Level One: Breaking Through Disengagement with HubSpot Ads
Lesson Overview: In this first level of engagement, brands fight for an audience to acknowledge their messages. To get through this level, students need to fully understand who they are as a business to find the ideal buyer persona that will connect with them. Then, they’ll need to understand the buyer’s journey - what an audience member might be thinking, feeling, and doing when they receive messages from you. With this as a foundation, you can create advertisements that effectively engage with your audience.
Flywheel Stage: Attract
Level of Engagement: Disengagement
HubSpot Tools Used: HubSpot Ads
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Level Two: Direct Website Traffic Using Pillar Content
Lesson Overview: This course focuses on pillar content to create resources for visitors to your site.
In today’s digital environment, attention is finite. This means it’s important to give site visitors what they need - fast. Unsystematic engagement is the second level of engagement, when visitors are confused by your messaging and cannot continue with their task. Negate unsystematic engagement by collecting the resources on your site in a comprehensive way. For businesses with a longer buyer’s journey to educate customers, leveraging pillar content is key to getting past this low level of engagement.
Flywheel Stage: Attract
Level of Engagement: Unsystematic Engagement
HubSpot Tools Used: Content Management System, Landing Pages
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Level Three: Use Contextual Messaging to Solve for Frustrated Engagement
Lesson Overview: This course teaches you how to create smart calls to action on your website, using smart lists and CTAs in HubSpot software. Start by creating different groups based on the data that is available in Coachella’s CRM. Using this data, students will learn the logic behind lists and how to leverage them to create smart offers for visitors on their website.
Flywheel Stage: Attract
Level of Engagement: Frustrated Engagement
HubSpot Tools Used: HubSpot CRM, Smart Lists, Calls-to-Action
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Level Four: Creating Structure Dependent Engagement With Your Instagram Audience
Lesson Overview:For most brands, the majority of their followers fall to a structure-dependent level where they consume content but never reach higher levels of engagement. This course teaches students to create engaging content on Instagram and focuses on what a brand can do to nurture these followers with the content that they post. By getting followers to like or comment, brands can open up the opportunity to engage with audience members at higher levels, which will have visible business impacts.
Flywheel Stage: Engage
Level of Engagement: Structure Dependent Engagement
HubSpot Tools Used: HubSpot Social Tools, Instagram
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Level Five: Connecting a Brand Partnership With Your Audience’s Self-Identity Through Email Nurturing
Lesson Overview: This course teaches how to create a smart email nurturing campaign to promote a brand partnership. Level five focuses on brand partnerships, based on an audience’s own self-regulated interest. In this stage, students will see the brand partnership as valuable as long as it connects with their audience.
Flywheel Stage: Engage
Level of Engagement: Self-regulated Interest
HubSpot Tools Used: Marketing Automation, Marketing Email, HubSpot CRM
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Level Six: Developing Critical Engagement With Followers Using HubSpot’s Social Media Tools
Lesson Overview:This course focuses on social media platforms to create a comprehensive social listening, engagement, and influencer campaign. Engaging with followers that are sharing their experiences with your brand involves an audience’s critical engagement, which is level six of the Seventh Level Engagement framework. This is when audience members are actively sharing your content not because they are prompted, but because you have inspired them to do so. This course teaches you to build your online community of followers and influencers.
Flywheel Stage: Delight
Level of Engagement: Critical Engagement
HubSpot Tools Used: HubSpot Social Tools
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Level Seven: Harnessing the Power of Brand Evangelists using the Seventh Level
Lesson Overview: This course focuses on the fundamentals of creating a valuable loyalty program that connects with the seventh level of your audience. The seventh level is the highest level of engagement that you can have with a customer, where they feel directly aligned with the values of your company. By understanding the motivations of customers to engage in these programs, you can create loyalty programs that effectively drive your audience to become brand evangelists like this.
Flywheel Stage: Delight
Level of Engagement: Literate Thinking
HubSpot Tools Used: Marketing Automation, Emails, Landing Pages
These courses are based on The Seventh Level, the debut book from Amanda Slavin, Co-founder and CEO of the brand consulting firm CatalystU, and the developer of The Seventh Level Engagement Framework. The book is the most comprehensive exploration of the framework to date.
The framework demystifies engagement by breaking it into seven distinct levels, and providing users with tools, questions, and a methodology for evaluating and elevating their own audience engagement. The Seventh Level Engagement Framework is the secret sauce behind everything Slavin’s team does at CatalystU, the creative agency that she founded with the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh—this book is that recipe.
To effectively teach this course, you should first understand the framework. There are a couple of ways to get started;
First, read The Seventh Level book. You can purchase/download your own copy here.
Second, leverage the resources available to you through HubSpot. In partnership with Slavin, HubSpot Academy has developed a free brand engagement course, which you can take here, as well as a 4 part blog series on the Framework, which you can read here.
In addition, within each of the lessons in this course, there are HubSpot Academy lessons to help teach additional concepts as well as links software tools that are needed to complete that lesson.
To learn more about The Seventh Level Engagement Framework and access additional free resources created by the CatalystU team, visit their website.
This is a series of free courses designed by educators , influencers, and HubSpot’s Education Partner Program to give educators the resources they need to teach Brand Engagement in today’s digital world. Every course is centered around real Brand Engagement problems that we see in businesses today, that are presented to students through case studies. These case studies challenge students to pinpoint problems affecting their business and provide solutions using HubSpot Marketing software.
As they go through these cases, our online lessons and how-to content will provide them all of the support they need to build out real marketing campaigns to solve these business problems. These campaigns will include the full stack of HubSpot Digital Marketing tools so that students can develop Instagram stories, smart content, nurturing workflows, and much more.
Our hope is that students taking these courses will learn how these tools work and encourage them to use software tools to come up with creative solutions to business problems when they graduate.
These courses look at engagement in a different light by introducing Amanda Slavin’s Seventh Level Engagement Framework, which focuses on the individuals that make up your audience and the engagement they feel with your brand. Instead of thinking of engagement as binary, where someone is either engaged or disengaged, this framework suggests a nuanced way to strategically re-engage your audience through seven levels of engagement until they become evangelists of your business.
Business examples are helpful in these types of exercises because it gives students context into why they are completing an assignment. Instead of creating a hypothetical solution for a problem, they can find a creative solution to a real problem. We want to inspire students to approach problems in innovative ways, so we allow them to develop their own ideas to solve these business problems.
The business cases in this course focuses on asking students questions that encourage them to evaluate a situation and the viewpoint of their audience as they approach a business challenge, so they can find the solution that solves for their specific customer.
Marketing software tools are the things that help you structure and scale engagement with an audience. Tools like website chat, Instagram stories, smart content and Facebook Messenger present new channels that marketers are just beginning to use. The next generation of marketers will mold what the future of these tools looks like. We need to show them these tools so they know what they have to work with and to help them think critically and creatively.
Every professor in HubSpot’s free Education Partner Program is given a free package of the HubSpot Marketing Professional tools so that their students can learn by doing.
We use assignments based on these case scenarios to present students with some ways we might use marketing tools to solve business problems, such as using the new Instagram close friends feature to incentivize Coachella attendees. Students taking these courses brainstorm and build these solutions on their own. By showing students how to use these tools, we aim to inspire them to come up with creative solutions on their own.
