question is to focus on opportunity. Be forward thinking. Talk about what this role or company offers and why that’s important to you. Don’t focus on what your current role lacks, why you don’t like your company, or how you feel like you’ve hit a ceiling.
So if your next step up at your current company is to a Director role, but that seat is currently occupied by a lifer, frame your answer around how you’d like to make an impact in a certain area that this new role or company provides. Or if you’re bored with an aspect of your day-to-day that is less prominent in the role for which you’re interviewing, focus on the chance to up your skill-level that the new position offers.
And no matter what you do, no matter how tempting it is, don’t badmouth coworkers, bosses, or companies. You’re wearing your professional pants today.
Recruiters are more forgiving of employment gaps than you might think, particularly if you’re working in marketing or tech. Often people leave jobs to pursue personal interests or take a professional risk that doesn’t end up panning out – and they’re left without a job for a while.
I asked MacIntyre for her perspective on employment gaps just to make sure I wasn’t being too lenient as a hiring manager. “There aren’t too many red flags, unless they left a company suddenly without having a job lined up,” she said. “I’m just listening for a good reason, whether it’s downsizing, trouble finding the right role, or embarking on a career change.”
I really hate this question, because it puts you in the position of explaining why you’re a special flower when, frankly, there are other people out there that can do this job, too. There just are. But alas, people ask it anyway, so here’s what I’ve learned about how to answer this question well.
First, don’t harp on skills. Any candidate they’re seriously considering for the position will have a similar skill set, so this isn’t something unique that you can offer. Where people tend to differ more is in their qualities – persistence, drive, creativity, etc.
Then, try to align the qualities that make you stand out with the problem or difficulties inherent in the role. For example, if the role requires getting buy-in from a lot of different stakeholders in order to move work forward, that’s a really tough thing to do. No matter how skilled you are at your discipline, inability to get over that hurdle will make you ineffective. So maybe you highlight that you’re great at building relationships, and talk about how you’ve done that in the past. Or you could talk about your creative approach to problem solving, and how you’ve used that to get over people-related hurdles in the past.
These are all qualities unique to you (and, yes, maybe some other people out there), but if you have the skill set and the qualities they need – hey, you’re sitting right in front of 'em, and the other person isn’t. ;-)
This is a question that you might hear phrased in a couple different ways. One of the ways MacIntyre has positioned it is, “What’s something you can do better than a room of 100 people?” She says questions like this are great because they take someone out of the day-to-day, and get candidates talking about something they’re passionate about. This gives a great window into who the person is, not just what kind of work they do.
So no matter how this question is phrased, if you hear it, keep in mind that the recruiter is probably looking to understand what makes you tick. What motivates you. What you’re passionate about. Some interviewers are open to hearing about accomplishments outside of work, while others will be more interested in hearing about something work-related – it’s alright to ask if they have a preference for one or the other. But be prepared with a few examples on each side just so you’re not caught with your metaphorical pants down.
If you’re uncomfortable bragging, remember that this question is all about what you’re proud of. They specifically asked to hear it! So don’t worry about sounding like you’re full of yourself, and tell a short but interesting story about what you did, and why it mattered to you.
“The best questions let the candidates shine,” MacIntyre shared, “and that’s why I love ones like this.”
The worst way to answer this question is to take the same approach candidates often take in the “what’s your weakness?” question. Trying to frame a mistake as someone else’s fault, or highlighting an inconsequential mistake to imply that you only make small mistakes, is a total cop out.
There’s also a way to answer this question that isn’t a monumental failure, but isn’t a huge success, either – and that’s thinking of a mistake that’s so far back in your career that it’s pointless to bring up today. For example, if you’ve got nine years of experience in funnel marketing and you’re talking about the time you failed to copyedit an email in 2007, you’ve technically answered the question, but not satisfactorily. Yes, you’ve admitted a mistake, but it’s not relevant to the professional you are today or the role for which you’re interviewing.
Instead, think about a real mistake from the recent past – the last year or two – that has a clear takeaway you can share with the interviewer. Here’s a hypothetical example that an interviewer would love to hear for, let’s say, a Sr. Manager of PR:
“A few years ago I found myself in dire straits from a hiring standpoint. I misread some cues from someone on my team in terms of how engaged they were, and I ended up losing them to another team internally. It left us without a copywriter, and I ended up having to take on all of that extra workload while scrambling to backfill. In retrospect, I realize I should’ve been having more proactive conversations with that employee about her career growth. She loved the work she was doing as a writer, but just felt there wasn’t enough progression for her on the team – which I could’ve outlined for her had I been more communicative with her about it. I ended up finding someone great to backfill her, and I outlined a strong career path for her that we talk about on a quarterly basis.”
Not well.
I mean, what do you want me to say? I think that’s why this question trips people up a lot – the kneejerk reaction is that you’re being asked how stress makes you feel, not how you react to it. But that’s what the interviewer is getting at: what actions you take when stressful situations present themselves.
And you do take certain actions. Try to reflect on the last three to five situations in which you were stressed at work. What did you do to move past the stress? If you jot down what you did, you might see a framework start to emerge.
By way of example, I know a lot of people I work with respond to stressful situations by taking a step back from the chaos and writing down a list of what needs to get accomplished to get their arms around the problem. They find breaking up a big, complex problem into its components makes it easy to start doing productive things to calm down.
Try to answer in terms of frameworks like that instead of cringing and saying “Oh, heh, I love stress, heh, bring it on!”
“This is one of those questions where they’ll respond something like 'I’m not a micromanager,’ or 'I lead by example,’ so you have to take answers to this with a grain of salt,” says MacIntyre.
But questions like this that lend themselves to trite or fluffy answers give you an opportunity to stand out. MacIntyre says if she does ask a question like this, she gets excited when she hears an individualized response – something that tells her more about the candidate as a person. That could be anything from “I’m an unrelenting fan of Bruce Springsteen” – something (presumably) unrelated to the work at hand – to, “That I’m a sucker for beautiful design and I totally geek out doing it whenever it pops up in my role.”
Much like the questions about your weaknesses or a time you’ve failed, just be sure you don’t use this question as an opportunity to humblebrag. Keep your “tendency to work too hard” to yourself.
The biggest mistake you can make with this question is to have no questions. It indicates a lack of curiosity and research.
The second biggest mistake you can make is asking superficial questions. This also indicates a lack of research, but perhaps worse, it doesn’t exactly make you sound smart.
What’s an example of a stupid question? For starters, anything you can find out on your own through a bit of research. These include information like basic company history, product or service suites, key hires, or company performance – provided the company releases information publicly.
Unless you’re in the final stage of the interview, it’s also smart to steer clear of questions that are related to HR – things like time off, salary, or benefits packages. If you’re still in the stages of exploring whether there’s a mutual fit, jumping to this end stage may advance the interview process too fast, and it could turn out unfavorably for you as a result.
Some better questions to ask are ones that are built off of the conversation you’ve had with the interviewer. Dig deeper into something you talked about that lends itself to more nuanced discussion. For example, if you’ve been interviewing for a writing position and the interviewer briefly mentioned that writers on the team dabble in design, you might ask some follow up questions, such as:
Another great topic for discussion is team structure, and how teams interact with one another. Getting context on how the team you’re interviewing for is structured, and how they fit into to the larger organization, is not only a thoughtful question but also critical information for you to have. Without it, it’ll be hard to know whether the position is right for you based on where you are in your career – and where you want to be.
The contents of one’s answers are just one part of the interview. And while they should be enough to move the hiring conversation forward, some interviewers can get thrown by the content of the answer if the delivery is poor.
Poor delivery could be a matter of stammering, saying a distracting number of “likes” and “ums,” getting short of breath and speaking in an awkward cadence, or just droning on long after you’ve sufficiently answered the question. This sounds like trite advice (and maybe it is, but here we are): The interviewer wants you to do well. They don’t want to keep interviewing candidates, and they definitely don’t want to be in a super awkward conversation for a half hour watching you squirm.
So, remember to:
To reinforce the importance of remaining calm, cool, and collected in your delivery, I’ll tell you an interviewing story my friend relayed to me about a really kind recruiter that helped her get her current job. In her first in-person interview, she was really nervous and apparently it showed in the first round of feedback.
The recruiter called her back and said, “When you come back tomorrow, drink a beer and just relax.”
Everyone bombs some of their interviews. If you bomb the interview because of lack of preparedness, that’s one thing. If you bomb it because it just wasn’t a fit, try not to get down on yourself by remembering that it’s not just that you weren’t a fit. It’s that you and the company weren’t fits for each other. For example, if someone lobbed me one of those purposefully weird interview questions like “How many zeros can you fit in a Subaru?”, I’d be both SOL in the job department and relieved because that’s an insane question to ask someone.
You might also do well to remember that interviewing is kind of like dating. If it’s been a while, you might really suck at it. But you’ll get back in your groove the more you do it. So if you find yourself newly on the job market, try to stack your interviews in order of interest if possible – scheduling the ones you have more interest in after you’ve had a few trial runs at less interesting roles.
If you can’t stack your interviews, ask a forgiving friend or family member to do some dry runs with you. It’ll be awkward, but saying the answers to common questions you might come up against – like, out loud – will make it more likely to come out with some degree of eloquence when it really counts.
