There are nearly five billion active internet users and over four billion social media users worldwide — simply put, that’s a ton of opportunity for your brand to engage with an audience and achieve massive growth for your business.

One of the most effective methods for spreading brand awareness and attracting new customers is through content marketing.

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing valuable and relevant content online with the purpose of reaching a targeted audience and incentivizing profitable customer action. Ultimately, content marketing is a critical component for long-term, sustainable growth.

And yet, despite its immense impact, many marketers don’t know how to implement a successful content marketing strategy.

To ensure you’re able to cultivate a truly valuable marketing strategy, we’ve created this round-up of content marketing tips. Keep reading to become a true content marketing expert.

1. Make sure your content has a clear, measurable business goal.

You might be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content you can create for your business — anything from Instagram Stories, to blog posts and e-books, to podcasts.

However, as Karla Cook, Senior Manager of the HubSpot Blogs, notes, “[It’s critical] every single piece of content you’re creating has a clear, measurable business goal in mind — and simply ‘getting views’ isn’t a complete business goal. Take the time to think about how content can serve your overall marketing strategy, and create pieces that tie back to that.”

For instance, let’s say you decide you want to lean heavily into a blogging strategy. Simply crafting and publishing content isn’t enough — instead, it’s important you identify your target audience and decide how your content can best serve that group. Additionally, you’ll want to use analytics to ensure your content is able to reach the right people with the appropriate search intent.

Once you identify how to serve your audience, you’ll want to ask yourself, “How does this tie back to the business?” While it’s critical you write quality content to grow your audience, it won’t attract prospects if it doesn’t tie back to your business.

Take a look at the strategy that helped the HubSpot blog break a year-long traffic plateau to learn more about cultivating a business-focused strategy for content creation.

2. Know your audience.

Content marketing is all about attracting the right audience — that is, those who are most likely to engage with your brand and buy your products. But you can’t write content that attracts the right audience until you know your audience.

No need to go out and interview every customer who’s ever done business with you, although that could definitely be helpful. Sit down with your team and create a buyer persona, the ideal customer who’s best served by your products. You’ll want to take into account both psychographic and demographic information, and create a buyer persona document that your team can refer to.

Knowing your audience helps you create content that speaks to them as they go through the buyer’s journey.

3. Understand your buyer’s journey.

A good content marketer understands that their strategy needs to engage and delight readers at any stage of the buyer’s journey. While your content should initially attract new visitors to your business, it should also convince hesitant prospects to purchase, and encourage customer retention and long-term brand loyalty.

For instance, perhaps some customers are hesitant to purchase your product because they believe you need extensive video knowledge to succeed with it. To help mitigate concerns and aid your sales team, you might create a video campaign to show customers how to use video marketing.

If you’re feeling stumped, learn how to create content for every stage of the buyer’s journey.

4. Solve for the reader.

When you’re creating content, you have two primary goals: to educate and to help someone solve a problem. While the objective is to generate leads or drive readers toward a purchase, you also want to establish your brand as a trustworthy source of information first. Then, after they’ve come to trust you, readers can convert and turn into paying customers.

Every piece of content should solve for the reader by answering their questions, offering useful resources and tips, and getting them slowly acquainted with what you offer and how you can help.

For example, if your brand offers vacation rentals, your content should revolve around travel and provide important information that potential travelers need. You would write city-specific travel guides, lists of best places to visit, lists of best practices for traveling solo, and so forth. Once a reader continues to come to you as an authoritative source of information, they’ll trust you enough to make you their provider.

5. Adopt the pillar-cluster model.

If you want to create a better reading experience while improving your SEO, organize your content using the pillar-cluster model.

In this model, a pillar page covers an umbrella topic, then cluster pages support that topic. You then use internal linking to connect all the topics together and signal to Google that they’re related.

For example, if you’re a web design firm, your umbrella topic might be web design. You’d write a pillar page titled, “The Ultimate Guide to Web Design.” Then, you would write pages such as “UX Design 101” and “How to Use HTML & CSS” to support that umbrella topic.

6. Write in-depth content.

It’s been well-established that, on average, longer content performs better in search engines than shorter content. So, when writing content for your website, you should make it long — but not just for the sake of it.

As you seek to solve for the reader, you should include everything they need to know in one post about the specific topic they’re looking for. You shouldn’t write long content with paragraphs upon paragraphs of fluff. Rather, answer related questions and bring up any tips that will help them walk away with all the information they need.

To find out the types of questions people need answers to, look at the “People also ask” box when you search the keyword you’re targeting. This will tell you the types of queries Google has picked up on that are related to your search.

Keep in mind that each post or page should only cover one highly specific topic and only target one to two keywords. You’ll want to do this for various reasons:

• You’ll avoid self-cannibalization because you won’t be writing about general topics.
• You’ll strengthen topical authority by writing in-depth content on one specific keyword.
• With less keywords covered per page or post, you’ll have more keywords to target in other pages.

7. Rely on analytics to track your performance.

Quality content is important, but it doesn’t mean much for your business if your visitors and viewers don’t convert into customers. This is why analytics is so important — by carefully monitoring, tracking, watching, and reporting on the numbers, you’ll be able to gauge what’s working, what isn’t, and what could be working better.

Traffic is important, but it’s important you also focus on conversion rates. Perhaps your Instagram account has only 1,000 followers — alternatively, your blog has 7,000 readers. However, your Instagram page has a conversion rate of seven percent, and your blog only converts at about .01. This should tell you that, while your blog is important for an initial introduction to your business, your Instagram is critical for sales and shouldn’t be ignored.

Additionally, focusing on analytics will help you refine and improve your strategy for the future. For instance, let’s say you notice your blog readers are particularly interested in blog topics related to e-commerce. This can help direct your future strategy — you can choose to focus more heavily on e-commerce topics, which will increase traffic (signaling your readers are happy with your content), and ensure you’re spending time and effort where it matters.

8. Keep content consistent and up-to-date.

Victor Pan, Head of Technical SEO at HubSpot, urges content strategists to implement simple SEO tactics to ensure content remains up-to-date and relevant to search engines. He says, “You can tell if being up-to-date is important to your topic if ‘keyword+year’ shows up in the ‘related searches’ of a Google search result.”

To ensure your content remains relevant and updated, Pan recommends the following three tips:

• Exclude the year in the URL when you’re optimizing your content. Great URLs don’t change.
• Include the year in the title of your content.
• Schedule your editorial calendar to revisit this content every year so you can keep it up-to-date, which could include updating the title tag, meta description, and content itself.

It’s important to note that if you do implement an optimization strategy, it’s critical you don’t update the URL. The URL should remain the same to ensure you don’t need to re-earn backlinks. Additionally, you don’t want to create unnecessary redirects.

Overall, consistency is key. Publishing consistent content will help you rank in the SERPs, but it will also establish trust with your audience.

9. Adopt a historical optimization strategy.

A few years ago, the blogging team at HubSpot figured out the importance of adopting a historical optimization strategy. Through repurposing old (yet still high-quality) content, the team was able to double monthly leads, and increase monthly organic search views by an average of 106%.

Ultimately, you don’t want old content to go to waste. If a topic is particularly evergreen (like “how to create a blog”), it makes sense you’d put time and effort behind repurposing it.

10. Repurpose your content.

It takes time and talent to craft highly useful, engaging content — so, by finding ways to recycle existing content, you’re ensuring peak efficiency. Additionally, repurposing content allows you to reach new audiences. For instance, let’s say your podcast team published a high-performing episode. Why not turn that episode’s topic into a blog post?

Alternatively, maybe you created a blog post that performed significantly well — now, you might consider creating a YouTube video that covers a similar topic to reach an audience that prefers video over text.

Repurposing your content will also ensure your audience has more than one chance to see it. Your readers, viewers, and followers are busy. Consider simply implementing a new content promotional strategy on a piece of content that deserves to be resurfaced.

11. Ensure your brand voice remains steady across channels.

Whether you visit Spotify’s Twitter page, YouTube account, or stumble across one of its billboard advertisements, you can quickly get a sense for the brand’s funny, candid, youthful voice. This is what makes me feel connected to Spotify — its unwavering brand consistency, regardless of the channel on which I choose to engage.

Image Source

Even if you have a marketing team of 30, it’s critical to produce similar messaging that aligns with your brand’s voice and values across channels. A viewer should watch one of your YouTube videos and then click a link to a blog post and think, “Ah, yes — this is definitely the same company.”

If you need help crafting or refining a brand voice, check out How to Find Your Brand’s Voice.

12. Personalize your content.

Have you ever visited a website multiple times, and each time, the experience gets more and more tailored to your tastes? (Think Amazon.)

Personalizing your website content is crucial. Your business doesn’t own a social media site, meaning you can’t personalize content there based on your follower’s behaviors. That’s why personalizing your website’s content is so important. On your website, you have complete control over what certain users see based on the pages they’ve visited, their dwell time, their account activity, and so on. You can also personalize by device and buyer persona.

One way you can get started is by including a reorder button on a product page for users who’ve ordered that product before. You can also create a popup that contains a CTA to download a guide that helps them get the most out of the product. To better serve each prospect or customer, consider using content mapping, which will help you figure out which content serves which buyer persona at certain stages of the buyer’s journey.

You don’t have to implement personalization manually: you can use personalization software to trigger certain actions, show certain content, and send personalized emails.

13. Use data to strengthen your points.

83% of marketers don’t use data and statistics in their content marketing.

Just kidding — I made that up. But using data is a great way to highlight the importance of a piece and strengthen your points.

Using stats and data provides an irresistible hook and allows you to show why one should read the piece in the first place. For example, I opened this piece with stats on how many people are online, highlighting the fact that content marketing can help you reach a large segment of the population.

The great thing about data is that it can be used both on your website and on social media platforms. Whenever you use one, be sure to tie it into the value of your product or use it to validate your points. For instance, if you’re a water bottle brand, you can write a caption that reads: Did you know that people who don’t regularly drink water are 15X more likely to get dehydrated? Stay hydrated with your [water bottle brand].

I also made that statistic up, but you see my point: statistics and data can prove the value of the product or substantiate your arguments.

Whenever you use statistics, be sure to cite recent research (two years at the latest) whenever possible. More importantly, make sure to use factual, accurate data from reputable sources. Data integrity is critical — especially if your blog is widely read.

14. Publish original research.

Publishing original research can help you look more authoritative and knowledgeable, spurring brand trust and giving your content an edge over your competitors’.

While you often see Fortune 500 companies undertaking this task, it doesn’t have to be left to big names in the industry. You can publish original data, too, by carrying out surveys of your customers or prompting your followers on social media to take a questionnaire. You can survey them on a variety of product-, service-, or industry-related topics.

For instance, if you’re a content marketer at a travel agency, you can conduct a survey about the ways people grappled with the lack of traveling opportunities during the pandemic. You can then cite this original research in a blog post about restarting travel plans after the pandemic becomes a thing of the past.

15. Go beyond written formats.

The rise of video is not about to stop — and with rich video and image packs taking precedence in SERPs, you’d be remiss to not include video in your content marketing strategy.

Content marketers have long heralded infographics as one of the best multimedia formats to include in blog posts. Indeed, infographics have the advantage of being pinnable and easy to scan. And, while they’re still important, it’s time to diversify.

Creating a YouTube video is one of the easiest answers, but you don’t necessarily have to go down that route, especially if you’re not sure how to create a video marketing strategy. You can also include other formats such as interactive photos, editable code modules, interactive charts and graphs, and more.

16. Prioritize the user experience.

User experience is king. You can have the most well-written, well-researched piece of content, but if your website’s user experience is buggy, you’ll lose readers and have them bounce off the page — which is a highly negative ranking factor. Most importantly, those are leads that you won’t convert.

Make sure your site loads quickly, is mobile optimized, and has navigability features such as a table of contents and back-to-top button. Your content should be easy to read on all devices, with a series of clear, consistent headings and a sans-serif typeface.

Be sure to also optimize for accessibility website standards. You should provide alt text for all images, include captions in videos, offer a high-contrast setting for the website, and ensure that your content can be read out loud by a software.

17. Remarket your content.

When you repurpose your content, you take a previously-covered topic and turn it into a new format. When you remarket your content, you take the content that already existed and try to re-engage users who interacted with that content but didn’t convert.

There are so many variables that aren’t on our side. A visitor may not be looking for your product right at that moment; it may not be their pay day; it may not be the right day. By intentionally remarketing your content to those who’ve already shown an interest, you increase your chances of capturing their interest at just the right time. And that’s what content marketing is all about.

Content Marketing Tips for the Modern Marketer

Content marketing is here to stay. While it evolves every day, its essence never changes: content marketing is all about the reader, not about the brand. In your content marketing campaigns, seek to know your target audience, serve their needs, and solve their problems, and you’ll soon have an army of brand evangelists who market your brand for you.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Facebook has changed quite a bit since I first signed up for an account in 2008. Back then, Facebook was still called “The Facebook”, and my bio literally said, “Check out my MySpace, it’s waaaay better than my Facebook.”

Needless to say, Facebook has evolved at breakneck speed since my middle school years, and it’ll keep adapting at a swift pace for as long as it exists.

If you need a refresher on how to use Facebook for marketing your business or you want to sign up for a personal account, check out this in-depth explanation of how to use the most popular social media network in the world.

In addition to sharing their own ideas, users can engage with the content other people share on Facebook by reacting to it with a like, a laugh, disapproval, and even a hug. Comments and shares are additional ways users can interact with each other’s content.

Facebook for businesses works similarly, except businesses have Facebook Pages not profiles like individual users do. Businesses can use their Facebook Pages to engage with existing customers, target new customers, and administer customer support.

To fully understand Facebook and how it works, you’ll want to become familiar with common terms used on the platform. Here is a list of key Facebook terms and what they mean.

Profile

The Facebook profile is where your information will live. Your name, photo, hometown, workplace, education history, and so on can all be added to your profile. You can make your profile as public or private as you want by disabling the information you don’t want publicly visible.

Newsfeed

This is the place where all of your friends’ posts will appear. You’ll also see updates from business pages that you’ve liked. Your posts will also appear in the newsfeed where your friends can see them.

Timeline

Often confused with a newsfeed, the timeline is your personal record of all the posts you’ve shared and posts you’ve interacted with. While you won’t usually see friend’s status updates here, there is one exception — if they’ve tagged you in a post or a photo, it’ll appear on your timeline. Your friends can see your timeline by default if they search your name unless you’ve set your privacy settings to do the contrary.

Algorithm

The algorithm is an elusive concept. Essentially, the algorithm is a series of computations that Facebook’s servers do every second to determine what content you want to see, interact with, and click on next. The algorithm uses dwell time (how long you view a post), engagement, page likes, posts, and more to determine the type of content you might like to see. Over time, the algorithm gets better at determining what content to show you.

Status/Post

The two terms are often used interchangeably, but “post” is the term Facebook uses to describe something you share on the newsfeed. Text, images, videos, and location are just a few of the types of posts you can share to the newsfeed for your friends to see.

Friends

These are people you’ve either sent a request to and they’ve accepted or people who have sent you a request and you’ve accepted. Unlike other social networking sites that allow someone to follow you without you following them back, Facebook’s friend system requires both you and the other person to be friends with each other. A personal account for an individual cannot have more than 5,000 friends (and it’s not a good idea to make a second Facebook profile to get around this rule).

Followers

Facebook has a follower option as well. When you add new friends, you automatically follow them (and they follow you, too). This is Facebook’s way of adding this new friend to your newsfeed and making sure you see their posts (at least for a little while unless you stop engaging with them). For individuals who exceed 5,000 friends on their personal Facebook profiles, people can opt to follow them instead to stay up to date on their posts. Keep in mind, while Facebook automatically follows your friends for you, you can manually unfollow them without unfriending them. This action removes these individuals’ posts from your newsfeed. If you do this, you’ll need to search your friends individually and surge their timelines to catch up on their latest posts.

Groups

Facebook users with similar interests might find it helpful to create a group on the platform. A group is a community of users who interact with each other based on various topics set by the group’s admins and other users. Only individual users can be added to groups — pages cannot be part of Facebook groups. Admins have a wide range of permissions they can enable or disable to have the group function in a particular way.

Pages

Businesses use Facebook Pages to create a presence on the social network. Pages are not individual Facebook users — think of them as profiles for businesses. They can post updates, images, videos, and all the other types of content that profiles can. However, they have an advantage — Facebook Pages have the ability to connect to Facebook for Business and run ad campaigns.

Events

With so much community happening on Facebook, individual users and businesses have the option to advertise events. The events can accept RSVPs, create a guest list, and share the date time, and location of the event. Events can be virtual through a video platform or they can be in person with a physical location.

Messenger

Instead of a direct messaging platform in the native Facebook app, Facebook Messenger exists as a separate application so users can chat one-on-one or in a private group setting. When using Facebook.com on a desktop computer, the messenger is accessible through the native Facebook website.

Story

Like Instagram stories, Facebook stories are another way individual users and business pages can connect with their friends and followers. Stories are short pieces of content that are visible for just 24 hours. After 24 hours, the stories disappear from the newsfeed.

Notification

Represented by the bell icon in the third circle below, a notification informs you when a friend engages with your posts, photos, videos, or timeline, you’ll receive a notification that explains what they engaged with and when. Friend requests will also appear here.

Now that you have an idea of what Facebook is and how it works, here’s a handy guide to using Facebook.

How does Facebook Work?

Facebook is powered by an algorithm that is able to learn each user’s preferences and interests. Then, the algorithm displays content like images, status updates, and videos posted by friends and businesses that the user might be interested in. The goal for Facebook is to get users to engage with, consume, and share content.

Along with this, Facebook runs advertisements for businesses and these ads are sprinkled in between organic content shared by your friends on the news feed. The ads are tailored to your interests so you see what the algorithm thinks you might be interested in based on content you’ve interacted with in the past. This is called behavioral targeting.

How the Facebook Algorithm Works

In the past, Facebook used a chronological timeline. This means that the posts on your newsfeed were listed in the order in which they were most recently shared by your friends on the platform. If your mom posted three hours ago and your best friend posted five minutes ago, you’d see your best friend’s post first, then your mom’s. However, that all changed in September 2011 when Facebook officially announced that it was doing away with the chronological newsfeed and replacing it with a more personalized experience. Rather than seeing your friends’ posts in the order they were shared, you now see the content Facebook’s algorithm thinks you’ll enjoy the most. This newsfeed is still around today.

1. Sign up for a Facebook account.

To sign up for a Facebook account, follow these three easy steps.

• Visit Facebook’s website.
• On the homepage, enter your first name, last name, mobile number or email, new password, birthday, and gender.
• Click Sign Up.

2. Set up your privacy settings.

After you’ve signed up for a Facebook account, you can adjust your privacy settings to control who can see your profile and information. Follow these four simple steps to change your privacy settings.

• Click on the downward pointing arrow that’s located on the top right corner of any Facebook page.
• Click Settings.
• In the left sidebar, select Privacy.
• Set who is allowed to see your past and future posts. You can also control how people can find and contact you.

Odds are, there’s probably someone on Facebook who has the same name as you. To differentiate yourself from these people and help your friends and family find you on Facebook, personalize your profile by adding a profile picture, cover photo, and some personal information.

3. Personalize your profile.

Picking a Profile Picture

• Go to your profile and click on your profile picture.
• To pick your profile picture, choose a photo that you’re already tagged in on Facebook, one that you’ve uploaded to Facebook, or a photo from your computer. You can also add a frame to your profile picture.

Choosing a Cover Photo

• Click the camera button on your cover photo, which is on your profile.
• To choose your cover photo, you can pick a photo from your Facebook profile, a selection of Facebook’s own cover artwork, create a collage, or upload a photo from your computer. You can also reposition or delete your current cover photo.

Updating Your Profile

• Click the About section on your profile page.
• In this section, you can fill in information about your work and education, the places you’ve lived, contact and basic info, family and relationships, details about you, and life events.

4. Like and follow public pages.

On Facebook, you can follow and get updates from your favorite brands, celebrities, sports teams, and publications. The best way to do this is by searching for them on Facebook and liking or following their public page, which will have a blue verified check mark next to their name. After you like or follow their page, you’ll start to see their updates in your news feed.

5. Review your timeline.

Your timeline is a digital log of your Facebook activity in reverse-chronological order. Your status updates, uploaded photos and videos, and the photos you’re tagged in will appear on your timeline.

6. Add friends on Facebook.

There are three ways you can add friends on Facebook. You can either search for them, find them in the Find Friends tab, or import a list of contacts from your email, iCloud, or phone.

To find friends on Facebook, go to your profile, select the Friends tab, and tap the Find Friends button. You’ll see a list of friend requests from other people and a list of people you may know that you can add as a friend on Facebook.

If you upload a list of contacts onto Facebook, you can add your friends as you sort through each of your contacts.

7. Post on Facebook.

The main purpose of Facebook is to help friends and family connect with each other. And the best way to connect with your friends and family is by updating them about your life with status updates. To share a Facebook status, go to the text box at the top of your news feed page or on your profile page.

With status updates, you can share text with 15 different colored backgrounds, photos, videos, GIFs, stickers, and links.

You can also share other types of posts, like:

• Feeling/Activity: Share how you’re currently feeling or what you’re currently doing.
• Check In: When you visit a city, location, or place, check in and let your friends know where you’re at.
• Tag Friends: If you’re hanging out with your friends, tag them in your status and share what you’re doing.
• Tag Event: If you’re at an event, you can tag it in your status and share what event you’re attending.
• Ask for Recommendations: If you just moved somewhere or you’re about to visit a location, you can ask your Facebook friends for recommendations on where to go.
• Poll: Ask your Facebook friends what their opinion is on a certain topic.
• Support Nonprofit: Choose a nonprofit organization of your choice and share it through your status. Your Facebook Friends can then select the donate button to support the chosen organization.
• Answer a Question: Choose a predetermined question to answer or create your own question to answer and share it with your Facebook friends.
• Lists: Choose a predetermined topic to make a list for or create your own topic and share it with your Facebook friends.
• Facebook Stories: All the content that you can share through a status update is shareable through your Facebook story. You can also upload content to your stories by clicking the Add to Your Story button on the right sidebar. Additionally, you can watch all your friends’ Facebook Stories by clicking on their picture in the Stories section, which is also located on the right sidebar on your home page.

8. Add photos and videos.

On Facebook, you can add photos, videos, albums, and live video broadcasts to your profile for all your friends to see.

Uploading photos or videos

To upload photos or videos to your profile, follow these four simple steps:

• Go to your Profile.
• Select the Photos tab.
• Select Add Photos/Video.

Upload pictures or videos from your computer.

Creating photo or video albums

To create a photo or video album, follow these four simple steps:

• Go to your Profile.
• Tap the Photos tab.
• Tap Create Album.

Upload pictures or videos from your computer.

Facebook Live

To do a live broadcast on your Facebook account, follow these three simple steps.

• In the box that says What’s on your mind?, select Live Video.
• Once you select Live Video, you can write a description about your broadcast, tag people in it, add a feeling or activity, check in to an event, support a non-profit, or add a poll. You can also title your live broadcast or tag a video game if you’re live streaming someone or yourself playing a video game.
• Select Go Live when you’ve finished describing your live broadcast.

9. Connect with friends.

On your news feed, you’ll see updates from your friends, family, or public pages you follow. To interact with them, you can like and react to their posts, share content on their timelines, and communicate with them through text or video chat.

Like, Comment, Or Share

If you like someone’s post, give them a thumbs up, comment on their post, or share it.

Other Reactions

If your Facebook friend’s post evokes a stronger reaction in you than a like, you can also express that you love, laughed, are amazed, sad, or angry at their post by holding down the Like button.

Sharing Content on Your Friends’ Timelines

Anything you can post on your status, you can also post on your friend’s timeline.

Facebook Messenger

To chat with your friends or public pages on Facebook, use Facebook Messenger. You can access it by tapping the Messages button at the top right corner of any Facebook page or selecting the Messages button on the left sidebar of the home page.

Next, select New Message and type in your friend or brand’s name that you want to connect with. Facebook Messenger also lets you create group chats by clicking on New Group. After that, all you have to do is name your group and add the friends you want to include in the group.

When you message your friends or group on Facebook Messenger, you can upload pictures, videos, and files from your computer, as well as stickers, GIFs, emojis, and take pictures and videos from your computer’s or phone’s camera.

You can also view Messenger on its own page, where you can search for past conversations and manage your settings. To view Messenger on its own page tap the Messages button in the top right corner of any Facebook page and then tap the See All in Messenger button.

To instant message your friends’ who are logged onto Facebook at the same time as you, tap the Chat button on the bottom of any Facebook page and strike up a conversation with your friends who are online.

Phone and Video Calling

When you have Messenger open on its own page, you can search for any of your friends or groups, click on their name, and tap the phone or video chat button to call them.

10. Review your newsfeed.

Your news feed is a curated feed of posts from your friends, family, and public pages you follow that Facebook’s algorithm thinks you’ll be interested in. You’ll also see ads from brands who think you’ll enjoy consuming their content or products.

To customize your news feed, tap the downward pointing arrow in the upper right corner of any Facebook page and tap News Feed Preference.

From there, you can prioritize whose posts you’ll see first, unfollow people and groups to hide their posts, reconnect with people and groups you unfollowed, discover public pages that match your interests, and hide apps from your news feed.

11. Discover additional Facebook features.

Facebook isn’t just a platform for viral content and connection. It’s also a hub for community communications, video streaming, marketplaces, and games.

Events

The Events page on Facebook will show you any upcoming events that are popular with your Facebook friends or have been set up by the groups you belong to. You can also find events based on their date, location, and category.

To find the Events page, select the Home button. Then, on the left sidebar, you’ll see the Explore section, where you can select Events

Groups

The Groups page on Facebook will show you which groups you manage and belong to. You can also discover groups to join based on Facebook’s suggestions and a ton of other categories.

To access the Groups page, tap the Home button and then on the left sidebar, you’ll see the Explore section, where you can click Groups.

Facebook Watch

On the Facebook Watch platform, you can watch videos from the shows you’re following and search for other shows and videos.

To access Facebook Watch, select the Home button. Then, on the left sidebar, you’ll see the Watch button right under the Marketplace button.

Marketplace

Not only does Facebook compete with Netflix in the streaming industry, but they also compete with eBay in the marketplace industry. With Facebook Marketplace, you can browse for all kinds of products, join groups to buy and sell products with people in your area or who share similar interests, shop for products sold from different shops, shop by category, and sell your own products.

To access Facebook Marketplace, select the Home button. Then on the left sidebar, you’ll see the Marketplace button right under the Watch button.

Games

Facebook Games is one of Facebook’s best features. They host a huge collection of massively popular games, and you can browse the most popular games on the platform by top charts and categories. You can even play most of the games with your friends, too.

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

If your brand has a business Facebook page, you’ll want to invest time understanding your Insights dashboard.

It holds important data that helps you understand how your page is performing and is key to growing your page.

Features like weekly insight summaries and competitive data on other business pages make Facebook Insights a powerful tool that every marketer should leverage.

Let’s dive into what Facebook Insights is, how to access it, and how to interpret the metrics it tracks.

Facebook Page Insights vs. Facebook Audience Insights

Despite having similar names, Facebook Insights and Facebook Audience Insights have completely different functions.

Facebook Insights visualizes incoming data from your business page so you can learn how users are behaving on your page, what content they’re engaging with, and how your page matches up to competitors.

Facebook Audience Insights, on the other hand, is used for ad campaigns and helps marketers understand Facebook audiences in general (which can also include those who follow your page).

The platform includes information on user demographics, such as location and relationship status as well as user behavior, including average ad clicks and comments.

Where is Facebook Insights?

To access Facebook Insights, you’ll need to have a business page. Then, follow the steps below:

1. Once you log into Facebook, head to your business page. Then, click on “Insights,” located on the sidebar to the left of the page.

   

2. You’ll land on the “Overview” page which features a dashboard with three main categories. The first is your page summary, which shows key metrics from the last seven days. However, you can also view data from today, yesterday, and the last 28 days.

3. Once you scroll down, you’ll see insights on your most recent posts.

   

4. The last section features insights from your competitors. In this section, Facebook can recommend pages to watch, but you can also customize which brands’ performance you track by clicking “Add Pages.”

   

5. To dive deeper into these metrics, you can click each category listed on the sidebar to the left of the dashboard.

How to Use the Facebook Insights API

The Facebook Insights API, also known as the Ads Insights API, allows you to fetch ad data to track your ad performance. The API is particularly useful because it allows marketers to pull the exact data they want to track, no matter how granular.

To fetch the data from the API, you must determine what data you want to pull and create an access token for that ad, so that only your team can access that information. You’ll then need to determine where to import that data, like Google Sheets or HubSpot’s ads software within the Marketing Hub.

It allows you to pull your Insights API into the platform and match it against with data already in the CRM. This will provide a better understanding of the customer journey and give you a 360-degree view of how your ads are performing.

How to Export Facebook Insights Data

1. Start on your dashboard overview. On the top right corner of your “Page Summary,” you’ll see “Export Data.”

2. A window will pop up. From there, you’ll narrow down what data to export, the data range, file format and layout.

3. Click “Export Data” and you’re all set.

Top Facebook Insights Metrics

Your Facebook Insights dashboard displays top metrics about your business page. On any given day, you can get a snapshot of your page’s performance and adjust your strategy accordingly. Top metrics include:

• Page views – The number of times your page has been viewed by Facebook and non-Facebook users.
• Page likes – How many Facebook users like your business page.
• Actions on page – How many actions users take on your business page, such as to click on a website link or ask for directions to your store.
• Post reach – The number of users on Facebook who saw your post.
• Post engagement – How many people liked, shared, reacted, or commented on your post.

You also have video insights, which can tell you how your videos are performing. Key metrics include:

• Minutes viewed – The total amount of time users have spent watching your videos.
• Video views – The number of users who watched your video for three seconds or more.
• Audience retention – How long you maintained your video’s audience in a video.

For tips on how to interpret your video insights, jump to this section.

How to Interpret Facebook Insights

Before you start analyzing your data, make sure you know what questions you want answered. This will help you narrow down which key metrics to focus on.

Once you know that, start looking through the data to identify patterns.

For instance, let’s say you notice that your how-to posts get shared at a much higher rate than your other content.This may indicate that this type of content resonates more with your audience and adds value to them and their community. As such, you may want to double down on these posts if your goal is to get higher engagement.

Analyzing the data is one thing, but what’s more important is what you do next. As you notice trends, take note of them and conduct experiments to learn more about what your audience wants. This will help you learn more about your audience and develop content that meets their needs.

If your team wants to focus on video insights, scroll down to the “Videos” tab on the left sidebar and click on it. Once there, you’ll see your top video metrics, such as watch time and top video performers.

For tips on how to understand your video insights, watch the video below. It dives into how to navigate your video insights dashboard and what your insights can tell you broken down by performance, loyalty, audience, and retention.

Your Facebook Insights dashboard holds so much information about your page’s performance and your audience. If you leverage that data, you can create better content and generate more revenue for your brand.

A widening set of engagement channels are leveling the playing field for businesses of all sizes to bring customers back to their products.

This is particularly true for modern software companies. Their products are increasingly reliant on non-product communication channels to drive awareness, engagement and customer success.

For data-driven teams, this is particularly powerful: increases in personalization, content optimization, and customized deliveries have become a force multiplier in a company’s ability to reach and maintain a loyal audience of customers.

Some of the world’s best brands have taken notice, differentiating through an integrated messaging approach that reaches users across devices at the right time. 

Enter OneSignal. Founder George Deglin and his team began as a small crew of app and game developers solving their own problems with reaching their users in a unified way. They built OneSignal to initially power push notifications.

Today, they are a customer engagement platform of choice implemented by over 1,000,000 developers across 500,000 live apps and almost 4% of sites on the internet. They’ve built a web and mobile SDK that developers install and marketers use to offer omni-channel messaging across web-and-mobile push, in-app messaging, SMS, and email. 

HubSpot worked closely with OneSignal to develop an integration (in Beta) that’s now available in our marketplace, and we’ve been steadily impressed by the power of their product and the considerable value it can bring to our customers’ core HubSpot experience. 

In addition to our integration, we are thrilled to announce HubSpot’s investment in OneSignal as we continue to collaborate with their team in powering a remarkable messaging experience for our customers.

One of HubSpot’s product leaders, Will DeKrey, shared a bit more about the collaboration between the two businesses after spending many months working with their team:

“Through HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, we want to help marketing teams craft remarkable customer journeys across all the channels where their audiences spend time. This integration combines the ease of use and deep power of HubSpot’s marketing automation capabilities with reach into critical channels where OneSignal has honed specific expertise, like web and mobile push. Marketers are going to be thrilled with the ability to tap into these channels, align their push messages with the rest of their marketing, and leverage CRM data along the way to power personalization.”

On top of a great product, OneSignal has built a wonderful team, and we are excited to support them in their next phase of growth. We have no doubt that the OneSignal journey is just getting started, and we are honored to be a part of that story.

Marketing is the actions you take to attract an audience to your business. You aim to get people interested in what you have to offer and share content with them to help them decide to do business with you.

However, since marketing helps you attract people to your business, it’s essential to know how to attract them, and even more so who the people are that you want to attract to begin with. Without this critical information, it will be challenging to be successful in your marketing processes.

The way you can get this information is through strategic marketing. In this post, we’ll define strategic marketing and explain the different phases of the process that will help you effectively market your business, attract customers, and drive revenue.

This process is beneficial as it helps you be more intentional with your marketing. You’ll be able to ensure that you’ve targeted the right audience, entered the right markets, and used the correct mediums.

You can think of it like this: strategic marketing is the butter you spread on toast. You can have plain toast as it is, but the butter enhances the flavor and makes it better. Strategic marketing ensures that your marketing campaigns are well-planned, effective, and shown to the right people.

Essentially, strategic marketing is the act of uncovering the information you’ll need to create an effective marketing plan and execute successful campaigns.

Strategic Marketing Process Phases

Given that strategic marketing directly influences many elements of your overall marketing strategy, it’s important to approach the process carefully. Below we’ll discuss the different phases of a strategic marketing process.

1. Planning Phase

The first stage of strategic marketing is the planning phase. It’s the most critical step, as it is the basis of your efforts. You’ll want to identify your business purpose, needs, and the goals and objectives you want to accomplish, as the entire process will help you achieve them.

Without this information, it will be challenging to progress to the next steps as you won’t understand the purpose behind your marketing efforts, which makes it even harder to create a solid plan that helps you succeed.

2. Analysis Phase

The analysis phase involves taking an outward look at how your company measures up to your competitors and your industry. During this stage, many businesses will conduct market research and competitor analyses.

Market research will give you an understanding of what your industry looks like, like current trends, market share, and an overall sense of the playing field. The information you discover should also validate your goals and objectives and let you know if they’re achievable. For example, if your overall business goal is to bring a new type of fork to market, but there is no industry or consumer demand for this new type of fork, your efforts won’t be worthwhile.

A competitor analysis will teach you the ins and outs of how your competition works, their position in the industry, and any possible gaps in the market that you can take advantage of to out-perform them. You can look at competitors’ customer testimonials to get a sense of what your target audience is looking for that they don’t provide and use that insight to build a product that your ideal customer already wants.

You’ll also want to take time to study your target audience and create buyer personas. Aim to gain a well-rounded understanding of who your customers are, their needs, desires, interests, and where you’ll find them within the market.

All in all, your analyses should give you an understanding of how competitive you are, and how competitive you’ll need to be in your final strategy to outshine similar businesses and become a viable market competitor.

3. Development Phase

Once you have a clear picture of your industry and how you should present yourself in the market, the next step is to develop your marketing plan. This stage is more closely related to the aspect of marketing you may be most familiar with, as you’re establishing the marketing tactics that are informed by your strategic marketing process.

This stage involves defining your marketing mix, which is how you’ll meet the objectives from phase one concerning the information you discovered during phase two.

A marketing mix is composed of four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. Let’s go over some brief definitions of each:

• Product: This is what your business is selling. Product marketers or managers typically do this work, but it involves researching (from phase two), development, and creating a product launch timeline.
• Price: The price point at which you’ll sell to consumers. Pricing should also be informed by market research and reference to different pricing strategies.
• Place: Where your product or service will be sold, like online or in-store.
• Promotion: How you’ll advertise your product and introduce it to the market. For example, the different promotional channels (like social media) you’ll use to get your audience excited and entice them to do business with you.

You can think of it like this: say your end goal, developed during phase one, is to create a full-service CRM. Your discoveries in phase two have shown you that the current CRM your customers use isn’t scalable, which is a consistent pain point. They also want a more reasonably priced option.

This current phase would help you create, price, market, and promote your full-service, scalable, and affordable CRM to the correct audiences that are ready and eager to purchase what you have to offer.

4. Implementation Phase

The final phase of the process is when you begin to act on your marketing efforts. As the name suggests, you’ll start implementing the strategy you’ve developed based on your planning and market research. You’ll launch your product and begin seeing sales.

After implementation, it’s also important to take time to review your processes and make changes as necessary. As the market is constantly evolving, you may need to re-address certain things from phase two due to new trends or changing consumer interests.

Strategic marketing is a full circle process.

Although each phase has its unique requirements, it all comes full circle; the marketing mix you created during phase three is based on research from phase two. And, if you’ve put time and effort into your overall strategic marketing process, you’ll attract customers, drive revenue, and meet the goals and objectives you identified in phase one.

A conference is a powerful opportunity to establish authority in your industry, increase brand awareness, and inspire or entertain both prospects and your existing consumers.

Best of all, a conference can help you meet your team’s objectives. In fact, 95% of marketers believe in-person events can have a major impact on achieving their company’s primary business goals.

In 2020, the majority of events were hosted virtually — and this likely isn’t going to change in 2021 or immediately beyond.

And, in a world of digital-first, a website is many people’s first introduction to your event. A conference website can influence whether someone clicks “Buy Ticket Now”, or abandons the page entirely.

No pressure, right?

Here, we’re going to explore 21 of the coolest, most inspiring conference websites we’ve found. Use these examples as inspiration as you’re designing your own.

Conference Website Design Best Practices

Before we dive into the examples we’ve collected, let’s explore some best practices to keep in-mind when you’re designing your own conference website.

A good conference website design should include:

• Put your location and date above-the-fold: People should know immediately where, and when, your event is taking place. If they can’t find it easily, they could abandon your website completely. Before you dive into speakers or any other information, ensure your visitors know whether they can even attend in the first place.
• Use interactive elements: Videos or animated graphics can go a long way towards making your website look sleek and professional. Plus, video is a good opportunity to showcase events from years past.
• Center the page around your visitor: What’s in it for them? Great speakers to inspire their work? A chance to network with industry leaders? Ensure your copy outlines, clearly and concisely, how your website visitor will benefit from your event.
• Have a clear call-to-action: Your page is ultimately meant to convert web visitors into event attendees — so make this easy to do. Create a bold “Register Here” or “Buy Tickets” button so your visitors can easily convert when they’re ready.
• Include fun visuals: One thing that’s apparent in all the conference web designs we chose is interesting, unique, fun visuals. I wasn’t impressed by conference websites with too much white space. Use visuals to grab your visitor’s attention, and communicate through images what your event is all about.
• Create time-pressure by including a countdown feature: In a few of the websites we’ll look at, below, you’ll see a countdown that outlines how many days, hours, or minutes visitors have left to sign up for the event. This is a fantastic way to create momentum and encourage visitors to sign up immediately, or risk missing out.

Now that we’ve covered some conference website best practices, let’s see how these 21 conferences put those ideas into practice.

1. Leading Design Festival 

Color is an important factor to consider when designing any webpage, and this homepage for the Leading Design Festival does a good job using complementary colors to evoke a sense of warmness. Additionally, you have everything you need at the top of the page — including a button to purchase tickets, the date of the festival, and what you’ll get for attending (a month of design leadership activities). This page proves oftentimes, less is more.

2. Canvas Conference 

I can’t think of many images more inspiring than an image of a rocket taking off for outer space, which serves as Canvas’ backdrop image for the conference homepage. Additionally, the page doesn’t shy away from bright, vibrant colors — like purples, pinks, and blues — to attract the visitors’ attention.

Plus, the price is clearly stated front-and-center, which helps visitors know whether they can afford the event before exploring anything further.

3. London’s UX Fest 

This scroll-triggered, interactive page is so fun, I scrolled it a few times. As you move down the page, you’re introduced to new information about the conference, with fun, unique design elements, like the “Stay Home and Level Up” image to the right of the first Conference box. Best of all, the page is incredibly simple, with plenty of blue space on either side, to evoke a sense of calmness as visitors learn about the conference.

4. GOTOpia Chicago

One of the best features of this conference page is the “Early Bird Ends In…” countdown that appears above-the-fold as soon as a visitor enters the site. The sense of urgency encourages visitors to sign up immediately, or risk losing out on a good deal. The page also does a good job outlining all the critical information you need to know in just a few words — including “Engaging Talks”, “Keynotes”, and “Trivia + Happy Hours”.

Plus, who doesn’t love the bright vibrancy of a red-and-white color scheme?

5. Consumer Technlogy Association 2021 

The CES conference page uses 3D visuals to grab a visitor’s attention immediately, with a simple “We Are CES Ready” tagline. The design is vivid and dynamic, and looks high-tech — undeniably the goal of CES. The page offers all necessary information, including date, location, and a CTA, from the very top of the page, ensuring CES-fans can sign up immediately.

6. Affiliate Summit East 

“If … you mean business” is a compelling statement that hooked me from the get-go. The entire page does a good job explaining how a visitor will benefit from the conference, including the state of the ecommerce industry in 2020, and how ASE can help you. This is a powerful page that makes the most of the real estate to demonstrate why ASE is an important conference for anyone in the retail industry.

For instance, on the homepage, they write: “Right about now you are probably asking yourself, ‘How on earth do I reach and convert buyers in the most competitive retail environment ever?’ We asked ourselves the exact same question and have built ASE21 to help you.” This page successfully keeps attendees’ needs and challenges at the forefront of the messaging.

7. Digital Design Days 

This colorful, sleek-looking homepage uses purples and greens to evoke a futuristic vibe. What I loved most about this conference website was the moving, interactive elements they’ve used to keep your interest as you scroll the page, including exploding visuals and continuously-moving debris. Give it a try for yourself — it’s more entertaining than you might think.

8. Circles Conference 

When attendees are choosing which conferences are worth their time and resources, one of the first questions they’ll ask is, “Why this conference over all others?”

This question is answered immediately on the Circles Conference homepage, and it’s answered using powerful, engaging text. For instance, the first sentence you’ll read in response to “Why Unmasked?” is “Shed layers of fear and doubt, and reveal your inner creativity” — convinced yet?

9. Collision Conference 

Seeing Seth Rogan at the top of the page is undoubtedly reason enough to pause on the site for anyone who’s a fan. Plus, “The Olympics of Tech”, a quote from Politico, does a good job demonstrating the value of the conference.

But what impressed me the most was the “Prices increase by 20% in…” countdown, right beside a bright blue “Book Tickets” CTA. For anyone whose eager not to lose money, this is a compelling argument for booking tickets immediately.

10. An Event Apart 

Consider standing out from the crowd by using in-house designs on your homepage, like An Event Apart does. The page is cheerful and colorful, and provides all critical information in only a few words. Before a visitor has even scrolled, they’ve learned where (online), when, and for whom the conference benefits.

11. Startup Grind Global Conference 

Using a mixture of photography and unique design shapes works well in this case, and the bright purple, pink, and green colors you see at the top of the page contrasts well against a simple black backdrop. The page is sleek and uses three bold buttons to provide all information a visitor will need to learn more, or purchase tickets.  

12. The Martech Summit Singapore 

If you’re hosting a conference in a unique or exciting location, consider using an image of that location as a compelling backdrop. In this case, The Martech Summit used an image of Singapore to remind website visitors of the other benefit they’ll get if traveling from another location for the conference — a trip to a vibrant city. Plus, the attendee count helps persuade hesitant buyers who likely don’t want to feel like they’re missing out.

13. React Day New York 

First off — who doesn’t love hot dogs?

This React Day page does a great job using humor to stand out. Not only is there a big illustration of a hot dog — which hooked me immediately — but there are multiple mentions of hot dogs, including below Buy Tickets (“Psst: There will be hot dogs”), and used in response to “Why” to the right of the page.

Consider how you might use humor on your own conference homepage to surprise and delight new audiences. 

14. INBOUND 2021 

Okay, okay — I might be biased, but hear me out.

This INBOUND page demonstrates the speakers from INBOUND 2020 to excite and impress visitors with the possibilities of similar popular speakers in 2021. This is a good idea if your conference has pulled in some big names in conferences’ past, to give visitors a sense for what they can expect at an upcoming conference if you haven’t officially released upcoming speakers.

The top of the page also effectively outlines all necessary information, including sponsorship opportunities and a prominent “Purchase Tickets” CTA.  

15. ProductCon 

One element that made this #ProductCon page, a conference held by the Product School, stand out to me was the easy-to-find “Get Free Ticket” box, which is front-and-center for new visitors. Particularly if your conference is online and free — which creates minimal barriers to entry — it’s a good idea to make it easy for prospects to sign up instantly.

16. IBM’s Think 

One of the cleaner, sleeker designs in this list, IBM’s Think page employs a bright blue background and minimal text to simplify the user experience. You’ll find everything you need to know at the top of the page — including the topic of the conference, dates, and how to register.

Consider how you might use similarly powerful and concise language to tell new visitors what your conference is all about.

17. AdWorld Conference

If you’re going to have some impressive companies in attendance at your event — including Google, Facebook, and IBM — it’s a good idea to showcase them on your conference’s homepage, like AdWorld does in the example above. Plus, what really stands out about this example is the small videos of various speakers that move across the page, creating a dynamic and unique experience.

18. Growth Marketing Summit 2021

One element I appreciated about this page was the clear, “No Risk. Order Can Be Cancelled Free of Charge…” text right below the CTA, which helps dissuade any visitors’ concerns over being unable to attend and losing money. The page effectively leverages bright colors and a futuristic-looking heart to grab visitors’ attention from the get-go.

19. NPR’s How I Built This Summit 2021

NPR begins its How I Built This Summit conference webpage with one large, compelling statement: “Bold Ideas Need Company.” The bright yellow page is simple and retro-looking, particularly with the cartoon lightning bolts in the corner.

Additionally, NPR displays an original hashtag for the conference, #buildwithus, so hestitant buyers can search for the conference on social platforms, and hear reviews, before purchasing tickets.

20. From Business to Buttons

This theme, which reminded me a little bit of a carnival ride, uses bright colors and an unusual typography to stand out. The page is fun and unique, and has a clean navigation menu at the top to help visitors find exactly what they’re looking for.

21. Red Hat Summit

We round out this list with an incredibly simple yet sleek page from Red Hat Summit, which says only “Open Your Perspective” above-the-fold. The use of white space and minimal design elements helps to highlight this one phrase, which piqued my interest in the conference. Plus, the “Register” button is clear and easy-to-find.

Conference Website Templates

Ready to create your own?

Fortunately, there are plenty of templates available to help you craft a compelling conference website.

1. WordPress Conference Templates

If your website is hosted on WordPress, for instance, you can use one of WordPress’s themes to create an inspiring, sleek, professional website to attract and convert event attendees.

Best of all, you can start with a pre-designed theme, and then use WordPress’s easy website builder to add unique features to make your conference stand out. WordPress offers a free version, and the Business plan is $25/month.  

Take a look at 21 Best Conference WordPress Themes of 2021 for more WordPress theme inspiration.

2. Wix Conference Templates 

Another great option is Wix, which has a large compilation of clean, interactive conferences and meetups website templates. Wix has a free option available, and the Professional version is relatively inexpensive at just $23/month.  

You can also edit your site for mobile, ensuring your mobile site visitors will want to attend your conference just as much as your desktop visitors.

3. Canva Conference Templates

Finally, take a look at Canva’s conference and event program templates. Canva is incredibly easy-to-use, with drag-and-drop features, color schemes, and high-quality stock photos, illustrations, and graphics.

Best of all, if you’re designing with your team, you can easily share your editable file from Canva and then place your colleagues’ suggestions right into Canva.

And there you have it! Now you’re ready to begin creating your own conference website to attract visitors and increase attendees to your own branded event. Who knows — maybe your company will make it on this list in the future. Good luck! 

Link building is an invaluable part of SEO. In fact, it’s one of the top factors search engines look at when determining your ranking.

Whether you’re developing a new link-building strategy or revising a current one, it’s important to look at where you currently stand. That’s where a backlink strategy comes into play.

Let’s cover what a backlink analysis looks like and the tools needed to conduct one.

Backlink Analysis

What is backlink analysis?

Backlink analysis is a comprehensive review of a website’s backlinks to analyze the site’s performance and identify issues that could affect its search engine ranking.

Backlink analysis is like the SEO version of going to the doctor for a check-up. You should do it regularly to ensure everything is in order, but you also do it when you notice something is wrong.

Completing this process is one of the best ways to understand your site’s health and understand what factors are contributing to its ranking. Perhaps you’ve noticed a sharp dip in your ranking, or you’re simply not seeing the progress you were expecting.

A backlink analysis will also show you how your website measures up against your competitors. You’ll gain some insight into what strategies your competitors are using and what you could implement in your own process.

Lastly, it’s a chance to identify new growth opportunities that you haven’t yet explored.

1. Choose the sites you want to analyze.

While it’s obvious you’ll be analyzing your own website, you’ll also want to narrow down the competitor sites you want to review.

You may already have a few top of mind, but if you don’t, you’ll want to pick sites that:

• Offer similar products or services.
• Are currently outranking you for your target keywords.

2. Select an auditing tool.

Although you could conduct a manual backlink audit, it’s likely more efficient to use a backlink tool that already has the key features you’re looking for.

There are several backlink checker tools out there, ranging in price and capabilities. You’ll usually find them as a section within an SEO tool, like Majestic and SEMrush.

Need help finding a backlink analysis tool? Find a few suggestions here.

3. Get a quick overview.

Once you select your auditing tool, it’s time to start the analysis.

Enter your domain name into the search bar and look at the results.

You’ll start with a ton of data. To get a quick idea of how your site is performing, focus on these metrics:

• The total number of backlinks: The total number of links pointing to the site. For instance, if website A writes a blog post and hyperlinks to a page on website B, that is a backlink. If this number is very low, it may be the reason why your page isn’t ranking well.
• Referring domains: The total number of websites that are pointing to your site. Website A pointing to website B counts as one referring domain. Sorting these domains by authority can tell you how valuable these pages are to your ranking and give you ideas for outreach later on.
• Top linked pages: The pages on a website that get the most backlinks. This can indicate the type of content that’s best for link building.

Repeat this step with your competitors to set a benchmark and learn where you fall. Depending on the tool you use, you may be able to compare these metrics on the same page without going back and forth.

4. Analyze the details.

Now it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty details and look at metrics that will answer the “why.”

Begin by looking at your anchor texts, the words used to hyperlink your webpage. This is a great way to identify spammy backlinks that could be hurting your ranking.

If you’re not sure how to know if the referral domain is spammy, see if the anchor text relates to the content on your site. If it looks like the junk section of your email and includes crude language, it’s likely spam.

Once you identify these links, you could reach out to the websites to ask to be removed. It’s a long shot but could work in some instances. Disavowing those links is the more realistic option, which is basically telling Google to ignore those backlinks.

Speaking of spam, you’ll also want to look at your country code top-level domain (ccTLD) distribution. ccTLD refers to the last portion of a URL, which designates the country it originates from.

This is another way to identify websites that could be the source of your negative SEO (i.e. malicious practice meant to negatively impact your ranking).

If your website gets a lot of traffic from Haiti, for instance, it wouldn’t be a red flag to see a lot of .ht backlinks. However, if you start to notice links like .cn or another unfamiliar TLD, you may want to look deeper into this.

Next up: broken or lost links. It’s important to identify your broken and lost links as you miss out on “link juice,” the potential to rank higher from a backlink. In addition, it can make your website harder to crawl.

How do you fix it? There are several ways to do so:

• Reach out to the referring domain and ask that it be fixed.
• Redirect the broken page to a new webpage on your website.
• Redirect the broken page to another page on your website with similar content.

5. See what your competitors are doing.

As you dive deeper into your domain, be sure to compare your findings with your competitors.

For instance, look at the referring domains for the website that’s outranking you. If there’s little overlap between your list and theirs, this could give you direction into which domains to aim for.

It’s also helpful to compare your backlink acquisition rate against your competitors. Are they growing at a much faster pace than you? It could highlight another section worth investigating.

Top Backlink Analysis Tools

1. Google Search Console

Image Source

Google Search Console is a free tool to do an initial backlink check. You can see top metrics, like your total links and referring domains.

The downside to this platform is that you cannot compare your site to your competitors. However, it is a good place to start to gain a big-picture view of your site’s performance.

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO tool with extensive features to help companies optimize their websites.

The backlinks checker is easily accessible through the “Site Explorer,” and allows you to quickly export the data for further analysis. You can also access the sections on the left sidebar to explore each backlink feature more in-depth.

Ahrefs is a paid tool with pricing starting at $82/month and up to $832/month for agency-level capabilities. You can also take advantage of their free trial for seven days at $7.

3. SEMrush

SEMrush is another top SEO tool with a backlink tracker available to subscribers.

You can easily compare your report to three competitors at a time and use the graphs for a visual understanding of the data.

To get a peek into how it works, SEMrush allows free users to make 10 requests a day. While you will only get a limited view of the feature, you can get an idea of how the dashboard functions.

For full access, you must obtain a subscription. Pricing starts at $99/month and goes up to $449.

4. Moz

Moz is one of the top backlink tools in the market.

The dashboard makes quick downloads easily accessible to focus on key areas of interest.

The “Spam Score” feature provides some insight into which links may be damaging your SEO efforts and how to reduce them. Another standout feature on the site is the “Discovered and Lost” section which shows you the linking domains you’ve gained and lost within a specific date range.

You can use Moz using a free 30-day trial or subscribe to one of their monthly plans, starting at $79.

Backlink analysis is an essential part of your SEO strategy and will require continuous maintenance. However, Once you know what to look for, it should be a painless process.

Initially launched in the 1990s, webinar caché once relied heavily on live events. In 2020 however, we saw the webinar space pivot towards the on-demand space.

Lower cost per acquisition, ease of automation, and building trusted archives of useful content has proven to be an effective means of moving customers through the sales funnel.

While not as flashy as their live counterparts, evergreen webinars have proven to be the tortoise to live webinar’s hare: slow and steady sees the highest ROI.

Read on to find out our favorite evergreen webinar strategies, platforms, and the features that make all the difference.

When businesses first started producing webinars the focus skewed towards live events. Shiny and new, the promise of a live webinar meant capturing highly engaged leads and collaborating with top talent in the industry.

But live webinars are also a ton of work to produce: weeks of coordination, marketing emails, practice sessions, and script revisions, building slide decks… all for an hour of learning, and a few days of follow-ups.

Tons of information was lost every time a webinar ended because there wasn’t a simple way to re-watch it. Until we got savvy and started recording them.

Hosting your recorded webinars is an excellent, low-cost way to create resources for potential or existing customers about how to get set up with your software, walking through common blockers customers face, or demonstrating new tools and integrations.

There are many different content streams you can explore with automated webinars, including:

1. Training videos: Record your account executive’s run-through of your software and make it work harder by offering it as an on-demand webinar.
2. Lectures and thought leadership: Get the most out of guest-speaker and C-Suite time by offering a thought-leadership section of on-demand webinars in your archive.
3. Tutorials: Make it simple to learn how to use and explore new product integrations or updates with quick, evergreen webinar content.
4. A case study walk through: Make your case studies come to life, and then automate the recording to make your witticisms and insights go the extra mile.

When done well, a library of on-demand webinars can act as an automated sales engine, driving customers through the funnel as they engage with and learn more about your product. It’s a great example of working smarter rather than harder.

Evaluating the Best Evergreen Webinar Software

It’s tempting to outsource your software search to Google. While you might end up with a good product, you may be missing key features that will make your presentations really hum. You may even end up over-investing. The first thing to do? Understand your limits.

A webinar program can be a simple automated recording … or it can be as complicated as producing live television. Understand the complexity of your program by asking yourself the following questions:

1. How many attendees do I expect per session? Most platforms have tiered pricing tied to how many guests can attend a given webinar. If you’re just starting your webinar program, look for an option that will allow you to scale up but doesn’t demand a huge investment right away.
2. What resources are available to me? Training and implementation take time. A lot of time. As you’re researching platforms, consider what kind of support is available. Will you be given a dedicated account manager? How robust is the platform’s resource library? Remember: The best software is the software you actually use.
3. Always take advantage of a free trial … and if you are considering purchasing the product, but need more time, ask for an extension.

The Best Evergreen Webinar Software

On-demand webinars don’t have the same immediate converting power as their live counterparts. Instead, they excel at customer education and establishing brand trust.

Think of your on-demand webinars as a way to educate your existing customer base, and as an ambassador of your company’s willingness to help.

Here are two of the best software for hosting, recording, and delivering evergreen webinars:

1. DEMIO

Demio is a best-of-both-worlds option. While its focus is on producing live webinars, Demio makes it simple to build out your webinar library. We love how Demio:

• Offers automated recordings, which make it easy to record and archive live events into an easily searchable content library.
• Has a “Stay Registered” feature, which allows participants to sign up once for an ongoing series and captures valuable emails for future marketing efforts.
• Boasts an excellent analytics dashboard to give you insight into how your live and on-demand webinars are performing — a great opportunity to let your learnings inform your live and evergreen webinar content.

2. EverWebinar

The OG in evergreen webinar technology, EverWebinar is all about the on-demand life. If you’re looking to set it and … well, not forget it, but not be beholden either, this is the software for you.

• EverWebinar allows users to schedule their webinars to play at set intervals throughout the day, week, or month. This has the double benefit of mimicking the live experience (which does tend to get higher engagement). It also lets your marketing team run tests as to what time of day is best for your audience.
• A list of unique features makes it easy to drive home the “live” illusion and cut back on the stress of managing a big roster of scheduled webinars. Options like “Block dates,” which stop your webinars from playing on specific days, or “Block nighttime viewing,” which keeps your analytics from being skewed by background streaming. “Time-zone auto-detection” makes it easy to globalize your offering with the click of a button.
• A bonus for super-users: if you’re looking for a platform to help you organize your collection of recorded webinars, EverWebinar and WebinarJam are designed to function together. *Insert handshake emoji*

3. WebinarGeek

A great option for a company new to the webinar game, WebinarGeek is a simple software that makes it easy to host and record live webinars and turn them into a library of evergreen, on-demand content.

Along with standard features like customizable waiting rooms and robust analytics, we also love:

• WebinarGeek’s intuitive interface: It’s easy for someone brand new to the webinar world to orient themselves in the WebinarGeek platform.
• The monthly pricing plan, making this option accessible for businesses looking to explore the webinar space without a deep financial commitment.
• The pre-record function makes it simple to test presentations, rehearse with multiple presenters, and explore other features. Pre-recording your webinar also leaves you with a “clean” version to upload as your evergreen content.

Build an evergreen webinar funnel with these top tools.

As we all get more literate in live and on-demand educational content, the need for simple and sleek webinar platforms will continue to grow.

By determining your needs early and taking the time to test various platforms, your team will be ready to educate, inspire, and get a better understanding of your customer base so you can help them make great decisions.

With nine in 10 marketers planning to use YouTube in their 2021 marketing strategy, it’s more important than ever to capture your audience’s attention. One of the best ways to do this is by creating a connection with your viewers through fostering community.

YouTube’s own creator academy says it best: “A loyal community of viewers can help promote your videos to new viewers through their own social networks, and give you instant feedback on what they do and don’t like.”

While building these relationships doesn’t happen overnight, it’s rewarding to see your channel grow.

The community tab is one important way that YouTube helps creators build relationships with their audience. Read on to learn how to get your own YouTube Community Tab, and how to use it to build relationships, increase subscriptions, and boost watch time.

Fans can comment and like or dislike posts, and share them with their friends. And just like that, a functioning community is created.

Community is an important part of our human experience. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the way we participate in our communities has changed.

According to SproutSocial, YouTube has stepped into this position. “Viewers are connecting with YouTube content in a way that helps them feel like they’re living what they’re watching. After a year in a global pandemic, this is a necessary way to help people still feel connected to their passions, hobbies, and normal life activities. “

How to Get a Community Tab on YouTube

To get a Community tab on YouTube, your channel will need to have over 1000 subscribers, and it can take up to one week after passing that number to see the Community tab appear.

Note that if your channel has over 1000 subscribers, but the Community tab option is not yet visible on your channel, you’ll need to enable custom channel layouts to display the tab.

How to make a Community post on YouTube

Once you have access to the Community tab, it’s time to start posting and engaging with your audience. Creating a post is simple and similar to posting on any other social media feed.

To create a Community post:

1. Sign in to YouTube.
2. At the top of the page, select ‘Upload’ and then ‘Create post.’
3. Type a message to create a text post or choose to add a video, poll, gif, or image to the post. You can also mention other channels using the @ symbol followed by the channel name.
4. Click ‘Post.’

Once your post is published, your subscribers will see it in their feed. They may also get a notification that you’ve posted something new.

Where is the YouTube Community Tab?

You can find each creator’s Community tab on their homepage, if they have it enabled.

On desktop, click on a channel name to go to their home page.

From there, click on Community in the middle of the screen. Here, you’ll find all their most recent posts where you can comment and interact with them.

On mobile, you’ll need to use the official YouTube app to see the Community tab, as it won’t show up in the mobile browser. Once you’ve opened YouTube, visit a channel’s home page. You’ll be able to click on the Community tab on the top of their page.

7 Ways to Use the YouTube Community Tab

Engagement is one of the most important YouTube channel analytics. When your audience is more engaged they will watch more videos, share more, and keep coming back. If you use the Community tab to its full potential, you can grow your audience and build a community around your content and brand. Here’s how.

1. Post behind the scenes footage and updates.

While your videos might be carefully produced, scripted, and put together, many viewers crave authenticity from creators. Your Community tab is where you can show more casual updates. Use this format for sneak-peaks or personal updates.

2. Heart ❤️ and respond to comments.

When reviewing your community comments, use a heart ❤️ to show appreciation for a viewer’s comments.

The viewer may get a notification (depending on their settings), and they’ll be able to see that you liked their comment.

Responding to comments starts a conversation, and builds a stronger connection with your viewers. Don’t get too caught up in replying to all of the comments on your channel, but taking the time to heart and respond to a few will show that you’re paying attention.

3. Pin a top comment.

When a comment really tickles your fancy, it’s from a VIP, or just something that you want to promote, you can pin it to the top of the comments. It will be the first thing other viewers see when they check out your community posts.

4. Promote a collaboration video with a fellow creator.

Are you really a YouTuber until you’ve done a collaboration with another creator? Once you’ve uploaded your shared creation, make sure both of you post about it on your Community tab. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your channel and expand your audience.

5. Poll your audience on what type of video they want to see next.

Find out what your audience wants from your channel. Ask them for feedback on your upcoming videos, or poll them about an upcoming competition.

Sportsnet has over 124,000 votes on their latest poll about the 2021 Rocket Richard Trophy.

6. Shoutout to a fan or fellow creator using an @mention.

Mention a fan or another creator to share the love or get more eyes on your videos. Popular channels will often select a fan to shout-out to at the end of their video. The Community tab is another place where you can make these connections.

7. Share ‘members only’ posts.

If you offer Channel Memberships (a paid subscription to your channel where “viewers make monthly payments in exchange for access to exclusive badges, custom emojis, and other perks”), you can choose to create posts that are exclusive to your channel members.

This is a great way to thank them for their support and give them even more opportunities to engage with your channel.

Building a Community on YouTube

One of the things I noticed when trying to find examples for this post is that many creators aren’t using the Community tab to its full potential.

The power of being able to post updates and notify subscribers is huge! You’ve got a captive audience, so make sure to update them regularly, even when you don’t have time to upload a full video.

Stay engaged with what your fans want, and you’ll build a loyal following quickly.

If you visit YouTube on any given day, you’ll be sure to find a recently-published video that’s been viewed millions of times in mere days.

Or how about YouTube Records? There, you’ll find the videos with the most view counts in YouTube history — and the videos that reached one billion views in the shortest amount of time. (Adele’s “Hello” reigns on top, taking only 88 days to reach this mindboggling view count.)

Where do those views come from? What exactly counts as a ‘view’ and what doesn’t? For those who are curious, or if you’re a marketer looking to expand your strategy onto a platform with over 2 billion users, YouTube has the answer.

Admittedly, YouTube hasn’t always been the most obvious choice for marketers. Sure, there are guides and explanations, even statistics on how to crack the YouTube code. Yet there’s still uncertainty about what does and does not count as a view. For a site that’s no stranger to regular changes, what’s the baseline?

More than that, there’s a magic number of views: 300.

Once a video reaches 300 views, YouTube temporarily “freezes” the view count to confirm that those are indeed legitimate plays by real humans. Its system begins to track incoming views, as well as the first 300. It can delete fraudulent views as they’re identified. Once the initial screening process is over, the view counter goes back to normal, but YouTube will continue monitoring for fake views on every video.

Why 300? Numbers below that don’t have the power to crowd the YouTube homepage and throw the website off its algorithm.

So, wait. If there’s no secret formula to what counts as a view, can’t anyone refresh their video to gain views? Not anymore. In the early days of YouTube, monetization wasn’t a thing. It was an assumption that almost every view fit into the original definition: a viewer-intended play of a spam-free video. It didn’t take the platform long to get wise to the fact that creators could cheat the system. This is loosely referred to as an “artificial” view.

Luckily, YouTube has gotten pretty good at spotting artificial views. Some of the signs they look for include:

• Views, reloaded: This is the classic case of a single user constantly refreshing the video to bring those numbers up.
• Viruses: If a video looks like malware — software designed to harm your computer, server, or network — it gets deleted.
• Website autoplay: If the video is set up to autoplay on a website, that doesn’t count as a view.

Software in YouTube’s security system has the ability to detect malware – a computer program that assists in sending spam messages from your computer – and spambots. YouTube automatically deletes them to make the screening process go more smoothly.

Now, let’s go over some questions you may have about YouTube video views.

Do your own views count on YouTube?

Yes, your own views count if you play your own YouTube video — but only if you do it once or twice, not if you constantly refresh the page.

Why does YouTube count my own views?

YouTube’s algorithm sees you just as it sees any other user, so your view will be counted.

Do replays count as views on YouTube?

Yes, but only if the replays seem natural. If you replay a video once, it will count as a view. However, if you constantly refresh the page to artificially up the view count, YouTube will pinpoint this as a spamming practice (see the Views, reloaded definition above).

Are YouTube views unique?

No. YouTube’s views aren’t unique; replays and re-visits are counted in the view count. You can see your number of unique viewers in your YouTube analytics dashboard.

How often does YouTube update view count?

Though YouTube doesn’t publish this information, we know that it updates views approximately every 24 to 48 hours. It does not update views instantly.

Do embedded YouTube videos count?

Yes, embedded YouTube video views count when the video is embedded into the content of the page and a user purposefully clicks on the video to play it. An autoplay embed video may not count. A background video (that is, you placed the YouTube video in the background of your website) will not count.

Do Facebook views count on YouTube?

Yes, Facebook views count on YouTube. They don’t count, however, if you manually download the video from YouTube and upload it to Facebook.

YouTube Guidelines for Videos and Views

If you’re thinking of implementing a YouTube marketing strategy, it’s critical to adhere to YouTube’s guidelines. If you don’t, your videos will be deleted. Viewership has its own set of guidelines and is taken very seriously.

If a video reaches a certain number of views and falls within the guidelines, it’s eligible to make money. YouTube’s account monetization allows a single video to earn thousands of dollars as it creeps into the territory of having millions of views. Accounts that give themselves fake views are, in essence, making money unfairly. YouTube’s policies here aim to make sure every creator works hard on every video they produce.

That said, algorithms change — sometimes at the drop of a hat. For the most updated information on proper video protocol, review YouTube’s guidelines regularly, especially when they announce changes for creators.

Another reason viewership is taken so seriously is users’ ability to find videos they’re interested in. It would be soul-crushing to sift through tons of spam videos in order to get to the one that you want to get to.

All of this talk of algorithms and homepages may seem a little overwhelming, when the main question is actually, “How do I use this stuff to get views?” Don’t worry, as long as you optimize videos for search, you’ll find ways to get people clicking on your content.

It can be a bit tricky to decipher the mechanics of YouTube. But YouTube uses a system that carefully and cleverly monitors viewership so it can deliver the most authentic experience to its creators and users. By counting views before fake views turn into a real problem, YouTube keeps its platform clean from spam.

Count Your YouTube Views to Measure Performance

Knowing how many people view your video is important. You can tell whether your title is compelling, whether your thumbnail is effective, and whether your content is watch-worthy based on views alone. By measuring your YouTube views, you can successfully pivot your strategy to grow your YouTube channel.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.