Use HubSpot Better

Hi, I’m Craig Bailey and this is my personal blog where I write about technology, business systems, HubSpot, marketing strategy and general life experiences. You can read my posts here.

I’m involved with two agencies in Sydney:

  • The first is XEN Systems. We help government departments and mid-large B2B technology companies with their sales and marketing strategy, including implementation and training in HubSpot 
  • The second is XEN Create. We provide premium graphic design services to companies, with a focus on using the latest AI tools, including Midjourney

I also co-host HubShots, the podcast and YouTube show focussed on getting the most out of HubSpot. We are the creators of the HubShots Framework.

Latest stories

Reusable shopping bags

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An observation. When the whole ‘ban the bag’ campaign came into effect in NSW last July I didn’t really give it much thought. A minor nuisance if anything – since we re-used the plastic bags from supermarkets as garbage bags and would no longer have that easy option – but overall not something I really cared about. I was probably cynical if anything – it seemed...

Social engagement

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How many highly effective leaders do you know that manage their own social profiles? Working with marketing managers, we are increasingly seeing the marketing department managing the personal social profiles (eg LinkedIn) of their company leaders (eg CEO). And often, someone junior in the marketing team. They post on their behalf, engage, and even answer DMs on their behalf. And yes...

HubSpot versus MailChimp

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In episode 166 of HubShots – the HubSpot focussed podcast for marketing managers – Ian and I chat about HubSpot’s announcement about adding even more features to their free version. This time it’s email sending capabilities. For free.

Yes, great news right? In the show we think through how this compares to MailChimp’s revamped approach.

Facebook Ad Manager Therapy

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If you are frustrated with Facebook’s Ad Manager constantly changing and often crashing, you are far from alone. Ads Manager is crashing with regularity, according to interviews with numerous advertisers. The outages, which can last for hours at a time and make it impossible to start a new ad campaign or manage an existing one, seem to happen every month, they say. Yep, it’s a pretty...

Surfacing podcast episodes in Google

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Good news for podcasters (of which I am one), with Google tweaking things in order to highlight individual podcast episodes more relevantly for search queries. Note: To pull off the search indexing, Google is automatically transcribing all the podcast episodes it finds. And also note: This new functionality could fundamentally change how people find new shows because podcasts have lacked...

Paying fairly for news

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From the WSJ, news of Facebook paying news outlets to license their content. Facebook Inc. is offering news outlets millions of dollars for the rights to put their content in a news section that the company hopes to launch later this year, according to people familiar with the matter.“people familiar with the matter…” On one hand I’d be thinking: On the other hand, perhaps...

Finding your brand voice

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At GROW with HubSpot earlier this week, one of the sessions was by Erik Newcomb from Shopify, talking about strategies for future proofing your brand. Part of his session focussed on the benefit of having a distinct brand voice. An example he highlighted was Naadam – an online fashion brand. Here’s their True Story video: Quirky, funny, compelling. I find this kind of stuff...

Podcast thinking

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Seth encourages you to start a podcast. Now is the time. Of his reasons, the third is the compelling one for me: A podcast helps you think more clearly. When you know you need to talk about something you care about, you’ll work to make your thinking more accessible and cogent–and because it’s spoken, not written, you may very well get past that block we were taught in third grade. When Ian...

Cockroach Branding wins

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Would have loved to have been part of the discussion when Cockroach Labs were deciding on their name and brand positioning.

I get the whole ‘resilient’ angle. Very clever.

And they’ve just closed further funding. Sounds like their product is actually pretty good. But I wonder how employees feel about listing the name on their resumes…

There’s worse I guess.

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