Tag Archives: HubSpot

When I will style myself John E. Bredehoft, HubSpot Academy Content Marketing Certified…and when I won’t

TL;DR: Today I received HubSpot Academy certification in Content Marketing.

John Bredehoft HubSpot Academy Content Marketing certification, valid from April 18 2022 to May 17 2024.
Details at https://app.hubspot.com/academy/achievements/s17pbsb4/en/1/john-bredehoft/content-marketing

This post explains why it feels familiar to a previous post of mine, what this certification is, and when I will (and will not) use my shiny new HubSpot Academy certification. It also includes a different call to action than the one I usually use.

Deja vu all over again: remember my CF APMP certification?

While certification in and of itself does not necessarily indicate operating confidence, it provides some level of assurance that the certified person knows what he or she is talking about.

Which is why I pursued and achieved APMP Foundation certification (CF APMP) in September 2021.

John Bredehoft APMP Foundation certification, valid from 2021 to 2023.
Details at https://www.credly.com/badges/f177cbf8-e085-4fae-943a-1e418d86c872.

For those who don’t know, the Association of Proposal Management Professionals provides many benefits, including improved service to Bredemarket clients because of my access to the APMP Body of Knowledge.

It also provides a mechanism for proposal professionals to certify their mastery of the proposal field.

Which is great, if you’re a proposal professional.

But I also do other stuff.

What does it mean to be “Content Marketing Certified”?

My Bredemarket consultancy can be sliced and diced in several ways, one of which is to look at the proposals side of my business and the content marketing side of the business. The latter concentrates on generating content that attracts customers to a company’s offering, leading to revenue. At Bredemarket, I practice content marketing on two levels:

  • I create content for Bredemarket that attracts customers to use my services.
  • I create content for my customers that attracts THEIR customers to use THEIR services.

In a sense, Bredemarket itself acts as a laboratory in which I can try out ideas that I can subsequently implement with my customers, ranging from creating a targeted LinkedIn showcase page for one customer segment (local customers) to creating initial versions of “pillar pages” that I can continue to iterate and flesh out with additional content.

As you can see from the text of the certificate above, content marketing encompasses numerous subtasks:

  • Long-term content planning. Haphazard creation of content is not as beneficial as creation of content to achieve a particular goal.
  • Content creation. An important part of the process, but ONLY a part.
  • Content promotion. If you build it, they may not come. They have to know about it first.
  • Content analysis. Analyzing pertinent factors about the performance of the content.
  • Increasing results. Does the content increase revenue?

What about the shiny new designation that comes with the shiny new badge?

Unlike other certifications such as an academic degree, PMP certification, or my APMP Foundation certification, there is not a suffix that I can add to my name to tout my credentials. So I can’t call myself “John E. Bredehoft, HSA CMC” or something like that. (You should only use acronyms sparingly anyway.)

But I can certainly refer to my certification in certain circumstances.

Here’s a quic: which of these would be appropriate?

If you answer the correct question in this quiz…YOU GET NOTHING.

Picture of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka with the text "Golden tickets aren't my only promotional tactic."
Generated from https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/18672402/Willy-Wonka-Blank

A different call to action

If you read the Bredemarket blog on a regular basis, you’ve probably seen my usual three-bullet call to action ad nauseum.

So this time I’m going to use a different one.

If you will benefit from achieving a HubSpot Academy certification in content marketing, follow the link below.

You don’t need to be a paid user of HubSpot, or even a free user of HubSpot, to get this certification (although you will need a HubSpot account).

And the certification is not constrained to use of the HubSpot application; other tools are prominently mentioned in the course.

Timewise, I spent several hours a day over several days taking the course, including the time that I spent applying some of the suggestions.

To access the HubSpot Academy course in content marketing, go to

https://academy.hubspot.com/courses/content-marketing

Screen shot of sign up page for HubSpot Academy's Content Marketing Course: Get Certified in Content Marketing. FREE certification course.
From https://academy.hubspot.com/courses/content-marketing

Happy learning.

On managing customer relationships as a sole proprietor

The intriguing part about running your own business is that you have to perform ALL of the business functions, including sales. Bredemarket does not have access to an expert commissioned sales staff; it just has access to me. (There is a separate third party service that looks up work for me, but even there I have to perform the sales function.)

When I developed my checklist of all of the things that I needed to do to start Bredemarket (latest checkoff – my City of Ontario business license has formally been approved), one of the items on the list was to obtain access to a customer relationship management (CRM) system. This would provide me with two benefits:

  • First, I could obviously track sales and marketing activities in the CRM.
  • Second, I could tell potential clients that I had SEVERAL HOURS of CRM administration experience. (Impressive, huh?)

Seriously, I I did have limited access to Salesforce and another CRM in one of my previous jobs, but never to the level of configuring the thing to meet my needs. Now I would have my chance, and learn a little bit in the process.

Actually, I had already been performing CRM in a not-so-elegant way. I’m using a Microsoft Excel workbook to track my contacts for my effort to gain full-time employment, and I was also listing contracting conversations in that same workbook. But when I decided to separate my efforts to obtain full-time employment from my contracting efforts, it also made sense to separate the contracting CRM data and move the Bredemarket tracking to a REAL CRM.

I ended up selecting the free version of HubSpot to use as Bredemarket’s CRM. (For those of you who have seen references to Mailchimp on my home page, that is for a separate mailing list not associated with the CRM.) I configured some essential items, linked to other services, entered a list of contacts with whom I had spoken over the last couple of months, and then prepared my “Announcing Bredemarket” email and the list of contacts who would receive it.

By the time I had prepared my list, and edited my email, it was already early afternoon Pacific Daylight Time. Now I had to start thinking about WHEN I would send the email. I seemed to recall that mornings were the recommended time to send emails, and I confirmed my understanding by reading this CoSchedule blog post. (10am appears to be the sweet spot.) But CoSchedule also linked to a WordStream post that included some of the same advice, but then said:

That’s the Advice. Now Ignore It.

-Megan Marrs

Two facts about the list for this mailing are relevant.

  • This was not an email list that I had purchased. This was a list of people whom I had interacted with personally over the last few months, often after they were finished with their work for the day. If they received the email at 10am, they might wait to read it until the evening anyway.
  • Many of these “recommended email times” studies do not account for the fact that emails are sent to multiple time zones. While I was sending my email from the Pacific Daylight Time zone, some recipients were in the Central Daylight Time and Eastern Daylight Time zones, and one recipient was in the Central European Summer Time zone.

So after some more re-edits of the email, I decided that there was no need to wait until tomorrow morning to send it. So I sent it at 4:45 pm Pacific Daylight Time. (For those keeping score, that’s 01h45 in Central Europe.) I figured that a few people might read the email that evening, and that the rest would see it when they opened their inbox the next morning.

As HubSpot send the email to the recipients, HubSpot started churning its data.

  • Most of the emails were delivered immediately (one remained in a “Sent” status for a while and wasn’t delivered for a few hours).
  • People started opening the emails.
  • People started clicking on the links to the emails.
  • People started sending email responses.

This is all old hat to people who HAVE been CRM administrators, but to me it was all novel.

Now I could get really fancy and look at advanced analytics, but for my purposes I just needed to know the basics. I’ll show you an example – I included one of my own email accounts on the mailing list, and here is the information that HubSpot provided for the delivery to that email address.

I had several clickable links in the email, and HubSpot told me which of those links my alter ego clicked, and the time that they were clicked.

In addition to viewing individual activity, you can view summary activity for all of the recipients. Even if you’re not performing complex Tableau analyses of the data, the summaries can show you some basic things. For me, one key metric is the Unsubscribe metric – the percentage of those people who never want to receive an email from Bredemarket again. The heat map of the email displays the percentage of clicks on various links, including the Unsubscribe link. I am happy to report that as of right now – 16 hours after I sent the email – my unsubscribe rate is 0%.

So I’ve gone from minimal exposure to a CRM to a basic understanding of what a CRM can do. Hopefully I can use this to serve my potential Bredemarket clients better.

Now I just wish that I had used a CRM for my full-time employment search from day one. Maybe I’d be off of COBRA by now.