HubSpot - Marketing Blog

How to Monetize Your Brand's Blog, According to HubSpot's Blog Leaders

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Whether you're running a personal blog or managing the official blog on your company's website, monetizing your work is entirely possible -- it just takes a good amount of time and effort.

While there's no exact formula to start making money, there are some tried and true strategies you can start experimenting with to see what works best for your content, your business model, and your audience.

Below, we'll dive into some of these monetization ideas and get advice from HubSpot's own blog leaders.

How Do Blogs Make Money?

Before we dive into the monetization strategies, you might be wondering, "How will my blog make money?" Well, your blog can make money in several ways including lead generation, affiliate marketing, brand partnerships, collaborations, or advertising. To find out more, you can learn about the types of blogs that make money and see which strategy would work best for your blog.

Now that we know a few ways that blogs can make money, let's dive into the top monetization strategies for your blog.

1. Map blog posts to specific conversion points.

As a company, you can use your blog to drive leads and conversions.

AJ Beltis, a marketing manager on HubSpot's channel monetization team, says, "Conversion is the foundation of blog monetization. Whether it's an ecommerce purchase, a demo request, or a content offer download, it's imperative to have your blog posts point to an intentional, related next step in the buyer's journey."

So, you might be asking yourself, "How can I do that?"

Beltis' advice is to ask yourself what somebody reading this specific blog post would want or need from your company. Then, you should create the assets you'll need to make that conversion happen in the form of website pages, forms, or content. After that, you'll naturally place your calls-to-action to that next step in the blog post so readers are reminded about what your recommended next step is.

"By placing these CTAs in appropriate sections of the blog, you're more likely to capture the attention of readers with high intent. This process puts more readers on the path to become paying customers for your business," Beltis adds.

2. Include information about your product or service in your blog posts — but do so sparingly, and thoughtfully.

When you're writing blog posts, it's important that each post isn't just a sales tactic. Your blog posts should provide educational content that anyone could benefit from, not just your customers.

However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't ever mention your product or service.

According to Caroline Forsey, the editor of the HubSpot Marketing Blog, "If you're writing content about the best tools for X, and your product or service is a good solution to that user's search query, I'd highly recommend including it in your total roundup of tools to increase exposure and, ideally, drive more leads and customers towards your product. This is one of the most effective ways to monetize your blog for the long-term, particularly since that same piece of content might provide your business with leads 3-5 years into the future."

Again, this doesn't mean you should always and only promote your own product or service.

Forsey adds, "You risk damaging your blog's reputation if you do this too often, or outside of the appropriate context. Readers don't want to see a random 'buy my product!' CTA in a piece of content irrelevant to your product — and, if they feel like your content is actually just a gimmick or hidden advertisement, they'll distrust your brand as a whole."

To avoid this, Forsey suggests only mentioning your product or service where it makes sense, and in a list of other tools you'd suggest for businesses so they feel you're arming them with useful information so they can make their own decision best-suited for their needs.

"Trust me: if readers enjoy reading your content and feel your brand is genuinely helpful, they'll give your product or service a second look," she says.

3. Build a lead funnel for your product.

If you work at a B2B company or have a long sales cycle, reading a blog post is usually a customer's first and furthest interaction from their actual purchase. But it's also arguably the most important stage of the inbound funnel. Attracting your audience's attention with helpful, educational, or entertaining content creates a larger pool of people to convert into leads and close as customers. In other words, your blog marks the start of a relationship with your customers.

Lestraundra Alfred, the manager editor of the HubSpot Sales Blog, says, "If you're looking to gain exposure from your blog, your content should help bridge the gap between the problem the reader is trying to solve and your product, which can serve as a solution. By creating content that your ideal customer is searching for and interested in, you can build a solid community of readers who are a great fit for your product, and when nurtured, can turn into customers for your business."

Ideally, you'll want to craft compelling blog content that your audience can discover easily through a Google search or social media. You can also pay to amplify your distribution on Facebook, which has the best targeting tools out of all the social media sites and is cost effective, or through paid search, which can thrust you to the top of a high-volume Google SERP, although some keywords are expensive.

After people start reading your blog content more, and want to read it on consistent basis, they'll sign up for your blog's email subscription. Once strangers to your brand, they're now regular visitors.

When these visitors read enough blog posts, you can entice them to download conversion offers like Beltis mentioned above. Then, you can then nurture qualified leads with more blog posts and lead generators through email or Facebook ads. Consistently educating them and helping them solve their problems will build their trust, making it more likely they'll move to the middle of your funnel when they're ready. And once you see them researching your product or service by reading case studies, requesting a demo, or trying to contact sales, you can move them to the bottom of the funnel, where sales will qualify their fit as a customer.

Sales will close some of these leads into customers, and they'll be thanking you when they do. Your blog introduced their customers to your brand.

4. Offer sponsored content opportunities to other brands.

Publishers like BuzzFeed and The Dodo produce content that floods social media every day. And they make money by helping other brands do it too.

Brands will collaborate with their video production, social media, and analytics teams to craft posts and videos that follow their formula for virality. Publishers also distribute this sponsored content to their massive social media and website followings. This content is similar to the publishers' native content, so their audience will enjoy reading it, exposing their clients to a huge, engaged, and new viewership and boosting their followings and audience engagement.

If your blog generates a significant amount of traffic, you can leverage your editorial expertise and audience reach to help smaller brands tell captivating stories to a bigger and better viewership.

Doing sponsored content right can pay huge dividends for your brand. Not only does it create another revenue stream, but partnering with other marketing minds can help your team unleash unprecedented amounts of creativity. In fact, T Brand Studio, the New York Times native ad business, crafted paid posts that captured as much engagement as some of nytimes.com's highest-performing articles.

5. Provide coaching services.

Your blog posts can serve as a teaser for how much your readers can learn from you about a certain subject matter. Because if you write about enhancing certain skills like selling, social savviness, sports, cooking, and music, your blog posts can only teach your readers so much. They need to practice these skills in real life to see substantial improvement.

But if your readers practice these skills on their own, they'll only get so much better. If they really want to improve, training with a coach will guide them toward success faster than anything else. Think about it. What would improve your basketball skills the most? Reading Michael Jordan's book about shooting and practicing his tips by yourself? Or reading his book and then taking shooting lessons with him?

If you're running a personal brand, as a coach, your blog is your most important marketing asset. It helps your potential clients improve themselves while giving them a glimpse into what life would be like if they actually achieved one of their life-long goals. Your blog inspires readers to strive for their dreams. And when they're more motivated to reach their potential, they'll usually want an expert directing them toward greatness, not just themselves.

6. Market your freelance writing skills.

If you're a freelance blogger, you need to show potential clients that you can write compelling content. To do this, you could try to attract their attention with your previous work, but you usually don't have control over those topics. So what if they don't pique their interest?

The best way to show potential clients you can write compelling content is by engaging them with your own content. When you start a blog, you have access to your post's performance metrics and complete control over the topics you cover. This allows you to write content that you know your target audience will devour, attracting more and more potential clients to your blog. And once they realize they rely on you for content marketing advice, they'll know they can trust you to help them improve their own content marketing.

For instance, Eddie Shleyner, a freelance copywriter and content marketer, markets his business called VeryGoodCopy by writing articles about copywriting, content marketing, and psychology. His articles are so engaging and insightful that organizations like The North Face, Geico, and Mercedes Benz hire him to write articles, eBooks, landing pages, website copy, and email campaigns.

7. Participate in affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to monetize a blog when you don't sell a product or service. It's a relatively simple process too. You'll partner with an ecommerce platform or businesses that have affiliate programs and pick out relevant products to promote on your blog. Your partners will then send you custom links to their product pages that can track customers referred by your blog. And if someone clicks on the link and buys the product, you'll earn a commission.

One of the most popular affiliate marketing programs is Amazon Associates. You can choose from over one million of Amazon's ecommerce products to advertise on your blog, and you can earn up to 10% in commission.

Out of all the ways you can make money blogging, affiliate marketing requires the least amount of time, money, and resources. You don't have to build, market, or sell a product or service and inserting affiliate links in your blog posts doesn't cost any money. All you have to do is wait for people to click on them and buy something.

Start Making Money with Your Blog

Choosing your monetization strategy will depend on the type of blog you're running and the type of product or service you offer. To up-level your blog, learn how to set yourself up for success and avoid the top blogging mistakes.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

16 of the Best Professional Bio Examples We've Ever Seen [+ Bio Templates]

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Does your professional bio make a statement?

In this article, we have great professional bio examples you should compare yours to — and a series of free bio templates you can use to make it perfect.

If you’re anything like me, you probably don't think about your professional bio until you’re suddenly asked to "shoot one over via email." You have approximately one afternoon to come up with it, and that's when you scramble, and the bio ends up reading like this:

Rodney Erickson is a content marketing professional at HubSpot, an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. Previously, Rodney worked as a marketing manager for a tech software startup. He graduated with honors from Columbia University with a dual degree in Business Administration and Creative Writing."

Woof, that was dull. Are you still with me? I swear, not even adding a tidbit about his cats would liven that bio up.

To be fair, in certain contexts, your professional bio does need to be more formal, like Mr. Erickson's up there. But in many cases, writing a readable bio — even conversational — is a really good thing. That means dropping that traditional format of listing your accomplishments like a robot and cramming as much professional-sounding jargon in there as you can.

How to Write a Bio

Download a free, editable short professional bio template.

Download a free, editable long professional bio template.

Writing a professional bio that captures your brand and what you offer to your audience can help you grow better. But doing it right is just as important. Here's how to write a bio, step-by-step.

1. Create an 'About' page for your website or profile.

Before you can publish your professional bio, you need a living space for it. Here are a few to consider (some of these you might already have in place):

Facebook Business page
LinkedIn profile
Instagram account
Personal website
Personal blog
Industry website
Industry blog byline

As you'll see in the professional bio examples below, the length and tone of your bio will differ depending on which of the above platforms you choose to be on. Instagram, for example, allows only 150 characters of bio space, whereas you can write virtually as much as you want on your personal website — or even your Facebook Business page. But once created, this bio should represent who you are in the eyes of your audience.

2. Begin writing your bio with your first and last name.

If your readers don't remember anything else about your bio, make sure they remember your name. For that reason, it's a good idea for your first and last name to be the first two words of your professional bio. Even if your name is printed above this bio (hint: it should), this is a rare moment where it's okay to be redundant.

For example, if I were writing my own bio, I might start it like this:

Lindsay Kolowich

Lindsay Kolowich is a Senior Marketing Manager at HubSpot.

3. Mention any associated brand name you might use.

Will your professional bio represent yourself, or a business you work for? Make sure the brand you want to be associated with is mentioned in your bio. If you're a freelancer, perhaps you have a personal business name or pseudonym you advertise to your clients. Here are a few examples:

Lindsay Kolowich Marketing
SEO Lindsay
Kolowich Consulting
Content by Kolowich (what do you think ... too cheesy?)

Maybe you founded your own company, and you want its name to be separate from your real name. Don't be afraid to keep it simple: "Lindsay Kolowich is the founder and CEO of Kolowich Consulting."

4. State your current position and what you do.

Whether you're the author of a novel or a mid-level specialist, use the next few lines of your bio to describe what you do in that position. Don't assume your audience will naturally know what your job title entails. Make your primary responsibilities known to the reader, helping them paint a picture of who you are during the day and what you have to offer the industry.

5. Include at least one professional accomplishment.

Just as a business touts its client successes in the form of case studies, your professional bio should let your own audience know what you've already achieved. What have you done for yourself — as well as for others — that makes you a valuable player in your industry?

6. Describe your values and how they inform your career.

Why do you do what you do? What might make your contribution to the market different than your colleagues? Better yet, what values do you and your colleagues share that would make your business a worthwhile investment to others? Start to wrap up your professional bio by simply explaining what gets you up in the morning.

7. Briefly tell your readers who you are outside of work.

Transition from describing your values in work to describing who you are outside of work. This may include:

Your family
Your hometown
Sports you play
Hobbies and interests
Favorite music and travel destinations
Side hustles you're working on

People like connecting with other people. The more transparent you are about who you are personally, the more likable you'll be to the people reading about who you are professionally.

8. Consider adding humor or a personal story to add flavor to your professional bio.

End your professional bio on a good note — or, more specifically, a funny note. Leaving your audience with something quirky or uniquely you can ensure they'll leave your website with a pleasant impression of you.

It's important to follow the steps above when writing your bio, but don't obsess over any one section. Remember, the people reading your bio are suffering from information fatigue. If you don't hook 'em in the first line, you'll lose them quickly.

(P.S. Want to give your professional brand a boost? Take one of HubSpot Academy's free certification courses. In just one weekend, you can add a line to your resume and bio that's coveted by over 60,000 marketers.)

Why Good Bios Are Important for a Professional

Alright, I know what you may be thinking ... So what? It's just a bio. I mean, how many people read professional bios, anyway?

The answer: A lot of people. More importantly, though, there's no way to tell exactly who is reading it — and you always want it to be ready for when the right people come across it. And when they do, you want it to catch their eye. In a good way.

You see, while your resume is only useful for when you're actively applying for specific positions, your professional bio is much more visible. It can live on your LinkedIn profile, your company's website, your guest blog posts, your speaker profiles, your Twitter bio, and many other places.

And, most importantly, it's the tool that you can leverage most when you're networking.

Bottom line? People will read your professional bio. Whether they remember it, and whether it makes them care about you, is a matter of how well you present yourself to your intended audience.

So, what does a top-notch professional bio look like?

Below, we've curated some of the best real professional bio examples we've ever seen on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the various websites where you might describe yourself.

Check 'em out, and use them as inspiration when crafting your own.

The Best Professional Bio Examples We've Ever Seen

1. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Bio Platform: Personal Website

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie begins her professional bio with an invitation into her world. In just one sentence, she describes the depth and breadth of her body of work as it has been translated into thirty languages and several publications.

Along with her notable writing career, Chimamanda showcases her speaking career which introduces readers to a well-rounded view of who she is as a professional. From there, her bio seamlessly flows into her recent work and a glimpse into how and where she spends her personal time – the United States and Nigeria.

Finally, Chimamanda’s bio ends with a call-to-action to read a more detailed biography, giving the reader a choice to read the information available about her life and career.

2. Ann Handley

Bio Platform: Personal Website

If you're a marketer, you've likely heard of Ann Handley. Her list of credentials is lengthy, and if she really wanted to, she could go on and on and on about her accomplishments.

But when people list out all their accomplishments in their bios, they risk sounding a little egotistical. Sure, you might impress a handful of people with all those laurels, but many people who read your bio will end up feeling either intimidated or annoyed. Think about it: Is that how you want the majority of your readers to feel when they read your bio?

To minimize the egoism that comes with talking about yourself, think about how you can list out your accomplishments without sounding like you're bragging. Ann does this really well, choosing a tone in her bio that's more approachable.

It starts with the excerpt in the footer of her personal website. Give it a quick read, paying close attention to the opening and closing lines:

"This is Ann Handley's website, and this is a bit of copy about her ... That's not giving you a lot of detail, is it? So read more here." This is the kind of simple, friendly language that invites the reader in rather than shutting them out.

Follow the link and you'll be led to a page dedicated to a fuller bio, which she's divided into two parts: a "short version" (literally a bulleted list of key facts) and a "long version," which includes traditional paragraphs. There's something in there for everyone.

3. Rebecca Bollwitt

Bio platform: Instagram

Instagram is a notoriously difficult platform on which to write a good bio. Similar to Twitter, you simply don't have room for a professional bio that includes everything about you. And because Instagram is primarily a mobile app, many viewers are reading about you passively on their mobile device.

Instagram's limited bio space requires you to highlight just your most important qualities, and blogging icon Rebecca Bollwitt does so in her own Instagram bio in an excellent way.

Rebecca's brand name is Miss604, and cleverly uses emojis in her Instagram bio to tell visitors exactly what makes her a valuable content creator. Take a look in the screenshot below.

Starting with a trophy emoji, Miss604 says she's BC's most award-winning blogger. I haven't even looked at her pictures yet and the introduction of her bio has already sucked me in.

The rest of her bio follows suit, breaking up the text with an appropriate emoji and a perfect collection of nouns to tell me who she is as a person. She even links out to her husband's Instagram account after the heart emoji (an adorable addition), and assures her followers that all of her pictures are authentically hers.

Take a lesson from Miss604, and show your personal side. Just because you're branding yourself as a professional doesn't mean you have to take your human being hat off. Often your most personal attributes make for the best professional bio content.

4. Mark Gallion

Bio Platform: Twitter

As a venture capitalist and an executive at several start-ups, Mark Gallion has different versions of his bio all over the internet. You can imagine some are more formal than others. But when it comes to his Twitter bio, he carefully phrased his information in a way that helps him connect with his audience — specifically, through the use of humor.

Why would he choose humor when he runs four start-ups and constantly seeks funding for them? Well, Mark's tactic is totally intentional: it's a lever he pulls to refresh his brand while maintaining his already impressive and established identity as an entrepreneur.

Mark leverages his Twitter bio because it’s place where he can be human. And it helps him relate to his followers and potential investors.

When crafting your own Twitter bio, consider your audience and the personal brand you're trying to create for yourself. Use it as an opportunity to be relatable. (And check out this list of amusing Twitter bios for inspiration.)

5. Chime Mmeje

Bio Platform: LinkedIn

A bio with a hook is sure to keep you reading. Chima Mmeje is a freelance SEO copywriter who’s “extremely good at one thing”: helping companies rank for their target keywords. By leading with a strong hook that aligns with her target audience’s marketing needs, she’s able to keep readers engaged.

What comes next is a unique differentiator in a professional bio. Instead of listing accolades, Chima shares a few wins she’s secured for her clients. This nifty section does two things: it builds the readers’ confidence in her ability to deliver results and it’s a practical way to name-drop her clients in a professional bio.

In the body of her professional bio, Chima briefly lists her process at a high level, giving her potential clients a birds-eye view of what they can expect when they book her services.

The simple call to action “Drop a message” in her email inbox is a casual invitation to learn more about her services.

6. DJ Nexus

Bio Platform: Facebook

This New England-based DJ has single-handedly captured the Likes of more than 2,000 people in and beyond Boston, MA. And even if you don't listen to the type of music he produces, it's hard not to listen to his compelling Facebook bio.

Stage-named DJ Nexus, Jamerson's professional bio makes use of nearly every Page field inside the About tab. Right away, his audience knows which genres he plays in, where he's from, and who else he's worked with. The latter — under "Affiliation," as shown in the screenshot below — is unique and seldom mentioned in professional bios today.

Our favorite part about DJ Nexus's bio? His tagline, under "About" — "Quiet during the day. QUITE LOUD at night!" DJ Nexus tells you when he works in an awesome way. I got goosebumps just imagining a dance club he might play his music in.

DJ Nexus's bio brilliance doesn't stop there.

The great thing about Facebook Business Pages is that you can write as much as you want without overwhelming your Page visitors. For those who just want Jamerson's basic info, they have the four categories shown above. For those who want to learn more about him, he tells an excellent story of his career. Here's just a preview of his story, below:

In this story, DJ Nexus describes both when he "became known as DJ Nexus" and a company he founded shortly afterward — all before going to college. This is a terrific lesson for Facebook Businesses today: customers want to learn about you, and as Facebook increasingly becomes a place for meaningful interactions, there's no better place to tell your story than on your Facebook Business Page.

7. Lena Axelsson

Bio Platform: Industry Website

When it all comes down to it, your professional bio is no different than any other piece of persuasive copy — no matter where it lives. One of the most common mistakes people make is thinking of it as its own beast, separate from other pieces of writing. If you think about it that way, you're far more likely to write something painfully uninteresting.

When you sit down to write your professional bio and you're watching that cursor blinking on the screen, think about how you would introduce a blog post. You don't just dive right into the meat of the thing, now, do you? No. You start with an introduction.

The best bios are often concise (around 200–300 words), so you don't have a lot of room to play around. But a single sentence that tees your reader up and provides context for the accomplishments that follow could make the rest of your bio that much more persuasive.

Take Lena Axelsson's bio, for instance. She's a marriage and family therapist — a job where empathy and compassion are a big part of the job description. That's why she chooses to open her bio with a great introductory sentence: "When human beings experience trauma or severe life stressors, it is not uncommon for their lives to unravel."

Then, she goes into why she's passionate about her job, how she helps her clients, and how she caters her approach to each individual patient. The necessary educational information is left for the end, after the reader has been hooked.

Your bio doesn't have to be super serious, nor does it have to start with a joke. This bio shows how you can capture your reader's attention by being empathetic and showing how that empathy shapes a valuable professional.

8. Mark Levy

Bio Platform: Personal Website

Mark Levy is a small business owner who's taken a more traditional approach to the professional bio on his website — but in a way that takes care to speak to his intended audience.

What we love about his bio is the way he's set it up: On his business' "About" page, he's listed two biographies, which he's labeled "Mark Levy's Biography #1" and "Mark Levy's Biography #2."

Click here to see the full version.

Like Ann, Mark's given his readers two different options. The first biography is a "short version," which includes a combination of bullet points listing his credentials and a few short paragraphs.

The second is the "long version," which is actually even more interesting than the first one. Why? Because it reads like a story — a compelling one, at that. In fact, it gets really funny at parts.

The second sentence of the bio reads: "He was frightened of public school, loved playing baseball and football, ran home to watch ape films on the 4:30 Movie, listened to The Jam and The Buzzcocks, and read magic trick books."

Here's another excerpt from the middle:

Of course, the fantastic copywriting isn't a surprise, given that this guy wrote several books. But the conversational tone and entertaining copy let his quirky personality (and great writing skills) shine.

9. Audra Simpson

Bio Platform: Personal Website

With a classic take on the professional bio, Audra Simpson crafts a brief overview of her career in just a couple of paragraphs. The “why” behind her work is emphasized in the first half of her bio before transitioning to the way she carries out that work in practice.

The second half of her bio combines her bodies of work and the awards she’s won for each from the year 2014 to 2020. This subtle timeline gives readers a picture of her experience in the field of political anthropology without listing her resume in detail.

Audra’s professional bio is an example for those of us with several years of experience to communicate, but a strict word-limit to write within.

10. Corey Wainwright

Bio Platform: Blog Byline

Corey Wainwright is the director of content here at HubSpot. She's written content for HubSpot's Marketing Blog for years, and her blog author bio has caught my eye since before I ever started working for HubSpot. (Back then, it started with, "Corey just took a cool vacation.")

What I love most about Corey's bio is that it's a great example of how to deliver information about yourself without taking things too seriously. And in this context, that's totally appropriate.

Despite having a number of impressive accomplishments under her belt, she simply doesn't like displaying them publicly. So, she prefers making her author bio a little more "light."

Her bio (pictured below) reads, "Corey is a Bruce Springsteen fan who does content marketing, in that order."

It works in this particular context because, at HubSpot, our blog authors often prefer to make themselves as friendly and approachable as possible — while letting the content speak for itself.

It helps that authors' social media accounts are located right below our names and above our pictures. For folks who really do want a list of Corey's credentials, they can click the LinkedIn button to go to her LinkedIn page. (You can read this blog post to learn how to create social media buttons and add them to your website.)

11. Marie Mikhail

Bio Platform: LinkedIn

Marie Mikhail checks off nearly every box for what makes an excellent bio. A professional recruiter, she expresses her "passion for recruiting" upfront, in the first sentence, while using that sentence to hook her profile visitors into a brief story of her background.

But there are a lot of recruiters out there, and Marie knows that. So, to differentiate herself, she closes the first paragraph of her bio explaining that she likes "getting people excited about the things [she's] excited about." It's a well-put value proposition that sets her apart from the rest of the HR industry.

Marie Mikhail finishes off her bio by including a smooth mixture of professional skills, such as her Spanish fluency; and personal interests, such as podcasting and Star Wars (she mentions the latter with just the right amount of humor).

12. Wonbo Woo

Bio Platform: Personal Website

Wonbo Woo is the executive producer of WIRED's video content, and he has a number of impressive credits to his name. What does this mean for his professional bio? He has to prioritize. With this in mind, Wonbo opens his bio with the most eye-catching details first (if the image below is hard to read, click it to see the full copy).

Not only does Wonbo's bio start strong, but he also takes readers on a suspenseful journey through some of his most harrowing assignments — where he was when news broke and how he responded. You can see this quality below.

The accomplished journalist concludes his gripping bio as strong as it began, measuring his experience by the number of states, countries, and continents to which he's traveled in his career. See how this looks above. All in all, it's a fantastically concise bio for as much detail as it holds.

13. Van Jones

Bio Platform: Twitter

Someone who’s known for a variety of talents and skills may find it difficult to capture who they are in a professional bio. When limited to just over 100 characters on Twitter, the feat is nearly impossible. But Van Jones effortlessly explains who he is and why it matters to everyone who visits his Twitter profile.

He starts his professional bio with a token of personalization and prioritization of his values. By mentioning that he is a dad first, we recognize what’s important to him in his long list of successes. As we’ve seen in other bios, sharing who we are outside of work makes us more personable and should find its way into your bio, if possible. Van leaves plenty of room to share a variety of professional experiences in his bio including CEO of REFORM and his 2020 Emmy award.

What’s great about Van’s Twitter bio is his ability to link valuable offerings to his readers. He invites us to check out his latest book and has his website reformalliance.com linked at the top.

14. Chris Burkard

Bio Platform: LinkedIn

If you're writing your bio but having trouble figuring out how to showcase your accomplishments without boasting, photographer Burkard's LinkedIn bio is a great example for inspiration.

Written in third-person, his bio tells a fluid story, starting with his ultimate mission — "capture stories that inspire humans to consider their relationship with nature" — before diving into more tangible accolades (giving a TED talk, publishing books, etc.).

Best of all, rather than using his bio as an opportunity to brag, he instead ties his talents into how he hopes to help others, writing, "Through social media Chris strives to share his vision … and inspire [his followers] to explore for themselves." I wouldn't necessarily be inclined to follow Chris if his bio had simply read "I post beautiful images" … but inspire me to travel? Now that's something I can get behind.

Lastly, he ends on a humble, sweet note, writing "He is happiest wth his wife Breanne raising their two sons". Don't be afraid to inject some personal information into your bio — it could help you seem more approachable as a result.

15. Megan Gilmore

Bio Platform: Instagram

Megan Gilmore is a best-selling cookbook author, and she often posts healthy recipes on her Instagram page to inspire followers' to realize that you don't have to sacrifice taste for the sake of health.

Fortunately, you glean most of this information immediately from her Instagram bio, which is short and to-the-point: "Best-selling cookbook author + former fast-food junkie + mom of 2. I like to make healthy food as easy as possible." Her "former fast-food junkie" call-out shows followers she's relatable (and that her recipes are likely delicious yet healthy alternatives), and by mentioning she's a mother, you get the sense that her recipes really will actually be quick and easy.

Plus, Gilmore includes a CTA link within her Instagram bio that leads followers to free, ready-to-use recipes. You might be thinking — Why would she do that, since it discourages people from buying her book? But that couldn't be further from the truth.

By giving her followers the chance to try out her recipes, she's slowly turning leads into customers. After I tried a few of her Instagram recipes and loved them, I decided to go ahead and buy her book, knowing I'd like more of what she had to offer.

16. Lisa Quine

Bio Platform: Portfolio Website

Although a picture is worth 1,000 words, a portfolio is quite different from a professional bio. While this might present a challenge for creative professionals who specialize in visual art to tell their stories, Lisa Quine quantifies her creativity to give her professional bio balance. Throughout her bio, you’ll notice the number of murals she’s completed and a brief timeline of her career thus far which helps paint the picture of who she is as a professional.

Lisa’s bio checks the box on nearly all of our recommendations for a great bio. She begins with her full name, her location, and what she does best. From there, she gets creative by appropriately mentioning the brands she’s worked with and highlights some of her favorite projects. With a third-person approach to the writing, this bio invites the reader behind a metaphorical door to meet Lisa as a professional, traveler, learner, wife, and mother.

Create Your Own Professional Bio

Prim and proper, relaxed, or studded with accomplishments, your bio is a reflection of your best professional self. Your professional bio will often precede your physical presence. Before people meet you for the first time, they’ll probably read your bio. Whether you’re creating an about page for your website or social media profile, one thing’s for sure, you’ll want to put your best foot forward with a top-notch professional bio.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in November 2019 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

13 Graphic Design Trends to Use in 2021 — and Two to Avoid

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

2020 was — in a word — unprecedented.

The only thing nearly as unprecedented as the events of the year itself? The number of times 2020 was described as "unprecedented."

With the conclusion of a year unlike any other, it's natural to seek out new looks and approaches.

Desires for new and different –– but also reassuring and less overwhelming –– experiences will exert significant influence over customer appetites in 2021, including in visual communications and graphic design.

Here, let's dive into the graphic design trends you'll see in 2021. Plus, what design techniques you'll want to avoid.

2021 Graphic Design Trends

Current graphic design trends for 2021 offer opportunities to update your brand's aesthetic, earn customers' attention, and unlock greater results.

These trends fall into three dominant themes or moods: socially-conscious design, dissonance, and optimism.

Within each theme, there are a number of design techniques and styles you're going to see artists and brands employ.

You're going to want to see this –– and not just because it means 2020 is over.

1. Socially-Conscious Design

Design and culture are integrally connected. Designer and author Robert L. Peters makes it clear where he thinks real change begins: "Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future."

To strive for a better future, it helps to visualize it.

Social unrest and movements for anti-racism have captured national attention, and every brand and business has to take notice and evaluate where they stand.

Socially conscious design gained traction throughout the past year, and it's poised for even greater impact in 2021. Within the theme of socially conscious design, key trends include authentic representation, sustainability, and celebrating diversity and imperfection.

2. Authentic Representation

Nike's instantly-iconic ad featuring Colin Kaepernick exemplifies the push for authenticity and design that includes diverse voices and perspectives.

After widespread protests following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, Nike spoke up again, unveiling "For Once, Don't Do It"– subverting the brand's instantly-recognizable tagline.

You'll continue to see brands pushing boundaries in 2021 when it comes to creating authentic, meaningful, and deeply powerful content over more superficial designs.

3. Diversity and Imperfection

The trend to more socially-conscious design aligns with broader cultural pushes to make all forms of media more diverse, inclusive, and affirming of all our various identities and imperfections.

DesignStudio applies these values and approaches in their authentic, intentionally 'imperfect' rebrand for insurance company Getsafe.

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4. Sustainability

Sure, humans had a rough 2020, but the Earth didn't fare much better.

And with all our time spent indoors, we had ample time to cultivate awareness (okay, anxiety) about climate change and other environmental issues. This –– plus the near-universal experiences of cabin fever after a year filled with pandemic-related lockdowns –– has sustainability featuring prominently in graphic design in 2021.

As consumers think about waste and their environmental footprint more than ever before, brands dealing in physical goods are especially sensitive to potential tension. Expect to see more and more packaging designs that emphasize sustainability through natural iconography, neutral color palettes, and eco-conscious materials.

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5. Natural and Manufactured Juxtaposition

Global lockdowns have disrupted our connections to our environment.

Graphic design is leaning into this tension through regular juxtaposition of the natural and the manufacture, earth and metal, organic and inanimate.

Gucci played with all of these themes when launching their Gucci Bloom fragrance, creating a gamified virtual experience for visitors to explore an animated garden:

Exploring contrasts and intersections between these forces is especially appealing for spaces hardest hit by the pandemic. Industries like fashion and travel will emphasize elements conveying solidity and technological progress while also reinforcing connections to nature through floral and herbal patterns, cheery hues, and blue skies.

These elements bring a sense of destination, movement, and outdoor exploration –– even when there's nowhere to go.

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6. Color Trends in Graphic Design

Socially conscious design is interesting and impactful –– but it's also mentally demanding. As people have found themselves spending more and more time at home grappling with monumental and unfamiliar stressors, tastes in color have shifted to hues that are proven to reduce anxiety and promote a sense of ease.

Unsurprisingly, organic and natural shades can provide welcome respite for people who stare at walls and screens all day. For best results, move past standard browns and greys. Understated oranges and teals evoke warmth and comfort, while providing more energy and optimism than their more drab neutral peers.

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These color trends are influencing interior design for homes and workplaces, as luxury paint brand Farrow & Ball reports.

Gone: dramatic accent walls and high contrast color schemes. In: calm and muted tones.

For paint companies, at least, pandemic-related quarantines have them seeing another earth tone: green. Revenue for Farrow & Ball, for instance, was up 20% compared to a year prior.

7. Dissonance

While some design currents aim to push society forward or distract from all sorts of stress we're under, other impulses in graphic design reflect our chaotic, tumultuous present moment.

Designs that embrace uncertainty often appear relatable to people living in unpredictable circumstances.

8. Color Blur

One trend playing up the theme of dissonance melds color and texture by adding grains and/or gradients. Such blending or layering adds depth and tactility to rendered or printed images.

With darker, brighter color schemes, color blur adds a level of broodiness, implying a depth of emotion and feeling, as well as a sense of three-dimensional space.

For a more disconcerting effect, pair a color blur or gradient with distorted text, as well.

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9. Outsized Typography

Another dissonant trend in graphic design intentionally misplaces typography in ways that defy expectations and flout design conventions. Images cut off or obscure portions of text or unpolished elements disrupt sleek designs, among other glaring "errors" that catch the eye.

Exaggerated sizes and violating conventional hierarchies, this approach plays with both scale and alignment – two of the basic elements of graphic design. The effect: arresting and memorable.

Designer Danielo Silveira's designs for Puma "This is My Flow" uses these concepts with visually stunning results.

Hype and buzz-focused streetwear brands employ these techniques with a studied nonchalance, leaving the uninitiated viewer feeling off balance –– and rewarding their die-hard fans for being in the know.

10. Surrealism

"The real is intertwined with the surreal, and in no year was that more deeply felt than in 2020" — 99designs.com

I feel this. Don't you?

Considering how mixed up –– and messed up –– day-to-day life often seems, it's no wonder graphic design is exploring imagery that bends the edges of reality.

What does that mean, if you're not a Salvador Dali-afficionado or modern art critic? Well, you should probably prepare yourself to make sense of more images like this one:

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11. Optimism and Reassurance

You're not alone if you're yearning for reassuring, optimistic visual experiences.

The third and final big theme in graphic design for 2021 reflects a common desire for brighter, more familiar, comfortable days.

12. Retro-futurism

Retro-futurism represents the first trend within this broader inclination towards optimistic design in 2021.

No, this isn't another new sub-genre of music known only to the most avant-garde of your college dorm mates. Retro-futurism refers to designs that take symbols and approaches from the past and present them "mashed up with elements of the imagined future."

Think: NASA's worm logo and "space-age" designs. These forms, originating in the forward-looking decades around the first moon landing. This type of design manages to feel both new and familiar at the same time. It reinforces humanity's confidence in the potential of technology and interstellar flight.

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Yes, nostalgia promises to do well in 2021. Colors and shapes that seem both vintage and tech-inspired blend reassurance with a sense of progress.

13. Symbol Revival

In an environment where so much is routinely challenged or called into question, graphic design offers key tools to connect with the universal and the uniquely human elements within us all. Carefully-chosen and constructed symbols possess this potential –– for communication that transcends language.

The simple, powerful imagery of a square peg fitting into a round hole makes a strong statement in the brand identity Pentagram's Paula Scher designed for the Mental Health Coalition.

Here, a symbol typically used to connote exclusion or ill-fittedness is reclaimed as a visual metaphor for inclusivity and acceptance. It's socially conscious, reflective, and also calling the viewer towards a better future –– and you can look forward to much more graphic design like in in 2021.

Graphic Design Trend to Avoid: Faking Authenticity

The 'trend' you definitely want to avoid: swerving away from allyship to co-opt complex and painful issues as if they're just more trends to copy.

Nike, Glossier–– these brands had already taken proactive anti-racist stances, embracing this as a prominent part of their identity. They can speak authentically about related events and issues.

Many chose to amplify or echo similar messages to reflect their own values or affirm a call for change. This is well and good. Opportunism? Not so much.

In short: make sure your design accurately, and authentically, reflects your values.

(If you decide to reexamine your values, more power to you –– but work on your values first, and hold off on pressing 'send' on some trendy graphic.)

How to Keep Up with Graphic Design Trends

Designers gravitate towards visually-driven platforms like Instagram, or Behance— Adobe's proprietary social media platform geared to showcase creative work. Instagram, as the most visually-driven of the ubiquitous social media platforms, offers a wealth of opportunities to observe, learn from, and keep up with graphic design trends.

You can easily see broad trends and also drill down into specific skills or minutiae of the field through keyword searches and following hashtags. Interested in hand-lettering styled after 1950's tattooing? You've come to the right place.

YouTube is also an invaluable resource for designers of all stripes and skill levels. You may never make it out from the rabbit hole of top 10 lists, design techniques, and how-to guides –– but you sure will learn a lot while you're down there.

Pick a Timeless Design to Ensure It Lasts

Before you go and apply all the 2021 graphic design trends in making delightful and chaotic – but somehow calm and reassuring and progressive –– imagery, there's one word of warning to take with you. Employ trends sparingly and with care, or risk becoming a quickly-outdated caricature.

This is especially true in logo design, where you'll need to avoid looking outdated –– and perhaps even worse to constantly change your primary branding. Go for something modern, but timeless, and make design decisions with your organizational values in mind.

Strike this balance well to benefit and learn from 2021 trends while not putting yourself on course to need a rebrand in 2022.

What to Expect from Graphic Design in 2021

In 2021, graphic design will continue to both draw inspiration from and exert influence to change culture. Perhaps it will be as tumultuous and unpredictable as 2020 (although we can certainly hope not).

One thing about 2021 is certain, though. For the foreseeable future, Adobe's Photoshop team deserves credit for calling the trend most likely to carry over from 2020 into the new year:

How to Get on Board With the Digital Transformation [+ Examples]

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Ten years ago, I couldn't have cared less if the new burger place downtown had a website. Now, I don't trust one that doesn't. If your business is online, you're a part of the digital transformation. But it's not enough these days to just "be online." Businesses that will thrive in 2021 that are operating online — and the COVID-19 pandemic has proved this.

Consumer buying behavior has drastically changed — today, most consumers are purchasing products online, including almost 70% of millennials. In 2019, nearly two-thirds of businesses ( 64% ) had a website. If you don't have one, you could be falling behind your online competition.

So, while it’s a great step to have a website and a Facebook page, there’s more to the transformation than just having an online presence — technology should be ever-present in all of your business operations. This piece will explore the digital transformation, why businesses are getting on board, and outline the roadmap for enacting one for your business. We’ll also give some real-life success stories from companies that have bought into the digital transformation.

Essentially, a digital transformation fundamentally changes how businesses provide value to their customers and streamline their processes. It’s a reminder that materials and processes your company uses during day-to-day operations, no matter how big or small, might need a new medium — technology. Let’s take a look at why this transformation exists in the first place, with particular reference to the present pandemic.

Why do businesses undergo a digital transformation?

Simply put, things are often easier when they’re online. New technology makes website building more accessible and creates more opportunities for businesses to connect with their audiences. A digital shift also saves time. You may already be using some methods of digital strategy, like Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) , social media scheduling tools, and instant messaging apps; these are all examples of small digital transformations that replace paper instructions, outbound marketing, and an extra trip to your managers’ desk.

A shift to digital processes also makes it easier to conduct overall large-scale business tasks. For instance, online databases that sort and catalog customer information, and automation tools that take over day-to-day activities and allow employees to focus their efforts on more pressing tasks.

Customers have also begun to expect the businesses they interact with to have some sort of digital presence, whether it’s an optimized Google My Business profile for easy access to mapping instructions or an automated chatbot that can answer their questions over Facebook Messenger .

In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has further proven and accelerated the need for businesses to get on board with a digital transformation. As companies around the world were forced to pivot to providing service online or at a distance from their customers, having digital tools at their disposal was, and is, critical to survival.

Many businesses have adopted different online practices during the pandemic, like providing digital customer service . It’s likely that, as a result of the pandemic and general trends, customers will expect that they’ll be able to conduct business online with their favorite brands.

70% of businesses today are finding that the digital shift is worth it, and these businesses either have a digital strategy in place, or are earnestly working towards one.

As a whole, 70% of businesses today are finding that the digital shift is worth it. These businesses either have a digital strategy in place or are earnestly working towards one. Whether you’re already one of these businesses or you’re hoping to begin your journey, let’s go over three critical questions that you can use as a roadmap for implementing your strategy.

Digital Transformation Strategy

Business leaders are faced with a variety of options for enacting a digital transformation. As technology becomes more commonplace, there are a significant number of tools to choose from. While it may be exciting (and overwhelming) to imagine all of the possible upgrades you can make to your business, a digital transformation strategy will help you become more focused.

This strategy is essentially a structured way to move through the process, how you get from point A (pre-transformation) to point B (post-transformation). Let’s go over some guiding questions and additional requirements to help you create a viable digital transformation strategy.

1. Why do we need a transformation?

Like all plans and strategies you’ve created for your business, designing your roadmap begins with identifying your purpose. You can start this process by uncovering the challenges your business faces that have significantly impacted success or processes that you feel may become easier with technology. This could be anything from day-to-day automation tasks like sending out email newsletters or more essential business needs like data collection and storage.

You may also be hoping to address multiple challenges at once. For example, say your business has had trouble handling customer service requests because you’re using different platforms to store customer data and communicate with customers. Reps may have difficulty accessing a client's history with your company because they need to sift through other records and jump between platforms to find the information they need. This takes time, and clients may report being frustrated by how long it takes to resolve their issues.

In this case, the answer to why do we need a transformation? is that your customer service team struggles to give customers the experiences they desire because of long wait times and a disorganized data storage system. Whatever your reasons are, identifying the challenges that expose the need for a digital transformation makes it easier to create further goals and metrics that will define your process’s success.

2. What do I need to achieve to transform?

As mentioned above, the challenges and pain points you’ve identified answer why you need to transform. Once you have this why, it becomes easier to figure out what needs to be done and what steps you need to take to overcome the challenges you’ve outlined.

Aim to come up with metrics or objectives you can use to guide yourself and your teams through this process, including workflows, identifying key stakeholders, and assigning critical tasks. If you have multiple pain points, come up with at least one objective or goal for each one of them.

When you identify these objectives, come up with a time frame in which they should be met to succeed in your transformation. Continuing with the previous example, your challenge is that reps don’t have access to a summary of client history. Your objective can be that, over the course of the year, you want a streamlined process for inputting and cataloging customer information and a less than one minute wait time for accessing customer records during service interactions. With this goal in mind, you know what you need to achieve to say that you’ve transformed your process. With this, it becomes easier to identify the tools that will assist you along the way.

3. What do I need to change to meet these goals?

The final question involves researching and identifying the technology you’ll need to successfully transform. Some of these may be middle-of-the-road tools that help you reach your end goal, while others may be the permanent solution you implement and use forever.

Using the same example as before, you’ll want to know the tools you’ll need to use to begin the process of transferring the data you already have into the tool that your representatives will use to access customer data within the timeframe you laid out. This could mean that your initial tool is a simple data integration platform that you’ll use to merge existing data from your different sources. After this, maybe you’ll need a sorting tool that catalogs and organizes data into business-relevant categories, and this data will be further integrated into a Customer Relationship Platform (CRM) that all of your representatives have access to during customer interactions.

4. Get company wide buy-in.

A digital transformation affects all areas of your business. Given this, it’s critical that you obtain company wide buy-in , from packing and fulfillment to C-Suite executives. You can’t just say “Okay we’re doing this!” and expect a seamless process, though. This is why this principle comes after the first three guiding questions — inspire buy-in using the understandings you’ve previously gathered.

One of the first things you should do is present teams with a clear why statement that explains the reasons your business needs to undergo a digital transformation. Along with the why statement, present a value proposition to explain the benefits the business (and employees) will obtain from this transformation. Maybe you can share sample projections you’ve come up with or a case study you’ve created based on market research and competitive analysis (which we’ll cover below).

Lastly, you should let them know that it’s an involved process. You’re not demanding that they get on board and deal with it — you want them to participate in the process. They can pose questions, offer suggestions, or simply ask about their new tasks.

5. Research industry and market competitors.

As with most new projects, it’s important to understand what your competitors are doing. Conducting a competitive analysis can help you do this, as you’ll generate a well-rounded picture of how they’re performing.

The results of your research will likely give you an understanding of how they do their business, if they’ve implemented and succeeded in a digital transformation, and uncover possible areas for your business to outperform them. It’s also important to conduct overall market research to understand what trends your industry is experiencing to understand how you compare, or as a means of inspiration to further guide your process.

6. Create a budget.

A digital transformation is a costly process, especially if it’s a complete overhaul of your current methods. Once you understand your purpose and outline how you’ll need to change, create a budget . This budget should address all possible expenses you’ll encounter throughout the process: software costs for transitional and permanent tools, any costs to hire new talent, employee training for new processes, and allocation of funds for any unexpected costs.

The unexpected costs section of your budget may be the most important, as a digital transformation is based on change. These changes are likely new, so you’ll want to be prepared if any issues arise from adaptation difficulties along the way.

7. Create a digital transformation roadmap.

Once you have all necessary information, the next step is to implement your strategy. Specifically, as mentioned above, how you’ll get from point A to point B. A digital transformation roadmap is the way to do this, and we’ll outline the steps below.

Digital Transformation Roadmap

After you’ve created your strategy, a detailed plan will guide you through implementation. HubSpot offers a free template that will help you schedule and work through a digital transformation roadmap, broken down into seven weeks.

Firstly, this template comes with a checklist that you can fill in with the information you’ve gathered while creating your strategy. You can input benefits, what you need to achieve to transform, the tools you’ll need to transform, and key stakeholders for your business. Having all information in one place makes it easier to refer back to a common document as you navigate through your process.

Week one is all about gathering existing sales and marketing materials on paper, while week two dives into transferring your business online, and so on. These small steps are designed to fit into your busy schedule and help you remain organized as you transition.

Week two is all about data migration. A free CRM, like HubSpot, can help you input business data, customer profiles, into an easy to access database.

During weeks three and four, you should have a functioning website and marketing resources that will help you learn more about your visitors and their behavior.

The latter half of the weekly plan ramps up your online presence. Using this template can help you organize your new digital shift by area to avoid doing one huge push all at once and confusing employees.

Creating a blog during week five will help you find your target audience online. Posts should be about your target market (if you're a tech marketing company, posts should center around the intersection between the two) to demonstrate your expertise. This will build your reputation as a thought leader in your industry.

By week six, you should set up a sales flow that will digitize your sales process. Online sales tools allow you to keep track of all your contacts, log your conversations, and keep tabs on-call schedules and upcoming meetings.

Email and paid ads should be rocking-and-rollin' by week seven. The email software you choose will help you through the process of sending automated emails to subscribers and let you test out paid ad software.

In a month and a half, most of your business processes will be digital.

Best of all, this template can be tailored to meet your business’ transformation individual needs and gives you the wiggle room to expand as your business continues to scale — but as a starting point, it gets you up and running.

Once you’ve created your digital roadmap, it becomes easier to go more in-depth into your processes and create a finalized list of the technology you’ll need to succeed in your transformation. Below, we’ll go over some popular digital transformation tools to consider using.

Digital Transformation Tools

Depending on your overall transformation goals, there are multiple platforms available to help you succeed and meet your objectives. However, there are various multipurpose tools that can benefit all types of businesses, and we’ll go over a few of them below.

1. Instant Messaging

Instead of having a meeting or a long email thread for a quick message, consider using a company-wide instant messaging tool for quick and easy communications. Some instant messaging services are made for corporate settings, like Slack or Flock .

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With these services, you can file share, direct message, and create channels where teams can collaborate and discuss projects. Think of it as the office water cooler — just online.

2. Application Tools

Are you looking for new talent? The best candidates (especially ones who prefer to work digitally) are online. For instance, LinkedIn, a site for professional networking, is an excellent source for recruiting candidates:

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Using LinkedIn’s template will help you post a listing, and you can use LinkedIn’s industries function to ensure it’s shared with relevant candidates. LinkedIn will alert you of new entries and send you their applications, making the selection process an online breeze. This is an alternative to collecting application materials via email, where it might be difficult to structure, organize, and compile applications.

3. Sales Management

Software is available to help manage many facets of your business, including sales. This software enables you to manage calls, pipelines, reporting, and follow-up resources to help your process migrate smoothly online.

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For instance, as shown above, HubSpot’s Sales Hub can be used to organize all of your sales materials online. Within the platform, you can manage deals, filter contacts, and create different tasks using a dashboard to help you keep track of your sales processes.

4. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

If you have certain aspects of your day-to-day that require multiple steps typically written down on paper, transfer it online. This will reduce paper trail and make the processes shareable and accessible to all employees.

Online SOP software makes it easy to list procedures and job functions, which can be beneficial for onboarding and employee training. To make a smooth transition to your new digital tool, consider talking to employees and asking them to contribute and collaborate with you in the process. The image below is an example of a digital SOP workflow management tool by Process.st .

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5. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

A CRM is going to be your best friend when shifting to an all-digital business. Whether your goals are to transform the customer experience, streamline sales, or digitize your marketing process, a CRM will make these processes more straightforward and even automate repetitive tasks. HubSpot’s free CRM offers three hubs that give you an all-in-one business platform designed for scalable growth.

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HubSpot's free CRM offers three hubs that give you an all-in-one business platform experience. From customer service reps to sales leaders and business owners, this free CRM helps you fully transfer your business online and drive growth.

6. Video Chat Software

Is your team out of town but you need to schedule a meeting? Are your representatives transitioning to a remote, work-from-home model but you still want to maintain a collaborative environment? Use video chat software to meet virtually and maintain employee connections.

Software like Skype for Business and Zoom offer free web-chatting services for professional use.

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Skype has automatic subtitle settings and 1:1 capabilities, and the option to host multiple people on calls at once. Most software also has mobile applications to make sure you’re accessible and able to meet at any point during the workday.

Though these tools are designed to make your life easier, you may be confused about how they can apply to your business. Thankfully, many companies that are joining the digital revolution are doing so because they have similar needs. Below, we’ll go over digital transformation trends that you can use to further guide your process and understand how to apply the tools to meet your business needs.

Digital Transformation Trends

As the digital world grows, many businesses are jumping on the transformation trend. Whether you already have your own plan or you’re hoping to get inspiration for a future transformation, let’s go over digital transformation trends to look out for in 2021.

Rapid Adoption of a Digital Operating Model

COVID-19 has required businesses to quickly adapt to online models. As the pandemic could not have been predicted, many businesses were left scrambling to scale their processes as in-person, and on-site business models became unsafe. Most industries needed to rise to the occasion unless they simply could not adapt to a work-from-home or work-from-online model.

For example, customer service businesses found themselves needing to integrate online processes to successfully meet customer needs, like chatbots to answer routine and simple questions. Restaurants and grocery stores offering food services were forced to adapt to online food and grocery delivery options to continue to safely provide nourishment to customers.

As COVID-19 related outbreaks become controlled, the need to adapt won’t die out but instead will become a requirement. Businesses will need to continue to utilize the new tools they’ve adapted or create detailed plans for future unpredictable circumstances that may force them to adapt quickly.

AI and Machine Learning

Consumers are expecting personalized experiences now more than ever. Personalized experiences are also a driving factor of customer loyalty, as 41% of customers have reported switching companies because of poor personalization . This doesn’t just mean that customers want you to refer to them by their name when they call you on the phone; they want your business to know what they want before they know they want it.

Because of this, a popular transformation trend is the adoption of AI and Machine Learning tools that contribute to personalized and customer-tailored experiences. A typical example of this is the algorithms on Netflix. It analyzes your previous watch history, likes and dislikes, and content ratings to figure out what you’re most likely to enjoy and recommends new content. This process works, as approximately 80% of the TV shows people watch on Netflix are discovered through recommendations.

However, outside of providing different experiences for your customers, AI and Machine Learning can also involve streamlining rote processes that your employees do themselves, like cleaning up and organizing your data or using a social media scheduling tool to post and analyze your social profiles. McKinsey has predicted that, across the board, this kind of automation can increase productivity by 14% annually.

Location-Adaptable Technology

Also influenced by COVID-19, businesses in 2020 have realized how important it is to have an arsenal of tools available that will allow their employees to work remotely whenever necessary. Some of these tools are familiar options, like Google Suite, Microsoft Office Teams, and Trello, but additional tools have gained popularity throughout 2020.

Ring Central is one of these tools, as it enables calls to your business line to be forwarded to mobile phones, or remote working employees. This is extremely beneficial for customer experience focused businesses. Zoom is another tool that has become a communication powerhouse over the last few months. It is an easy-to-use desktop platform for scheduling, hosting, and recording company meetings.

All in all, COVID-19 has shown us that working from home is a valuable modell for businesses to consider, both during and after the pandemic. Some businesses have already committed to continuing this practice as time goes on. For example, Google has pushed back planned office returned dates to September 2021 and has said that the company will be testing a flexible workweek model where employees can split their workweek between working from home and participating in office collaboration days.

Application Programming Interface (API) Security

As processes become digital, it becomes even more important to protect the private, sensitive information you store within your company platforms. Given this, a recent digital transformation trend is an increased need for API security.

In short, the APIs you’re using are the products you’ve implemented due to your digital transformation strategy, like Slack. Slack is a tool that can house business communications between internal teams and business employees. You’re likely using Slack to send out private information that is business-sensitive, but how are you going to ensure that this data isn’t taken advantage of?API security.

API security involves using safety measures that ensure your sensitive information is secure and safe from hackers or external threats, like encryption services and two-factor authentication. While these measures are essential for your business information, API security is also important to consumers.

For them, this means that the information you collect from them is stored securely and also safe from external threats. This means that if they enter banking information on your site to make a purchase, they want that information safe from malware. If you have an app that they’ve downloaded onto their phone, they want to know that the app is secure, and no third-party has access to this information. 84% of customers are more loyal to companies with robust security, so it’s worth adapting these processes.

Given the trends mentioned above, it’s clear that digital transformation is something to focus on for 2021 if you haven’t already begun the process for your business. Or, if you have, maybe you’re hoping to address a different business challenge and start a new process entirely. Whatever your desires are, let’s go over four real-life examples of brands that have gone digital in a notable way.

1. Nike

Nike, a sportswear company, has focused their digital transformation strategy on mobile devices. Rather than needing to visit a store and consult with an in-person employee, their mobile application uses machine learning and AI algorithms to study customer preferences and previous purchases to recommend products they may enjoy.

The company also created a scanning tool where customers can scan their feet and the AI uses 13 data points to recommend the best pair of shoes. This automation eliminates the need to obtain recommendations from an in-store employee, so users can make decisions at home and spend less time in stores because they already know what they want.

During the pandemic, this tool has become especially useful as customers can get shoe recommendations and make purchases online, ensuring the safety of in-house employees and other visitors.

2. Wepow

Wepow is a Human Resources tech company. They have enacted a digital transformation to digitize the application and hiring process. Like Nike, the company has used AI and machine learning to analyze data to make it easier for employers and applications to connect digitally through online video interviewing and online applications.

During the pandemic, businesses like this have become a beneficial resource as an alternative to in-person interviewing as remote work and safety requirements do not allow for in-house interviewing.

3. Target

Target, a U.S. based department store, has spent the past eight years enacting a digital transformation that bridges the gap between in-person and Ecommerce shopping.

Many of their stores have been remodeled and equipped with new technology like self-checkout kiosks and in-store scanners to obtain information about products they’re interested in rather than asking for help from a store attendant. As a result, employees spend less time on rote processes and focus on customer service needs that can’t be solved with a digital tool.

A transformation that has become increasingly beneficial during COVID-19 is their online shopping and curbside pickup option. Even though customers may be shying away from visiting a store, they may not want to wait for a shipped item to arrive at their house. Curbside pickup allows them to order everything they need online and seamlessly pick up their items at a physical Target location without leaving their car and entering a store.

4. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Borenmisza

Part of the allure of visiting a museum is the ability to aimlessly walk through exhibits and lose track of time. This desire hasn’t changed, but unfortunately, health and safety regulations have limited or gotten rid of the ability to safely browse your favorite galleries.

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Borenmisza, an art museum in Madrid, has risen to the occasion and undergone a digital transformation that allows art enthusiasts to continue enjoying what the museum has to offer from the comfort of their own home. They’ve digitized some of their most popular galleries and created an online museum walkthrough for interested visitors to explore and immerse themselves in the art.

Join In on the Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is digital because technology is used to solve traditional business problems and enhance the customer experience. For most businesses, some sort of digital presence has always been essential. However, recent health and safety requirements have shown that now, more than ever, businesses must have the ability to rise to the occasion and meet customers online.

To make sure that you’re one of these businesses, take the time to create a digital transformation roadmap, research the necessary tools, and understand the trends that have inspired other businesses to change. Being prepared now sets you up for success, regardless of what the future holds.

The State of Video Marketing in 2021 [New Data]

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

It's well established that video has been one of the breakout trends in the marketing world for the past decade.

But how is that assertion standing up to the twists and turns of a global pandemic?

The challenges — and changes — brought about by this most surreal year have affected us all.

At Wyzowl, we've released an annual State of Video Marketing survey every year since 2015, charting usage, spend, channels and opinions among video marketers and consumers.

We recently released our seventh State of Video Marketing report and, in light of the chaos of the past year, it's perhaps our most fascinating set of findings yet.

Our research suggests:

Video remains a key priority for marketers with usage and spend both, overall, increasing slightly throughout 2020, and plans to increase again in the next 12 months.
The pandemic has impacted the video marketing landscape in contrasting ways - while video is generally seen as a more necessary tool by both marketers and consumers, many have seen budgets restricted and plans shelved.
The pandemic has overwhelmingly increased the amount of online video people watch.
Marketers feel more positive about the return on investment offered by video than ever, as it continues to strongly influence traffic, leads, sales, and audience understanding.
Consumers continue to use video as an integral part of their journey with brands, and are excited to see even more video content in the year ahead.

About the Survey

Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing Survey is an annual report, now in its seventh iteration. Every year, we ask a range of questions — many of them the same from year-to-year — to evaluate how the video marketing landscape is changing and growing.

This time round, our survey was taken by a sample of 813 unique respondents (our highest ever sample) consisting of professional marketers and consumers.

The key findings …

86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, up slightly from 85% in 2019.

This is the high point in a general story of video usage growing which can be traced back to 2016 (the first time we asked this particular question in this way.)

What's more, 93% of marketers who use video say that it's an important part of their marketing strategy — an increase from 92% in 2020, making this the highest percentage of any year since 2015.

Perhaps most strikingly, 87% of video marketers reported that video gives them a positive ROI — a world away from the lowly 33% who felt that way in 2015. This could well be attributed to greater understanding of how to use video, as well as how to track and quantify its impact

Pandemic Impact

So what about the impact of the global pandemic?

Let's begin with the fact that 91% of marketers feel the pandemic has made video more important for brands.

A fairly considerable 40% of video marketers said their plans to create video were affected by the events of the last year — with around 74% of these saying they were more likely to use video, and 26% saying it was less likely.

Around 60% of video marketers say they expect their budget to be affected for 2021, with around 70% of those people expecting a higher video marketing budget, and the other 30% expecting it to be lower.

68% of consumers say the pandemic has impacted the amount of video content they've watched online, with the overwhelming majority (96%) saying this has increased.

Looking forward …

All the signs suggest that usage and spend are on course to continue their growth in 2021.

More than 99% of current video marketers told us they'll continue using video in 2021, and 96% plan to increase or maintain their spend (again, up slightly from 95% last year.)

What's more, from the people who told us they don't currently use video, 69% told us they expect to start in 2020. (This is 10% higher than last year's figure of 59%.)

The net result of this is that we can all expect to see more noise and competition for audience attention in the coming 12 months.

Of course, while this is a challenge, it isn't an insurmountable one. It simply raises the bar in terms of content quality. Video needs to be well-planned, and very well-executed.

The big opportunities …

You'd be forgiven for looking at these numbers and feeling that video might be on the verge of reaching saturation point. Most of the data around usage, spend, and consumer opinion are in the 80s and 90s — where they've held, consistently, for a number of years.

But the good news is that there still seems to be underutilized opportunities for marketers to explore around video.

Unsurprisingly, YouTube and Facebook are the most widely used platforms among video marketers — used by 87% and 70%, respectively.

But some of the lesser-used video tactics also seem to be reaping real results for video marketers.

Most notably, perhaps given global events and an increased desire for remote connection, 2020 seems to have been the year of the webinar. In 2019, just 46% used webinars — but in 2020, this rose significantly to 62%.

What's more, an overwhelming 91% of webinar marketers say they've been a success, making it the most effective video marketing channel of all those listed.

To Sum Up

The events of 2020 did, and are doing, little to slow the rise of video.

In many ways, with people being isolated in their homes, and some teams working with less budgeting and resources than pre-pandemic, the demand (and consumption) of video has been accelerated.

Video looks set to continue its ten-year overnight success story into the coming decade. These stats paint a picture of a media type that's almost universally popular among both marketers and their audiences, helping achieve a number of incredibly important goals.

You can check out the full report — with plenty more data points — and get a downloadable version by visiting Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing 2021 page.

Why You Might Want to Be More Negative in Your Marketing

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Ever wake up on the wrong side of the bed?

Of course you have. We all have.

Ever wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and then have to be cheery? Like, interact in social media? Write an engaging blog post? Put together a lovable email marketing campaign?

Ugh. Those are the times you wish you could shut out the world, or at least channel a little of your inner snark. Well, the good news is you can do that once in a while, and your marketing results may even thank you for it! Sometimes, it's good to embrace a little bit of the negative. (Trust me -- this will all make sense in a second.)

So, here we go ... if you ever wake up wanting to shut out the world, here's how you can take it out (positively!) in your marketing.

Keep in mind, however, that negative marketing shouldn't be deployed simply because you want to be cranky. Instead, it should be implemented strategically with one (or more) of these goals in mind:

Empathizing with customer struggles
Differentiating your brand with that of competitors, especially those who may not be willing to take a stand or acknowledge certain truths in the industry
Cutting through the noise of "neutral" messaging that might not be resonating

If you're successful, the end result causes you to stick in your audience's mind, which gives you the bandwidth to prove your brand as a superior alternative.

How to Be Negative in Your Marketing

So how do you implement this tactic successfully? Here are some opportunities to be "more negative" in your marketing.

1. Create negative, or exclusionary, personas.

Let's start with something a little bit easier to swallow than just being a total grumpy pants: exclusionary personas. Exclusionary personas, sometimes also referred to as negative personas, are kind of like the opposite of buyer personas -- they're the personas of the people you do not want to target in your marketing.

This is about more than just recognizing that not everyone in the world is a potential future customer -- it's about recognizing that your marketing attracts certain types of people who totally clog up your funnel, waste your sales team's time, and will never become customers.

Why won't they ever become a customer? Could be a lot of things -- they don't have the budget, or they're just fans of your content or social media presence. Or maybe they do become customers, but they cost you a ton of money; for instance, they could have a high acquisition cost or a high propensity to churn.

In this case, it behooves you to identify who these folks are so you can ensure you either 1) stop creating content that draws in the wrong people, or 2) let them keep reading and engaging with your content to help you spread your reach, but keep them from getting rotated to sales reps using methods like assigning them a low lead score.

2. Leverage a little exclusivity.

This is the VIP, red-carpet tactic we all know and love (or love to hate). When you tell someone they can't have something or what they want is scarce, it often makes them want it more. You know, the whole "playing hard to get" thing.

This just so happens to be a common sales tactic, but marketers can use it, too. Tell prospects they can have an offer ... but only for a limited time. Or only for the first 10 that respond in social media. Heck, you don't even always have to tell them what it is.

This tactic is particularly popular with savvy ecommerce shops, too -- ModCloth, for instance, frequently sends me emails letting me know that an item I like is so popular, it's almost out of stock. "Oh no! Everyone else is snagging it! I have to get it before I'm left out!"

The moral of the story? Leave people out once in a while. If everyone gets something, it's not as special. And when you go VIP, the ones who do get it feel uber-special. (There... we just turned a negative into a positive. See?)

3. Craft "negative" headlines and titles.

I don't know what this says about human nature, but there's an undeniable correlation between page views and negativity. Consider some of these titles you might find on a news site like CNN:

What you get wrong about BBQ
Could our favorite flavorings be damaging our DNA?
Beware the parental overshare

These are about clicks. No question about it. We all know the news has gone the negative route for years, and -- for better or worse -- they do it because it is effective at grabbing attention.

Now, you absolutely shouldn't throw out some inflammatory headline just to get clicks -- if you're going to get negative with your titles, you have to back it up with some solid content that actually merits that title of yours. Here are a few examples that worked out extremely well for us:

4. Create a bond over a shared negative experience -- but don't dwell.

Alright, now we're getting warmed up! So you're throwing out some negative titles, but have you considered drawing that negativity into your content? When you draw on a negative situation in your content -- particularly right in the beginning -- it can actually help reader retention and engagement. Some marketers are afraid to stir up negative feelings in their reader, but it can actually create a shared experience and tap into a level of emotion that some may not expect to get while reading marketing content, particularly if you're a B2B marketer.

I mean, that's why I started this post the way I did -- getting up on the wrong side of the bed is an experience everyone I know can relate to. And sometimes, it's easier to form a bond with someone over a shared negative experience than something warm and fuzzy.

But be forewarned -- once you have a bond with the reader based on a shared negative experience, it's crucial to shift the mood to something more positive and solution-oriented. People like to know they're not alone (misery loves company), but most don't like to dwell on the negativity.

5. Cast some villains.

Just like we can all bond over a shared negative experience, so too can we bond over a common enemy. Casting a villain has been a common marketing tactic for years, and I'm not just talking about the Hamburglar. Villains can take more subtle forms, playing on common tropes -- the jerk boss, the slob roommate, bureaucratic drone.

These take common experiences and personify them in order to elicit a feeling in the consumer, and help tell the story you're trying to tell. A great example of this is Genesis's "Going Away Party" commercial where they use the "stuffy" party trope and the "villains" within it to demonstrate that luxury doesn't have to be stuffy.

6. Take a stand for something you believe in, even if it's controversial.

If you feel confident about your brand, your PR team, and your position on an issue, you can take a controversial stance on a popular topic. Controversial marketing is a risky play because, in many cases, your brand could be seen as capitalizing on an issue just to peddle your products. However, when done well, your brand could be seen as socially responsible.

Controversial marketing can also do a few other things for your marketing:

Position you as a thought leader (only if your thought was a good one -- so try to make sure it is)
Help you define your brand in the eyes of consumers and what it stands for
Drive natural publicity
Elicit strong emotions from audiences, both positive and negative

That last one is what I want you to pay the most attention to. When you take a staunch position on a polarizing issue, you will have people who like you less for it. You will also generate some seriously ardent supporters. If you're going to play the controversy game, be prepared to deal with both, because while some results could be really exciting for your brand, some backlash will inevitably come with it.

7. Use data to build a case study around why something stinks.

Let's start off with an example: [New Research] It’s Official — Lots of Salespeople Hate Their CRM. It gets props off the bat for its grabby negative headline, but it's also full of interesting statistics like this one:

50% of sales leaders say that their CRM is difficult to use, and 18% say this has caused them to lose opportunities or revenue.

You build a case around why one thing stinks (traditional CRMs) so you can show why something else is awesome (the new HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise).

This can be made even more compelling if you have two data points that demonstrate a stark contrast; the juxtaposition of positive and negative paints a pretty dramatic picture in readers' minds, and the succinct data points make it easy to quickly demonstrate the bad versus the good.

8. Poke some fun at your competitors.

This is perhaps what most people think of when negative marketing is discussed, but it's rarely executed because of how delicate the situation can be. On one hand, a little healthy competition can be a good thing, especially if you want to position yourself as a better option. However, if done poorly, your audience may actually think less of your brand for "playing dirty" or being too low-brow. In addition, if you leverage false claims, you could be asking for legal trouble.

There are two types of negative marketing with regard to your competitors:

Attack: Focuses on the negative sides of your competition's offerings.
Contrast: Focuses on the positive sides of your offerings and establishes the gap. This is more subtle but still highlights what your competition may lack.

Typically, it's easier for larger brands to engage in negative marketing with their competition because they're already well-known, so the reward can be greater than the risk to highlight value propositions.

Pepsi has a famous "attack" ad in which a child dispenses two Coca-Cola cans from a vending machine and stands on them in order to reach the Pepsi button.

Bud Light uses the more subtle "contrast" approach in their "Special Delivery Corn Syrup" ad:

This ad works because it's a light narrative and doesn't engage in serious mud-slinging (it merely highlights a differentiator).

Nonetheless, controversy brewed even in this case as the company was sued for potentially misleading consumers by not acknowledging the difference between corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup, which demonstrates exactly why this tactic is risky.

If your brand isn't a household name, it may be better to highlight value propositions and differentiators in less risky ways.

For example, some brands engage in competitor criticism without mentioning any names. Doing this ensures you're not giving your competition free airtime while you capitalize on ideas your consumers know to be true. For example, Domino's does this in their "Designed to Be Delivered" ad, which doesn't mention a single competitor (but does imply them):

9. Make fun of yourself.

Another less risky way would be to turn that negativity inward. A little self-deprecation can be fun for others, makes you seem more human, and actually might make you feel better about your slip-ups. After all, we all have them, and it's important to learn how to make light of your mistakes. Speaking of Domino's, one of the best examples of recent self-deprecating advertising is when Domino's admitted their pizza tasted like cardboard and what they're doing about it:

When Negativity Backfires

All this being said, it's important to always consider whether your negativity is going to backfire. Are you being an unadulterated jerkface? Is this negativity going to be lost on your audience? Does your buyer persona really hate this kind of stuff?

For instance, something that almost always comes off as totally petty and unnecessarily negative is bickering with competitors. I mean, think about how annoying political ads are; you certainly don't want to come off like that. I think one piece of advice from my childhood can sum up how you should approach bickering with competitors:

"If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Yes, even if they started it.

It's also important to remember that any negativity you draw on needs to be tempered with some positivity.

Finally, I think striving to be inspirational should always be an aspiration for marketers. There's no question that marketers capable of inspiring people see unbelievable success from their efforts. In fact, I think if you're able to inspire people in your marketing, the effects last much longer and are much stronger than any of these negative tactics.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

How to Use Schema Markup to Improve Your Website's Structure

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Just like when I first watched The Matrix, when I initially heard the term "schema markup," I was intimidated by the technical know-how I felt I needed to understand it.

However, just like the movie, understanding schema markup isn't as difficult as you might think.

As a marketer, schema markup is important because you want to make it as easy as possible for search engines to crawl your website.

The easier it is for Google to understand your site, the higher in search engines your website can appear.

Below, let's review what schema markup is, where to add it, and how it can improve your website's structure.

What Is Schema Markup?

Schema markup is code you can add to your website that helps search engines return better results for users. Essentially, it gives vital information to search engines to include in your listing that can improve visibility online, as well as click-through rates.

In 2011, top search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex collaborated to create schema.org, which is a "collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond."

Ultimately, schema markup is a form of microdata. According to Wikipedia, "microdata is an HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages. Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users."

For instance, schema markup will create an enhanced description -- sometimes referred to as a rich snippet -- which will appear in search results.

As a result of using microdata, your website's structure will be simple and easy for search engines to crawl, making it easier to appear higher in search results.

1. iPhone 11 Example

Below is an example of a search engine results page featuring listings with and without schema markup data. As you can see, three of the top four results for the iPhone 11 have schema markup data including ratings, reviews, and price.

Although T-Mobile and Tom's Guide are the third and fourth listing down, using schema markup microdata can improve its click-through-rate. Plus, it helps the listing stand out from the rest.

2. Betabrand Example

In the example below, there are three listings for Betabrand yoga pants on Google. The ones from Betabrand and Good Housekeeping don't include additional information.

However, the one from Amazon includes ratings and reviews.

Again, including this type of information helps search engines provide more information that can persuade users to click on your listing.

3. Booking.com Example

In the example below, you can see Booking.com used schema markup to include ratings, reviews, price, and Frequently Asked Questions for an Orange County hotel. In their listing, they include a drop-down, answering questions a user might have.

If someone is searching for and might be staying in that hotel they can learn how close it is to the airport, the average cost, and the ratings.

Where to Add Schema Markup

You can add a variety of microdata depending on your service or product.

For example, you can include:

Reviews
Star ratings
Pricing
Availability
Events
Location
Price range
Payment options
Store hours

The options are endless. No matter what service or product you sell, you can use schema markup to enhance your search engine listings.

So, how do you add schema markup to your site?

Schema Markup Generator

The process is actually pretty simple. All you need to do is use a schema markup generator.

Step 1: Go to Google's Structured Data Markup Helper

Step 2: Select the type of listing you want to add schema markup to. Then, copy and paste the URL in the form field.

Step 3: Add schema markup data on the right pane by filling in the information you want to show up.

Step 4: Hit "Create HTML" button.

Step 5: Copy and paste the yellow, highlighted code. This is your schema markup code. Alternatively, you can hit the "Download" button to grab the code.

Step 6: Paste the code into your content management system.

Once you've gone through this process, you'll want to then test your schema markup to make sure it shows up correctly in search engines.

If you use HubSpot, you can actually use a Schema Helper integration to add schema markup to your posts.

Below, let's review how to test your listing.

Schema Markup Tester

Now that you've added the schema markup code to your site, it's time to test it out. You can do this by using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

You can test your schema markup two ways: by URL or code.

To test the URL, all you need to do is copy and paste the URL of the webpage you want to see. Then, the tool will showcase a preview of your listing.

To test the code, you can copy and paste the code the structured data markup tool generated for you. Again, a preview of your listing will appear.

While schema markup may seem technically intimidating, it's actually a simple process. By using schema markup code, you can increase the visibility of your search engine listings and improve click-through-rates.

19 Brilliant Examples of Holiday Marketing Campaigns

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Every year, as soon as Halloween is behind us, it seems like the floodgates open. Without warning, there are holiday marketing campaigns everywhere, with countless businesses rushing to cash in on a spending frenzy. There are holiday emails, social media posts, and TV ads — oh, my.

It might seem like holiday marketing is out of control. But some brands do it very, very well.

How? Well, these brands create campaigns that actually delight customers instead of adding to holiday "noise." They evoke emotions and promote sharing, sometimes even connecting people with their loved ones, or partnering with a charitable organization.

Great holiday marketing campaigns come in many different shapes and sizes. Check out our favorites below, and use these ideas to fuel your own holiday marketing ideas.

1. Walkers: All Mariah Carey Wants for Christmas

While the holiday season is a time for caring and sharing, Walkers shows musician Mariah Carey doing the exact opposite. After filming a music video for her famous song, "All I Want for Christmas Is You," Mariah Carey gets angry with an elf for taking her Walkers chips. To fend him off, she sings a highnote which makes him block his ears and let go of the chips.

This is a hilarious commercial because it shows that the only thing you might not want to share on Christmas is Walkers products. It also shows how even stars, like Carey, enjoy the brand.

2. Coca-Cola Canada:Give Something Only You Can Give

In a recent holiday commercial, Coca-Cola brings us the story of a dad doing everything possible to deliver his daughter’s letter to Santa.

The dad enjoys a Coke while deciding what to do with the letter. We can sense that he’s not sure whether he’ll get there in time.

We see him sail through a sea, hike through a forest, ride across a desert, and climb a snowy mountain as he searches for Santa. Finally, he gets there, but Santa’s closed for Christmas. Just when we think the situation’s hopeless, Santa saves the day by cruising in on a Coca-Cola-branded truck and taking the dad home.

His little girl’s wish? For him to be home for Christmas. (This ad will definitely make you cry.)

While we’re always tempted to give expensive gifts, the best thing that you can give to your loved ones is your presence and time.

This installment is just one of the latest in the Coca-Cola company's legendary holiday marketing campaigns — I mean, who doesn't love the annual debut of the Coke-drinking polar bears?

3. Microsoft: Find Your Joy

The year 2020 was difficult for many of us. We spent more time on Zoom than ever before, and we heavily relied on technology to distract us from the COVID-19 pandemic. But that doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t celebrate the holidays and make the most out of it with our loved ones and pets.

Microsoft’s holiday commercial takes a fun spin on this theme. The commercial begins with a puppy named Rufus. Rufus longs to play and approaches each member of the family, but everyone, from the mother to the grandpa, is enjoying a Microsoft product and doesn’t pay attention.

Rufus grabs his best bud, a puppy from next door. Together, they go on an imaginary adventure involving the games and activities their humans had been enjoying. The ad not only showcases Microsoft’s offerings, but reminds us to cherish our loved ones (and to pay attention to our pets!).

4. Macy’s: In Dad’s Shoes

Macy’s campaign offers a new spin on what might be considered an overdone gift: socks.

“In Dad’s Shoes” takes a little girl through a “Freaky Friday”-like adventure, where she finds herself literally walking in her dad’s shoes for a day. Even though we see her as the daughter, everyone else, from neighbors to passerby, greets her as if she’s her dad.

Throughout the ad, she realizes how much work her dad does and how many places he frequents throughout the course of the day. He spends a lot of time walking. That’s how she gets an idea for what she’ll get him: socks. We all know that you can’t get anywhere without a good pair of socks.

We love that Macy’s showcases a simple gift borne out of empathy. This ad tells us that gifting doesn’t have to be complicated, expensive, or over-the-top.

5. Airbnb: Airbnb Hosts Ring Our Opening Bell

This is a great example of an ad that doesn’t explicitly allude to the holidays, but rather emphasizes the value of community and gratitude.

Airbnb celebrates the season by thanking its four million hosts for opening their homes to strangers all over the world. The video shows various hosts from different countries ringing the bell and opening the door. We go from the United States to Japan, from Kenya to New Zealand, from Brazil to Spain. (We love that each of these countries were listed in their original languages!)

This campaign demonstrates that you don’t need string lights or artificial trees to create an amazing campaign that embodies the holiday spirit. You can uplift your company’s values, celebrate your wins, and appreciate those who’ve played a role in your success.

6. Amazon: The Show Must Go On

If you lived through the 2020 pandemic (which you most likely did if you’re reading this), then you know how much it derailed any and all plans. Being quarantined keeps us from achieving things, it turns out. Unless it requires alone time.

In this ad, Amazon effectively punches us in the gut with the story of a ballerina who was chosen to play the lead in her dance school’s winter show. The girl is thrilled to be chosen, but as the months pass and the pandemic gains traction, the event is canceled. Ballet classes are moved online. The girl’s initial thrill fades, a feeling we can all relate to.

Her little sister remedies the situation by putting together a DIY event next to their apartment building. All of the tenants look down on her as she dances. The event is socially-distant, and the girl gets to dance the ballet she’d been practicing for since the beginning of the year.

What we love most is Amazon’s tasteful product placement. Rather than showing everyone ordering all supplies from Amazon, the ad showcases the purchase of a single product: a flashlight. The flashlight is the critical piece that allowed the tenants to watch the show from their balconies.

7. Woodie’s: #WereAllHomemakers

This one made us cry. Woodie’s, an Irish home improvement store, reminds us of what the holidays are about through the story of Mrs. Higgins, an elderly woman who’s beloved in her neighborhood.

Throughout the ad, we see multiple people greet her. Neighbors and passersby are fond of her. Even the rowdy teens who loiter in front of her house love her. She has one problem: the door that leads to her yard is missing a hinge. In the United Kingdom, homes typically have a fence with a gate. Every time she leaves and comes home, she struggles opening and closing that door, as one corner drags across the ground.

When Mrs. Higgins comes home on one particularly snowy day, she finds that her door opens smoothly. The picture focuses on the new hinge that had been installed.

Who fixed it? It turns out it was a one of the teenagers who loitered in front of her home. With this advertisement, Woodie’s not only subverted expectations but also effectively communicated what’s so wonderful about the holidays.

8. Hinge: See What We're Thankful For

This holiday season, what are you thankful for? Recently, dating app Hinge sent around an email posing the same question to its members, using the opportunity to talk about its recent rebrand and subsequent growth — something for which Hinge itself has enormous gratitude, according to the email.

The timing for this sort of marketing is impeccable. The holidays are notorious for the sentimentality they invoke among the masses, and the desire to spend them with "someone special."

Hinge used this email to harness the holiday spirit and redirect attention to an app that helps people find meaningful relationships, instead of, well, shorter-term alternatives.

[Click here to see the full email]

9. Lagavulin: Nick Offerman's Yule Log

This one is an oldie but a goodie. Actor, writer, and humorist Nick Offerman loves his whisky. He's sung about it before, and during a previous holiday season, he joined his favorite whisky brand, Lagavulin, to film a 45-minute video of — wait for it — Offerman sitting in a leather chair next to a crackling fire, drinking whisky and looking calmly at the camera. Where do we sign up for that gig?

"This is smart branding on Lagavulin's part," Kristina Monllos wrote for AdWeek. "Creating an extended ad that can serve as a conversation starter — should consumers swap the traditional Yule Log video for Offerman's at parties — will also get everyone talking about the brand."

Since the video was initially released, a new 10-hour version of it became available. Consider it our gift to you.

10. BarkPost: Yappy Thanksgiving Eve

Holidays are traditionally a time to be spent with family. For many of us, that includes our dogs.

BarkPost is no stranger to marketing campaigns that help "dog ruvers" include their furry friends into day-to-day life. In November, the pet-friendly brand showed how to do that at Thanksgiving, with a clever email that included holiday-themed cartoons and videos, feeding safety tips, and other holiday survival techniques — which, of course, involve your dog.

Plus, check out that adorable call to action at the bottom of the email: "Stop getting cute dogs in your email. Unsubscribe." I mean, who would want to unsubscribe from that?

11. reMarkable: Keep Your Goals for the New Year

You may not have heard of reMarkable, but no matter: this company is the definition of cool and simple. Their single offering is a tablet that acts as a “digital notebook.” When you jot anything down, the reMarkable tablet automatically turns your writing into typed notes. Pretty cool, huh?

In its New Year email ad, reMarkable embodied the simplicity of its product by creating an equally simple campaign. In the email, they entice you to splurge with a $50 discount. Everyone knows that New Years is a time to make plans, set goals, and get your things in order.

reMarkable presents its product as the way to do that. They want to help you save time, which will help you spend more time with your loved ones and pets in the upcoming year. And who likes transferring notes from a notebook to a tablet?

Image Source

12. Kool-Aid: All I Really Want for Christmas feat. Lil John

In a music-video styled ad, rapper Lil John quietly sits down to drink a glass of Kool-Aid as the Kool-Aid man smashes through his wall. At that moment, the bass drops as a festive musical video begins showing Lil John rapping in front of a family Christmas gathering. The video goes on to show Lil John, the Kool-Aid Man, and Santa dancing along with shots of holiday food, presents, and Lil John's Christmas list.

By launching a full-fledged music video with a prominent rapper, Kool-Aid both entertains prospects and demonstrates how "Kool" their brand is. Along with being humorous and entertaining, this ad also reminds you that you can still drink Kool-Aid during a time of the year where you're mostly thinking about hot beverages.

13. Resy: Where to Spend New Year’s Eve

Don’t want to cook for New Year’s Eve? We don’t want to, either—mostly because washing dishes is a chore.

That’s what Resy bets on in a recent New Year email campaign. In a short but effective email, the company invites its subscribers to the best places to dine in the San Francisco Bay Area for the New Year. (If you’re not in San Francisco, you have the option to look for local eateries near you, also curated.) Like OpenTable, Resy allows you to make effortless reservations for you and your loved ones.

We love that this simple email keeps the focus on what we can do to celebrate New Year’s Eve. And what better way to do that than through delicious, local food that we don’t have to cook ourselves?

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14. Erste Group Bank: #EdgarsChristmas #believeinlove #believeinchristmas

You might not recognize this company, but you’d definitely recognize their holiday ad from 2018. Remember the cute porcupine who couldn’t get any friends because his spikes were, well, spiky? The short film has more than fifty million views on YouTube and touched millions of people’s hearts on other social media platforms.

Erste Group Bank did it again during their 2020 holiday campaign. This time, they made it just a little bit more clear what they offer: loans that can help you purchase something that may feel out of reach, but that may help bring your family together.

The ad begins with a granddaughter handing her grandfather his hearing aids. Throughout the video, the grandfather seems unhappy. We later find out that it’s because he’s been wanting to play music, but has no way to because he doesn’t own a piano.

The granddaughter purchases a piano for him. In the end, the grandfather gets to play a song he’d written for his mother. The entire family joins in, and they play the song together.

15. Sonos + Spotify: #PlaylistPotluck

One great way to celebrate the holiday season is with an event. And with events typically come music. Spotify is aware of that tradition, which is why it created #PlaylistPotluck.

It started with a partnership with Sonos. The brands got together to turn playlists into something like a potluck in which everyone contributes something to bring the event together (the tagline of the campaign is "One home. One host. Everyone brings a dish.") Only, instead of contributing food or drink, everyone contributes a tune to a collaborative playlist.

Oh, look. That feature is available with Spotify!

The idea is delightfully interactive. Instead of using traditional invitations, guests RSVP to the potluck by adding songs to the collaborative playlist. And the cherry on top? Both brands also partnered with the PBS series "Mind of a Chef" for a televised holiday special, in which various celebrity chefs will be using the feature for their own meals.

What we love about this campaign is the fact that it incorporates several different elements and media formats to make it cohesive — a speaker system, a music-streaming app, and a televised special. Plus, if you participate, you're entered for a chance to win your very own dinner party, hosted by a world-renowned chef. Bon appetit — and rock on.

16. Google: Santa Tracker

While Google's Santa Tracker has been around for a few years now — and we recommend checking out the back story here — its features have evolved over time. Now there are interactive mini-games such as “Santa Selfie,” “Wrap Battle,” and “Build & Bolt.” Additionally, you can watch delightful short films such as “A Day at the Museum,” so you can see what Santa’s day-to-day looks like.

It's hard to narrow down what makes the Santa Tracker so delightful, but if we had to summarize it, we'd say this — it combines the holiday wonder of a belief in Santa with real-life technology. What a wonderful way to teach kids about the web, while also allowing them to be kids. (Although, we adults certainly appreciate it, too.)

Google even introduced a B2B element of the Santa Tracker by sharing the code with developers and releasing other elements of the tool as open source. Why make all of that information public? To inspire developers to create their "own magical experiences based on all the interesting and exciting components that came together to make Santa Tracker," writes Google's Developer Programs Engineer Sam Thorogood.

Up until Christmas Eve each year, visitors can have a peek at the "North Pole," to see what Santa's elves are up to as the holiday approaches.

17. Disney: From Our Family to Yours

Culture, history, and holiday cheer come together in this holiday advertisement from Disney. The media giant takes advantage of their long-standing name to take us back to 1940, when a young girl gets her first Mickey Mouse plush toy.

As the video goes on, we see the little girl grow older until she becomes a grandma. She hands down the plush toy to her granddaughter, who doesn’t appreciate it as much as she becomes a young adult.

The granddaughter realizes how much it means to her grandma and restores the toy back to its former glory. We definitely did not cry when the grandma opened her holiday gift and saw her old toy fixed and restored.

We expected something quite touching from Disney, and this one did not disappoint. We especially love how Filipino culture has been showcased to three million viewers and counting.

18. Black Owned Everything: Jingles and Things (with “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey”)

Black Owned Everything, an Instagram curator of Black-owned businesses and brands, creates the perfect gift guide in Jingles and Things.

Done in partnership with Netflix and the musical “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey,” Jingles and Things curates the very best gifts for the holiday season, including items ranging from fragrance to dishware to dolls. There’s truly something for everyone here—and the best part is that we can support Black businesses while completing our holiday shopping.

Zerina Akers, the owner and head curator of Black Owned Everything, introduces us to the shop by explaining that it’s not just a marketplace but an inclusive platform. There’s nothing more that encapsulates the holiday spirit than inclusivity, community, and belonging, and we love that Jingles and Things uplifts that theme.

19. Heathrow Airport: The Heathrow Bears Return

This adorable holiday commercial from Heathrow Airport shows the journey of two grandparent teddy bears as they decide to pack up, leave their sunny home, and go visit their teddy-bear grandchildren for Christmas. At the end, you see the bears reunite with their family in London's Heathrow Airport.

For many, these bears are both nostalgic and relatable. They remind you of the bears you might have played with as a child and the average grandparents. At the end, when you see the teddy bears join their family, you might also remember the happiness you felt when your grandparents came and brought you gifts or hugs during the holidays.

This commercial is a sequel to a similar commercial the Heathrow launched a year before, titled "Coming Home for Christmas". This ad follows the bears riding and exiting the plane to meet up with their family at a Heathrow Airport Gate:

This series of commercials has all the great aspects of an ad campaign because it’s relatable, nostalgic, and incredibly heartwarming.

Go Forth and Be Merry

Out of all the things that we appreciate about these campaigns, there might be one thing we like the most — the fact that they put the fun back in holidays. This season, don't let the stress get to you. Have a laugh or a cry with these examples, and please, be merry.

From our family to yours, happy holidays.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in December 2015 and was updated in January 2021 for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

How to Run Marketing Team Meetings That Don't Suck

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 13:30:00 GMT

Meetings suck. They're time for people to avoid doing actual work, stare blankly at each other, throw in generic comments to look like they're paying attention, and if you're lucky, maybe come out with some wicked notebook doodles.

Is that how people perceive your marketing meetings? I hope not, because they don't actually have to be that way.

Turn your marketing meetings into something useful by — you guessed it — creating compelling content! (Oh my gosh, inbound marketing concepts work in real life, too!)

As your team grows, it's important for everyone to get in a room together and talk about what they've been working on in their corner of the world. So to ensure those marketing meetings aren't blocks of time your team dreads, make note of these tips for how to make marketing team meetings truly useful for your employees.

How to Run an Effective Meeting

While this post will primarily focus on marketing meetings, I want to address a team-agnostic section about effective meetings as a whole.

As I said above, meetings can be a grandiose waste of time. It's tempting to run your work by others, gather feedback or affirmation, or simply avoid the tough stuff by calling meetings.

I'm here to tell you — don't do it. The first step to running effective meetings is to only schedule meetings when absolutely necessary.

Quarterly meetings to report on company progress and important news? Of course. Monthly meetings to touch base on KPIs and recruit help for projects? Sounds great. Weekly meetings to report on current responsibilities and asks? I'm torn on whether this one is necessary, but for large teams or teams with new employees, this could be a good move.

Every moment in a meeting is time away from heads-down work, the work that arguably moves your business forward. Are meetings necessary to take a break, touch base, and rally with your team? Of course.

Secondly, to understand the effectiveness and efficiency of a meeting, ask your team. Ask, "is [meeting] helpful for you? If so, what are its top two benefits for you?" This can help you understand what percentage of your teams finds value in your meetings and what components or agenda items may be able to be removed to save time.

Speaking of agendas, let's discuss next what your marketing meeting agendas should resemble.

Marketing Meeting Agenda

Whether your marketing team meeting is weekly monthly, this section will explain the content you should every single time. We also recommend creating a slide deck that you project for your team in each meeting so you can all follow along with each agenda item.

Marketing Meeting Agenda Example

For every meeting, you should have a dedicated agenda slide that lays out three things:

What will be discussed in today's meeting
Who will be leading each discussion
How much time is allotted for each discussion

Take a look at one of our recent marketing team meeting agenda slides:

Outlining who is talking, what they're covering, and how much time they have to discuss it will help prevent the meeting from getting derailed. It will also prevent people from delving into unproductive conversations that are best had at another time and place.

As for what components should be on your marketing meeting agenda, let's discuss what to cover during your marketing meeting.

Review Important Metrics

Do a quick review of your most important marketing metrics. These shouldn't be niche metrics, like email unsubscribe rate, social media reach, or blog subscriber growth; save those for your monthly meetings where you review month-over-month progress.

These should be the metrics your marketing team is measured on. In other words, at the end of the month, what metrics will tell you whether the marketing team succeeded?

While every business will likely review something different depending on their business model, here are some ideas for you:

Leads waterfall
Sales waterfall
Volume of marketing qualified leads(MQLs)
Paid vs. organic leads breakdown
Website traffic

It's important to review your team's important metrics because these are how you're measured onas an overall marketing team. And if you don't all know how you're faring as the month progresses, individual contributors can't do anything to step up and help your team's numbers improve.

A Bit of Education

Marketing meetings should be a healthy mix of state-of-the-union content and educational content. Each week, have a couple team members present briefly about interesting projects they've been working on. This serves two purposes: it lets people know what their team members do all day, and they get to learn something new!

Think about it ... wouldn't it be interesting for a blogger to learn a little bit about a PPC experiment? Or for a social media intern to learn about the results of the latest email A/B test?

Sharing lessons from projects helps everyone expand their knowledge base, sidestep landmines if a project backfired, and implement effective new techniques that they never knew worked.

Boom — everyone leaves your weekly meeting a smarter, better marketer!

The Nitty Gritty Retrospective

Your meeting should also contain a review of the projects each employee (or if you're a larger marketing department, each team) worked on last month/quarter/year, plus the results they've seen.

This is good for a few reasons. First, it keeps everyone accountable knowing that each meeting they need to stand up in front of their colleagues and explain just what they do all day. Second, everyone gets to learn from what everyone else worked on and become generally better marketers. Third, it helps everyone identify how individual teams are faring, and what projects they're doing to improve their own metrics.

For example, if you have a social media team, this is their opportunity to report on the success of every single social network they manage. How is their reach faring? How much traffic are those networks sending to your site? How many leads are being generated? Why are some networks more successful than others?

While your weekly meetings (if you have them) may focus on more high-level, team-based metrics, a monthly or quarterly meeting is a good opportunity to do a deep dive into the channels and metrics that enable the entire team to meet its goals.

How You'll Meet This Month's Goals

After the retrospective, each employee or team should also present on their individual goals for the month or quarter, and how exactly they will meet those goals. This is not the time to be generic.

Teams should explain, point by point, everything they'll be doing during the time period to meet the metrics they're measured by.

For example, let's say the email marketing team is responsible for driving more reconversions this month. What exactly will they do to, well, do that? Well, that slide might have some initiatives like A/B test email copy with and without a P.S., anoffers analysis to determine which offers convert at the highest rate, list segmentation experiments, tailoring lead generation offers to align more closely with personas to improve CTR ... the list could, and should, go on.

This is also a critical time in your meeting for feedback. Build in time during every presentation — at least 5 minutes, more if you find you need it after a few meetings — for each team to solicit feedback on their proposed projects. This will help individual teams from getting derailed on projects that might not help them meet their goals, or perhaps other members of the marketing team have fantastic ideas that the teams hadn't even thought of yet!

Big Wins

A little bit of recognition is a good thing. Set aside a couple of minutes — come on, you can't find 5 minutes? — to showcase some of the amazing things your team members or department as a whole have accomplished.

This could be anything from press coverage, speaking engagements, engaging with power players on social media, a smash hit blog post, an email that received unprecedented click-through rates ... you get the point. It's easy to harp on where you're falling behind, but a little cheerleading can help rally your team and remind them just how successful they can be when they put their mind to it.

Solicit Help

Everyone should have the opportunity to solicit help from team members during your marketing team meetings. The larger your team gets, the easier it is to work in silos — but everyone has their own little super powers that sometimes go unnoticed.

If there is a platform during every meeting for employees to share (if they need it) something they need a little help with, you may find others pipe up with a simple solution or resource that solves the problem.

There should also be a few minutes built into each presentation for a little feedback. If someone is presenting on the progress of an ongoing project, part of "soliciting help" may be getting feedback on what steps to take next. For example:

Is this project still worth pursuing?
How should we measure the success of this project?
Does anyone have a solution to a major roadblock?

So while there should be a few minutes at the end of each meeting dedicated solely to giving employees the floor to solicit help, time for feedback should be built into presentations if the presenter needs it.

You know what content to include in your marketing team meetings. Now, let's discuss how to make those meetings run smoothly. These tips, despite helpful content, can make or break the usefulness of any marketing meeting.

1. Stay on time.

Start on time, you end on time, and honor the budgeted time set for individual presentations. I know it's hard, especially when there's a good discussion going on, but delegate a timekeeper who lets presenters know when they're coming up to the end of their allotted time.

If you're vigilant about this, people will start to self-edit their presentation, and meeting-goers will self-censor their comments, only contributing what truly needs to be said.

2. Don't allow computers ...

... said the internet marketing company. Seriously though, only the meeting coordinator should have a computer to pull up the agenda and presentations.

If others bring their laptops, you'll find people can't help but check their emails, get little bits of work done, and chat online, no matter how riveting the presentations are.

3. Build in time for a break.

Your weekly meeting may only be 30 or 60 minutes, but your monthly meeting could take a lot longer. In that case, build in time for people to get up, stretch their legs, go to the bathroom, get coffee, whatever.

You'll start losing people's attention otherwise.

4. End every meeting with action items.

Whatever you talked about during your meeting should be revisited briefly at the end of the meeting, preferably by the meeting coordinator. If you spend 20 minutes talking about how to solve your lead shortage problem at the beginning of your 90-minute meeting, there's a good chance some of the to-dos and initiatives trickled out of people's minds.

Make sure there's someone taking notes throughout the meeting, and allot five minutes at the end of every meeting to review what people should start doing once they walk out of that meeting room.

5. Consider your remote folks.

Whether your entire team or just a few members are remote, it's important to consider the remote meeting experience. As a remote worker myself, dialing into meetings as one of the few remote attendees takes a bit to get used to.

Research helpful technology to mitigate the gap between in-office and remote workers. Zoom is obviously a great choice, but other technology like The Meeting Owl by Owl Labs may be a good fit for your team. At the start of each meeting, test your connectivity and walk through your slides to be sure the message is clear for folks at home.

Source: Getty Images

Most importantly, gather separate feedback from your remote team members to understand their struggles and accommodate their requests.

6. Review metrics and celebrate wins.

You know those marketing metrics you decided to measure and review in the first section? The ones that noted your team's progress throughout the month?

Now's the time to see whether you hit your goals or not! If you hit your goals, do two things: celebrate, and explain exactly why you hit those goals. That second one is critical. Someone should explain what marketing activities strongly contributed to you hitting, say, your leads goal. That way you can repeat those activities this month!

Meetings Don't Have to Suck

Meetings are a necessary part of work. They're a time to celebrate wins, ask for feedback or help, and get aligned with your team and company.

Sit down with your colleagues to audit your meeting schedule and see where you can trim time or cut meetings altogether. Effective and efficient meetings are much more important than meetings for the sake of it. Your team will thank you.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2012 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

How to Leverage Sensory Language in Your Blog Posts [Data + Expert Tips]

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Check this out:

"You're sitting in the creaky, mesh-backed, black ergonomic desk chair you bought at a discount off Amazon — hunched over, eyes reluctantly wide open, staring intently at a dimly lit laptop screen bearing a blank document.

It's 4:45 PM. For most of the day, you've heard hardly anything except for the occasional click-clack of keys to commit some fruitless inspiration to your blog post and the intermittent spells of grating silence that came after deleting everything you jotted down.

The lasting taste of the coffee you drank about two hours earlier has gone sour but still coats your tongue and the roof of your mouth. And you can feel the effects of the caffeine slowly waning. Subtle muscle fatigue is setting in. Your eyelids are heavy and it's a struggle in and of itself to keep them from covering your aching, weary eyes.

Your mind has gone stagnant — trapped in the clutches of what's most commonly known as writer's block."

Now, I like to think that passage was vivid and immersive, and that's mostly a credit to the kind of language I used and the personal sensations I played on — specifically how it described the sensory experiences of the subject matter.

That language is most commonly known as sensory language, and it's a powerful resource for any writer to understand and apply. Here, we'll cover what sensory language is, review some of the data surrounding it, and go over how you can use it in your blog posts.

Sensory language is used to describe the five primary senses — touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste. They're most commonly used to convey the specific details of scenes or add a more imaginative element to concept descriptions.

Sensory language is most commonly associated with literature. It's a central component of most fiction and poetry, but that doesn't mean this kind of vocabulary is exclusively artistic in its application. Marketers stand to gain a lot from understanding how to leverage it as well.

Let's take a look at some of the data on sensory language to get a better picture of why it's effective and how to apply it.

What Data Says About Sensory Language

Our day-to-day experiences are multisensory, but that's hard to capture linguistically.

A 2012 study from Charles Spence, published in Science Direct, established that "most of our everyday experiences are multisensory." Very rarely — if ever at all — are our senses siloed when we perceive the world around us.

That said, the English language is limited in its ability to capture that phenomenon and general sensory overlap. In his book Sensory Linguistics: Language, Perception, and Metaphor, linguist Bodo Winter, explains those limitations by describing the experience of eating Kimchi.

He says, "The experience involves the salty and spicy mélange of pepper and garlic notes that excite the taste buds, on top of the fermented smell, the tingly mouthfeel, and the crunchy chewing sound."

Though his description is vivid and engaging, he notes that "conveying this experience forces the use of decoupled sensory adjectives such as salty and crunchy. The compression inherent in these words, each one singling out one aspect of the experience, means that the simultaneity of the multisensory taste experience cannot be conveyed."

This passage helps illustrate what might be the main challenge that comes with using sensory language. Ultimately, the goal is to capture a seamless multisensory experience, but the language you have at your disposal is mostly categorized by individual senses.

Taste and smell are the most difficult senses to describe.

The five senses are essentially tiered when it comes to expressing them linguistically. Certain senses are more ineffable — or difficult to put into words — than others.

A 2014 study from Stephen Levinson and Asifa Majid, published in the journal Mind and Language, found that “in English, at least, it seems generally easier to linguistically code colors than (non-musical) sounds, sounds than tastes, tastes than smells."

Everyone's sensory perceptions are different, but how we individually experience taste and smell — also known as "the chemical senses" — is particularly unique.

A landmark 1990 study in the journal Physiology and Behavior found that the number of taste buds humans have on their tongues can vary radically from person to person. It's also been found taste and smell vary as a function of factors like age, gender, and culture.

In short, it's tough to capture the essence of senses so personal and, in turn, ineffable. And the English language's limited vocabulary for the senses doesn't exactly make things easier.

As Winter puts it, "Detailed descriptive characteristics of smells are not encoded in the English lexicon." Instead, smell is often described in terms of perceived pleasantness through words like aromatic and pungent.

It might seem like taste and smell have less practical application in marketing — especially when it comes to elements like blog copy — but don't count them out. You can get a lot of mileage out of those senses if you can convey them articulately and compellingly.

The perception of taste and smell is more emotional than other senses.

Though these senses are harder to capture, it's in your best interest to try when appropriate. Sensory language is used to invoke meaningful images and feelings. And research indicates that language describing taste and smell bear more emotional weight than other kinds of sensory language.

As Winter puts it, "Taste and smell [as senses] are more emotional in perception, and the associated words are more emotional as well, compared to words from the other senses...There is, by now, a wealth of converging evidence for the emotionality of taste and smell language "

This point can mean a lot in the context of certain schools of marketing. If you can believe it, emotionally charged and compelling language can be an asset to a company's emotional marketing efforts.

And if you're interested in using sensory language in your copy in the interest of that cause, it's worth having a pulse on which aspects of the concept are the most emotionally evocative.

Multisensory language makes for better marketing.

As I mentioned, our perception of the world around us is always multisensory, so it's intuitive to assume that we're naturally more receptive to marketing that reflects those kinds of experiences. And the data on the subject is consistent with that notion.

A 2009 study published in The Journal of Consumer Research focused on how multisensory advertising impacted subjects' perceptions of taste. It found that multisensory ads result in higher taste perception than ads focusing on taste alone.

And while the study focused primarily on multisensory advertising's impact on a single sense, other researchers have extrapolated upon its findings and assumed it applies to the other senses as well.

What does this tell us? Well, this means that multisensory marketing — supported by tactful use of sensory language — is more engaging and enriching than marketing that focuses solely on conventionally touched-on senses like sight or sound. It shows that there's tremendous value to using a robust sensory vocabulary in your copy.

How to Use Sensory Language in Your Blog Posts

Understand when it's appropriate to use.

First and foremost, you need to understand that sensory language can seem awkward and jarring when you force it in certain contexts that don't necessarily warrant it.

For instance, if you're writing a matter-of-fact, professional post about a business concept, you probably wouldn't want to use sensory language while defining it.

Take this definition from a HubSpot blog about strategy consulting:

"Strategy consulting is when businesspeople — generally executives, boards, or management — bring in a third party to offer an outside, expert perspective on their business challenges. Strategy consultants usually have considerable industry knowledge and are expected to assess high-level business issues objectively. They take a holistic look at specific problems companies are dealing with and give advice on how they should approach them."

It's more appropriate to keep that aspect of the article more straightforward and professional. Overloading it with sensory language might undermine your ability to clearly establish what the concept is. That said, there are ways you could incorporate sensory language to bring that dry concept to life and make it engaging.

Add a narrative element to the post.

Even though sensory language might not be the best way to convey the more rigid, objective aspects of your post, you can still use it to qualify and illustrate certain concepts. One of the best ways to do that is by giving your piece some narrative flair.

This method gives you some space to use sensory language and make concepts more engaging and entertaining. Here's an example of how you could do that when covering the concept of strategy consulting I just described above:

"Picture this: A CEO sits, poised in a high-backed pleather chair at the head of an engineered wood conference table, eyes shut tight with a cast of stuffy, sharply suited board members flanking the table's sides. They look on intently — expressions caught somewhere between frustration and desperation.

The smell of stale coffee and the special kind of silence that only comes after an hour or so of beratement hang in the air. Day has turned to night out the floor to ceiling windows without any resolution about how to amend the company's recent marketing campaign — the one that's been trending on social media for all the wrong reasons.

The CEO finally opens their eyes, and in a tone that's equal parts stern and exhausted, they say it: 'We need to bring someone in.'

Enter the strategy consultant."

With that kind of description, I was able to set the stage, capture reader attention, and pave the way for a more thorough description of what a strategy consultant does.

Use metaphors or similes.

This point ties into the one above — to a certain extent. Sometimes the subject matter you're writing about is too dry to pull a narrative from without coming across as desperate to force sensory language on a concept that it doesn't naturally gel with.

In those cases, it can help to use metaphors or similes — rife with sensory language and vivid description — to simultaneously engage and inform the reader. For instance, let's imagine you're writing a piece about quote graphics. You might want to incorporate something like this:

"Think of your quote as the entree to a Michelin star meal — an immaculate cut of filet mignon that tastes like heaven and cuts like butter.

It's the centerpiece of the dish, and it's delicious in its own right, but some side dishes and 'eye-eats-first' presentation would take it to another level. By filling out the plate with crispy, golden-roast potatoes and perfectly charred, still-sizzling Brussel sprouts, you can take the dish from 'intriguingly a la carte' to 'bonafide five-star.'

That's the fundamental principle behind quote graphics. The engaging backdrop, distinctive font, and other engrossing visual elements you use can elevate your content and make it compellingly complete."

Though it might not always be obvious, you can often find ways to incorporate sensory language into your blog content. And when done tastefully and effectively, it can pay off in spades. So if you're interested in finding ways to add some oomph to your blog copy, consider taking some time to better understand sensory language.

How HubSpot's Report-Based Acquisition Campaign Hit 150% of Our Lead Goal in 30 Days

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:30:00 GMT

This post is a part of Made @ HubSpot, an internal thought leadership series through which we extract lessons from experiments conducted by our very own HubSpotters.

Acquisition marketing campaigns are critical to bring in new customers and revenue. At HubSpot, we run these campaigns quarterly.

Despite the rapid cadence, every quarter we work to create new, remarkable ways of reaching, informing, and converting our audience.

I wrote this post to share with you how we crafted our latest acquisition campaign to hit and exceed our acquisition targets.

Establishing the Campaign

The beginning of our Q1 2020 Acquisition Campaign started with a blinking cursor. As we brainstormed how to start our research, we had a few inputs to work with.

First, we knew our target audience consisted of marketing managers, as we were re-launching our Marketing Hub Enterprise product that month.

We knew that reports were a content type that worked well for us in the past. We saw our 2019 Instagram Engagement Report and a 2020 Social Media Report successfully attract new audiences.

At the very least, it was a motion that our audience was familiar with, which meant there was less of a barrier to show the value.

Additionally, seasonality played a large role in our planning. We wanted to build content to support marketers planning their strategies for the upcoming year.

With the combination of 1) a target audience, 2) an understanding of high-performing content types, 3) timing, and 4) our additional user research, we wanted to create a remarkable go-to resource for marketing managers building their strategies for the year.

Thus, the idea for “Not Another State of Marketing Report” was born.

In this article, I’ll talk through the report surveys and content, the web experience, the promotion, and the results. Hopefully, it gives you a peek behind the curtain and some inspiration for future campaigns.

Running the Surveys and Creating the Report Content

The first and most important thing about the content of this report was to start collecting survey data for analysis and visualization.

Working with our team at HubSpot Research, we ran our first survey in November/December of 2019 that went out to 3,400 global marketers.

After we sent out the survey, we talked about what might differentiate this content from other reports we had released in the past. While the data was valuable, we knew that data can be dull without human context or insights.

So, we brought in the humans.

Our first criterion for selecting our experts was their subject matter expertise. We had come up with a list of topics we wanted the report to cover (from SEO strategy to content marketing strategy and more) and wanted our experts to have deep and specific knowledge about the topic we chose them to represent.

Our second criterion was seniority. We were crafting a report for higher-level marketing managers, directors, and VPs, so we wanted our experts to have a similar level of seniority.

We are fortunate enough to work with a lot of brilliant marketers at HubSpot, so eight of our experts were internal. The other two, Cynthia Price (VP of Marketing at Litmus) and Ellie Mirman (CMO at Crayon) were generous enough to offer their time when we asked them to share their expertise with us.

We interviewed each of our experts for about an hour, took detailed notes, and recorded the interview. We also shared the survey data with them to gather their commentary about the data points. Finally, we worked with the experts to craft detailed articles with their advice for the upcoming year.

We decided to leave these articles ungated on the web experience, so we optimized them for organic search with extensive keyword research. We’ve seen some exciting results from that play — generating over 15,000 backlinks in the first two months and taking the number three result for the search term “state of marketing”.

When we received the initial survey data, we were thrilled by the results — but knew we needed to take it one step further. So, we ran an additional survey in January to a North American database of marketers.

At this point, with the additional survey data and expert commentary, we sourced some quotes from experts across the industry. We ended up with a great group of contributors from Dropbox, Twilio, and more.

When all was said and done, we had 19,000 words worth of insights and 70+ data points.

Designing and Developing the Web Experience

Differentiating this campaign didn’t stop at the expert insights. We wanted to create an immersive web experience to pair with the report PDF.

The result was a fully custom web experience with a homepage, nine child pages for each article, and custom interactive form that follows the user in a non-intrusive banner. It was designed by an incredible lead designer, and built from the ground up by three developers. (It’s better seen than described, so I’ll leave you with this.)

We were curious about what kind of conversion rates this custom web experience could drive.

To date, the homepage of the report is converting at around 35%. This metric is calculated as the ratio of views vs. submission and is measured in HubSpot’s own HubSpot portal.

We’re really excited about that conversion rate, but we’ve noticed that it doesn’t stay as high throughout each page of the web experience.

For example, on a sample article page, we noticed the conversion rate was about 5%. The leading theory right now is that people are downloading the offer when they land on the homepage, and then they explore the rest of the experience after downloading, so they aren’t converting on the offer pages.

Overall, though, we’re very proud of how the web experience turned out and think it’s a strong differentiator. After all, 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content doesn’t look pretty on the page.

How We Promoted the Campaign

When it came time for promotion, we had to decide on three things: the story we wanted to tell, our creative promotional assets, and the channels we wanted to pursue.

1. The Story

The literal offer that we were marketing was a report. However, the emotion that we wanted to portray was confidence. This was the story we wanted to report and campaign to tell.

For some marketing managers, feeling confident about a strategy can prove difficult. Are other people in the industry doing this? How will I know if it will work?

Data can help ease those concerns, as can long-form articles from deep subject matter experts.

So, we wrote 20 headlines around that concept. This was a good exercise because, although most of them ended up unused, we found this process sharpened our writing “muscle”.

One of the early headlines we landed on was,“A report for marketers who use data to outperform their goals.”

2. Our Creative Assets

The design of this campaign was important to us. We wanted it to feel cohesive across the web experience, the PDF offer itself, and our promotional efforts.

So, under the guidance of our lead designer, we put together a detailed brief for a freelancer, and he came up with some beautiful stuff.

Our learning here is that cohesive design across all campaign assets makes the campaign feel larger than life.

3. Promotional Channels

On the Global Campaigns Team here, we like to bucket our promotion into three categories:

Paid : What channels can we activate that we have to put direct dollars into?
Owned: What organic channels and established HubSpot audiences can we leverage?
Earned: What are some additional free promotion and placements (e.g. organic SEO) can we leverage?

For our paid channels, we chose to focus on Facebook Ads (historically the lowest CPL for us) and LinkedIn Ads (typically more expensive but more effective targeting for the audience we wanted to attract). For this channel, we built a more standard landing page to drive conversions.

For our owned channels, we activated our brand channels (social media, email, etc.), our solutions partner channels, our customer channels, our HubSpot Academy Channels, and Sales Channels (our BDRs used the report as a conversation starter). We also asked our authors to promote it on their personal social networks, and we gave them personalized assets to make that promotion remarkable.

For our earned channels, we focused heavily on the organic SEO value of our ungated articles, the promotion from our partners in the report (Litmus and Crayon), and media placement in marketing publications.

Tracking and Analyzing the Results

This campaign was quickly successful: We hit 100% of our net new lead goal in 16 days and 150% of the goal in just over one month.

As of April 21st, there are 15,800 backlinks to the report. We are ranking for over 350 organic keywords and secured the #1 result for the search term “state of marketing.”

The custom homepage is converting at over 30%, and the paid landing page is converting at 25%.

About 50% (48%) of the net new leads for the campaign came from paid social media. We are hoping to see that percentage decrease as organic traffic continues to gain traction.

There were a lot of factors to our success, but we’ve identified the following as the main ones:

Spend time in the strategic planning process. It’s tempting to rush a campaign out the door, but a well thought out strategy goes a long way. Use qualitative, quantitative, and search data to inform the direction you choose.
Think about how you can contribute to a conversation that’s already being had in a new way. There are a lot of State of Marketing Reports out there. We focused on providing that same value but took it a step further.
Help your creative team by giving them strong creative guidelines. This makes the design more cohesive and powerful in the end.
Identify at least three channels you can activate for promotion. You should prioritize the ones that will most help you with your goal. Since we were looking to attract a new audience, our paid channels made the most sense to invest in.
Double down on the details of your content. If someone is willing to give their information for your content, you better make sure it delivers on value.

Best of luck with your future campaigns!

13 Tips on How To Nail a Presentation To the Board of Directors

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

In college, I always made it a point to listen intently to presentations. I knew how stressful and nerve-wracking it was to present in a room of peers and authority figures.

I would nod feverishly to let presenters know I was invested in their presentation. And they knew it too. They often zeroed in on me as I became their focus point and silent motivator. The fixation felt awkward at times, but that felt like one of my small contributions to society. That, and an endless supply of cat videos.

Back then, the stakes were relatively low. But when you’re tasked with putting together a presentation to a board of directors, the pressure’s on.

But with a few tricks in your arsenal, you won’t need a sympathetic audience member to gauge how well you’re doing.

Let’s walk through some tips to prepare for your presentation and review some things to avoid.

1. Know your audience.

Knowing your listeners is as important as the content of your presentation. When you understand their priorities, you can put together a presentation that speaks directly to them.

If you don't know the board well, do some research and get answers to these questions:

What does the board care about?

This will help you see from what lens they look at things. For instance, a board keen on community impact may not be drawn to a presentation focused on return on investment (ROI).

There are a few ways to find this out. You can start by looking into each board member’s professional background. If most members have a finance background, for instance, you’ll want to make sure you cover any financials as it relates to your presentation. This could be cost, expected ROI, or operating margins.

You can also get some insight into what the board cares about by looking back at your interactions with its members. Think about the conversations you’ve had: What comes up most often? Is it company culture, profit, philanthropy, innovation, or something else?

What are their main concerns?

A board of directors is responsible for making decisions that will ensure the growth and sustainability of a company. So naturally, they will be looking out for anything that may impede that process.

Common concerns a board may have are:

Costs: How much time and money will it require?
Timeline: How long will this project take and is that timeline feasible?
Risks: How risky is your proposal and what is the risk-to-return ratio?

You may find that each board member has a different focus, which means your presentation should be well-rounded to tackle these issues.

Once you know this answer, you can subtly handle each concern throughout your presentation. Getting those answers will help you create a presentation that not only interests your audience but also aligns with their goals. This, in turn, will bring you much closer to accomplishing the plans laid out in your presentation.

2. Plan ahead.

The next step in delivering a great presentation is making a plan. This means figuring out the focus of your presentation, what you’ll cover, and what you’ll leave out.

A presentation should follow the structure of any good movie, with a beginning, middle, and an end. Here’s an example outline for a presentation where the head of the marketing team is proposing course offerings as a new lead generation channel.

In the beginning, you should set expectations for what you will cover. This is also an opportunity to set the baseline and explain the current state of affairs. This may look like discussing KPIs or reviewing goals and outcomes.

The middle is the meat and potatoes of your presentation. You'll likely spend time providing data, contextualizing it, and explaining your approach.

Your ending should bring together your key points and leave your audience with actionable steps. Because what good is providing the information if you have no plan for what to do moving forward?

3. Structure your presentation based on the board’s process.

Not every board of directors operates in the same way. Sure, there are standard guidelines for every meeting. However, the approach may vary for presentations.

Some may operate more like a town hall, pausing periodically to discuss the points as they come up. In this case, leave room after each section of your presentation to discuss what was covered.

Others may follow the more standard approach: presentation followed by a discussion. Studies show that humans remember best the beginning and end of what they read, hear, and see. What’s in the middle tends to get lost. With that in mind, consider sharing your most pertinent information toward the beginning and end of your presentation.

4. Keep it concise.

One thing board members aren’t known for is open availability. That said, you want to make the most of your time with them. How do you do that? Stick to the scope of the presentation.

While it’s great to incorporate storytelling, avoid getting sidetracked and wasting time. Be clear and keep it simple.

If you’re showing data, only share one highlight per data graph. There are several reasons for this:

Data itself doesn’t tell a story. You, as the presenter, do. As such, you have to explain what it means and why it matters. Let’s say lead generation at your company has plateaued in the past year across all channels. That’s all the data says. But during your research, you realize it’s due to a shift in how your audience is consuming information. Your role is to present the data and explain the "why" behind the plateau along with a solution.
You want to prevent information overload. Share the piece of data that best supports your points and has the most impact. For instance, if a new lead generation channel is the focus of your presentation, diving into the specifics of another channel may not be worth your time.

If you leave it to your audience to make sense of the data, they might reach a conclusion that doesn’t align with your message.

5. Set up early.

There’s nothing more awkward than silence during a technical difficulty.

Everyone’s looking at you while you’re figuring out why technology has forsaken you. The more time the issue takes to resolve, the more panicked you get. We’ve all been there.

To avoid this, set up early and do a run-through before your scheduled presentation time. It’ll give you time to get familiar with the space and any technology you’ll need to run during your presentation.

6. Incorporate visuals into your presentation.

When choosing between words and media, pick the latter.

Visuals help us make sense of information at a much quicker pace than words do. We’re also better at remembering what we see versus what we hear by 55% – it’s called pictorial superiority.

It’s also beneficial to keep your visuals simple. If you have too much going on, your audience will be confused. But if it’s too bare, it will take too many visuals to paint the picture. So, pull your most significant data and use data visualization tools to design intuitive graphics.

7. Focus on results.

A board of directors typically focuses on big-picture decisions that will have a long-term impact on the company.

In this vein, every piece of your presentation should get you closer to answering these questions:

"Why does this matter? "
"What is the long-term impact? "
"How does this bring the company closer to its goals? "
"Any potential roadblocks? How will you address them? "

Incorporating these answers into your presentation will set you up for a smoother Q&A session.

8. Send materials beforehand.

Depending on what you’ll be covering in your presentation, it may be helpful to send the board materials to review in advance. This should only be supplemental information that would be too time-consuming or distracting to cover in a presentation, like reports and demos. This way, the focus during the presentation will be on the "why" and not the "how."

The one material you don’t want to send is your presentation, as you want to be the one to contextualize it. Otherwise, the board might form an opinion based on limited information.

A week before the meeting is a good rule of thumb, leaving room for you to respond to initial comments or feedback.

Think of this process as an advantage. You get insight into what the board members may bring up during the meeting and more context to prep. Secondly, it ensures everyone is on the same page ahead of the meeting. That way, you can dive straight into key points during your presentation without covering minute details.

9. Build confidence with your power outfit.

Building confidence is one of the less concrete tips on the list to implement. But the good news is, there are research-backed techniques you can use to achieve it. One of them is right within your reach: clothing.

Many of us can relate to the feeling of trying on clothes in a fitting room and feeling like a million bucks. It tends to put us in a better mood and shift our perspective.

Well, turns out there’s a reason for this. In 2012, two researchers coined the term "enclothed cognition" to refer to the impact clothes can have on the psyche. They found that the clothes we wear can shift our perspective.

In that spirit, put on your best blazer or suit the day of your presentation. That outfit may be just the boost you need.

10. Rehearse your script.

During a presentation with a board of directors, you want to avoid the Michael Scott approach at all costs.

Instead, go the exact opposite route: practice. Practice is the cure to presentation jitters and the formula for seamless delivery. The more familiar you become with your content, the better the presentation will be.

If it’s been a while since your last presentation, start by practicing in the mirror. You’ll immediately notice any mannerisms that may be distracting to your audience. Recording yourself also works great.

Then, practice in front of an audience. And, unfortunately, your dog won’t cut it for this one. Practice with family or friends who can give you feedback on how to improve.

And remember: You’re the only one who knows your speech and presentation. So, if you mess up or forget to mention something, you’re likely the only one who noticed.

11. Don’t fall into the PowerPoint trap.

You’ll likely use a tool like PowerPoint to guide you during your presentation. Yet, it’s important that you don’t overly depend on it.

For instance, packing your slides with heavy text or bullet points is a surefire way to lose your audience. In fact, 40% of respondents in a 2018 study by Prezi said it caused disengagement and made it harder to retain information.

So, stick to one key point on each slide. It’s easier for your audience to remember and prevents information overload.

12. Read the room.

Even if you follow every tip listed above, you might hit a point in your presentation where there’s a disconnect between you and your audience. You might notice confused looks or a shift in body language. If that happens, that’s your cue to pivot.

If your audience seems confused, dive in a little bit deeper on your point. If you sense disagreement, tackle those concerns head-on.

Let’s say you’re proposing a new initiative for the company, and you sense some pushback on the timeline.

You can address it by saying something along the lines of, "You may have some concern regarding the timeline and whether it’s feasible given our current projects. While the timeline may seem tight, we have factored in X, Y, and Z, and, given our past initiatives, we believe this timeline will account for A, B, and C."

A response like this can mitigate the situation while still keeping you on track.

13. Include time for questions.

As a foodie, dinner for me isn’t complete without a good piece of chocolate. Whether it’s a KitKat or a chocolate cake, having chocolate after dinner feels like the perfect ending. Q&A sessions are kind of like that. It’s the audience’s chance to ask questions and discuss the presentation.

Be ready for questions regarding the data and solutions you presented. The length of the Q&A session will vary depending on the length of your presentation, the size of the board, and other factors.

Additionally, it’s your opportunity to address any looming concerns and re-emphasize your key points. Not sure what to do if you don’t have an answer to something? Here are a few responses:

"That’s a great question. I don’t have an answer for you at the moment, but I will follow up over email by end of day."
"I don’t have much experience in that X [topic/department/]. However, I will reach out to X and get back to you within a week."
"We haven’t explored that yet, but what I can tell you is …"
"That’s a great point we hadn’t considered before. My team and I will reconvene and strategize on the best way to approach this."

When the stakes are so high, a presentation to the board can seem daunting. By incorporating these tips into your strategy, you can remove the stress and focus instead on your delivery.

7 Best Event Registration Tools

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

When it comes to event marketing, there are many tasks that need to be completed prior to (as well as during and after) your event. This can become overwhelming, especially if you're on a small team.

The good news is that there are a variety of event marketing tools available to help with all aspects of your event, including event registration. In this blog post, we’ll cover seven of the best event registration tools on the market today.

For the sake of simplicity, the free event registration section includes one option that is always free for event registration. The second section includes event registration tools that are either always paid, or offer free and paid plans.

Free Event Registration Tools

1. HubSpot Free Online Form Builder

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HubSpot’s Free Online Form Builder makes it easy to create, integrate, and share forms with your audience. The drag-and-drop builder makes the process of designing your registration forms simple — then, all attendee contact information obtained is automatically stored in your CRM .

Share your event registration form on an event website or web page. There are over 1,000 form fields and over 12 field types you can use to customize your event’s registration form. Then, decide if you want to trigger notifications when an attendee signs up for your event by completing and submitting your form.

Are you a WordPress user? Well HubSpot still applies to you thanks to the HubSpot WordPress Plugin.

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When it comes to using HubSpot as your event registration tool (or as your CMS, CRM, Marketing Software, Sales Software, or Service Software, for that matter), you have a lot of flexibility — even if your website is built on WordPress. In fact, HubSpot’s free WordPress plugin, which is built natively in WordPress, helps capture, organize, and engage visitors with free forms (as well as live chat, contact management, email marketing, and analytics).

Select to receive notifications once an attendee completes registration, as well as automate event-related follow-up emails. Use the drag-and-drop form builder for your event registration or stick to the WordPress builders you already use (this is made possible by the many integrations HubSpot offers, like Gravity Forms). Lastly, built-in analytics and reporting dashboards allow you to keep track of your attendees and their contact data with ease.

Next, let's look at some more event registration tools.

Best Online Registration Tools

2. Google Forms

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Google has a variety of tools you may find yourself using every day (I know I do) — Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides are just a few examples. So what about a Google Event Registration Tool? Well, Google Forms offers the necessary features for just that. Similar to other Google products, Google Forms offers a plan for personal use (that's free) and a plan for your team (that's paid and comes with greater security and control).

With this paid Google Business plan, you can create event registration forms for attendees, students, or patients and track all sign-ups. To create your event’s registration forms, simply open a new form and begin customizing the form fields. Drag and drop these form fields so they’re positioned accordingly, and add images, videos, and custom logic as you see fit.

Then, send registration forms directly to your audience members' email addresses and view data about submitted forms within the built-in analytics dashboard.

Price

Google Forms Workspace requires a Google Business Plan. You’ll gain access to Google's other products in addition to Froms with a paid plan. Plans range in price from $6 per month to $18 per month. If you’re looking to use the product at the enterprise level, contact a rep for a quote.

3. Splash

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Splash is an event marketing program for online, in-person, and hybrid events. This tool allows you to design and customize responsive web pages and emails for your event. As for attendee sign up, choose to share registration forms and RSVPs that your audience can then send back to you with ease. Smart guest lists, targeting, and email marketing features exist to optimize and streamline event registration and promotion.

Splash also provides the necessary tools to check-in attendees, share event-related surveys, and run sweepstakes and contests. Integrate Splash with your marketing automation platform and CRM, and analyze event data via the tool's reporting dashboard.

Integrate Splash with HubSpot to create, plan, and host on-brand events all from a single tool and leverage attendee data in HubSpot for future campaigns and events.

Price

Try Splash for free, request a demo, or speak with a sales rep to learn about the right plan for your team.

4.Eventbrite

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Eventbrite is an event technology platform ideal for supporting and managing any event you host. The tool's event registration feature is so easy to use that it only requires you to work through three steps.

Start by entering your event details. This is when you’ll finalize your event’s who, what, where, when, and why.

Then, create your tickets — select whether or not your tickets will be free as well as which type of tickets you'll offer (e.g. single vs. multi-day pass). This is also when you'll determine whether you want to offer a discount or promo code for early-bird and group purchases.

Lastly, open registration to your audience via web page or social media. Specifially, Eventbrite makes it easy to share registration via Facebook and Instagram.

Price

Eventbrite offers both free and paid plans. The Essentials and Professional plans are free if you host a free event. Eventbrite will only charge you when you sell a paid ticket.

If you are hosting a free event, you have access to all features offered in the Essentials plan, and you have access to all features offered in the Professional plan except for phone, chat, and email support. There’s also a third plan option, Premium, which offers the greatest amount of flexibility and customization at the highest price.

5. Whova

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Whova is an event management tool that comes with an online registration feature. Create tickets within minutes and customize registration in a number of ways. Offer discount pricing (for early-bird or group ticket purchases), offer different types of tickets (e.g. single vs. multi-day pass), and ask attendees questions about your event when they're registering (e.g. what made them want to attend your event or what they're most excited for).

You can also create a registration web page and embeddable widgets to link to your registration as well as use the real-time reporting dashboard to track sales and attendance.

Price

Contact Whova directly for a quote via their pricing page.

6. Wild Apricot

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Wild Apricot is a membership and event management software with an online event registration feature. The tool makes it easy to create an online event listing that attracts your target audience as well as includes images and your online event registration form. Any event you create with Wild Apricot is added to the tool's calendar and/or your website so your audience can learn about and sign up for the event from anywhere.

Share early-bird discounts or coupon codes, offer add-ons at checkout, and schedule automatic confirmation emails to be sent to attendees. Wild Apricot also automates your event’s promotion, accepts online payment, and manages event check-in. The tool even allows attendees to connect and network with each other via the mobile app.

Price

Wild Apricot has eight different plans that range from free to $600 per month. Each plan offers different features and capabilities as well as a free trial so you can test out the tool before committing to it.

7. Bizzabo

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Bizzabo is an event management platform for all events including those that are online, in-person, and hybrid. The software offers an event registration tool that's customizable and embeddable so attendees can register without ever leaving the event website. You can also brand your event’s registration form so its design complements the event.

Customize your event registration form’s fields to ensure you get all of the information you need from attendees — then, view these details in Bizzabo’s contact management dashboard. Bizzabo also integrates with a few social media platforms so you can promote your event and share content that your attendees post with ease.

Price

Reach out to the Bizzabo team for your free demo and a quote.

Think about the various features you need out of a registration tool for your event and get started sharing event registration with your audience members. Then, sit back and watch attendee sign-ups start flowing in.

How to Create a Successful Blog Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Did you know that 55% of marketers say blogging is their top inbound marketing priority?

Did you also know that these marketers are 13x more likely to see positive ROI than marketers who don't invest in blogging?

Over the last decade or so, businesses have increased revenue, improved brand awareness, and boosted conversions with valuable written content published for their target audience and customers. The key here is that their blog content is valuable — it isn't enough to simply have a blog; there has to be a purpose or reason for its existence.

So, how can you create and maintain a successful blog that provides your target audience worthwhile, high-quality content — all while building your business's reputation as an industry thought-leader and expert?

The answer is with a blog marketing strategy.

Before we review the steps to your blog marketing strategy, let's take a look at how to start a successful blog. We'll also include examples of successful blog sites to illustrate some of these steps.

1. Choose your blog topic and purpose.

The first part of developing your blogging strategy is to clearly define your blog's topic and purpose.

Your blog topic should be broad enough so you can write hundreds of articles about it but also specific enough to relate to your business niche and area(s) of expertise.

When thinking about your blog's purpose, ask yourself, "Why does this blog exist?"

You should be able to answer that question in one, straightforward, defining statement. (Document your blog's purpose to you can refer to it as you grow and your business evolves.)

If you need help defining your blog's purpose, take a moment to ask yourself these questions:

What is the greater purpose your company is trying to fulfill?
What story supports this purpose?
Who shares your passion for this purpose?
Is your team aligned with the meaning of this purpose?

Example

HubSpot has four blog properties: Marketing, Sales, Service and Website. Each blog focuses on its respective industry and relates the content back to the appropriate HubSpot product.

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2. Register and host your blog

This step is two-fold. First, let's talk about your blog's URL structure.

A domain name, also known as the root domain, is the text in a URL that identifies your website — and, therefore, your business — for a web browser. For example, HubSpot's domain name is hubspot.com.

Subdomains are part of your root domain — they appear before the domain in your URL like this: blog.hubspot.com. "Blog" is the subdomain. Subdomains are helpful for organizing a lot of content, including multiple content types. If you have a large blog operation, this structure can help you over time. However, it does pass less authority from your root domain in the short-term.

Subdirectories are divisions of your domain that live on your website, but represent specific pages on your website. For example, a subdirectory that'd take visitors to a specific blog post on a website would look something like this: hubspot.com/blog/article-name. Subdirectories often pass more authority from your root domain and subdomain. However, they can make it hard to scale your content strategy over time since you need more subdirectories to organize your content properly and protect your user experience (UX).

Subdirectories can also represent certain types of content within a subdomain. For example, blog.hubspot.com/marketing/article-name takes visitors to a marketing article on blog.hubspot.com.

The option you choose for your blog has the potential to impact your organic ranking, which is why it's important to choose wisely.

Next, you'll need to pick a host for your business's blog. The simplest way to host your blog is through the same software on which your website is run.

For example, HubSpot users can employ HubSpot CMS and access their website creation and management tools alongside their blogging tools — all from a central location.

Another common way to host your business's blog is through WordPress— compare HubSpot vs. Wordpress here. Other popular options include Wix, Bluehost, and Squarespace.

3. Design your blog.

Design your blog in a way that entices your readers to regularly read (and hopefully, share) your content.

Your blog should be inviting and on-brand. It should be well-organized, clean, and easy to navigate. Within seconds of visiting your blog, readers should know it's published by your company.

To do this, choose a theme that's consistent across your blog properties and articles. Depending on the host you choose for your blog, you'll likely have several theme options that are both free and paid.

For example, HubSpot offers a marketplace of free and paid blog template options. Templates help you easily customize and edit your blog template to tailor it to your business.

The Help Scout blog is a wonderful example of beautiful blog design. Its minimalist design limits the use of copy and embraces negative space by promoting the latest posts with gorgeous feature images. The blog is aligned with the Help Scout brand and promotes readability and easy navigation.

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4. Decide who will write and manage your blog.

Now it's time to think about who's writing, running, and managing your blog. Ask yourself (or your team): Who's accountable for each role within your blog strategy?

There are lots of moving parts when it comes to your blog — if you don’t create ownership around each component, it'll be difficult to reap the benefits of a successful blog operation.

We've put together a list of some examples of the roles you need to fill to effectively implement a blogging strategy.

Blog article topic ideation
Search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword research
Statistics, examples, personal stories, and thought leadership
Editing
Strategy and editorial calendar governance
Promotion
Repurposing, updating, and historical optimization

Depending on your resources and the size of your marketing team, you may find one person holds responsibility for multiple roles.

5. Determine how frequently you’ll share blog posts.

How many blog posts can you commit to writing and publishing? How often are you planning on producing blog content for your audience?

Consistency is the key to keeping your audience engaged and interested. This will also allow you to maintain your status as an active thought-leader and expert in your industry. Use a content calendar to consistently manage and schedule your blog posts.

Plan and optimize your marketing content with these free calendar templates.

The beauty of creating this type of blogging rhythm and sharing that information via an editorial calendar is that it creates a sense of accountability among your team of bloggers. It ensures all writers and contributors have optimized for keywords, added CTAs, and edited their pieces by a certain time and date. This way, you'll have a consistent stream of content your readers can get in sync with.

If you're a HubSpot CRM user, you already benefit from an editorial calendar built right into the COS.

6. Write compelling and valuable content.

It's important to reiterate just how critical it is for your blog content to be both compelling and valuable to your readers. This plays a large part in how you're viewed by your target audience, customers, competitors, and other industry leaders. It's also how you're going to keep readers engaged and loyal to your blog — and hopefully converting to customers, too.

Remember, it takes more time and energy to obtain new subscribers than to maintain current readers. Plus, your current readers have the potential of becoming your brand advocates faster than new subscribers do. So, focus on consistently producing content that captivates your audience all while providing them with useful and worthwhile information so they stick around for the long run.

Patagonia's blog, The Cleanest Line, is a fascinating publication. It's not a generic brand blog that discusses Patagonia products or customers; it tells compelling stories written by some of the best writers on the web — yet it still resonates with Patagonia's target audience and those who share its core values. I've personally spent hours reading the articles on The Cleanest Line, and it's endeared me to Patagonia in the process.

Source

7. Include CTAs.

Are any of the reasons you're developing your business's blog to drive organic traffic to your website, improve conversions, and boost sales?

That's great news — but to accomplish these goals, you'll need to include relevant calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout your blog posts.

CTAs can be paid or free for your audience members. Either way, effective CTAs provide readers with a level of value that they simply cannot pass up.

A CTA might share in-depth content and information with your audience on a specific topic. Or maybe it includes a discount code or special deal on your product or service. A CTA could also provide further training related to the subject of your blog article.

Check out this blog post if you're looking for some examples of clickable CTAs to insert in your content.

If you're a HubSpot user, the CRM offers a CTA creation tool to help you develop relevant — and even personalized — offers to drive traffic to your landing pages and convert more leads.

For example, the Omniscient Digital blog naturally weaves CTAs into its posts, making the linked items part of the broader story or takeaway. The goal of CTAs should be to encourage readers to take action without deviating too far from the purpose of the post.

Source

8. Launch your blog.

Now it's time to launch your blog!

This is the exciting part — you finally get to share the content you've been working so hard to develop. Put your blog content on it's corresponding landing page on your website and send your email list of recipients their blog article(s). Share it via social media and send it to members of your network as you see fit.

9. Track and analyze your blog’s success.

Remember to track and analyze the success of your blog over time. To do this, decide which metrics matter most to you and your business. Once you understand how a specific metric contributes to a positive outcome, then you'll be able to make your blogging strategy more targeted. Examples of blogging metrics you might track include:

Number of readers and subscribers
Number of page views per post
Number of conversions
Number of backlinks
Number of referrals
Overall traffic

When applying these metrics to the goals you're looking to set, consider the following questions to provide concrete targets that make sense for your business.

Does this goal help you achieve your purpose, or is there something more relevant we can aspire to?
Is this goal aligned with the initiatives of other parts of our business?
Which metrics track the progress towards this goal? Are these metrics complementary or counterintuitive?

Once you determine which metrics you're going to use, start by setting goals for a 60-day period. This gives you enough time to see whether your strategy is working and then you can adapt your goals based on the results you see.

Next, let's dive into your blog strategy.

Blog Marketing Strategy

Your blog is an important component of your business marketing strategy and will hopefully market your products and services, but in order for it do this, you must market the blog itself.

A blog marketing strategy is how you share and promote the content on your blog. Unfortunately, "build it and they will come" doesn't apply to blogging as well as it does in Field of Dreams.

For your blog to do its intended job — drive traffic, convert visitors, increase revenue, and/or promote your brand as a thought-leader or expert — it must have a marketing strategy in itself. How will people locate your blog? What type of content will keep them reading? How can you use your other promotional channels to elevate your blog content?

Follow these blogging best practices to promote and market your blog content to your target audience.

Always keep your buyer personas top of mind.

When writing, managing, and scheduling your blog — or working on anything related to your blog, really — keep your buyer personas in mind.

Ask yourself, "Who are our ideal customers?" and "Why do they need our product or service?" Once you can answer these questions in detail, you'll be nail down your buyer persona(s).

Use this free template to create your business's buyer personas.

Once you create your buyer personas, document a detailed description of who this person is so you can reference it has your business and blog grow. You should be able to refer to this description every time you write a new blog post.

This way, you'll be able to create content specifically suited to your target customers' wants, needs, challenges, and/ or pain points. This will also help you turn your blog into a powerful lead conversion tool for your business (i.e. your blog will show your readers and target audience why they need your product or service).

To get a deeper understanding of the actions your buyer personas are likely going to take, research the behaviors of your target audience so you can adapt and tailor your blog content to meet their needs in a way that pushes them to convert in some way. To conduct this type of customer research, you can use:

Q&A forums (Quora, Yahoo! Answers, or Fluther)
Social media (LinkedIn Groups, Twitter Advanced Search, and Google+ Communities)
Content creation tools within your industry or niche (BuzzSumo or Topsy)
Other blogs (comments and interactions on blogs similar to yours; your competitors' blogs)

Keep an eye on your competition.

Speaking of your competitor's blogs, it's important to keep an eye on these other thought-leaders in your industry. Your competitors provide insight into what's working (or not working) in terms of blog content among your target audience.

It also tells you a little bit about what they're experimenting with and what you'll need to accomplish to stand out and provide your readers with valuable content they can't get anywhere else — something unique to your business and your business only.

Create a list of 5-10 of your closest competitors with blogs you could conduct a content audit on. Make conclusions about the type of content they share, unique techniques they've implemented in their blog, and how they're doing in terms of ranking for the keywords you hope to rank for.

Then, look for gaps in their content so you can capitalize on them. To help you do this, use tools like QuickSprout, Open Site Explorer by Moz, and SEMRush Competitor Research.

Perform SEO and keyword research.

When one of your customers searches a phrase on Google (or any search engine), you want them to find your blog (or web page), not a competitor’s. To make this happen, dedicate some time to researching which keywords and phrases your target audience is typing into search engines so you can include them in your blog posts where they naturally fit.

In other words, you'll significantly improve your chances of ranking on the search engine results page (SERP) by performing appropriate search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword research prior to writing your blog post, and then incorporating those findings in your content.

Start by creating a list of 5-10 keyword groups you want to rank for, along with their associated long-tail keywords, in the SERP.

Remember, Google's algorithms are constantly changing to become more intuitive — meaning, old tactics like keyword stuffing will hurt your ranking in the SERP. Instead, you're better off writing copy that engages audience members first and search engines second.

Note: HubSpot customers have access to a built-in keyword and SEO tool to help with this.

Focus on your blog's SEO and keyword research with HubSpot CRM's Content Strategy tool.

Decide where you'll distribute your blog content.

Strategically determine where you'll distribute your blog content. You chose a host for your blog already, meaning your content is likely already easily shareable on your website.

For example, if you use the HubSpot CRM and blogging software to host and manage your website and blog, it's simple to add your articles to their corresponding landing page on your site.

Other ways and platforms through which you might distribute your content include social media, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, and online publishing platforms, such as Medium. You might also work with industry leaders, experts, and influencers to share your content on their websites and social profiles.

Promote your blog content.

It's probably safe to assume you want your blog content to be as discoverable as possible. In terms of your blogging strategy, this refers to your ability to get your content out there so members of your target audience find, read, and (hopefully) share it.

There are many inbound tactics you can use to promote your blog. We touched on a few options above, but another common form of effective blog promotion involves an influencer marketing strategy.

Get started promoting your content with the help of a free influencer marketing guide.

To begin, identify the key influencers in your niche or industry you want to contact and work with. These should be people your current customers and target audience perceive as credible, trustworthy... and, yes, influential.

As you begin making and managing your influencer connections, remain in regular contact with the ones who are promoting your blog content. Be sure you know what they're doing to support, share, and promote your blog content and that their tactics meet your business's standards — you want to ensure they're representing your brand accurately. After all, you're likely paying them to promote your content among their audience members.

You can make your relationship with your influencers even stronger by interacting with their content regularly to show your support. For example, if you're working with an influencer who also has a blog, then go to their blog and read, comment on, and share it (even when the content they're publishing isn't necessarily related to your business).

How to Maintain a Blog

Creating and marketing your blog is merely half the battle. As we mentioned above, consistency is key to a successful blog — which means maintenance is most of the hard work.

Creating blog content can be time-consuming, especially when you aim to command authority in your niche with researched, thoughtful, and planned posts.

This is why updating, repurposing, and republishing your existing blog content is so valuable — it saves you time and energy but it also allows you to efficiently achieve the results you're looking for.

What do I mean by this? Well, ranking in the SERP with a net new post takes significantly more time (I'm talking months) than an updated post. Meaning, you'll see a positive impact sooner if you start repurposing existing posts rather than solely creating new content.

Audit your existing blog posts to determine what you can repurpose and update. Outdated content to remove and/ or replace might include statistics, examples, infographics, quotes, product or service details, research, and irrelevant ideas. You can also add keywords you've determined are missing through your research.

(Check out this post if you're looking for more ideas on how you can effectively repurpose your blog content.)

The process of updating content also allows you to reinvigorate the brand new content you've worked so hard on. Updating allows you to maintain the quality and relevance of your blog without having to recreate blog posts from scratch.

Grow Better With An Effective Blogging Strategy

Growing an influential blog in your niche is a surefire way to nurture your potential customers. By creating regular content that solves the challenges of your readers and fulfills their biggest curiosities, you'll start to build a vault of trust and advocacy. This will inevitably contribute to the overall success of your business. Start with your purpose — the big why — and slowly unpack the individual levers that will contribute to your blog marketing performance through the steps and strategy we've reviewed above.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

8 Inclusive Advertising Tips for 2021, According to Microsoft's Head of Inclusive Marketing

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Advertising can help create a direct connection between consumers and your brand, and is a critical component of marketing.

And inclusive advertising can yield dramatic results and increase brand trust, loyalty, and better overall brand perception. In fact, 64% of people said they are more trusting of brands that represent diversity in ads, and 85% of consumers said they will only consider a brand they trust.

Advertising that works hard for your company has never been more important as we come off the heels of a challenging year affecting all businesses. However, there is one concept that rang true for us all that can inform our approach in advertising for 2021 and beyond – that is, we are all interconnected and interdependent, both as consumers and as advertisers.

In this post, we'll provide eight tips curated from Microsoft's Marketing with Purpose Playbook to help you create more inclusive advertising, reach more customers, and grow your business.

1. Showcase human diversity in your campaigns.

Inclusive advertising means having diversity authentically represented in your ads and promotions, while aligning it to your local market's composition of diversity. It also means considering the many dimensions of human diversity, including (but not limited to) age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, location, language preference and gender expression.

Additionally, you'll be able to expand your ability to connect and tailor ad creative and promotions with your audience when you consider experiential diversity like ability, parental status, marital status, military status, affinities, and job function.

Ultimately, inclusive advertising is understanding with empathy who your customers are, representing them accurately, and more importantly, recognizing who you're excluding in your marketing materials.

2. Perform a landing page and website audit for audience diversity.

Inclusive advertising doesn't end with the ad. In fact, half of the customer experience with your advertising resides where you send them after they click — which means it's critical you demonstrate diversity in your landing pages or website, as well.

Considering 64% people are more likely to consider or purchase a product after seeing diversity or inclusion in advertising, it's critical you ensure your landing pages and website represent true diversity.

Does your website's collection of photos and images match the audience representation you created across your entire ad campaign? Does each inclusive advertisement point the customer after the click to the landing page that matches the inclusive spirit of the image creative? If not, it should.

However, while it's relatively easy to spot-check a landing page with the corresponding ad creative, how can you collectively evaluate your entire website for the right amount and variety of diversity?

For an easy way to review what images are across your site's web pages, simply use Bing.com and type in the search bar the command, "site:" and then add your website's URL after the colon.

For example, let's search Bing for the clothing brand Tommy Hilfiger, which looks like this in the search bar: "Site:https://usa.tommyhilfiger.com". Then, hit "Enter". Bing will produce a search engine results page indexing all your web pages:

Then click on the "images" in the search engine results page for your "site:" search in the navigation bar:

This will produce all the images found on the website. You can quickly scroll through to get a sense of the diversity — or lack of diversity — in the collection of images on your website.

Your audit can be used as a general website check, or a search for specific dimensions of diversity that you feel are underrepresented in your upcoming advertising campaign.

3. Align your advertising messaging to the nine feelings of inclusion.

Emotions are becoming increasingly linked with brand outcomes. As Maya Angelou once said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Feeling included so that a person feels that this brand is for me is at the heart of brand trust, love, and loyalty.

There are actual identified feelings of inclusion in advertising, which can create connection and drive trust. Inclusive advertising can conjure two major feelings: joy, and trust. As a marketer, it's critical you look for brand connection points in product or features that can create these two main feelings.

However, there is more to it than that – there are actually nine feelings that make up joy and trust, which is great news for advertising. If you can find a genuine and authentic way that your product creates any one of these feelings, this can convey inclusion, which – you guessed it, builds trust, brand love, and loyalty.

This product marketing approach facilitates connections with people, making them feel like part of a community. Here are some marketing ideas to evoke feelings of joy and trust:

Celebration: Of people, their successes, honoring of holidays, etc. How does your product celebrate them?
Zest: For life (for ours, theirs, and that of the planet). Convey enthusiasm and energy. How does your product create a zest for life?
Hope: Bringing hope to conquer challenges and/or societal issues. How does your product give your consumers' hope?
Relaxation:Instead of portraying the need to be on guard, remove tension or anxiety for your customers. How does your product produce relaxation?
Relief: From concern or worry, removing something distressing or oppressive. How does your product bring relief?
Safety: Create experiences or highlight how your brand extends safety to all people. How does your brand experience make someone feel safe?
Confidence: Instill a sense of confidence—the belief that we strive to act in the right way. How does your product give your consumers' confidence?
Acceptance: Of others' differences, typically to be included as part of the group. How does your product make someone feel accepted or demonstrate you are accepting of others?
Clarity: Bring a sense of certainty, clarity, and transparency in ambiguity. How does your product bring clarity to a confusing situation?

4. Incorporate three metaphors of inclusion.

Another customer touchpoint that can help your brand emotionally connect with people in your advertising is language cues and context, which evoke positive feelings.

Discovered in our research, The Psychology of Inclusion and the Effects in Advertising at Microsoft Advertising, we uncovered the following fifty language-based cues that signal inclusion, as well as three metaphors of inclusion which are inextricably tied to emotions.

If used in context and in a genuine and authentic way in your ad copy, website, or digital content marketing, these metaphors can help convey inclusion and drive brand performance.

5. Practice inclusive and authentic image selection.

Authentic representation in advertising is important. It drives trust and brand support — so the images you choose matter. It is worth noting that from the Microsoft Advertising research around trust, we found that there is a strong tie between trust, love, and loyalty.

Once trust is established as the baseline, a brand can begin to build love and loyalty. To do this, brands must go the extra mile to make someone feel understood through inclusion, and that means authentic imagery, too. Inclusion was found to be a key brand attribute that creates loyalty.

The same story threads are woven through our inclusive advertising research. Our research uncovered that authentic representation in advertising builds trust and brand support, with 72% of people saying they're more likely to support brands with authentic advertising.

Choosing imagery is an important part of the process in constructing a meaningful and inclusive customer experience. Inclusive advertising isn't just about representing everyone — it's also about making everyone feel your products or services are for them.

Here are some tips to help identify and select inclusive imagery:

Tips to illustrate "Connection":

Have more than one person in an image
Include realistic diversity: use authentic and genuine imagery, which is best conveyed using real people being themselves, that reflect everyday life, not actors hired to play a part
Create a visible relationship between people that is positive
Include people in photos rather than featuring the product only

Tips to illustrate "Openness":

Include people with disabilities
Feature non-traditional dimensions of diversity like people with larger bodies
Include unique subsets of diverse populations
Include multiple people of color
Have people with intersectionality in diversity

Tips to illustrate "Balance":

Everyone is featured with the same prominence
Equity is conveyed
Ensure multiple dimensions of diversity are represented in an image
Within your campaign, have the creative represent the spectrum of people that your potential customer base could be

Lastly, it's good practice to include a diverse representation of people in the review of your creative to uncover blind spots, such as non-obvious negative connotations, stereotypes, cultural inaccuracies, or negative associations.

6. Perform an accessibility audit on your ads, content, and landing pages.

Would you want to turn away one in four people from buying your product simply because your ad or website was not in the right format for them?

Conversely, wouldn't you want to increase your reach by 25%? I hear you saying, "Yes, of course!"

Without accessible advertising, no matter how perfect your product or offer is for someone, one in four people in Europe or the United States might not get your message. This is the ratio of people with disabilities to the general population. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people globally live with disabilities.

Digital inclusion is important because it provides access to services, products, data, information, and education for everyone. We, as advertisers, can recognize these exclusions, solve for them, and make a difference for the one in four people — and also in our business performance.

Download the plug-in for your browser https://accessibilityinsights.io/ and begin to learn how to make your landing pages for your campaigns accessible. This free open-source tool by Microsoft will highlight what accessibility issues are present and how to fix them. It could not be more turn-key, it's free.
Use the Accessibility Checker in Microsoft 365 to make any media or content more accessible.
Learn the ten accessibility principles to building accessibility into your advertising from the start.

7. Develop an inclusive keyword library.

Nothing replaces the value of first-hand customer experience as you develop an inclusive keyword library for your brand. Begin with customer focus groups with the audience you are trying to reach, and you'll be surprised what you uncover. You can even start by sourcing this information from your internal Employee Resource Groups.

To develop an inclusive keyword library, you'll want to consider the consumer decision journey for the product or service you offer. Next, layer on the journey for the consumer with a physical disability, cognitive difference, military status, age consideration, gender expression, or other dimensions of diversity.

Include their lived experience and map the unique keywords that they might use to seek out your product. By understanding the consumer decision journey from their perspective, you will develop your own inclusive keyword strategy for your business.

One simple example is understanding gender differences. In Microsoft Advertising 's Inclusive Automotive Marketing webcast, we shared the difference between men and women in the consumer decision journey when shopping for a car. An inclusive keyword strategy can inform not only your search engine marketing (SEM) but could shape you content marketing, as well.

As suggested earlier, don't stop at the usual dimensions of diversity — go further and see what you can uncover to help you connect and give people the feeling that you're "a brand for someone like me."

8. Root out bias in your ads and your data.

Contending with and working towards eliminating bias applies to all of us. As marketers, our job is to understand and identify potential bias that can live within our datasets and our marketing models. Bias in data produces biased models, which can be discriminatory and harmful. Bias can lead to missed opportunities in marketing, or even damage your brand's reputation.

There is a long list of bias types, and it's good to become familiar with many of these. A great resource is the Harvard Implicit Bias Tests, which you can use to explore and learn about the variety of biases.

For instance, a marketer might conclude that a luxury accessories brand should target women, because gender appears to correlate with a higher purchase probability. You might assume that only women buy luxury handbags. However, gender may just be a red herring. Income could correlate to a much higher degree with conversion.

The resulting bias of only targeting women, then, would limit your opportunity. I invite you to have deliberate curiosity about long-held beliefs, because you might be accidentally leaving out other buyer personas.

Additionally, it's critical you're cognizant of gender-neutral pronouns in your marketing materials. Refer to "they" or "them" when writing about people (rather than "he" or "she"), and ensure you offer at least a third option when asking for gender in customer profile forms.

As we start 2021 and work to find new ways to drive business impact while making a positive impact in the world, we hope these eight tips for inclusive advertising help get you there. Let's work together to build a more inclusive world today.

How the HubSpot Blog Generates Leads [+ How Yours Can, Too]

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 13:00:00 GMT

It's hard to believe that if the HubSpot Blog were a person, it would currently be in high school.

That's right – for well over a decade, content has been published on the HubSpot Blog to help hundreds of millions of readers discover best practices in the areas of marketing, sales, customer service, website development, agency work, and general business best practices.

Behind the scenes, our team also thinks about how we can convince as many readers as possible to become leads and access more information, tools, and resources from HubSpot – and anyone who has worked on lead generation knows that accomplishing this task is much easier said than done.

Effective blog lead generation requires both creative and analytical skills. It's about knowing what numbers to crunch, how to analyze your existing data, and how to make projections based off of traffic, monthly search volume, and conversion potential.

Additionally, any good marketer needs to understand the human aspect behind this process and not lose sight of the people reading your blog and the problems your business can help them solve.

Over the years, the team at HubSpot has landed on a process that continuously generates leads day-after-day, with a reliable blog view-to-lead conversion rate and a steady flow of traffic.

Here are the steps my team at HubSpot takes to generate leads from our blog.

1. Audit existing blog metrics.

To develop a process for growing our blog lead number, we first needed an understanding of how well we were performing.

To capture the current state of blog lead generation, we looked for the overall traffic number and number of leads generated from the blog. These two numbers gave us a baseline conversion rate (in this case, number of leads generated, divided by the total views to the HubSpot Blog in a given time period) from which we knew the team could only go up.

While the number of leads was the ultimate goal for our team, we wanted to take a deeper look at the overall conversion rate and how it changed month-over-month – this number would let us know for sure if we were growing traffic to posts and topics that were most likely to convert their intended audiences.

The big-picture conversion rate gave us an important directional view, but if we ever saw a major shift in that conversion rate, we needed to know where that shift was happening. For example, if we saw a surge in traffic to a low-converting post, that would hinder the overall conversion rate for the blog.

To drill down further, we also looked at all of our post-level data – that is, each post's traffic number, number of leads generated, and CVR. By exporting and tracking this data monthly, we were able to see which posts were dragging down our CVR, which posts were keeping it strong, and which posts were prime candidates for a better CVR.

How to complete this step:

Choose a time period (last quarter, last month, etc.) for which you want to know your conversion metrics.
Determine your overall data for traffic and leads generated in this time and calculate overall blog CVR.
Export your traffic and lead numbers for individual blog posts for this time period. Depending on your analytics tool, this may require you to export data from two different sources and combine metrics using a VLOOKUP on Excel or Google Sheets.
For each post, divide the number of leads it generated by its traffic number to get post-level conversion metrics.

2. Group common posts together.

Over the years, HubSpot has published thousands of blog posts – and while this was immensely helpful for growing HubSpot's email subscription base and ranking for countless keywords, it made the process of organizing and analyzing conversion metrics extremely difficult.

Luckily, the blog and SEO teams developed a model to group posts with similar search intent with the pillar-cluster model. In a nutshell, this model was the result of a massive audit to better organize our blog, reduce redundancy on the blog, and help search engines understand which pieces of content we wanted to be considered the most authoritative on a given subject.

As a result of this project, all of our blog posts were given a relevant "topic tag" – or the cluster for which each post belonged. For instance, any Instagram post is assigned an "Instagram Marketing" tag, and links back to our Instagram Marketing pillar page.

This process ensures effectiveness when analyzing metrics. For instance, when exporting blog metrics, we can analyze blog posts by tag (i.e. all "Instagram Marketing" posts), of which we have a few hundred — rather than analyzing each individual URL, of which we have over 10,000.

How to complete this step:

Export all of your blog posts from your CMS or website analytics tool onto a spreadsheet.
Categorize each of your keywords into a topic cluster. These topic clusters should be high in search volume, anchored by a long and high-trafficked post, and related to each other when it comes to search intent. For example, rather than put all of our posts on social media in one giant “Social Media” cluster, we created more niche clusters for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to help us categorize with more specificity.
With each post properly categorized, organize your data with a pivot table to look at the numbers generated by each cluster rather than each URL. Your pivot table should include the number of posts in each cluster, the views generated, and the leads generated. From there, you can calculate the cluster's CVR by dividing total leads by total views.

3. Determine the best content offer opportunities.

One of the major benefits of grouping your posts together is identifying a content offer opportunity that can be effectively promoted on multiple blog posts, as opposed to an individual post.

As acquisition marketers, it's tempting for us to attempt optimizing the conversion paths for high-traffic posts. However, these high-traffic posts are oftentimes too general and unrelated to what it is we're trying to market.

This mismatch results in misplaced efforts and unmet lead goals, as we're quick to ignore blog posts which – on their own – may have lower traffic numbers, but together have a substantial traffic number.

Ask yourself – which of these two options is a better pursuit for lead generation?

A blog post that has little or nothing to do with your products or services, but is viewed 100,000 times a year.
10 individual blog posts that have a clear connection to your company's core competencies, but on average generate only 10,000 views each per year.

In either scenario, you'd be optimizing the conversion path for 100,000 readers – it's only by grouping these posts together that you'd realize option #2 is a much better option for lead generation.

To address this issue, we organized all of our blog topics by the potential number of leads they could generate, but readily discounted any topic cluster of which we doubted the conversion potential. This crucial step ensured we only considered ideas that we believed would be worth our time and resources to create.

Along with dedicated CTAs for each blog post we create, we also create featured resources for certain topics we believe have high conversion potential. For instance, in this Ebook Format blog post, we created a special featured resource, 18 Free Ebook Formatting & Creation Templates:

How to complete this step:

Calculate how many leads each topic cluster could be generating. At HubSpot, we do this by subtracting each cluster's actual CVR from its target CVR, and multiplying that difference by the traffic number for the desired time period.
Organize data by each cluster's lead generation opportunity – looking first at the highest opportunity and at the lowest opportunity last.
Work through your list of high-opportunity clusters and remove any low-intent clusters from your consideration, ensuring you're only left with topic clusters that have a direct connection to your products/services.
Select one (or many) topic clusters which you want to support with a lead-generating content offer.

4. Create lead-generating content.

By this point, you've identified topic clusters which you feel would benefit from a new, dedicated piece of lead generating content. Now, it's time to create that piece of content.

Understanding what kind of content to create comes from knowledge of your industry, your market, and your buyer personas. In our experience, we discovered HubSpot's Blog audience responds to actionable, personalized, and customizable content in the form of templates, tools, and kits.

However, this is not the case for all organizations – so figure out which content format works best for your audience by auditing the performance of your current library or testing out different formats to see what resonates with your blog readers.

With the knowledge of what formats work best for our readership, we got to work on creating templates for our most-read but lowest-converting clusters, so that readers would see our content as an actionable next step for them to apply the knowledge they gained in the blog post. Below are a few examples of how we mapped an offer to a topic cluster.

Blog Topic Cluster	Content Offer
Customer Experience	Customer Journey Map Templates
Sales Training	New Hire Sales Onboarding Template
Product Marketing	Product Go-to-Market Kit
Pricing Strategy	Sales Pricing Strategy Calculator
Facebook Advertising	Facebook Advertising Checklist

The most important thing to remember during this step is to not overcomplicate your content. Remember, to secure a conversion, you need to convince a reader of your content's quality and relevance. If you're struggling to make the connection between your blog content and your offer's content yourself, how well do you think a reader skimming your blog posts will make that connection?

How to complete this step:

Look through the posts in the topic cluster you want to optimize with new content and think about what a natural next step would be for the reader.
Cement an idea for a piece of content you can create that aids your readers in that next step.
Create the content in your desired format (PDF for ebooks, Google Sheets or Microsoft Word for templates, etc.) and launch it behind a lead-generating form on your website.

5. Promote content with CTAs.

To facilitate a blog conversion, you'll need to let blog readers know about the new lead-generating piece of content on the same page as your blog content.

Blog CTAs can take a variety of formats. Two of the most popular are:

Anchor Text CTAs– Hyperlinked text to the landing page of the offer you're promoting. Remember to keep anchor text direct and clear so readers know what they're clicking – action words like “download” and “access” are useful here.

Image CTAs– Hyperlinked images to your offer's landing page. These CTAs might look like a banner ad and contain an image of the offer alongside copy explaining the value of it. These image CTAs could also be an image of the offer itself, which makes sense if promoting a template or a tool.

At HubSpot, the majority of our posts contain at least three CTAs – one anchor text, and two image. Depending on the intent we expect readers have on a specific post, we may include several more. However, all of these decisions are based on years of data collection and A/B testing – which we encourage you to rely on as well to ensure a non-intrusive CTA experience on your blog posts.

How to complete this step:

Determine the CTA types you want to include for the blog posts you're optimizing.
If necessary, create CTA imagery with a design tool like Adobe or Canva.
Add CTAs to each post, either by utilizing a CTA tool or hyperlinking each image or line of text you add into your blog posts. We recommend the former.

6. Analyze your results.

We gained confidence that this approach worked best for us when the results confirmed so.

After 30 days of launching a new content offer on a series of blog posts, we always answer two questions:

How many leads did each blog generate before we optimized it with the new content offer?
How many leads did each blog generate after we optimized it with the new content offer?

Far more often than not, these clusters see a notable increase in CVR, with some increasing by more than 1,000%.

However, there have been times where we missed the mark and the offer did not perform as expected. When that was the case, we reverted the changes and went back to the drawing board – equipped with the knowledge of what didn't work, which helped us determine what would help us generate more leads in the future.

How to complete this step:

Calculate the traffic, lead, and CVR numbers for each blog post optimized with the new offer before swapping out the CTA.
Calculate the same for a set time period after the CTAs were swapped.
Calculate the difference in leads and in CVR for each post.
If the post did not increase in CVR as expected, consider reverting your changes and creating a new content offer.

7. Align with SEO.

When we discovered that this process was helping us hit our goals, our immediate thought was protection. HubSpot writers and SEOs work hard to ensure our blog posts continuously rank on the first page for the search results of their intended keywords — and we don't want to lose that hard-fought real estate.

However, like all teams, SEO needs to prioritize which blog posts are most in need of protection from losing their SERP rankings and traffic – so it became our job to ensure HubSpot's SEO team knew which posts were most important when it came to generating leads.

We're fortunate here at HubSpot to work with expert SEOs who are able to quickly and effectively prioritize the right content.

As my colleague Braden Becker – HubSpot Senior SEO Strategist – said when we spoke about this topic at INBOUND 2020, "Traffic doesn't pay the bills."

Once we were all on-board regarding prioritization, our teams came to an agreement on how to best manage an SEO strategy for high lead-drivers while respecting the importance of maintaining high traffic numbers for posts across the HubSpot Blog.

The team takes the following steps to ensure lead generation goals are met:

Protect the traffic to high-traffic, high-converting blog posts by regularly checking performance and making as-needed updates to the content of these posts. By frequently optimizing these posts, we let search engines know we're quick to add the most relevant information onto these pages.

Grow the traffic to low-traffic, high-converting blog posts – or ensure that these posts have maxed out their organic traffic potential.

Create posts for keywords that we have not written articles for – but align with related content offers or clusters – as these posts could generate substantial lead numbers for us. This step requires keyword research to ensure these new posts generate traffic.

Stop protecting traffic to high-traffic, low-converting posts. While strong traffic numbers are great, we came to the conclusion that a lower traffic number is acceptable if it means redirecting our historical optimization efforts away from posts that might not generate as much traffic, but will generate significantly more leads than other posts.

How to complete this step:

Come up with a list of blog content that you'd like to see an increase or decrease of traffic to for lead-generation purposes.
Present this list to your colleague(s) in SEO to determine what work can be done to redirect traffic growth efforts to the right posts. Note: it's important to set expectations here, as an SEO cannot wave a magic wand and increase demand for a low-ranking keyword. Sometimes, a post is ranking as well as it can be – but that doesn't mean you shouldn't double check to see if there's opportunity to grow traffic where possible.
Present a list of high-traffic, high-converting blog content to see if there are similar keywords which could be written about in a new (or updated) blog post, in addition to potential keywords that could be the basis for net new posts.
Come with data. SEOs aren't in the business of risk-taking, so explain how a sacrifice of traffic in some areas could result in a stronger CVR and higher lead number from your company's blog.

8. Repeat the cycle!

HubSpot's bloggers are always creating new blog posts and historically optimizing existing ones. In other words, my team is always presented with opportunities to create new lead-generating content and ensure the content we've already made still holds up and is of value to our leads.

Whenever we create a piece of gated content, we always follow the seven steps above, and we're consistently rewarded with an increase in leads from our blog.

How to Design a Process Infographic (And Where to Find Templates)

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Have you ever wished you could just use a picture to explain a process instead of words (or your hands)?

A process infographic could be just what you need to show your audience how to do something or how a process works. A well-designed one can establish you as an authority on whatever subject you choose to cover -- whether you’re trying to show how your business’s coffee is sourced or train the new hire remotely.

Even better, they’re easy to create using a template or from scratch, meaning you can get started on one today.

What is a process infographic?

A process infographic simplifies and explains the steps of a process in primarily visual terms. Generally, it illustrates what happens during each step or phase with an intuitive layout that’s easy for the viewer to follow from start to finish. A well-designed process infographic makes the concept you want to share more accessible and saves you and the audience time.

Chances are, you encounter process infographics in some form pretty regularly in your daily life. Just imagine how much (more) complicated it would be to build your new Ikea desk if the instructions only included words and no visuals. Pretty daunting, huh?

Process infographics allow us to visualize how a process works more quickly and with more clarity. This makes them excellent training and educational tools -- but also a smart marketing strategy.

Here's an example of a process infographic that explains mechanical recycling:

Image Source: bluevision

For marketers -- particularly those of us who are trying to market products or services that require a bit of explanation -- process infographics are extremely helpful for connecting with potential leads and communicating your company's value. Explaining how your company's offerings can provide value to customers with visuals can make your marketing materials more memorable and impactful than using copy alone.

Where to Find Process Infographic Templates

If you want to create your own process infographic with a template, here are a few offerings for every budget.

Venngage

Venngage has a wide variety of process-specific infographic templates for a number of different purposes. If you're looking to essentially plug your process into a finalized design and go, you'll likely find what you want on Venngage. Monthly and annual subscriptions are available that give you full access to their template library and the ability to create and download your own process infographics.

Template available on Venngage

Canva

Canva has ready-made infographic process templates ideal for fun activities, recipes, and the occasional life hack. You can also create a blank infographic process template on the site if you can’t find one that fits your project. Canva has a free and paid version depending on your needs.

Template available on Canva

Visme

Visme's library of process-specific templates includes an extensive variety of different options, including more flowchart-style process templates than other infographic builder sites. If you're looking to translate a particularly complex process into a visual medium, Visme is a smart place to start your search for the perfect template. You can set up an account for free or get access to the full library as a premium member.

Template available on Visme

HubSpot

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention that HubSpot offers free infographic templates, including a number of process-specific templates that are easy to customize. All of our templates are free to use and compatible with PowerPoint, so you don't need to download any new programs or apps to use them.

Template available from HubSpot

DesignCap

DesignCap is an online graphic design tool with a curated selection of process infographic templates available to customize to your needs. While their selection is technically smaller than other template tools on this list, every template was created by a professional designer. They offer many templates for free and have paid plans starting at $4.99/month.

Template available on DesignCap

How to Create a Process Infographic Without a Template

If you can’t find a process infographic template that fits the process you want to visualize, you can always create your own from scratch.

For the mechanics of conceptualizing, structuring, and creating a cohesive design for your infographic, you can check out our step-by-step blog post here to develop your own infographic design in PowerPoint. Below, we'll chat through a few tips specific to process infographics you can apply to any design.

Pick one process to explain.

Process infographics are good at breaking down complex subjects, but you still want to limit the scope of your design to one single topic that can be explained in a linear way -- i.e., things that have a start and an end. Trying to explain too much in one visual can make your design confusing. Stick to one central idea per infographic.

Speak to your audience, not yourself.

This applies to most marketing strategies, but it's always important to remember that you are -- more often than not -- not your target audience. Chances are, you know a lot more about the subject of your infographic than your audience, so it's easy to fall back on that knowledge as you plan your design.

Because your audience knows less than you do about this subject, it's important to approach any complexity from their perspective, taking the time to explain more elements than you would need yourself.

Map out each step with a clear start and end.

As you start outlining your infographic, identify where your audience will start (what they likely know about the process before reading the infographic) and where you want them to end (what you want them to know by the end). With those specifics in mind, map out the steps of

Experiment with the layout.

What’s the best way to structure the information of your process infographic? This will ultimately depend on the “shape” of your information.

For example, a supply chain infographic will likely benefit from a straightforward, linear way of displaying information, but a process like how your company recommends specific products for different needs would need more of a flowchart style design. Experiment with different ways to lay out each step of the process you’re describing until you find one that makes sense.

Edit for clarity.

Once you have a draft of your process infographic completed, give it a re-read and check for areas that might be unclear or confusing. Or even better, ask someone else to review your work with a fresh pair of eyes.

Don't skip this final review -- the goal of your infographic is to make something complex more accessible, and not everyone learns new information in the same way. Having someone else take a quick look can help you refine your infographic so it suits a wider audience.

Visuals succeed where words can fail.

We've avoided using this particularly relevant cliche for this entire article, but here it comes: a picture really is worth a thousand words. Using visuals to aid in your explanations of complex subjects or processes can help make your marketing materials more accessible and human.

The next time you're tasked with breaking down a subject that seems to resist clear explanations, consider making a process infographic instead.

A Comprehensive Guide to LinkedIn Sponsored Updates

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

When it comes to growing your brand and boosting your revenue, social media matters.

Here's why: More than three billion people worldwide now have social media accounts, and 54% of those users leverage social media to research products.

The biggest challenge? Finding the right platform for your social media posts where you can connect with your ideal audience.

While many businesses leverage sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to promote their content and increase conversion rates, there's also a case to be made for more business-focused frameworks like LinkedIn.

In this comprehensive guide to LinkedIn sponsored updates we'll tackle the big questions — what are LinkedIn sponsored updates, how do they work and how much do they cost?

We'll also offer a list of sponsored updates best practices to help your brand make the most of this social content solution.

What are LinkedIn Sponsored Updates?

Let's start at the beginning: What exactly are LinkedIn sponsored updates?

Also called sponsored content, the official LinkedIn help page says a sponsored update is, “a LinkedIn Page update that is sponsored as an advertisement and is delivered to the LinkedIn feed of members beyond those who follow your company.”

In practice, LinkedIn sponsored updates are advertisements created by your company or marketing team which are then served to LinkedIn users who either follow your page or follow pages in a similar content space.

These ads are served as part of the native LinkedIn feed and typically include a combination of relevant text and contextual images or videos, in turn helping them blend in with similar user content rather than stand out as paid-for advertisements.

When designed and deployed well, LinkedIn sponsored updates can help drive organic interest in your brand from both current followers and a wider audience of LinkedIn members. Worth noting? While these posts are designed to follow the format of familiar user updates, they're always labeled as “sponsored content” to ensure there's no misleading users or confusion.

What Types of Sponsored Updates are Available?

Brands can create four types of direct sponsored updates:

Single Image Ads

Single image ads include one image and text that are displayed directly in targeted member LinkedIn feeds.

Carousel Image Ads

Carousel ads contain multiple images in succession that users can scroll through to get a better sense of your products or services.

Video Ads

Video ads offer a way to include multimedia marketing with in-feed videos that users can watch on-demand.

Single Job Ads

If you're looking to expand your team, you can create single job ads for your targeted audience. They must promote a single job opportunity and be linked to an active job post on LinkedIn.

You can also create what's known as “direct sponsored content”. These ads won't display on your LinkedIn Page or Showcase Page before being served as advertisements.

As a result, they're often used by companies to test several marketing approaches and see which one produces the best results and use it as the basis for more robust sponsored content updates.

How much do LinkedIn sponsored updates cost?

The short answer is that more resource-intensive ads — such as videos or carousels — will cost more than their single-image counterparts.

The long answer is slightly more complicated. First, it's important to understand that LinkedIn uses a bidding model for sponsored ads; you select and create your ad type and then specify how much you're willing to pay — a minimum price exists to ensure advertisers are fairly paid, but you'll never be charged more than your maximum upper limit. Differing ad providers then bid on the service and the lowest price wins.

Ad price is also determined by your target audience and relevance score. If your target audience is in high demand, you'll be charged more because there's greater competition to capture user interest. You can also lower your ad costs by creating relevant ads. The more relevant and content-rich your ad, the less you'll pay -- because there's a better chance of engaging LinkedIn users.

It's also worth considering the best cost model for your ad: Cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM). CPC means you only pay when users click on your ad and visit your site, while CPM means you pay for every 1,000 views or “impressions” of your ad.

If your goal is generating brand awareness, opt for CPM. If you have an established audience and are looking to drive click-throughs and conversions, choose CPC.

LinkedIn Sponsored Updates Best Practices

Want to get the most from your LinkedIn sponsored updates? Keep these best practices in mind:

1. Follow LinkedIn sponsored update specs.

Each type of sponsored content comes with its own specifications.

Single image ads: Up to 255 characters for the ad name, 150 characters of intro text to avoid truncation, URLs with “http://” or “https://” and JPG, GIF or PNG files that are 5MB or smaller.

Carousel ads: Use a minimum of two cards and a maximum of ten. Each card has a maximum file size of 10MB and dimensions of 6012 x 6012px. Supported formats include JPG, PNG and non-animated GIFs.

Video ads: Video ads must be three to 30 seconds in length, between 75KB and 200MB and in MP4 format. They must also be less than 30 frames per second (FPS).

Single job ads: Single job ads should be concise, relevant, and clear and follow the same image guidelines as single image ads. They must also link to an active job posting on LinkedIn.

Failure to follow these guidelines may result in ads being rejected. If ads contain misleading or inappropriate content, LinkedIn may choose to remove the ads or terminate your LinkedIn account.

The service also makes it clear that “spam” posts are not permitted: According to their Best Practices for Sponsored Content page, “Businesses that post updates excessively are subject to review by LinkedIn and could risk having their LinkedIn Page deleted.”

2. Don't overshare.

While targeted, relevant content can help drive user interest, too many ads too quickly can result in over-saturation.

LinkedIn recommends regularly tweaking your content strategy to deliver analysis rather than simply news, include curated content (with credit) from other sources, and repurpose older content where applicable.

3. Test, test, test.

As noted above, direct sponsored content is a great way to try out new advertising efforts and see what sticks.

With the social media market continually evolving, it's worth evaluating ad performance every few weeks to see what's working, what isn't, and where specific changes can help.

4. Spend wisely.

Sponsored updates can get expensive as you incorporate new advertisements and use multiple ad types.

Here, it's worth tracking your ad spend and switching from CPC to CPM models once click-through rates start to rise. If ads begin losing steam, consider moving back to CPM to generate increased awareness.

5. Find new markets.

While engaging your target market is critical, diversify ad objectives is also important to expand your overall impact. LinkedIn recommends using tools such as Lead Gen Forms to find better leads, assess ROI and manage your advertisements at scale.

LinkedIn's sponsored update model offers a streamlined solution to help brands reach their target market, expand brand awareness, and boost ROI. Best bet? Start with direct sponsored content to see what sticks, then choose the cost model that makes the most sense — CPC or CPM — and adjust as needed to reach the largest LinkedIn audience.

How to Create a Stunning Presentation Cover Page [+ Examples]

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

When you're focused on creating a meaningful, persuasive presentation, it's easy to overlook the cover page. But giving that first page of your deck a little more love can actually go a long way towards grabbing your audience's attention early on and setting the tone for the rest of your presentation.

A stunning presentation cover page can intrigue your audience into wanting to know more and increase engagement with the information you’re presenting. On the other hand, a lackluster slide, or even the lack of one, can dampen audience enthusiasm for your presentation, and maybe even your own.

You've put so much work into your presentation -- why waste that valuable real estate on the first slide of your deck?

In this post, we'll cover the basics of creating a presentation cover page that's informative and attention-grabbing. Let's dive in.

What's included in a presentation cover page?

A good presentation cover page accomplishes three simple things:

It introduces the topic with a straightforward title.
It introduces you (and your organization, if applicable)
It sets the tone of your presentation.

Title

We probably don't need to tell you this one, but your presentation cover page should be centered around a title. And ideally, a title that's straightforward, descriptive, and simple. If you're finding it hard to keep your title short, add a subtitle (in smaller print) to clarify what you'll be speaking about.

Speaker

Next, identify the person (or group) who will be giving the presentation. In some cases, this will be as simple as including your own name, and in others, you'll want to include your company name, logo, department, or other identifying information. As a general guideline, you'll need less identifying information if you're giving an internal presentation.

If your audience is mainly folks outside of your company (or there are plans to distribute your deck externally) you'll typically want to include more information to identify your company clearly.

Tone

A successful cover page sets the "tone" of your deck -- but what does that really mean? The colors, imagery, fonts, and placements of different elements on your cover page all create a specific visual style that the rest of your deck should follow.

A well-designed page conveys a sense of professionalism and preparedness that a simple monochrome text slide simply cannot. Even if you're not a design expert, you need to pay attention to the aesthetics of your cover page. Fortunately, it's easier than ever to find free, professional-looking presentation templates without needing a degree in graphic design. Whatever you choose, it's important to remain relevant to your presentation (and, if applicable, your company's branding).

We'll explore a few examples of cover pages below so you can see how different elements converge to set the tone for a variety of different presentations.

Presentation Cover Page Examples

Below, we've compiled a number of presentation cover pages that succeed in different areas. Remember: there's no single perfect format for a presentation cover page, but hopefully, you get some inspiration from this list.

Setting An Emotional Tone

The right presentation page can set an emotional tone as well as a visual one. This presentation cover page for a nonprofit conveys a mission-driven approach to protecting nature, with a well-selected, relevant image, and a call-to-action directly in the subtitle. (Photo by Andy Køgl on Unsplash)

Focusing on a Photo

You don't need to overcomplicate the format of your cover page, especially if you have a great photo to use as a full background image. A simple stock photo here provides a clean backdrop for this presentation on remote work. Just make sure your title text is legible over any background photo you decide to use. (Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash)

Leading With Your Brand

Even if you're the central speaker for a presentation, it might make more sense to highlight your team or brand on your cover page, instead of including your own personal information (you can always include your own contact info at the end of your deck for follow-up questions). Context (if you're speaking at a particular event or annual meeting) can be important to highlight as well on your cover page.

Go Minimal

There's a big difference between a cover slide you didn't put much thought into and a slide that makes good use of whitespace and leans on strong copy. Sometimes, the best way to lead an audience into your presentation is to create space for a little mystery.

If you're giving a more casual presentation or a pitch that doesn't need to follow a particular format, consider going the minimal route and opening with a simple cover page slide that asks your audience a question (one that you of course plan to answer).

Set a Purpose

Many presentations include an agenda slide directly after your cover slide, but that doesn't mean you can use your cover slide to set a clear purpose upfront. Consider using your subtitle to explain a more robust (but still simple!) description of what you'll cover.

Presentation Cover Page Templates

Instead of creating your presentation cover page from scratch, using a template can take much of the work out of the process. Check out these websites for templates that you can use for your presentation or for inspiration to create your own designs.

Canva

A tried-and-true favorite of many marketing teams, Canva offers up a wide selection of modern, drag-and-drop presentation templates with truly unique cover pages. If you're on the hunt for a cover page that looks like you hired a graphic designer to create it just for you, Canva is a good place to start your search. Canva offers both free and paid options.

Beautiful.ai

Beautiful.ai has an intuitive, highly-customizable presentation builder that allows you to import your own visual elements directly from your computer or a Dropbox folder. Like Canva, they offer a number of free and paid template options (with great cover pages). Their biggest differentiating feature is their (frankly, very cool) adaptive AI technology, which intuits how you're trying to design a slide and makes changes automatically to suit the direction of your project.

EDIT

For a completely free option with cover page starter template to suit a wide range of different projects across different formats, check out EDIT. Their online tool is specifically designed to create cover pages in a simple, easy-to-use interface.

Visme

Another highly-customizable template source is Visme, which gives users the ability to select a starting template from their (expansive) library and customize elements in a simple web editor.

VectorStock ®

VectorStock® has a massive selection of PowerPoint presentation cover page templates for purchase if you're looking for something that's ready to plug and go without the need for customization (beyond adding your own name and title, of course).

First Impressions Matter

For better or worse, audiences will judge a presentation by its cover page. Because of this, it’s vital that you give your cover page the care and attention that it deserves. Ultimately, a cover page isn't simply a placeholder, it’s a vital component that can drum up interest for your presentation. The best part is that with the tools available online, you don’t have to be an artist to create a stunning presentation cover page.

The featured image on this post was created using a Canva template.

11 Stats That Make a Case for Landing Pages

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

A landing page is a standalone website page dedicated to a specific marketing campaign that is meant to convert site visitors into leads. Landing pages typically offer visitors something that they may be interested in, like an Ebook or a free trial, in exchange for contact information. Getting this information then gives businesses the tools they need to further nurture leads and urge them down the purchasing funnel.

Since landing pages are tailored to customer interests, using them in your marketing strategy can help you convert a significant number of qualified prospects since you can assume that they’re ending up on a landing page because its content interests them.

If you’ve yet to consider using them or you want to update your current landing page strategy, this piece will go over 11 stats that make a case for using landing pages as a means to increase your conversion rates and generate more leads.

11 Stats That Make a Case for Landing Pages

1. The average landing page conversion rate across all industries is 9.7%.

Given that 10% is a benchmark for a good conversion rate, taking the time to create a landing page that carefully considers the interests of your target audience will benefit your business. Whether you sell SaaS or clothing, a higher conversion rate from landing pages means a longer list of leads to nurture into paying customers.

2. Landing pages are the least popular type of sign-up form, but they have the highest conversion rate (23%), and 62.6% of leading landing pages already use them.

Using landing pages to obtain customer contact information for lead nurturing is likely to bring higher conversions. If you decide to use forms, the highest-converting number of fields is 3, with an average conversion rate of 10%. The most popular combinations use email address and name (7%) and email address and birthdate (5.7%).

3. Businesses using optimization software for their landing pages see an average conversion lift of 30%.

While optimization is always an essential factor for generating traffic, using optimization tools to perfect your landing page strategy is valuable for increasing conversions.

4. Addressing buyer fears on landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%.

Marcus Sheridan, a keynote speaker at Inbound 2019, ran an experiment where he found that addressing customer fears, like email spam or personal date use, on his landing pages increased his form conversion rate. If you’ve found that your landing pages aren’t converting as you’d like them to, consider using Sheridan’s strategy to be upfront with consumers about what will come from completing forms on your landing pages.

5. Personalized CTAs convert 202% better than default versions.

Consumers prefer personalization because it ensures that they aren’t overloaded with irrelevant information that doesn’t pertain to their interests. Given this, using personalized and targeted CTAs in your landing pages will likely increase your conversion rates.

6. 48% of top landing pages ranked in Google Maps and organic search query results

Ensuring that your landing pages are SEO optimized for both regular search and Google Maps results increases the likelihood that they’ll show up in both types of search queries, increasing exposure and the possibility of generating more leads. If you also link landing page CTAs in email ads, you’re ensuring exposure and visibility from three different channels.

7. 65% of top landing pages have their business name in the title tag.

Since customers value transparency, using a recognizable brand name and logo shows them that you’re not running a scam or being deceitful. You’re claiming ownership of the CTAs and personal information you’re asking for. Therefore, Including your business name on your landing page is a simple step you can take that can help you increase conversions.

8. 30% of top landing pages use video content.

If you already use video as a part of your marketing, incorporating it into your landing page strategy can help you increase conversion rates. In fact, relevant embedded video content can increase conversions by 86%, and 80% of video marketers say that video has directly increased sales.

9. 36% of top landing pages have testimonials, 11% have reviews.

You likely already solicit reviews and testimonials from current customers. Repurposing them to use on your landing pages can increase customer trust and higher conversion rates, especially considering that 60% of consumers think that user-generated content (UGC), like reviews, are the most authentic form of content a brand can use.

10. 55% of top landing page submissions on the HubSpot blog came from Ebook offers.

If you have a blog or website that wants to distribute long-form instructional content, offering Ebooks in your landing pages can help increase your business conversion rates.

11. 49% of marketers report that increasing customer acquisition is their primary objective in 2020, and a top priority for marketers was generating leads.

If you fall into either of these categories, landing pages can be a valuable element of your marketing strategy to generate leads and increase customer acquisition.

Landing pages are a valuable piece of your marketing strategy.

Considering the above stats, we can see that marketers who create landing pages that build trust with page visitors, provide valuable information, and use different content types see higher conversion rates.

Whether you already use them and aren’t obtaining the results you desire or you’re new to landing pages in general, using them will likely help you draw in new customers and drive revenue.