Whether you’re providing social media management, marketing, or consulting services, the crucial step in winning a client is sending out a business proposal.

A business proposal can help you prove to clients’ that you’re the most well-suited to meet their needs, and help you stand out from the competition.

And, if you’re particularly interested in providing social media-related services, you’ll need to create a social media proposal.

Here, we’ll explore best practices for creating a social media proposal that will enable you to exceed client expectations and expand your portfolio.

But first, let’s zoom out and take a wider look at the social media sales process. There are quite a few stages you have to successfully complete — and things to do right — before even starting your proposal.

Let’s dive into that, now.

A Brief Overview of the Social Media Sales Process

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all sales workflow that you should follow to win a social media job, but most of the times you’ll go through the following stages before closing a sale:

• Prospecting
• Discovery
• Proposal

To ensure that all your prospecting efforts don’t go to waste, it’s super important to get as much information from a discovery stage as possible. One thing to keep in mind – a business proposal is just a presentation of the things you’ve discovered. If you skip this step, you won’t have anything to write about in your proposal.

The discovery session could be a video call or an actual meeting at a hotel lobby as long as you get to chat with the prospect and understand what it is that she really needs.

This task may sound simple at first, but in fact, you may realize the client doesn’t understand why she needs social media services, or across which platform(s) she needs those services distributed. This is where I suggest becoming a psychologist for an hour, and asking the following ‘Why’ questions:

• Why did you choose Facebook over Twitter for your social media activities?
• Why did you stop running Facebook ads?
• Why did you change your LinkedIn posting schedule two months ago?

Clearly, you’ll need to do your homework prior to a discovery session, reviewing and analyzing the client’s social media profiles (as well as their top competitors), and what they’ve done on their social channels so far.

If you can’t get to the root of the problem, you may use the 5 Whys analysis which involves even more ‘Why’ questions. Eventually, if you understand your clients and how they think, you’ll be able to write a proposal that speaks your clients’ language, addresses their needs, and presents the exact solution to their problem. That is the proposal that is very likely to win a client.

The Anatomy of an Effective Social Media Proposal

Next, let’s move onto the actual structure of an effective social media business proposal. You can create a proposal from scratch or simplify your life significantly by using a free social media proposal template that already has the pre-written texts and is broken down into sections.

One way or another, it wouldn’t hurt to get familiar with the must-have social media proposal sections:

1. Introduction. Nailing the proposal introduction is winning half the battle. Remember the discovery session where you should find out the true meaning of what they’re after? Introduction is the place where you will repeat the exact words used by your client to describe their problem. No matter how tempting it may be, this is not a place to speak about your company and its history or mission. Introduction isn’t about you — it’s about your clients’ needs described in their language.

2. Scope of work. A well-written detailed scope of work leaves very little room for future misunderstandings. Here’s where you specify the exact list of activities that are meant to solve the client’s problem. Explain how your service is going to help tackle the issue and outline the scope of work required for that. Speak of the social media goals that you’re going to achieve with your service, and list the social media activities you’re going to be working on. Depending on the social media services you provide, you may want to mention:

• Content creation. Specify what kind of written and visual content you are going to create, how often and how it’s going to be approved by the client.
• Publishing schedule. Let your client know when, where and what time the pre-approved posts will be going live on different social media platforms.
• Launching social media special offers. Let the client know the nature of the special offer you are planning to launch whether it’s going to be a contest, special discount, giveaway or else. Specify the timing, frequency, assets and media budget required.
• Monthly strategy sessions and weekly calls. Plan out the one-to-one calls to review the last month’s activities and plan the month ahead. Let the client know if you are going to sync up every week to make sure you are on track.
• Monthly KPIs and reporting. Depending on the client’s goals, outline how you are going to measure the social media progress and which metrics you’ll use as indicators.

Additionally, don’t forget to speak of the benefits your customer should expect.

As Kinga Odziemek, CEO at social media marketing agency
BrainyBees, says: “Your clients need to understand not only what you will deliver, but also what’s in it for them.”

Odziemek adds, “What does it mean that you will do A, B or C for them? How will this be reflected in their business? What are the benefits? Showing the benefits will encourage potential clients to take the next step more quickly than you might expect.”

For greater clarity, finish up the scope of work with the timeline where you specify the exact steps you are going to take over the first month. This way it’s clear what a client can initially expect from you, and when.

3. Case studies. Prospects want to see what you have accomplished in the past for other clients. It’s the social proof that tells the client you are actually able to achieve the goals. If you haven’t had great social media results in the past, how can a client know you’ll succeed this time? Try to include a case study or two from a client in a similar industry, or with similar issues and goals.

It’s important to note — if your prospect is treating social media as a lead acquisition channel, referring to case studies showcasing how you’ve been able to grow number of followers isn’t helpful for them. Keep it relevant. Another rule of thumb for case studies is keeping the focus on results rather than how hard you worked to achieve them.

4. The pricing. This is a very important part of the proposal. Some of your clients will skip the entire proposal and get straight to the Pricing. What we’ve found after analyzing almost 200K proposals sent with Better Proposals is that putting the title ‘Investment’ on the pricing section (instead of ‘Pricing’) increases your chance for closing a deal. It works as a psychological trick – the client perceives the amount of money as an investment (that they’ll receive back in ROI) rather than dollars to which she needs to bid farewell.

5. Next steps. This proposal section is often neglected. However, I strongly recommend including next steps to your social media proposal so your prospects know what they should do next. Of course, they can always email you asking what’s next, but why not make their life easier? Just put it in simple words, like in this example below.

6. Terms and conditions. Don’t neglect the legal part of your proposal, as this is your only protection in case your relationship with the client becomes impaired. Make sure to secure your agency by specifying what’s going to happen when and who’s responsible for what. If you don’t want to hire a lawyer to do the job, at least use one of the online tools to generate the terms and conditions. I recommend keeping the contract and terms and conditions part of your business proposal. This way they are bind together and you won’t be facing any confusion caused by the wrong expectations of your client.

The How and When of the Social Media Proposal

Now that you’re familiar with the main sections of the business proposal, let’s focus on the best practices for sending your proposal that will get you from “eh, maybe” to “heck yes!”

Proposal Format: The Era of Word and PDF Withers Away

It’s no secret that more and more people consume digital content via mobile devices these days. Business proposals are no exception. In fact, our analysis of 200K+ proposals showed that 34% of proposals are opened on mobile.

Now, think about it — if you opened a Word proposal on your mobile and you need to endlessly scroll left and right to read it, would you even read it to the end? I wouldn’t.

You want to make an impression that your social media squad is full of tech savvy people always on the top of their game. This can’t be achieved with a non-responsive business proposal. If you’d like to create a pleasant responsive experience for your prospect, present a proposal as part of your website (given that your website is responsive, of course). The easiest way is to make use of a proposal software that lets you do this.

The Best Time to Send a Proposal

Unlike social media statistics where there are recommended times and days for posting on different platforms, we haven’t discovered a pattern for sending out business proposals.

There’s a slight 0.9% increase in conversion for proposals sent on Monday, which is not significant enough to create any sort of best practices around it. However, sending proposals within 24 hours, compared to 3-4 days after the meeting, increases your chances to hear a yes by 14%.

Additionally, our analysis demonstrated printing a proposal lowers your chance for a conversion by a whopping 78%. Therefore, the best advice I can give is avoid anything printed at all costs.

Luckily, it’s 2020 and electronic signature software tools like DocuSign or DocuSign alternatives are on the rise, which saves everyone a great deal of time signing a proposal.

Moreover, with payment system integrations, bringing your prospects right to the payment page is a breeze. The hassle-free proposal experience of 2020 cuts down the unnecessary steps of printing, scanning, emailing, calling, invoicing and leaves the essentials: sending an effective proposal and winning new clients as a result.

Just like any other proposal, a social media proposal requires some effort from your side starting with a thorough and well-prepared discovery session, asking the right questions and going down to the root of the problem. Once you have that in place, the rest is fairly easy. The actual proposal writing boils down to a set of proposal best practices as well as technical hacks to make a great impression, prove that you are the best for a job and prevent your clients from jumping the hoops.

When I sit down to write a blog post, I stick to a routine that has some flexibility.

The way I write changes from time to time, but two things never change: who I’m writing for, and how to deliver the best experience.

When you sit down to write, what are some of the questions you ask yourself? Are you keeping your audience in mind?

For example, if you are writing for enterprise audiences, how are you framing that content to achieve your goals? If you’re writing for the professional who is part of a large organization, how does your blog cater to their needs?

Though an enterprise audience is a smaller number of people to reach, blogging for those customers can be a huge driver for ROI and acquisition.

Many marketers agree — blogging is an important part of their content strategy.

Blogging does way more than populate your website with content. Did you know that B2B marketers obtain over 70% of their leads from blogging? Or that businesses that prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to see a positive ROI?

When you blog for customers, you’re not only providing useful content. Properly optimized posts lead to an increase in brand awareness and conversions.

Enterprise customers have their own set of unique needs and challenges, separate from customers in a startup. Your blog can assist with these needs, like how to manage a positive scale within a company.

However, a successful enterprise blog stems from having a successful strategy. Implementing a process for writing makes your content stick to business goals.

1. Come up with the purpose of your enterprise blog.

The good foundation of any strategy is to define the purpose of your goal. So, think about why your blog is going to exist. Are you aiming to build brand awareness and increase conversions?

Content that serves a purpose is easier to write because it has a focus. For instance, if the reason for starting your blog is to increase the number of enterprise leads you earn, all of your content should support this goal.

Having a clear purpose will also help you fill in some of the blanks for the rest of your blogging strategy, like distribution and topic research. To get started defining your blog’s purpose, think about the goals of your company and identify how your blog can contribute.

For instance, if one of your goals is to bridge the gap between the awareness and delight stages for leads, think about how you can create content that gets customers thinking about the value of your company on a deeper level. Blog posts can be highly engaging vehicles to entertain and inform the reader, and with the addition of widgets like calls-to-action, offer your customers more ways to familiarize themselves with your company.

Once you identify the purpose of your blog, you can finalize a goal that will allow you to create content that reaches them.

2. Determine your persona.

Your business already has a buyer persona — a fictionalized idea of the perfect customer. Keep that customer in mind when you’re writing. If it’s appropriate, you might want to come up with an entirely different persona, one that’s solely based around your enterprise audience.

If you’re creating a persona from scratch, ask yourself what your enterprise customer will find the most useful about your blog. What stage in the buyer’s journey do you want to target with your content, and how will a blog help you get there?

When you have a persona to reference for your blog content, you’ll have an idea of how to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and focus on writing that’s going to serve them the best.

For example, let’s say you create a persona called “Enterprise Ernie.” When you created Ernie, you identified challenges and pain points that keep him from doing his job better, like roadblocks that come up from being a marketing team manager for an enterprise.

When you create content, then, you can focus on how to help Ernie be a more effective marketing team manager. You’ll brainstorm topics that solve those challenges and offer resources to reinforce that message.

3. Conduct keyword research.

Optimizing your blog for SEO shouldn’t be the extent of how you’re using SEO for your blog. SEO can help inform better business decisions, including better blog topic development. This happens through keyword research.

Keyword research is an SEO tactic that identifies possible words and phrases on the minds of your target audience. This is done by referencing the search queries your customers type in on Google. At HubSpot, keyword research informs the topics we write about each quarter.

Use this process, with a tool like Ahrefs, to understand what to write about to better serve your customers. If, by performing keyword research, you find the phrase, “customizable chatbots” a common trend among audiences. You’ll be solving questions that are common among your audience.

That way, when people in your audience use keywords in Google, your content has a high chance of ranking highly and driving traffic.

4. Think about possible topics.

After conducting keyword research, you’ll have an understanding of what enterprise customers want to read. Come up with a log of topics your keywords will fall under, such as “Marketing Automation,” “Marketing and Sales Alignment,” and “Product Launches.”

This does two things: First, it’ll help you organize blog ideas, and second, it’ll keep your content diverse. Diverse articles solve for your customer at every stage of the buyer’s journey. When you have your topics down, you can refer back to your list if you think of more or need more ideas.

5. Determine how to structure your posts.

Keep the structure of your posts consistent. This aids your writing process and keeps the look of your blog aligned. An effective post format guides readers through your content.

Use the tools available with your blog software to come up with a structure that fits your needs. When I first started blogging, I completely disregarded the use of headers and bulleted lists — for organizational purposes, I do not recommend this.

Headers separate the large portions of text in your articles. For instance, this section’s snippet, How to Create an Enterprise Blogging Strategy,” tells the audience what this section is about. The H3s in this section, like “Determine how to structure your posts,” indicate that I will give an explanation about format.

Even if your structure comes down to “Use at least one H2 and blockquote in every post,” having rules for how you guide your post will keep you and your readers on the same page. They’ll know what to expect.

6. Outline content to stay focused.

Outlines feel like they box in creative freedom sometimes. But when you’re a busy professional and need to structure your time, outlines are a gift.

Organizing your ideas into an outline gives you a vision of what you’re going to write. Once you pick a topic, like “Chatbot software tools,” start jotting down how the post would look. If you decide to write a listicle with 10 software tool options, list them out in your outline and begin to structure your piece using the rules you decided on earlier.

A full outline with short sentences about my introduction, the body of the post, and what to highlight in the conclusion are a huge asset for keeping ideas in order. Plus, if you don’t like planning out everything, don’t — outlines are for your benefit.

7. Write and edit your post.

Now, you’re ready to write. Get those fingers moving, and don’t forget to have some fun. Writing doesn’t have to be a pain. If you know what you’re writing about and how to write it, the rest will come.

You might have to conduct some extra research to beef up your points, so allow for that time and cite your sources. If you’re having trouble making the sentences flow, know that it takes time to really refine a technique. In the meantime, tools like Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and ZenPen proof your writing and add suggestions for making the content better.

Even if you have tools installed, edit your post when you finish writing. Check for spelling mistakes and read for flow. If you’re nervous about being a “good editor,” don’t worry. Here are some resources for you to help the process:

• How to Become a (Better) Editor: 13 Editorial Tips
• 10 Simple Edits That’ll Instantly Improve Any Piece of Writing

8. Optimize your page with On-Page SEO.

You’re almost done. This step can’t be forgotten if you want that positive ROI. On-Page SEO raises the chance of search engines choosing your articles to populate search engine results pages (SERPs). Let’s talk about what you should do to optimize your page:

• Choose a featured Image — Featured images with an alternate text description tell Google what your image is communicating to the reader. Write a sentence that includes your keywords, like, “This is a marketer choosing chatbot software tools.”
• Include tags — Tags are keywords that describe a post. For a chatbot software listicle, tags would be something like “Marketing software,” “Software tools,” “chatbots,” etc. Notate in your CMSe what the tags are for each post — all this information informs search engines about the content of your page.
• Compose a relevant title — The title of your post is the first thing many readers (including search engines) see. Even though it’s tempting to make the title something witty, make sure you are including keywords, so you can land on the right SERPs and clearly signal to your readers that you have the content they’re looking for.

Here’s a refresher on blog SEO. Once you’ve covered all your bases, you’re ready to post.

9. Decide how and where to promote your blog.

Part of your strategy should include a promotion plan. This, along with on-page SEO, is how you ensure that your content is seen by the right people. You might have the same promotion idea for every post across the board to streamline this process, or have a different idea for different posts.

For example, HubSpot’s socials do both. Sometimes, similar messages are posted on different channels to reach larger audience segments, but other times, messages are specifically tailored for each platform.

Whichever method you choose to promote your blog, make sure you’re doing so effectively. This means choosing a platform your customers frequent. It would be pretty hard to share posts meant for enterprise customers on a channel with few prospects.

Analyze the web behavior of your audience to get an idea of where they spend their time online. This can be done by looking at the demographics of web users and social channels, then comparing results to get a full understanding.

For example, 30 million companies are on LinkedIn — if your blog’s purpose is to increase brand awareness among other businesses, promoting your content on LinkedIn is a good place to start.

10. Repurpose and update old, applicable content.

Maybe you have a backlog of old content on your blog. Or maybe you have a bunch of outdated content in general. Before you delete this content from your archive, think about how it can be repurposed to serve your blog at its current state.

For example, if you have a post about how to navigate Twitter for Business written in 2017, consider updating it. Instead of rewriting the whole article, this time-saving method is more efficient.

Look for content that can still be helpful to your audience and align with your current purpose and business goals. That post from 2017 about adaptive testing is great for an enterprise audience, while a post about beginning a startup should either be deleted or rewritten to serve your customers.

Alright, we’ve defined a strategy for making your enterprise blog process smooth. To identify the tools that will make your posting process a seamless one, keep reading.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot’s blogging tool is a stand-alone feature and part of Marketing Hub Enterprise and Marketing Hub Professional. These are software designed to assist businesses where they are to drive growth efficiently and effectively.

Blogging Software’s features boast a fully integrated platform for stunning, professional content. The clean, sleek look that enterprise customers are looking for will be achieved through the tools in HubSpot’s system. Nearly every essential for managing a blog is present, from embedded multimedia tools, to easy formatting options, and analytics.

With on-page SEO suggestions (shown above) you’ll drive traffic to your blog and be able to analyze potential improvements. HubSpot’s system doesn’t suggest a post should be pushed live unless SEO-based steps are completed, like adding a featured image. That way, in case you forget a step, you’ll have a reminder.

Enterprise customers can enjoy a blog that fits in seamlessly with the rest of your website’s layout, supports an interactive experience, and includes easy navigation.

2. WordPress

WordPress is one of the most widely-used content management systems. It’s a platform that offers website creation software. WordPress offers tools that are essential for running a blog — like formatting options, layout editing, and templates.

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A standout feature of WordPress is its widget hosting. You can implement a ton of widgets into your blog to personalize the experience for enterprise readers. For example, you can add a page scrolling widget to give your blog layout an infinite scrolling setup.

If you upgrade a WordPress account to one of their paid plans, you get access to a suite of on-page SEO tools to help drive traffic and growth. The ecommerce plan gives you the option to host an online store from a WordPress website.

3. Ghost

If you’re looking for an open-source, Node.js blogging platform, Ghost might be your winner. This service allows entrepreneurs, developers, and publishers to build and grow a fully-functional, easy-to-use blog from scratch.

Ghost offers content management, a text editor, SEO features, and email newsletters to support the success of your enterprise blog. You can use the software to insert paid memberships on your blog with no transaction fees — so everything you earn, you keep.

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If you’re looking for a CMS that’s popular on GitHub and can be customized to your needs, Ghost is a great option. If your focus is to drive sales with a membership service, Ghost offers the software you need to bring that vision to fruition.

4. Blogger

Blogger allows users to create, monetize, manage, and archive a fleshed out blog, all under a free domain. If you’re a small business owner, Blogger can be a great choice to get your feet wet with running a blog.

Expansive features Blogger offers, such as layout templates, flexible editors, and multimedia support, are tools for creating attractive content for enterprise audiences.

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Blogger is also an integratable platform. For example, you can connect your account with Google Analytics so you can target your audience and get insight into post performance. Blogger itself offers analytics as well, so you’ll be able to compare those reports to inform your strategy.

An enterprise blog solves for the needs of customers at a different level of an organization. You’ll be able to raise traffic and conversions while offering valuable information to your readers. When you think about how you can reframe your blog, really keep your purpose and target in mind — that way, you’ll make informed decisions about where to take your channel.

With some 1.7 billion websites worldwide, it’s fair to say the web of 2020 is a cluttered place.

Plus, there are over 2 million new blog posts published daily. To help stand out from the crowd, it’s vital publishers create compelling and engaging content.

But how do you go about creating attractive, engaging, and memorable content? The key is to make it visually appealing. The human brain processes visual content 60,000 times faster than text.

That’s a huge disparity and goes a long way to explaining why images and videos are so key to driving engagement on social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Simply put, visual elements are key for driving traffic and engagement across your sites and social channels.

With all that said, what are the key visual elements you should be mindful of including in your content? Where do the opportunities lie and how can you engage your audience in the most meaningful ways?

Fortunately, my team at Ever Increasing Circles has created the following infographic to explore key visual elements you should be mindful of including in your content — as well as where opportunities lie, and how you might engage your audience in more meaningful ways. Check it out, below.

 

Every week, I use LinkedIn to talk about current events and connect with other content creators.

And I’m not the only one. In fact, LinkedIn has had nearly 700 million active users in 2020 and has become one of the top social media platforms.

In the last year, companies have started to use the social network’s new live-streaming technology.

While Facebook and Instagram launched live streaming features in 2016, LinkedIn just recently decided to join the live streaming platforms.

In February 2019, LinkedIn Live was launched to individual users. This year, it was announced that LinkedIn Live would also become available to business pages.

With this announcement, LinkedIn decided “to bring you a tighter integration between LinkedIn Events and LinkedIn Live, by turning these two products into a new virtual events solution that enables you to stay connected to your communities and meet your customers wherever they are.”

Live streaming continues to gain popularity among audiences. In fact, in 2019, internet users watched 1.1 billion hours of live video.

Additionally, according to Go-Globe, by the end of 2020, live streaming is expected to account for 82% of all internet traffic.

Plus, LinkedIn Live streams have increased by 158% since February 2020.

Although LinkedIn Live isn’t available to all businesses right now, it might be time to start thinking about live streaming.

To get started with LinkedIn Live, you can complete an application online to become a Live broadcaster.

In this post, let’s review how you can leverage LinkedIn Live in your marketing strategy to attract new audiences.

1. Virtual Events

With the recent integration of LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events, the social media platform is a great place to host your virtual events.

LinkedIn virtual events allow you to meet your audience where they are and host your event in a trusted environment.

Additionally, hosting a virtual event on LinkedIn Live will help you attract the right professional audience.

You can share your events with your business page followers, plus you can send event invitations to your first-degree profile connections.

Instead of taking videos during your virtual conference and posting them on LinkedIn later, LinkedIn Live allows you to connect with your audience in real-time.

According to LinkedIn, LinkedIn Live is seeing 23 times more comments per host and six times more reactions per post than native video.

With LinkedIn Live, you can engage and connect with your followers in real-time during your virtual events.

2. Recruiting

LinkedIn is one of the main hubs for recruiters and job-seekers alike. In fact, recruiting is one of the top benefits of having a LinkedIn profile for individuals and brands.

With LinkedIn Live, you can support your recruiting efforts by showing off your workplace culture, introducing team members, and answering questions from your audience.

Additionally, you can host a live panel with employees on what it’s like to work for your company. Team members can discuss what their hiring journey looked like and give tips to people who want to work for your company one day.

You can also host a Q&A with different people on your team to highlight their specific roles. For example, you can have them introduce themselves and their role, and then take questions about their day-to-day tasks and duties.

If you want to use LinkedIn Live to support your recruiting efforts, think about other social media tactics you’ve implemented, and then strategize how those can convert into a live stream.

3. Thought Leadership

One of the central LinkedIn strategies for most companies is to use the social media platform to position yourself as an industry leader.

To do this with LinkedIn, you can discuss current events in your industry and boost your content creation strategy.

Using LinkedIn Live, you can host a panel for industry thought leaders, including those at your company, to talk about industry trends and issues.

Additionally, you can host a live stream dedicated to interviewing industry professionals and experts.

Amplifying thought leaders and participating in industry discussions is a great way to use LinkedIn Live to attract new audiences.

4. Showcase Expertise

Not to be redundant, but becoming an authority in your industry is an important part of your marketing strategy.

LinkedIn Live presents an excellent opportunity to showcase your expertise.

Using live streaming technology, you can share your tips and tricks with your audience. To do this, brainstorm how-to topics that your audience is interested in.

If you’re struggling to come up with ideas, consider repurposing old content like blog posts or YouTube videos.

Producing live streaming content will help you boost your content marketing strategy.

5. Announce a New Product or Partnership

As a professional social media platform, LinkedIn is a great place to announce a new product or partnership.

In fact, you might consider doing this on LinkedIn Live. You can bring on representatives from your company and partner company to discuss what the new partnership entails.

This is also a great opportunity to educate and interact with your audience.

By launching a product during a live stream, you can get immediate feedback from your audience, answer questions, and conduct a live demonstration.

The announcement of LinkedIn Live proves that live streaming will continue to be an important tactic in your marketing strategy. In fact, this feature shows that consumers are interested in interacting with brands in real-time.

If you’ve already used Facebook and Instagram Live, LinkedIn Live might be another platform to use and experiment with — especially if your audience is more likely to be on LinkedIn than other platforms.

To learn more about how real brands are using LinkedIn Live, check out this blog post on LinkedIn Live examples.

I don’t know about you, but I miss taking classes. I miss taking notes, studying, and most of all, learning a ton of new skills.

That’s not to say I don’t learn a lot on the job here at HubSpot — because I absolutely do. But sometimes, there’s nothing quite like listening to a lecture, taking notes, and doing homework.

Given the frequency at which new technologies and software are developed, it can be overwhelming to try to keep up your knowledge by only reading blog posts and ebooks. That’s where self-paced online learning comes in.

I’ve taken a few awesome courses and certifications through HubSpot Academy, including an inbound marketing certification and a content marketing certification. These classes helped me be better at my job, so I started making a list of other classes I could take to learn more skills. When I finished the list, I realized that you, dear readers, might have similar skill gaps, so I wanted to share it in a blog post.

Below is a long list of free online courses you can take to beef up your skill set. These offerings vary in time commitment, but many are self-paced so you can work on your own schedule. The topics these courses cover include:

1. Content Marketing
2. Social Media Marketing
3. SEO Marketing
4. Email Marketing
5. Other Digital Marketing Courses

Want to learn more about brands and organizations that offer the courses on the list below? Scroll to the end of this post, or click here, to jump to a section on where to find affordable online marketing courses.

Content Marketing Courses

1. HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification – HubSpot Academy

2. HubSpot Content Marketing Certification – HubSpot Academy

3. Internet Marketing for Smart People – Copyblogger

4. Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content – Coursera

5. The Strategy of Content Marketing – Coursera

6. Copywriting Blunders – Udemy

7. Content Marketing for B2B Enterprises – Udemy

8. Content Marketing – Udemy

Social Media Marketing Courses

9. Free Social Media Certification – HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy’s free online Social Media Certification offers eight lessons — from developing a social media strategy, to social media listening and moderating, to content strategy, digital advertising, and crisis communications. You’ll learn how to build an inbound social media strategy that delights your customers and grows your bottom line.

10. Developing an End-to-End Instagram Marketing Strategy For Your Business – HubSpot Academy

11. Strategic Social Media Marketing – edX

12. Diploma in Social Media Marketing – ALISON

13. Facebook Blueprint – Facebook

14. Social Media Analytics – Quintly

15. Social Media Week of Webinars – Buffer

SEO Marketing Courses

16. SEO Training Course – HubSpot Academy

17. Google Digital Marketing Course – Google

18. SEO Training Course by Moz – Udemy

19. Advanced SEO: Tactics and Strategy – Udemy

20. SEO – QuickSprout

Email Marketing

21. HubSpot Email Marketing Certification – HubSpot Academy

22. Email Marketing – QuickSprout

Web Development and Site Design

23. Make a Website – CodeAcademy

24. Learn Javascript – CodeAcademy

25. Learn Ruby – CodeAcademy

26. Learn Python – CodeAcademy

27. Learn HTML & CSS – CodeAcademy

28. Learn to Code Awesome Websites – General Assembly

Other Digital Marketing Courses

29. What Digital Advertising Is and How to Do It – HubSpot Academy

30. Paid Advertising – QuickSprout

31. Wordstream PPC University

32. Creativity – Canva

33. Photoshop 2020: One-on-One Fundamentals – LinkedIn Learning

34. InDesign 2020: Essential Training – LinkedIn Learning

Where to Find Free or Affordable Courses

HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy offers certification and training courses to teach people how inbound marketing and HubSpot software work. Classes are often taught by marketers at HubSpot and are made up of video lessons, quizzes, and tests. Most HubSpot Academy classes are available free of charge, and if you pass the certifications, such as the two below, you get a nifty certificate and badge to share on your social media profiles. Check out mine on LinkedIn:

Copyblogger

Copyblogger is a content marketing company that creates content about content (so meta). Its blog provides a ton of great resources about digital marketing, and this class, “Internet Marketing for Smart People,” is made up of ebooks and emailed lessons and other course materials. Copyblogger espouses four pillars of content marketing success, which it delves into over the course of this class.

Coursera

Coursera offers MOOCs (massive online open courses) created and taught online by universities such as Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California system. These courses start at various times throughout the year, so browse the catalog to see when one lines up with your schedule. Below are a couple courses that are perfect for content marketers — here’s what a module for #4 looks like:

QuickSprout

QuickSprout is Neil Patel’s content and business marketing blog, and QuickSprout University features a ton of helpful videos breaking down and explaining a myriad of concepts and best practices. Each video also includes a transcript in case reading is more your learning style than watching a video. Here’s what one course video looks like:

Udemy

Udemy is another online learning platform that focuses specifically on courses related to skill building for working professionals. One thing to note about Udemy: The classes we’ve highlighted are free, but it offers a myriad of other paid options for as little as $10, in some cases. If you have a good experience with a free course, it could be worth a small investment to deepen your skills, too.

Wordstream

Wordstream is a search engine and social media marketing software company that helps marketers drive the greatest ROI from their paid search and social media campaigns. These free guides and ebooks distill learnings and best practices for users with varying levels of expertise running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. Here are some of its topics and offerings:

edX

edX is another MOOC provider that features courses offered by top-tier universities, including Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University. Like Coursera, classes are taught online and start at specific times throughout the year. Here’s a class we think you’ll find valuable:

ALISON

ALISON offers free online classes in various professional skills users can take at their own pace. In the Diploma in Social Media Marketing course below, students can get into the nitty-gritty and big picture views of different skills of different topics — just check out one of the many modules:

Facebook

At this point, you probably already know what Facebook is and what it does. What you might not know? It has a training and certification program. Facebook Blueprint offers self-paced and live e-learning courses for marketers seeking to grow their organizations using Facebook. Blueprint offers classes in different languages on how to use Facebook and Instagram — here’s a peek at the course catalog.

quintly

quintly is a social media analytics tool that offers courses through quintly Academy. The self-paced course provides an overview of social media analytics, benchmarking, and goaling using downloadable written materials and video lessons.

Buffer

Buffer’s Social Media Week of Webinars isn’t exactly a course — it’s a series of live webinar recordings on YouTube — but the videos are chock-full of current and valuable information for social media marketers from the experts. Topics include Instagram and Facebook marketing and how to do public relations on social media.

Google

Google is another company you’ve probably heard of before, and its digital marketing course offers a ton of valuable information if you plan to advertise and rank on the search engine. You can even take a Google AdWords certification at the end of the process that helps you beef up your resume (and your Google+ profile).

CodeAcademy

CodeAcademy offers free, interactive coding classes that take you from lesson one to building a fully-functioning website. The courses we’ve highlighted below are just a few of the courses; CodeAcademy offers many more, depending on your organization’s needs. CodeAcademy classes feature lectures and a workspace in the same browser window so you can see the effect of your work live, as it’s created.

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General Assembly

General Assembly offers live and online paid and free courses for a variety of technical skills and disciplines. General Assembly’s Dash offers a free online coding class that teaches the fundamentals of HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript — watch the course overview below:

Canva

Canva helps people easily make beautiful images for web design, and Canva Learn offers design courses that are valuable for any kind of storyteller. The Creativity course explores the challenges of constant creation and innovation and how to do it well — with visuals, of course.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in May 2018, but was updated in June 2020 for comprehensiveness and freshness.

For businesses to grow in today’s climate, marketers must think about their content and strategies on a global scale.

The internet has opened doors to new markets around the world, and yet, without paying proper attention to these new customers’ preferences and culture, marketers can miss out on significant opportunities.

So, how can marketers make sure their content is prepared for when new markets open?

Localized content is the key to catching new customers’ attention and creating a place where they want to spend their time and make their purchases.

With content built around a personalized experience, you can guide new customers through the customer lifecycle, regardless of where in the world they live.

In today’s post, we’ll discuss what localized content is and when to use it.

When we talk about entering new global markets, the first thing that might come to your mind is translating content. After all, it should be as simple as running your content through Google Translate and sending it off to customers on their journeys, right? Not so fast!

Translation is a complex process. While machine translations like Google Translate can churn through low-value content with relative ease, your high-value content deserves a more personalized touch — not only the words we use, but how we use them, matter. Otherwise, we’re holding a conversation without context, and customers won’t be able to build a relationship with you.

While the words matter, other elements of your presence in a new market matter as well. Consider your website: you might be displaying images that make sense to a North American audience. But would a customer in Asia understand the photograph? Could they see themselves as one of your customers?

This kind of thinking must be evident through every bit of your presence. Pictures and colors should match a customer’s cultural expectations. Prices should be shown in their local currency. The brand logos you display should be recognizable in-market. These elements all come together and tell your brand’s story to your customers in both a conscious and subliminal method.

Companies that understand localization are best suited to adapt their content to a customer’s culture, language and mannerisms. While translators are focused on the words of your content, localization also customizes currency, dates, units of measurement — the factors that seem small but add up into a truly welcoming experience for a global customer.

The need for localized content is growing in tandem with the expansion of global markets. The internet serves as the primary medium for reaching these new customers, because of all the internet users in the world, just 7.6% live in North America. For context, more than 50% live in Asia. If your content is only targeting North American buyers, then you’re missing out on most of the world’s internet traffic — and the customers it brings.

Customers are equally discerning about their purchases regardless of where they live. They expect the same personalized brand experience that North American customers would receive. When you localize content, that desire for a personalized experience should guide how you reformat and alter content to suit a new market’s culture and expectations.

You should be conducting research into cultural norms just as you would for any other part of your product or selling process. Did you know orange has a specific religious connotation in Northern Ireland? Or when you translate text from English to Finnish, the size of your content could expand up to 60%? Your global customers will expect you to not only know about these minute differences but also create content that capitalizes on it. They want to be impressed just like their English-speaking counterparts.

It falls upon marketers to create content that gives potential customers everything they need to make purchasing decisions. With an attentive eye toward researching a new culture, you can set up your brand to create memorable experiences with customers and build brand loyalty.

Localize Content for the Customer Lifecycle

To build brand loyalty, you will of course need a hefty amount of content ready to localize to different markets. Depending on how much content you need, the amount of localization to do can grow very quickly. For example, if you have three buyer personas you plan to target with content, and you’re localizing content for five languages, you’re spending time and resources to prepare one piece of content in fifteen different ways.

Take that example and expand it to websites and other content media you’re using, and that number likely grows even higher. When you’re beginning to localize content, it pays to be smart about which pieces you localize first. Like your native language-based content, you know certain pieces perform much better than others, or provide a high amount of value to customers.

When you enter into a new market, consider that customers are going to follow the customer lifecycle model: discovery, education, purchase, post-purchase engagement and advocacy. Just like how you would guide a customer through the lifecycle in your native language, your global customers will also buy this way and expect a similar path to follow.

Since you’re producing content for each stage in the lifecycle already, that content is likely high-value content primed for localization.

Let’s review the content that will need localization in each stage of the customer lifecycle.

Discovery

Customers are beginning to be made aware of your company and the products you offer. At this stage, your content is focused on creating brand awareness, with social media ads or introductions to your product offerings. Ensure content like product descriptions are translated properly and include the context of your new market. Many cultures find video content from brands to be appealing, so think about localizing video content with not only subtitles but also local imagery or showcasing products they would know.

Education

Customers have been doing their research and want to know more about your brand and your products. For your native-language content, you likely have a knowledge base with articles or FAQs sharing more about your product offerings or presenting thought leadership. While much of the content in FAQs is repetitive and can be assisted mainly by machine translation, human translators can provide context for your written content. The human touch for localizing high-traffic blog posts can better educate customers in-language.

Purchase

When your customer is ready to make their purchases, they should be given a seamless process that makes it easy to buy in-language. The seemingly small factors like using the payment platform that is most popular in that country can make a major difference in a customer completing a transaction.

Post-Purchase Engagement

Once your customer completes their purchase, you want to keep them engaged so they return and buy more at a later date. Content such as a thank you email or follow-up emails with content about new products should be localized in their language. Customer support is also a critical component of retaining customers, and both the self-service content of a knowledge base and interactions with customer support staff should reflect the needs of individual cultures.

Advocacy

Customers happy with your products will want to share their experiences. Their recommendations, ratings and reviews should all be in-language and include relevant context that will engage other customers in that market. Incorporating user feedback like reviews into your webpage, for example, should be a localized process. Reviews from in-country customers written in their native language will have a more effective impact on attracting other customers.

What is perhaps most critical is that every touchpoint you have with your customers should be in-language. Regardless of location, each of your customers should have a seamless experience within their own language. If your customers start jumping between languages during the customer lifecycle, they will seek out a competitor who can fulfill a seamless process.

As you’re translating your content as part of the localization process, human translators can help smooth over those potential jarring points and ensure an excellent experience for your customers. Whilst machine translation can process much of the bulk of your content, your human translators will find the gaps in context and fill in the nuances a global customer would otherwise notice.

People buy from people, and your content should already be written that way. Human translators help ensure that’s the case and provide extra creativity and cultural knowledge to accomplish that within your content. This process of “transcreation” actualizes the concept of localization by sharing the same message you would in other markets, but tailoring the content to fit in-language. With transcreation, you can breathe new life into your content and ensure it has the creativity and cultural knowledge needed to resonate with your new audiences.

When to Localize Content

Your content is an important part of your first impressions in a new market. Your potential customers will expect an in-language experience from the first day, and you should be prepared to offer it and be ready to adapt to changes in the marketplace and culture as they arise.

So when it comes to when you should localize content, you should be thinking about it from the very start. When you’re planning your website, for example, consider how you could templatize webpages to make the localization process easier for each new market. Each type of content can also be templatized in some fashion to simplify the process. When you produce a video, create a time-coded script to go along with it. When you need to translate the text for subtitles, you’ll have what you need to do it as efficiently as possible.

When your company is preparing to expand into global markets, that is the right time to focus on localizing content. With proper research into your markets’ cultures and content prepared for every stage of the customer lifecycle, you can create those critical in-market first impressions and begin building brand loyalty with new customers around the world.

The tough part is over — your budget’s been approved for the next quarter. But now, another challenge looms how to spend that money.

You might be a little lost about how best to allocate your budget. Consider the resources and tools your team needs to do their jobs well. Additionally, leave a little room for celebrating your team for their wins — both big and small.

So, how do you accurately plan out that perfectly balanced budget?

Whether you have “use-it-or-lose-it” funds left over from the quarter, or are putting together a budget for the first time, here are some guidelines for allocating that money effectively.

1. Test new versions of calls-to-action that are performing poorly.

Estimated cost: $50 per call to action

In your analytics software, sort calls to action by click rate and conversion rate. Then, redesign ones with the lowest performance and test them. One way to do this is by performing an A/B test, which will show you which design your audience prefers.

Perhaps a simple design change is in order to attract more visitors, like choosing a different photo. Or, maybe tweaking the wording can strengthen the connection you make with leads.

This test will be useful in identifying the best ways to further prospects along in their buying journey.

2. Identify improvement opportunities on your homepage.

Estimated cost: $150

Install heat map tracking software, like Hotjar or Crazy Egg, on your homepage. This software will show where people are clicking and how far they are scrolling down the page.

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These tools will help you determine if your audience is finding the content you want them to see the most. You’ll gain a good idea of if you need to restructure your webpages to be more effective.

3. Revise landing page copy.

Estimated cost: $150 per page

There’s always room for improvement on your landing pages. Start with pages that have conversion rates of less than 20% and rework the language to tune it into your target persona’s needs.

If you are unsure which language will resonate with your audience, conduct keyword research and perform A/B tests. Additionally, do a little social listening. These methods will help you understand how to connect with your audience on multiple pages.

4. Find SEO keyword opportunities on your website.

Estimated cost: $250

SEO keywords help you use language that improves rank on search engines and boost acquisition. For instance, if you spot a couple of offers that aren’t performing as well as you’d hoped, research the keywords surrounding that topic and revise your offers accordingly.

Find software that has built-in SEO tools, like HubSpot’s CRM. These tools optimize your content to get found on search engines.

5. Do a social media engagement analysis.

Estimated cost: $250

An analysis of social media messages will reveal which received the most engagement. Find out what worked best for your business. If you find that one or two channels are outperforming others, you can begin to infer how to plan for its use next quarter. Maybe you invest more into successful messages or deactivating underperforming accounts.

Or maybe you’ve found that there’s a huge YouTube audience you’re missing out on. Look at your analysis and decide if YouTube is worth investing in moving forward. Check out this resource for growing a YouTube audience in a little over a year for quick tips.

6. Conduct a usability test.

Estimated cost: $350

A usability test gives real feedback from potential customers. Similar to the results you get from a Net Promoter Score, you’ll figure out what customers are and aren’t liking about your web pages.

Using the results from a usability test, figure out how to revise the content on your website to be more user-friendly. For instance, if you find that your product pages aren’t effective, you can mark this as a place to work on for the next year.

7. Try ad retargeting to boost performance.

Estimated cost: $500

Ad retargeting catches those visitors who almost converted into customers. They bridge that gap so the process is completed. Retargeting ads give you the chance of hooking in a previously interested lead with a new, personalized offer.

Ad retargeting can give your acquisition numbers a boost. Look for ad retargeting options on social networks like Facebook, so you can build and revise ads within the channel.

8. Experiment with social media advertising.

Estimated cost: $500

Social media strategies should be evolving as customer behavior evolves. When you hit a block with planning, mix up your strategy. Try a new channel or a new approach with a network you’re already using

Advertising with social media takes some experimentation. Knowing your audience and conducting social listening gives you an idea of how and where to reach your audience, but knowing which copy, format, and design will be a hit calls for some testing.

9. Invest in employee knowledge.

Estimated cost: $500

Because marketing is an ever-changing industry, investing in learning opportunities makes your team well-equipped to excel in their day-to-day tasks. Training can come in the form of ebooks, blog posts, or webinars.

Additionally, scope out courses online that will give team members a deeper understanding of the industry. For example, HubSpot Academy offers courses about content marketing, social media marketing, and sales, in digestible, interactive lessons. Courses update as needed, so you don’t have to worry about getting a certification for an outdated skillset.

10. Celebrate your success of the past quarter.

Estimated cost: $500

Remember to allocate some funds to celebrate your colleagues and their wins for the quarter. This doesn’t have to be a huge blowout party, but it could be something small, like sending colleagues a care package, that will remind your team their hard work is appreciated.

Come up with superlatives and present them in a year-end meeting. Awards like “Best Movie Buff,” or “Funniest Marketer” build up morale.

11. Perform customer research.

Estimated cost: $500

Customer research is important. You may have done previous customer research at the start of the quarter, but allocate some funds on an ongoing basis to routinely refresh your understanding of customer behavior.

For instance, how are you monitoring the web behavior of your customers? Are you investing in social listening tools? And have you revised your personas to reflect the change in customers?

Invest in tools that will help you accurately perform customer research so you can develop new ideas and strategies for future campaigns.

12. Design an infographic.

Estimated cost: $150

Run an analysis, such as a deep dive into customer demographics on Twitter, and create an infographic to give your results a visual representation. This infographic can be used to provide a bird’s eye insight about a section of your customer base. Additionally, infographics can serve as great material for a blog post.

Check out this infographic about font sizes. On the surface, it sounds like a dull topic. An infographic makes the information more exciting and easier to comprehend.

If you were to write a blog post about social media demographics in the marketing industry, for example, you could use the Twitter infographic to illustrate your findings. You can use a tool like Canva to design your infographic (Plus, it’s a tool that integrates with HubSpot).

13. Optimize your outdated blog posts for conversion.

Estimated cost: $100

Because the life of a blog post can span several months, and because you’ve published new content offers, you may need to revisit old posts and see if there’s a more relevant call to action to improve conversion on your blog.

SEO tools help identify posts that are falling in traffic and can be updated with new information. Keeping an archive of previous blog posts will assist with keeping track of blog performance.

14. Perform a sales analysis.

Estimated cost: $1,000

Finding qualified contacts in your CRM that your company wasn’t able to connect with could close sales that didn’t happen last quarter. With a sales analysis, identify those contacts so you know who exactly to target within the next few months.

Once this is done, come up with ideas to reach out to those customers and connect with them. There are a couple different ways to do this: You can send a personalized email, for example, create a specialized offer just for closing sales, or look into performing an account-based marketing campaign.

15. Invest in a better CRM integration.

Estimated cost: $300

Does your website automatically send leads into your CRM? Can your sales and marketing teams share feedback on leads? Now might be the time to make adjustments to your CRM integration to make it work better for your company.

Look into CRMs that automatically integrate with the programs you use on a daily basis, like HubSpot. This will streamline all the work you need to get done. Collaboration between teams will improve as well as navigation between the inner workings of your job duties.

15 Conduct an SEO audit on your website.

Estimated cost: $500

Re-evaluate your website for SEO opportunities every six months or so. Have your core web pages reviewed to optimize on-page factors, and review web copy for missing keywords.

SEO audits clean up your website, improve the user experience, and boost the chance of web pages being found on search engines. When you improve the SEO language on specific pages, you’re making them easier to be crawled by Google and recommended to searchers.

16. Plan and script a webinar for the next quarter.

Estimated cost: $200

A webinar is a great way to generate new leads. Focus on topics that solve your target persona’s pain points and produce a high-quality webinar. It can be live and saved for later or pre-recorded.

Persona pain points you can focus on are topics you know your audience has questions about, such as sales analytics. For a webinar like this, reach out to a top salesperson at your company and ask them to host. Alternatively, interview them about topics they see as trending.

Once you shoot and edit the webinar, you can promote it via email subscribers and on social media.

17. Localize your website for an international audience.

Estimated cost: $2,000

If you have an international audience or are planning to expand internationally, remember to update your website. A localized website will make the content on it enjoyed by audiences everywhere. Go beyond translating the language and think of what customers in other countries will really love.

For instance, research some topical elements and offers that are popular in different regions — really familiarize yourself with culturally relevant graphics and website formats that are compelling to global audiences.

18. Compile an ebook of relevant information.

Estimated cost: $200

An ebook is another content marketing idea for generating leads. Studies or experiments you’ve conducted over the course of the quarter that provided interesting results could be very valuable for your customers.

Look at ebooks that are impressive and take notes of what’s inspiring about them. Decide on a topic for your ebook and work on formatting it as an offer to subscribers and for social sharing. Additionally, create an offer you can add on a couple of relevant topics to expand the reach of your ebook.

19. Contact industry thought leaders for an interview.

Estimated cost: $500

HubSpot likes to host “HubTalks,” in which different thought leaders are brought in for an interview. This could be a book author, an educator, medical professional, or motivational speaker. These talks are meant to inform or entertain attendees.

Talks like these expand the knowledge of employees and give them opportunities to explore their interests. Have your team vote on possible interviewees or topics so you’re picking the right thought leaders, and ask them to submit questions. This is a great opportunity for team bonding and learning.

It’s tough to make sure you’re spending your budget wisely. When you stop and think about what your team needs, what your audience needs, and what those parties want, however, you can begin to form a pretty good idea of how to plan out those resources.

Once you do a little research, plan your budget accordingly, and get ready to step into a new quarter on a great note.

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

Have you ever tried to bring your clean laundry upstairs by hand, and things keep falling out of the giant blob of clothing you’re carrying? This is a lot like trying to grow organic website traffic.

Your content calendar is loaded with fresh ideas, but with every web page published, an older page drops in search engine ranking.

Getting SEO traffic is hard, but keeping SEO traffic is a whole other ball game. Content tends to “decay” over time due to new content created by competitors, constantly shifting search engine algorithms, or a myriad of other reasons.

You’re struggling to move the whole site forward, but things keep leaking traffic where you’re not paying attention.

Recently, the two of us (Alex Birkett and Braden Becker 👋) developed a way to find this traffic loss automatically, at scale, and before it even happens.

The Problem With Traffic Growth

At HubSpot, we grow our organic traffic by making two trips up from the laundry room instead of one.

The first trip is with new content, targeting new keywords we don’t rank for yet.

The second trip is with updated content, dedicating a portion of our editorial calendar to finding which content is losing the most traffic — and leads — and reinforcing it with new content and SEO-minded maneuvers that better serve certain keywords. It’s a concept we (and many marketers) have come to call “historical optimization.”

But, there’s a problem with this growth strategy.

As our website’s traffic grows, tracking every single page can be an unruly process. Selecting the right pages to update is even tougher.

Last year, we wondered if there was a way to find blog posts whose organic traffic is merely “at risk” of declining, to diversify our update choices and perhaps make traffic more stable as our blog gets bigger.

Restoring Traffic vs. Protecting Traffic

Before we talk about the absurdity of trying to restore traffic we haven’t lost yet, let’s look at the benefits.

When viewing the performance of one page, declining traffic is easy to spot. For most growth-minded marketers, the downward-pointing traffic trendline is hard to ignore, and there’s nothing quite as satisfying as seeing that trend recover.

But all traffic recovery comes at a cost: Because you can’t know where you’re losing traffic until you’ve lost it, the time between the traffic’s decline, and its recovery, is a sacrifice of leads, demos, free users, subscribers, or some similar metric of growth that comes from your most interested visitors.

You can see that visualized in the organic trend graph below, for an individual blog post. Even with traffic saved, you’ve missed out on opportunities to support your sales efforts downstream.

If you had a way to find and protect (or even increase) the page’s traffic before it needs to be restored, you wouldn’t have to make the sacrifice shown in the image above. The question is: how do we do that?

How to Predict Falling Traffic

To our delight, we didn’t need a crystal ball to predict traffic attrition. What we did need, however, was SEO data that suggests we could see traffic go bye-bye for particular blog posts if something were to continue. (We also needed to write a script that could extract this data for the whole website — more on that in a minute.)

High keyword rankings are what generate organic traffic for a website. Not only that, but the lion’s share of traffic goes to websites fortunate enough to rank on the first page. That traffic reward is all the greater for keywords that receive a particularly high number of searches per month.

If a blog post were to slip off Google’s first page, for that high-volume keyword, it’s toast.

Keeping in mind the relationship between keywords, keyword search volume, ranking position, and organic traffic, we knew this was where we’d see the prelude to a traffic loss.

And luckily, the SEO tools at our disposal can show us that ranking slippage over time:

The image above shows a table of keywords for which one single blog post is ranking.

For one of those keywords, this blog post ranks in position 14 (page 1 of Google consists of positions 1-10). The red boxes show that ranking position, as well as the heavy volume of 40,000 monthly searches for this keyword.

Even sadder than this article’s position-14 ranking is how it got there.

As you can see in the teal trendline above, this blog post was once a high-ranking result, but consistently dropped over the next few weeks. The post’s traffic corroborated what we saw — a noticeable dip in organic page views shortly after this post dropped off of page 1 for this keyword.

You can see where this is going … we wanted to detect these ranking drops when they’re on the verge of leaving page 1, and in doing so, restore traffic we were “at risk” of losing. And we wanted to do this automatically, for dozens of blog posts at a time.

The “At Risk” Traffic Tool

The way the At Risk Tool works is actually somewhat simple. We thought of it in three parts:

1. Where do we get our input data?
2. How do we clean it?
3. What are the outputs of that data that allow us to make better decisions when optimizing content?

First, where do we get the data?

1. Keyword Data from SEMRush

What we wanted was keyword research data on a property level. So we want to see all of the keywords that hubspot.com ranks for, particularly blog.hubspot.com, and all associated data that corresponds to those keywords.

Some fields that are valuable to us are our current search engine ranking, our past search engine ranking, the monthly search volume of that keyword, and, potentially, the value (estimated with keyword difficulty, or CPC) of that keyword.

To get this data, we used the SEMrush API (specifically, we use their “Domain Organic Search Keywords” report):

Using R, a popular programming language for statisticians and analytics as well as marketers (specifically, we use the ‘httr’ library to work with APIs), we then pulled the top 10,000 keywords that drive traffic to blog.hubspot.com (as well as our Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese properties). We currently do this once per quarter.

This is a lot of raw data, which is useless by itself. So we have to clean the data and warp it into a format that is useful for us.

Next, how do we actually clean the data and build formulas to give us some answers as to what content to update?

2. Cleaning the Data and Building the Formulas

We do most of the data cleaning in our R script as well. So before our data ever hits another data storage source (whether that be Sheets or a database data table), our data is, for the most part, cleaned and formatted how we want it to.

We do this with a few short lines of code:

What we’re doing in the code above, after pulling 10,000 rows of keyword data, is parsing it from the API so it’s readable and then building it into a data table. We then subtract the current ranking from the past ranking to get the difference in ranking (so if we used to rank in position 4, and we now rank 9, the difference in ranking is -5).

We further filtered so we only surface those with a difference in ranking of negative value (so only keywords that we’ve lost rankings for, not those that we gained or that remained the same).

We then send this cleaned and filtered data table to Google Sheets where we apply tons of custom formulas and conditional formatting.

Finally, we needed to know: what are the outputs and how do we actually make decisions when optimizing content?

3. At Risk Content Tool Outputs: How We Make Decisions

Given the input columns (keyword, current position, historical position, the difference in position, and the monthly search volume), and the formulas above, we compute a categorical variable for an output.

A URL/row can be one of the following:

• “AT RISK”
• “VOLATILE”
• Blank (no value)

Blank outputs, or those rows with no value, mean that we can essentially ignore those URLs for now. They haven’t lost a significant amount of ranking, or they were already on page 2 of Google.

“Volatile” means the page is dropping in rank, but isn’t an old-enough blog post to warrant any action yet. New web pages jump around in rankings all the time as they get older. At a certain point, they generate enough “topic authority” to stay put for a while, generally speaking. For content supporting a product launch, or an otherwise critical marketing campaign, we might give these posts some TLC as they’re still maturing, so it is worth flagging them.

“At Risk” is mainly what we’re after — blog posts that were published more than six months ago, dropped in ranking, and are now ranking between positions 8 and 10 for a high-volume keyword. We see this as the “red zone” for failing content, where it’s fewer than 3 positions away from dropping from page 1 to page 2 of Google.

The spreadsheet formula for these three tags is below — basically a compound IF statement to find page-1 rankings, a negative ranking difference, and the publish date’s distance from the current day.

What We Learned

In short, it works! The tool described above has been a regular, if not frequent addition to our workflow. However, not all predictive updates save traffic right on time. In the example below, we saw a blog post fall off of page 1 after an update was made, then later return to a higher position.

And that’s okay.

We don’t have control over when, and how often, Google decides to recrawl a page and re-rank it.

Of course, you can re-submit the URL to Google and ask them to recrawl (for critical or time-sensitive content, it may be worth this extra step). But the objective is to minimize the amount of time this content underperforms, and stop the bleeding — even if that means leaving the quickness of recovery to chance.

Although you’ll never truly know how many page views, leads, signups, or subscriptions you stand to lose on each page, the precautions you take now will save time you’d otherwise spend trying to pinpoint why your website’s total traffic took a dive last week.

By 2027, the live video market is expected to surpass $184 billion. And brands are taking notice.

By the end of 2018, marketers were using live video as part of their social media strategy. Since then, this number has likely grown as brands continue to use a number of online platforms to stream virtual events, Q&As, and other content that their audiences will value.

Although brands are jumping on the live video bandwagon, you might still wonder if live video is really worth investing in. After all, creating any video costs your company time and money. Additionally, measuring the ROI of a live video can be tricky.

Before you decide to implement live video planning and production into your strategy, you’ll need to learn more about this content’s consumers, how often they watch this content, and which platforms they primarily use to stream it.

Learning about your prospective audience’s live video behaviors will allow you to consider a strategy that offers them valuable content while meeting them on the platforms they’re already on.

To give you insight on how often and where general internet users watch live video, I conducted a survey of more than 400 people using Lucid software. In the survey, I asked two questions: “How often do you watch live videos?” and “Where do you watch live video most often?”

How Often Consumers Watch Live

When I asked consumers how often they were watching live video, I didn’t expect a large percentage to say they were consuming it more than once or twice weekly. As a marketer and social media user, I was expecting that only a few people would regularly stop everything and devote time to watching streams on fast-paced online platforms.

However, when I looked at the results, I was surprised by how frequently consumers were actually watching live videos.

According to the data, 57% of those surveyed watch live video at least three times per week, while only seven percent said they never watch live video.

Data Source

While the result above is fascinating to think about, you should keep in mind that this is just a survey of one small group of consumers rather than a representation of the global internet user population. Additionally, just because our pool of consumers regularly watches live content, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re watching branded content.

Although you should take this result with a grain of salt, the data above, combined with mounting research that shows how live video is growing, signifies that this format might be more than just a trend. .

Although you should consider your budget, audience, and the time involved in a live video strategy before your create or plan content, this result indicates that you might want to keep this tactic on your radar.

Where Consumers Watch Live Video

Now that you know live video is capable of generating solid viewership, you might be wondering where the best place to stream your first video actually is.

You’ll want to pick a platform with a high user base, but you’ll also want to make sure that the site you choose has an audience that aligns with the audience you want to engage with..

When you start by picking the best platform for your brand and audience, you can learn what it takes to be engaging on this site, and adapt your content from there.

But, simply choosing a platform can be easier said than done.

At the moment, almost all of the top social media platforms — including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and now even TikTok — have live streaming features. Additionally, emerging platforms like Twitch.tv have gained notoriety for primarily hosting live content.

To help you identify a few platforms worth looking into, I asked the same Lucid participants. “Where do you watch live videos most often?”

While the results about how often consumers watched live video surprised me, I wasn’t as shocked when I discovered where they were watching their content.

The platforms with the biggest audiences, and the most mature live streaming tools, took the lead. These platforms were YouTube (48%), Facebook (20%), and Instagram (13%).

Data Source

One thing that did surprise me was that fewer people were viewing live videos on Twitter. Although the platform isn’t primarily known for live streaming, Twitter’s company was one of the first to invest in it with the 2015 acquisition of Periscope.

Although some platforms were less popular than others in this poll, you shouldn’t necessarily rule them out. For example, if your most engaged audience is already on Twitter, or your followers love your B2B content on LinkedIn, you could consider testing those platforms first since you might already have a great sense of what those audiences will engage with.

Or, if you’re selling a B2C product, you might want to focus on the bigger, broader networks like Facebook or YouTube since they have a large range of audience demographics.

As you plan your next live video event, here’s a look at what other brands are doing on popular live video platforms.

The Top 3 Platforms Consumers Use to Stream Live Video

YouTube

As the world’s second-largest search engine, YouTube’s more than 2 billion-person user base is incredibly broad. This means that almost anyone will log on to YouTube and search its content for a number of different reasons.

Aside from being one of the oldest and biggest online platforms out there, YouTube’s also offered a live stream feature, called YouTube Live, since 2011.

YouTube Live allows users to broadcast live content to viewers. With this live video feature, you can share unfiltered moments, as well as allow the audience to participate with real-time comments and reactions. Live videos on YouTube are recorded, appear on profiles and feeds like any other video upload, and can be watched even after the stream has ended.

Below is a great example of a live video launched by Adobe as part of its Sketch Party series. During each Sketch Party stream, Adobe films a graphic designer sketching or designing something with Creative Cloud software, such as Adobe Illustrator. While the artist is sketching something visibly on screen, they read comments and answer questions from viewers.

 

 

This stream allows Adobe to engage with audiences, highlight the raw talent of graphic artists, and show off how its software works at the same time.

Facebook

Today, more than one-quarter of videos uploaded to Facebook are live. This, plus the fact that one in five of the consumers we polled watch videos on Facebook Live most often, show that this platform might be incredibly useful for live video strategies.

Like YouTube, Facebook has the benefit of having a giant global audience that represents different ages, interests, and cultural backgrounds. While this broad audience has allowed B2B and B2C brands to effectively grow audiences on the platform, many companies have also developed successful Facebook Live tactics, too.

In the branded Facebook Live example below, a clothing store called By Alexa Rae Boutique highlights some of the clothing products that can be purchased from the store’s website.

The video is formatted like a show you’d see on the Home Shopping Network as the host shows each clothing item to the camera, explains the perks of each, and notes when items are close to sold out to encourage urgency

Instagram

According to our survey above, 13% of people say they watch live video on Instagram most often, making it the third most popular live platform among the group we surveyed.

Instagram has been rising in popularity for years, especially to millennial and Gen Z audiences. The success of the overall app is due in part to Stories, live video, and IGTV.

Instagram’s Live feature allows you to film streams that show up in your following’s Stories feed for 24 hours before disappearing.

These videos are often filmed vertically, but have similar features as YouTube Live. For instance, those recording live video are able to see and respond to questions from viewers.

Before putting time and effort into creating an Instagram Live video, it’s important to keep a few things in mind.

First of all, although Instagram will show followers that you’re live through the Stories feed and via app notifications, the live symbol — as shown above — can be very subtle and easy to miss. This is unlike Facebook, which might prioritize a live video on your followers’ News Feeds.

Another thing to note is that your content will disappear within 24 hours. However, you can send your pre-recorded streams to the IGTV tab of your profile when you’re done with them. Although these videos would no longer be live, presenting them on IGTV might get them more additional views after they’ve aired.

Non-verified users can post a video between 10 seconds and 15 minutes to IGTV, while users who are verified or have more than 10,000 followers can publish videos or streams up to one hour long to this tab.

At this point, a number of brands have already gone live on Instagram and later added this content to their IGTV tab. Below is just one example of a live post that was later shared on IGTV. In the video, a representative from Providence, R.I.-based Bolt Coffee walks viewers through how to brew iced coffee with the brand’s products:

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two different recipes to make a tasty Flash Brewed Iced Coffee!

A post shared by Bolt Coffee (@boltcoffeeco) on Apr 18, 2020 at 10:14am PDT

Other Platforms for Live Video Streaming

Twitter

While Twitter allows you to connect with friends on its social network, many use the platform to follow news, trends, and topical discussions. This is why a large portion of the live videos you’ll see include news coverage, video of current events, or someone discussing a hot trend.

Despite much of the live video being dedicated to news or trends, some brands have experimented with streaming content on Twitter. One example of a brand that’s done this is Coinbase — a platform for storing and selling cryptocurrency. In a recent live stream, Coinbas’s CEO did an AMA — or Ask Me Anything — session where he answered questions submitted live by users.

I did a live AMA yesterday answering people’s questions on Twitter/YouTube https://t.co/Ifq7naVlA6

Let me know what you think. Maybe next time can add someone else from the Coinbase team, make it more conversational. Or just walk around the office and chat with folks!

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong)
April 4, 2019

Although Twitter owns Periscope, a live video streaming app, you can go live directly through the Twitter app. To do this, tap the “Compose” button, then tap the “Upload” icon which looks like a camera. Once you’re in camera mode, you can toggle from “Capture” to “Live” mode.

If you want to add a second video box where other Twitter users can stream with you at the same time, tap the symbol with two smiley faces in the upper right hand corner to invite guests.

Before you go live on Twitter, you should keep in mind that the platform doesn’t center around live video. While it algorithmically might show your content in a followers’ feed, Twitter does not have a specific home for past-recorded live videos like Facebook Live or YouTube Live does. This means that to see your video after it’s streamed, users will have to go to your profile or search for it.

You should also note whether one of the other platforms above might be better suited for your audience targets. While Twitter does have a large audience, consumers — such as those who took our survey — might think of Twitter as more of a general social media network rather than a live video platform.

Reddit

While Reddit was later to the game by launching live video in 2019, brands have still leveraged it quite a bit to engage with the platform’s niche communities, or subreddits.

One way brands have leveraged live streaming is by hosting live AMAs with celebrities, company leaders, or thought leaders. The AMA format originally started as text-based discussion threads in subreddits. For example, to promote Microsoft and his non-profit organizations, Bill Gates has published a number of threads in technology-related subreddits that asked his fans to ask him anything. From there, fans added their questions and he tried to answer as many as possible.

Since live video launched on Reddit, brands have re-formatted traditional AMAs into video streams. For example, Audi recently posted a series of live streams called “Think Faster.” In each live stream, celebrities sped around in one of Audi’s newest cars while answering Redditor questions. Here’s a screenshot from one of the events which featured actress, Olivia Munn.

Twitch.tv

Twitch is one of the newest platforms on this list. However, the live-streaming site has notably gone viral as video gamers have been using it to stream their sessions.

But Twitch isn’t just for gamers anymore. At this point, a number of marketers and brands have identified ways to leverage the platform.

One major brand that won a Clio for its Twitch-based campaign was the fast-food chain, Wendy’s. In 2019, a mission set in the popular video game Fortnite, told players to harvest beef and place it in freezers of nearby restaurants to collect coins.

Because Wendy’s claims to sell, “Fresh, Never Frozen Beef,” its marketing team decided to launch a nine-hour Twitch stream where a Fortnite avatar dressed like Wendy ran around the video game attempting to destroy freezers. As a Fortnite player, you could join Wendy and help her smash the appliance.

According to the Clio sizzle reel, the Wendy’s stream began to go viral as more people logged in to watch and post in the comment thread. Gamers also began to start attacking freezers to help Wendy’s avatar.

Building a Live Video Strategy

Although live video might seem like a great opportunity to engage with your audience, it still could cost time and money to plan and produce. Like any marketing strategy, you’ll want to research the tactic before diving into it.

As you determine if live video is right for you, and identify the platforms you’ll experiment on first, it’s important to lay out what goals you’ll want to achieve with the content.

For example, if you’re interested in pulling in views or awareness from broader, more general audiences, YouTube or Facebook might be the perfect live platforms for you. Or, if you’re interested in pulling in a younger audience, you might want to consider Instagram, which has a slightly younger audience.

To help you learn more about the live video platforms and strategies out there, check out this list of live video stats. If you’ve determined where you want to publish, but don’t know how to format your content, read this post to find out which types of live video are most engaging to consumers.

It’s a defining human impulse — the desire to quantify the world around us. And given the pending 2020 U.S. Census, it seems a fitting time to contribute.

Recently, my team did just that: Like our astronomic ancestors under ancient skies, we looked outward and began to count.

What did we count?

Every marketing agency in America. Sort of.

Truth be told, it would be foolish to declare an exact tally. Our source was online listings, so there’s plenty of margin for error. Some agencies get gobbled up by competitors two weeks after you count them. Others shutter in the real world but endure online. And some never existed; they were always empty shells, built by hustlers with an UpWork account, pronouncing their “team” ready for your next big project.

What I can say is this: America is home to at least several thousand marketing agencies. We trawled 6,000 listings, and analyzed 600 websites and LinkedIn company profiles, to cover as many disciplines as possible. Those include:

• Advertising
• Branding
• Content Marketing
• Design
• PR
• SEO/SEM
• Social Media
• Web Design
• Web and App Development

We gathered a number of measurements, too, including:

• Agency size
• Agency age
• Agencies per capita
• Top disciplines
• Hourly rates
• Gender distribution in leadership
• Homepage hero images
• Company names
• Company taglines

You’re encouraged to read the full report.

Below, I’ll share our four key takeaways from the state of marketing agencies in America in 2020. I encourage leaders and contributors alike: sit back, take a breath, and think big thoughts about your trajectory in the agency universe.

1. Preserve What’s Special as You Grow

Our analysis found 77% of agencies have 10 to 49 employees, and 18% of agencies have 50 to 249 employees.

I wonder how many in the smaller range wish they could get to the next level, and how many big agencies long to be small again? Like rock bands, do agencies graduate to playing arenas, only to find themselves slumped over a shrimp buffet backstage, longing for their leaner, grimier club days?

It raises the fundamental question: What do we lose as we grow?

Small agencies should anticipate the challenge and make a vocal commitment to certain values that can be threatened when scaling. Big agencies should take stock. What’s been sacrificed — agility, focus, community? Pick something that once defined you, that you want back. Make it a 2020 goal.

2. Anticipate Lifespan and Legacy

On average, a dog will live 10 to 13 years. As for a marketing agency? Not much longer.

In America, 61% of marketing agencies are between five and 19 years old, after which the population drops off significantly.

Why is that?

Think about what influences an agency’s lifespan. How much is external versus internal? Are agencies barely outliving dogs because markets and technology tend to evolve beyond their original mastery? Or because 20 years roughly aligns with the sweet spot of a human career and visionary founders struggle to make their businesses outlive them?

In either case, there’s lots to anticipate and act on at various points in the lifespan of an agency.

Be mindful of where the heart is in your agency — its center of energy. If it comes from a single charismatic founder, beware. The heartbeat of an organization should be sustained by many people.

Take an unflinching look at the evolution of markets and technology around you, since the beginning. Just because you mastered something that was new five years ago doesn’t mean you’re positioned to master what’s around the corner. A long life depends on lots of planning (and a little luck).

3. Don’t Just Hire Women — Empower Them to Lead

This topic is a monster, and certainly deserving of much more attention than I’ll give it here. But I’d like to share a candid note about how our agency was founded, and what it means for gender equality in agency leadership.

The founders of Digital Third Coast are both men. They worked together at an early iteration of a digital marketing agency, early in their careers. They left that agency and ventured out to start their own business.

For the purposes of our analysis, we classified our agency as having “all men” in leadership. In this case, the highest identifiable tier of leadership is “owner”, and there are two owners, both men.

Our owners are conscientious, fair, and progressive. They value contributions of women as much as men, they hire women regularly, and they give women opportunities to lead in our organization. But none of that changes where they started. When they were at their previous agency, they looked around and found each other, among other men.

The numbers are abysmal in the agency world, as they are in so many other sectors of business. But female leaders don’t materialize out of thin air, and we won’t reach a state of equality through promotions alone. If we flipped a switch and suddenly every marketing agency in the country with 250+ employees had all-female C-suites, these numbers would barely budge.

This is a small business problem, not a corporate problem. We need an industry, economy, and society where young women feel empowered to
start their own businesses, just as our owners once did.

A challenge for agency leaders: right this minute, are there women in your organization who are working and growing with other women, in substantive ways, who may one day feel empowered to venture out on their own? There should be.

4. Make an Authentic First Impression

On a (slightly) lighter note — can we end the scourge of stock model photography? Please.

In a world defined and dominated by user-generated content and the unprecedented intimacy and access of social media, agencies should not be representing themselves with sterile stock imagery.

The homepage hero image is an enormous opportunity. Marketing agencies in America do various things with it. Most show people, objects, or places. You might see a light bulb, a group of people standing around a table, or a city skyline.

The opportunity, of course, is not just to look good, or look on-trend, but to reflect expertise, integrity, and professional values.

Agency leaders should reflect: is my homepage hero everything it can be, or is it what I’ve seen everyone else do?

Much of our daily grind is occupied by an appropriate depth of focus — we manage the work at hand, our people, our quarterly and annual goals, our company vision. Occasionally we venture beyond that and consider our competitors and our markets.

And, once in a while, we’re prompted to go a step further and consider existential questions about longevity, equality, and connection to our past. I hope this data helps you with that.