(121) The Brand NEW AI Marketing Strategy for 2025 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw-o9WRyCxI

Transcript: (00:00) Please welcome Chief Marketing Officer, HubSpot, Hip Bodner, and Senior Director of Global Growth, HubSpot, Asia Frost. Inbound, we made it to Friday. Oh my goodness, it has been a week, hasn't it? Asia, thanks for joining me today. Uh, I host a podcast called Marketing Against the Grain. My lovely Oh, wow. Thanks. Thanks. Appreciate it. (00:26) Fans in the audience. Thank you for listening. Uh my normal lovely co-host Kieran Flanigan could not make the journey to inbound this year. So Asia has gracefully agreed to step in and we are going to basically give you a deep dive into loop marketing. You and I have been doing it. We've been running tests. (00:46) We are in the weeds of it deep for the last like year and a half. And we're going to break down and basically share the behind the scenes of everything we've learned. Yeah. And we're really excited to do it because we have a lot to say. We do. If you're a marketer, things have been pretty broken, right, Asia? Like, give us the rundown as to like what are the challenges the average marketer is seeing. Oh, okay. (01:06) What are they not seeing is probably the easier question to answer. True. Okay. 50% 58.5% of Google searches are now ending without a click, which is kind of bonkers because for a long time, Google has been the most predictable way to drive traffic and therefore demand for your business. So, that's bad. (01:26) We're seeing doubledigit traffic declines as AI intercepts that traffic. I almost shared a picture of my inbox, which is just emails from CMOs being like, "What happened? What do I do?" It's like, it's like an email every couple of days is basically what I receive. So, you have that and then with that, you have rising ad costs. (01:44) You have lower email engagement rates because what's happening as you get less traffic from search, people are overspending on ads or they're sending twice as many emails. And that is bas basically flooding their audiences and just dropping performance at a pretty exponential rate. Right. Every other channel is getting saturated. (02:00) They're getting more competitive. You and I I think were in the pit of despair maybe what like a year to 15 months ago. Like it was a dark dark place. It was a we were on a lot of Zoom calls. People were just kind of silent shaking their head. You never want to see your CMO just shaking his head. I will tell you that. (02:20) It was one of these a lot, you know, and so it was, but now we're smiling. We've come out the other side. And what have we learned and how have we come out the other side is what we want to share with you all today because I think we've never been able to do better marketing at HubSpot than we're doing right now. Oh, certainly not. We're learning more quickly than we ever have. (02:38) We're doing more interesting things than we ever have. And what are we calling this new way of working? We're calling this new way of working in this new playbook loop marketing. So, if you missed the keynote or if you're on YouTube and you haven't seen any content on loop marketing yet, we're we're calling it loop marketing because well, it's a loop and two because it kind of builds on what HubSpot started with inbound marketing, but inbound marketing was very linear first of all. (03:02) Second of all, like the average business a decade ago when inbound marketing was in its prime had way more simplistic business models. They had less revenue streams. They use way less technology. Even the average like 20 person business I talked to is exceptionally savvy and complex and they need a framework for doing marketing that matches that complexity of their business and the changing landscape of the world of AI. The complexity of the consumer journey. (03:32) Yes. I mean people used to just move in straight lines and now we see they're doing all sorts of things. They're going in places and ways that we didn't necessarily expect or plan for. And so we need a framework that is dynamic, that is adaptive, and that is a loop and not a line. I call it AI add I feel like I have AIA add where it's like, oh, I've got this thing. (03:56) I'm asking chat GPT and I've got my I use perplexity comet if you were at the keynote this morning and I've got like my assistant open in five different tabs. Yeah. And I'm like literally all over the place and eventually I come back to like some common thread and we need marketing that's going to work for that. So we want to break down what loop marketing is. (04:12) We want to walk through the stages, but instead of just walking through the stages, we want to spend a few minutes on each and get deep into like the tactics and the tips that you should go and do and use now to start transforming how you're thinking about marketing. Yeah. Okay. (04:31) So, Asia, why don't you break down give us give us the rundown of the loop talk, you know, you and I have debated all of this stuff, all of these names. Is is this really right? We had a plethora of discussions. I think we landed in a great place. Why don't you kind of walk us through this the loop overall and then we'll break down kind of the tactics from there. That sounds great. All right. (04:49) So, we've got four phases of the loop. Hopefully, everyone is familiar with these four phases by now. Express, tailor, amplify, and evolve. The first phase is actually my favorite. And Kip, we were talking about this earlier and you were kind of shocked. I think you would have said I was an amplify gal. But you're an express gal. I'm an express gal. (05:06) And tell tell us why. I I'm I'm I'm going to So, okay, Express is all about bringing your brand voice, your brand identity, your brand style to life. And this is a very human phase and I think that that's why I really appreciate it. You actually don't know this about me, Kip. (05:27) When I am not working on HubSpot, I am a creator and I run a very successful Substack and I use a lot of AI, but the the core content creation that I do, it's all me. before I ever bring AI into the picture, then I'm figuring out, okay, what do I want to say? And how can I say it in a way that no one else but Asia Frost can? And to me, that's what Express is all about. (05:51) And then I'm using AI and I'm using all my data to say, well, how is this going to resonate? What's going to get the best, you know, open rate based on my previous subject lines. I think what's really important that I want everybody to understand is, and I think it goes back to the first time I met you. The first time I met you, you were in college. you were about to finish college and you were writing and you were hustling and writing and you to this day are one of the best writers I know. (06:15) And so if anyone was going to be threatened by AI and do I need to write anymore and all of the fear that's out there, it'd be somebody like you. Sure. Right. Like you like this is like for your main to who you are as a person and instead you're saying no, it's actually the part I'm the most excited about. Yes. (06:34) which to me is like way different than most people expected us to land here, right? Yeah. I think other people are starting to catch on too. I'm talking to other writers who are really excited about the opportunity to distill what makes their voice really special. And I think that this is even more gerine for brand. Distill what makes your brand special, codify that, and then bring in AI to help scale and amplify that. (07:01) So what I love about the express stage is is just what you said that AI can build upon your own creativity, your own point of view, your own voice. Y the other thing is I'm a I'm an instant gratification isn't soon enough kind of person. You know Ditto who among us doesn't love instant gratification as most marketers are. You know that's we we like the dopamine of checking the checking the ad click rates and the email performance and and all of that. (07:25) And one of the things I've always not loved about marketing is like the market research feedback side of it because it take it took a long time and it was really expensive. Yeah. And I think the thing I like most about this express stage is I can get that feedback instantly. Yes. you know I can basically have the data on my target audience and then share whatever I've written or whatever I've presentation I've designed what doesn't really matter and get feedback from that audience like so for example what I would share with all of you is we did I surveyed a (07:56) thousand marketers about loop marketing before before inbound and I ran that same survey through a cloud project I made with all of the data about you know our lovely customers and community at HubSpot It was basically the same. It was like the cloud project was like within 90% accurate of where the survey was. (08:17) Survey was thousands of dollars and took a few weeks to run. Cloud project was, you know, 20 bucks and it took 20 seconds. Yeah, that's so cool. I think you bring up a really good point about the express phase, which is it's also contingent on understanding your customer really well and stress testing those concepts against what you know about your customer. So, it's not just, you know, you off in a corner doing watercolor. (08:44) It's, okay, how is this actually gonna resonate with the people that I'm trying to reach? Yeah. So, I I think we should give people like the if you're going to go be really successful at this and what would you go and do right now? I'll start and I'd love for you to add. I think you need to collect some qualitative and quantitative data about your audience. (09:01) So, you have data about them in HubSpot or whatever CRM you're using, right? You also have emails with them, support tickets, call recordings, all of that. You need all of that to kind of know who they are and what their problems are relative to your company. I think that's the first thing. (09:20) What would you say the next step needs to be? I would say get in a room with your core creative team or whoever is responsible for defining your brand and make sure you have a really definitive authentic point of view on who your brand is. And then I think you take that brand and style guide and you take all the data that you've just called out that we've collected and you use that to say okay you know Claude tell me does this style resonate with this persona and not just does it resonate there there are two addages of of HubSpot that started with Brian Dermesh when the company started and I think are more important and more true today than they've ever been. Yeah. (09:59) The first is Brian would always say is like is it remarkable? And he meant like the Webster's dictionary version of remarkable is it worthy of remark would somebody talk about that would that would they care about that? And AI can really help you have a much better chance of predicting if your audience is going to care and really like about some like this thing that you're making which is awesome and I think really important. (10:23) The next part of it is you essentially say, "What do I have to do to win?" We would always say, "What do I have to do to win the marketing internet this week? What what do I the thing in my industry that is being talked about in that given week?" And that's like a good litmus test for I'm expressing the right ideas. Yeah. Because part of what we haven't talked about is like you do have to select the right ideas. (10:46) And like a filter for that is like are people gonna care and are people going to talk about it? Is it going to be one of the most re relevant things in my market this week or this month? Can I be a headline? Yes. Can Can I be a headline? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, there's a couple ways to get started with Express. Yeah. Sake of time, we got we got to keep moving. Let's move on. Okay. Let's talk tailor. (11:05) Tailoring is very interesting because it really builds on this old notion of personalization. this notion of, hey, I've got these personalization tokens and I can fill in these personalization tokens with cool data and my it's going to make it feel like I know that person in some way. Cool data might be overstating it a little bit. First name, last name, company name. (11:24) I was trying to make it seem like you're giving it more credit than it deserved. Basic maybe 10 years ago as it really was. But it is that's that's what where we started. Where we're at now is completely different. So, you and your team have done probably more work tailoring, especially email, than anybody on this planet, I would say. Tell us what you've learned. (11:49) The digital marketing team has been doing some absolutely bonkers things with personalization. I think our coolest learning is we found that if you take a lot of unstructured data about a contact. So not just their first name, last name, company name, but the pages on your website that they have visited, the content that they've downloaded, how they describe their business on their website, and you feed that into AI. (12:15) AI can craft these personalized emails that feel like they could have only been written for that individual contact because in truth, they were. And a person getting that email responds to that email in a totally different way than a fill-in-theblank mad libs style email that was marketing personalization of old. (12:35) What I would just say is I've had very few holy moments in doing marketing. Reading these emails was one of them. Yeah. where I remember like very vividly like being on an email thread with you and Emmy and a few people on our team looking at these early versions of them before they even got really good and just being completely blown away. (12:56) I was like, "Oh, it felt like somebody was a human spent like an hour researching this company to write this perfect email to this person and instead it happened in seconds." It's like your best sales rep who spends the most time crafting their outreach and figuring out what is going to resonate wrote the email, but instead it's AI and it's doing it at scale. (13:15) And so we saw I think an 82% improvement in conversion rate from adding personalization to email. And this is not a new program folks. This is not something that you know you can send on a Wednesday and then you try something new the next week. Like that is a program that we have been iterating and trying to move the needle on forward. (13:33) Almost double conversion rates on an email program that you have been grinding on for 10 plus years is almost impossible. Yeah. So, are we tailor people now? I'm not I'm not I'm not ready for the loop are equal. I'm not I'm not ready to make that commitment. No, I'm I'm an Amplify guy. I'm sorry. I I can't I can't I I know where my loyalties lie. (13:50) We're going to get there in a second. Yeah. But so, when you say that data, we're talking about you can use HubSpot's new data hub product. You can use our friends over at Clay. There's a bunch of other third party data sources. But what you're really trying to answer is the question, what data do I have access to that really gives me unique insights on my audience? It's not that I know them at this big kind of general level like the ideal customer profile level. It's like no, I know them on like the contact company personal level because I have (14:21) this information and can build a different relationship with them. And once you have that, then you're taking kind of a core message template and a and a prompt and generating these personalized emails. And we just rolled out that feature in MarketingHub. We've been doing it very manually and very technically and we're excited to have the help of engineers to help us scale this, but it's worked incredibly well. (14:46) Yep, that's exactly right. Okay. So, this is the I would say the step that you get the most benefit of immediately is tailoring the comms that you're already good data. I think you're right to call that out and that's why we've been banging the drum about data for a while now. (15:05) We we know we got to give amplify a few we'll give Kip Amplify. Well, as as I said, I'm a I'm a self profofessed fan of the Amplify because I believe distribution is undefeated and that in when all else fails, like get your message in front of people and as long as your message isn't terrible, you will win. Well, your message isn't terrible because you've expressed it well and you've tested it. (15:22) I see I see what you're doing there. I like it. I would say that you know more about AI engine optimization than 99% of the humans on this planet. You've spent a lot of time doing it. Our citations in perplexity in chat GPT thanks to the work you and the amazing team are doing are going up up and up. Yep. Everybody here is like, "Okay, I want to do that. What do I need to do?" Yeah. (15:50) So, for everybody in the room and everybody watching, give us an AEO crash course because it's one of the most important parts of Amplified. We'll talk about a couple of other parts, but I want to make sure we get to AEO. Yeah. Well, I will just say it that is a very nice compliment. AO is also very nent. So if you are overwhelmed or nervous or simply don't know what you're talking about, well the good news is it doesn't. No one does. (16:14) Yeah, I know a little more, but I still don't know a lot because it's changing all the time and it's a very new field. So that's just my little disclaimer. Like please feel like you can dive in here and and catch up very easily. Real quick, I know you're thinking to yourself, "Okay, Kip, this sounds amazing, but what do I actually type into chat GPT?" We've got you covered. (16:32) That's why we built the Loop marketing prompt library. Over 100 prompts that take you from theory to real execution. Whether you need to craft your style guide, personalize emails, or get real time insights, this is exactly what we're using to grow our business. Get it right now. Scan the QR code or click the link in the description below. (16:50) Now, let's get back to the show. The cool thing about AEO is that it breaks down into many of the same pillars that SEO did. different techniques, different tactics, and some of the underlying wise are different. But I like to think about it as your content tactics, your on page or your technical tactics, and your off-site or authority building tactics. (17:15) I have one clarifying question for the audience because I've had a lot of conversations with AEO, and I want to bring it for everybody on the pod. Yeah. Is what I used to do in traditional search engine optimization, is that foundational and I still need to do that or is that something I need to throw out and do something differently? before you break down everything like help help people understand. So I'm getting that question over and over again all the time. I get this question too. (17:34) I would say that the heart of good SEO if you were doing SEO well you were producing great content that was meant to educate and be valuable for your persona. And that I don't think has changed. I agree. Now the mechanics of it have changed pretty dramatically. And the the specific nature of the content that you're producing that's also changed pretty dramatically. (17:57) But as long as you're producing great content, like that that is the heart of a good AEO strategy as well. And people get really nervous when I start talking about and and we can go into it. Um like the hyper longtail content that we are now producing. We have gone from publishing the ultimate guide to content marketing which is very broad, very generic. (18:16) Anyone who wants to do content marketing in this audience could read that guide and we would want you to read that guide. And now we want to talk directly to the marketing manager at a 200 person logistics company who actually feels pretty good about their lead genen strategy but needs a lot of help you know for ABM for enterprise. (18:39) I think this is a very important insight for everybody to understand because when you are going back and forth with an LLM, you're having a very personal detailed conversation that is just for you, right? And it's got memory of who you are. So, it's giving its answers based on who you are and the problems you're trying to solve. (18:57) Because of that, the information that needs to be provided to both people and robots needs to get more personal and more detailed. That's that's what you're telling us. That is that is at the crux of it. Yes. When when you Google something, you're probably gonna get a pretty similar result to me. When we ask Tragy BT the same question, we are going to get very different results because Tragy BT knows that you always like Travis Kelsey's sweaters and that I really like Christy Don dress. I did see that in your tragic boutique history once. (19:21) I've been sitting on that for years. I was trying to find this one particular sweater he wore was really good. Did you find it? I don't like the Amari outfits, but I like No, I never found it because I think it was like, you know, custom. Oh, yeah. I think it was I think it was a custom pre-release kind of situation. Yeah. Okay. Um, okay. So, yeah. (19:40) So, the content needs to be uh written or created in the way that AI engines are providing responses. And that is very longtail. It's very specific. It's persona and use case versus here's what this educational content could be for anyone. Yeah. I was talking to an amazing HubSpot customer yesterday, Wilderness Motor Homes. They rent RVs in New Zealand. (19:58) So, if you ever want to go to New Zealand, you should you should go and and check them out. Pro tip. And we were talking about the type of content difference. And it's like before it'd be like, "Oh, here are like the 10 different RV paths across New Zealand." And now it would be like, "No, here are like the five animals a family from America would want to see while they were visiting New Zealand. (20:17) " Right? Like that is I think that's what you're saying the level of fidelity change looks like in like a very practical way. That is absolutely right. I think another key thing for people to understand is that your educational content now needs to be bottom of the funnel in that if Wilderness RVs publishes that, they can't just publish a a listicle of animals like they used to. (20:35) They need to be And here's how you can see that. Give me a Yeah, the the I don't know the kiwi. Kiwi kiwi bird. I think they are the kiwi. Yeah, kiwis because of the kiwi bird. The puffin. Yes. Um you know, here's how you see this puffin in your wilderness RV. Like we drive there, where you buy the tickets, how you get the parking pass. Yes. (20:59) Because if you just feed humans, well, if you feed AI engines that'll feed humans educational insights without tying it back to your product, the AI engine won't know to recommend you. And then you're making the AI engine smarter without any benefit to your business. Okay? So, your content strategy is changing dramatically. It's getting far more specific. (21:17) it's getting more bottom of the funnel and you have to tie your product and your business back to that content in a more deliberate way. Make sure that you're going to get those recommendations. I would say the last of the three big AO tips I think would be like where else you do you need to show up. So maybe talk about that for like real quick before we move on to the next stage. (21:36) I think you said it best. You said we're optimizing for brand mentions and not backlinks because AI engines do not care about backlinks as a measure of how credible or authoritative your brand is. What they do care about is how many shoutouts your brand is getting on places like Reddit and LinkedIn and Kora. I see lots of nodding heads. (21:54) So, it sounds like folks are starting to really pick up on this. And that means that you need to deploy your happy customers. You need to be active in in forums where your customers are and where AI engines are. And that is what's going to help you get those recommendations from AI engines. Shout out to the HubSpot subreddit. (22:13) If you're not not on there yet, join the HubSpot subreddit. Shout out to the HubSpot subre. Shout out to the HubSpot community team. Fantastic partner in that work. And I think the other nice thing about doing all of those amplification efforts on those channels is that that's also where your humans are. That's another part of Amplify. (22:29) Your creators, your advocates, like those are very important, too. We'll do multiple shows. is you and I will come back and do a show with Kieran just on the Amplify stage. We'll talk influencers, we'll talk events, we're going to talk everything. But AEO is such a big part of how Amplification can change that we wanted to dive into it. And a year ago, it was a decimal point of our traffic. (22:49) Now, it's a material amount of our traffic and our revenue. And I think that can be the same for anybody who is watching this right now. Absolutely. And now that AI engines are referral source and HubSpot, you can know. Exactly. and they convert much higher. So you want to make sure you put them on a high high speeded path towards conversion for folks coming from those AI engines. (23:13) Well, I think that's a great segue because we saw that AI engines visitors from AI engines were converting at a much higher rate and we were like, "Oh, okay. Let's evolve, let's adapt, let's optimize in real time." Yeah. So that's the last step here is what you want to do is learn faster. When you're in a period of big transformation, learning is your advantage because everybody everybody knows basically the same amount of information. Sure. You and I, we've been doing this for months more than people watching this. (23:36) So, it's like we don't know that much more than anybody else. And if you learn real hard, you can catch up or or surpass almost anybody. We hope you do. And I would love that. That would be freaking amazing. Um what we've figured out is you need some time and some tools to focus on really quick learnings and iterations so that you can learn and evolve like you just gave a great example. (24:02) We saw that the conversion rate from chat GPT traffic for example was really high and so okay well now we need to change our conversion paths and the other aspects around that buyer journey to make sure that those people can become customers as easy as possible. Yeah, if I can actually tie it in a bow for us. tied in this loop. Um, now you're I really getting into it. (24:21) Uh, we saw that AI engine visitors were converting at 3x the rate and so we told that to our product team who said, "Oh, okay, great. We need to carve this out for customers. It needs to be easy." What they also did was they're like, "Oh, you should start personalizing to folks that are coming from AI engines because we know that they are higher intent and so we need to show them different things on our landing pages." And so that I believe is uh very possible right now. Yeah. (24:45) You can now do dynamic personalization just for people coming from VLMs, which is which is really amazing, right? So it's this idea of like seeing something and acting on it the next day. There's no longer like two you can't be acting two months later. You need to be acting tomorrow. (25:03) If you use HubSpot, I would say on this evolve stage, you should you should use either Breeze assistant or you should connect HubSpot with chat GPT or Claude and use that that ability to just text or talk. I use this app called Willow Voice that I can just dictate and it's even faster cuz typing's too slow because I have problems. Um he once told me you're like our biggest problem is that we don't have enough time and I was like wow that's a good problem to have. That's how I feel. (25:29) Um, but you can ask very good questions just like uh the CEO of Perplexity was talking about this morning. It's curiosity and questions. And that's what Evolve is about. Can you ask the right questions without needing a big data analyst or having to comb through a spreadsheet or a dashboard to get unique insights about a tactic or a campaign? Yeah. (25:47) And then the biggest thing is you need to take that lesson, share that with your team, share that with your AI tools so that it's just part of how you do marketing going forward. You can kind of close the loop and you learn. You get that compounding benefit from doing it better every time. Yes. Going forward. Yeah. (26:04) Well, you close the loop and then you restart the next loop smarter. That's what I love. You're not done with the loop. The loop keeps going. No. I will say as some as a team that's been doing loop marketing, the biggest change I've noticed, I'd be interested what yours is. Yeah. The conversations we have are very different. Before they were very problementric. Now they're very much learning centric. (26:25) like I have learned this thing and I want to go do something and scale or this thing based on what I've learned versus like I'm just kind of stuck. Will you help me solve this problem? Yeah, it's been a very drastic difference to me. (26:41) Well, we have these experimental pods set up which I think is a very tactical way to kind of bring that to life and something that certainly any business could do. We we've said, "Okay, you three people, your whole mission right now is actually just to learn as quickly as possible, and you're going to share your learnings every week, so the rest of us learn with you. You're going to have a pretty open field. Like, we're going to give you some highle goals. (26:58) We know what you should be running toward, but the way that you run, that's up to you." And I think that that's been pretty I mean, that doesn't just apply to the learnings from that pod. It's really brought the entire team up. I think if you're leading a marketing team right now, you have to find some space for the team to experiment and then you have to give them bold challenges. It's like the whole four-minute mile problem. Nobody ran a four-minute mile until everybody ran a 4-minute mile, right? Like once (27:21) one person did it, I'm never running like a 10-minute mile probably. But that's that is what it is. But don't say, "Hey, go make this 10% better. Go double this." Is is what we mean. It's like have a really high aspiration. Okay, we got a couple minutes left. (27:41) Yeah, we want to leave everybody in person and is watching online with some things that you should go do immediately. So, let's go through for express. What is the one thing you would tell somebody to go do right now? I'm going to say style guide. I think style guide is really important if you don't already have one. And if you do, go back to it and see does it actually reflect your brand. (27:59) Do you feel like it's as punchy as authentic as it could be? I love that. I would add like make sure you have a section of that is like what my audience thinks is cool like what are the things that they love and appreciate that like I could uniquely deliver for them because that is what's going to set you apart in this next era. Love that. (28:16) Okay. Tailoring. It's literally getting the right data and starting and and start testing email and you might you'll end up starting testing I think pretty small very small groups a lot of human review but I think you will eventually find a workflow that works for your company. (28:36) What would you add? I mean, I think dynamic email and dynamic landing pages. Those are the two where you're going to see some really nice returns. All right. AEO, give give us the what you would go do crash course. Right now, AEO wise, if you don't know your personas from step one, get to know your personas and then start mapping out the unique questions that each persona is going to be asking. (28:54) Figure out where you have content, figure out where you don't, and start creating that super longtail content. All right, I love that. for Evolve. Set up, use Breeze assistant or get your chat GPT Gemini or Claude connected with your HubSpot data and start asking that data really curious and interesting questions about the specific projects or campaigns you've been running so that you can learn how to make them better the next time when you close the loop. Yeah. (29:24) And I would say philosophically like embrace the learning mindset. We're all learning right now. It's a super fun. It's a super interesting era in marketing. Like soak that up. It's never been a more fun time to be in marketing marketing in a long time. I wake up every day super excited and you wake up every day to a lot of slacks from me and that's basically how life goes. That's how it goes. It's true. Thank you so much for having us everybody. (29:48) I hope that you dig into the loop. Thank you all. We'll see you real soon. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa. I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed. HubSpot. Grow better.