When you work at a small business with a limited budget, it’s not really possible to shell out $340,000 for a 30-second TV commercial or $10,000 for an email marketing campaign.

It can be frustrating when your budget dictates how many people your business can reach.

Surprisingly, there are a lot of free ways to supplement your paid advertising efforts. By incorporating free advertising tactics into your strategy, you can remove some nonessential costs and dedicate your budget to deeper, more long-term plays.

In fact, we suggest some of these methods regardless of your budget.

To help you spread the word about your business without breaking the bank, we’ve compiled these 14 ways to get advertising for free.

1. Use Google My Business to optimize for local search.

One of the most powerful free ways to advertise your business is through Google My Business, which enables companies to manage their presence on Google Search and Google Maps. The tool can bolster your rankings in local search results.

Ranking high in local search shows you’re a legitimate and relevant company: you wouldn’t rank #1 in Google for “pizza places near me” if you’d closed down six months ago. Plus, if you rank high in local search, more consumers will choose your business over a competitor’s. In today’s fast-paced world, convenience is key.

Click here or scroll to the bottom of this post to learn how to advertise on Google for free.

2. Check out Yext.

The more places your business is listed online, the better your chances of showing up in search results, and the easier it is for potential customers to find you. To ensure great local SEO, the details of your listings on every website and online directory need to match up.

For instance, if your website lists your company’s new phone number, but Yelp lists your old one, this inconsistency could hurt your SEO.

Yext scans the web to find every place your business is listed, so you can tweak your listings to guarantee accuracy.

3. Write guest posts for other blogs.

There are a few major advantages to guest posting for a well-established blog. You can benefit from connecting to that blog’s audience, and you can also start establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

Since guest posting on a popular blog allows you access to an established audience and high domain authority, this practice can sometimes be more beneficial than posting to your own blog. Plus, you can link back to your own website from your article, giving you an inbound link that boosts your domain authority and can increase your own website’s ranking in search engines.

4. Answer Quora questions.

Writing content for Quora can expose your business to a large audience: in 2018, Quora reported a worldwide audience of 300 million monthly visitors.

Besides the large built-in audience, your business can answer direct questions from prospective customers. This lets you interact with high-quality potential leads and establish yourself as an expert in the subjects that matter most in your industry.

5. Publish content on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a platform to connect with professionals, which is why it’s also a great place to share business-related content. LinkedIn’s blogging platform lets you demonstrate your expertise within your industry.

Your connections and other LinkedIn members will engage with your posts and share them, doing the free promotion for you. With almost half of all social media traffic coming to B2B company sites from LinkedIn, it’s a missed opportunity if you don’t publish and promote content on LinkedIn.

6. Offer to do interviews on other business’ podcasts.

To figure out which platforms your team should prioritize, it’s important to diversify your promotion platforms to discover where your audience is already consuming content. Some of your audience might prefer listening to podcasts over reading articles. To reach those people, contact a few businesses with podcasts and pitch interview ideas.

7. Promote your website on your email signature.

With all the emails you send every day, it’s a shame if you aren’t taking advantage of the promotional potential of your email signature. Your email signature can also be unexpected property to promote a sale, contest, event, or even a new blog post.

Add a link to your business’ website on your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram profiles, as well.

8. Send email newsletters.

An email newsletter can be a useful vehicle to promote content, share business-related news, and build deeper relationships with both potential and existing customers. There are plenty of free tools out there that assist you in designing, sending, and optimizing your newsletter.

With the right time investment, an email newsletter can be the perfect place to share quality content with leads and potential consumers, establishing your brand as helpful and informative.

9. Network at in-person events when possible.

Connecting with fellow professionals at industry networking events is a great opportunity to meet potential consumers in a place where they are eager to discuss your business. The niche topics of networking events ensure you’re meeting high-qualified leads. For example, a “Best Technology Startups of 2020” event will primarily be filled with participants who are interested in technology and startups.

Particularly for small businesses looking to make their first connections, networking is a chance to get your name out there, meet potential partners, and find opportunities for growth. Plus, it’ll keep you up-to-date on trends in your industry.

10. Speak at an event when possible.

Similar to networking, speaking at an event about a topic related to your industry is another way to exhibit your expertise. Giving a thought-provoking and powerful speech will draw attention to you and, by association, your business, which can increase brand awareness and prove your business is qualified to tackle consumer’s challenges.

To start, brainstorm different topics and volunteer at various upcoming networking events and trade association conventions. If you’re afraid of public speaking (don’t worry, a lot of us are), you could enroll in a local Toastmasters chapter to improve your game.

11. Do a free product giveaway or contest

A product giveaway or contest is an easy way to incentivize new viewers to check out and subscribe to your social media channels or website. Plus, handing out inexpensive branded products like t-shirts or mugs is a good way to spread your brand name.

Word-of-mouth is alive and well — and a little swag can go a long way.

12. Put up brochures or flyers.

Putting up brochures or flyers in local libraries, coffee shops, and businesses is a unique way to market to offline locations where people spend a good deal of their time.

You can create free brochures and flyers on PowerPoint or Canva. Depending on your industry, it might even help you reach an ideal clientele: if you’re a physical therapist, for example, perhaps you could hand out brochures to local gyms or nearby hospitals.

13. Create YouTube videos.

YouTube has more than two billion active users, which accounts for almost half of everyone on the internet. 

Moreover, in a recent study, 84% of people said they’ve been convinced to buy something after watching a brand’s video, and people reported being twice as likely to share videos with their friends than any other type of content.

Creating engaging, informative, and share-able YouTube videos is one of the most efficient ways to sell your brand. If done right, your YouTube videos will entertain viewers enough to share your content and seek out your website.

14. Take advantage of your partnerships.

Partnerships are an opportunity to offer supplementary services that you don’t provide. For example, a web design company and a copywriting agency might choose to partner together, so when a client requires written content for her web pages, the web design company can offer copywriting services from their partner.

This increases consumer satisfaction, and it also provides exceptional advertising opportunities. When your partner’s consumers need your services, your partner will point them in your direction.

15. Post on social media.

Nowadays, social media is crucial to most marketing strategies. Luckily, most types of social media platforms and posts are free — even to businesses. While many platforms will let you advertise, you can still post or tweet for no cost if you’re on a budget.

Pick the platforms that best suit your audience. Then, post links, photos, videos, or text posts about your company, product launches, or any other occurrence that you’d like to promote.

Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are a suitable place to start for most businesses. They all offer a way to share video, text, photo, and link-based posts and have large user bases. To learn more about other forms of social media, check out this post.

16. Experiment with photo and video platforms.

While Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn could be great platforms to start on, expanding to platforms like Instagram or Pinterest will give you more opportunities to show product shots or embrace the heavily-visual strategy of influencer marketing.

Aside from spreading awareness with free images of your product or service, most social platforms, including Facebook, offer live video and story features which can allow you to create video promotion related to your products. For example, you might use Instagram Stories or Facebook Live as an outlet to publish tutorials of how to use your products.

Because these videos and photos are on social, you can also boost their shareability by hashtagging them, creating interesting captions, and encouraging fans to react with actions like “likes” or comments.

17. Encourage happy customers to give online reviews.

Word-of-mouth is still one of the best ways to market your product. Consumers trust the opinions of other consumers, especially when there are many great testimonies.

If you have happy customers, encourage them to write a review about their experience on popular review platforms like Google, Facebook, and Yelp. If you want great reviews on Facebook, be sure to create a Facebook Business page if you don’t have one already.

How to Advertise on Google for Free

As mentioned above, you can create a free page on Google My Business which can help you rank higher or first in search results. Here’s how it works.

Create your Google My Business account.

First, you’ll want to create a Gmail account for your business. Then you’ll want to register for Google My Business with that account.

Google will first ask you to enter the name of your business. Then, you’ll be asked to select a “Delivery Area.” In this form, note the mileage and area where your target audience lives.

Optimize your business page.

After your setup process is complete, you’ll be able to fill out your profile. As you do this, you ideally want to fill out all the information Google requests for the best search optimization.

A few key things you’ll want to include will be:

• Your address
• A phone number, email address, and other contact information.
• Your website
• Hours of operation
• Photos of your business and products
• A detailed description on what your business offers
• Pricing or menu information
• The year your company opened
• Other business attributes such as “free Wi-Fi.”

The above items are things locals might search specifically for. For example, if someone searches for a “cheap Mexican restaurant open after 8pm”, Google will examine the details in business profile and prioritize your restaurant if it seems like a great match.

Here’s an example of what it looks like when a Google business fills out all their information:

Verify and monitor your business page.

Once you’ve created your Google My Business profile, be sure to verify your listing so Google knows it’s a real, legitimate business. There are a few ways to do this including email, postcard, and phone verification.

You can also download the GMB app to monitor how your business is doing on a smartphone. This post walks you through the different verification processes.

Don’t forget about SEO.

Along with Google My Business, taking advantage of free SEO strategies can also help your website rise higher in search results. These tactics can be simple and easy to work into blogging, web design, or other processes. Download this template to help you plan your SEO strategy this year.

Don’t let your advertising budget dictate how many people your business can reach. Try these 17 free advertising tactic to promote your products and services and bring in new revenue.

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

Today, I was scrolling through the Bon Appetit website, and by the end of my visit, I’d signed up for their newsletter.

When I saw their newsletter advertisement, it was so effective that I just couldn’t help myself.

Good ads get consumers to stop and stare. Effective ads inspire engagement. And when I saw this, I stopped scrolling, laughed, and typed in my email:

Source

This ad successfully combines humor and relatable language to compel me to subscribe — additionally, it solved a “problem” (learning how to cook pasta) I didn’t know I had. Those are three elements that can make an amazing ad.

Oftentimes, marketers assume a good ad can only be made with a big budget. They also believe ads are most effective if they’re busy or loud.

While these factors do contribute to an enjoyable ad experience, ads certainly aren’t limited without them. In fact, some of the most effective ads I’ve come across have none of them.

The ad above, for example, isn’t busy or flashy at all, yet it’s still an example of a good ad. In this post, let’s explore six components for creating a good, engaging ad.

These methods can include customer testimonials, a sense of urgency, data points, or a compelling, moving story.

Ads don’t need to employ every method to be successful. In fact, picking one to three of these components can still make a dazzling, engaging ad experience for consumers.

The basics every ad should have — like engaging graphics — are covered in this excellent post about ad creation.

The tips we’ve outlined below can help you elevate and refine your ads to ensure they delight your viewers and draw them in.

Use these tips as a reference when creating an ad or refining for finishing touches. They can be that last step before an A/B test, or a starting step when brainstorming content ideas.

1. Use keywords to rank on search.

Remember, keywords help rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). If a marketer wants to place an ad using Google, but doesn’t use any keywords in their ad, it can be ineffective.

For instance, let’s say I was Googling a laptop for professional use. I type “business laptop” into Google. This is the first ad that comes up:

From this ad, I can tell that business laptops are being sold at Dell, which is what I want. Using ambiguous language in an ad doesn’t bring much traffic. It also doesn’t help consumers know what’s being sold.

A small business would benefit using their industry or their product when advertising, especially if the product is in a niche market.

2. Solve a problem for your audience.

Your product or service solves a problem, and you probably know that advertising should tell the audience about how your product or service is a solution. If you’re thinking this method is outdated, it doesn’t have to be.

For instance, rather than taking out an ad in a newspaper or spending huge money on a billboard, you can use Twitter for Advertisers — a tool that lets users shop from the app by clicking on a link.

Take a look at Kohl’s ad, which was created on Twitter’s platform:

Shop comfy outfits for the whole family: https://t.co/S5Dv2UVMuC pic.twitter.com/XxKXcLesCf

— Kohl’s (@Kohls)
February 11, 2020

Copy such as “For the whole family” solves the problem of a busy parent needed to go to different stores for clothes shopping. This ad is effective, showing siblings of different ages modeling clothing in a comfortable home setting.

By clicking on the ad, consumers will be able to see every piece the models are wearing, the price, and even purchase items without leaving the app.

3. Ask your audience important questions.

Asking questions engages idle consumers. A question gets browsers thinking, much like the copy from this ad from BuzzFeed on Facebook:

Source

The language in this ad is fresh, young, and personable. If I were idly scrolling Facebook, I’d pause on this ad because I’m always looking for an easier way to shop. Here, BuzzFeed recognizes a pain point of its readers and pulls readers into the article by identifying it with a question.

The way the relatable question is posed would make me look at the ad, while the no-frills design of the ad (a simple photo), coupled with the call-to-action, (“Get This Amazing Deal Today”) would make me open the ad.

That initial pull to the ad is possible due to the question. Ultimately, by beginning your ad by posing a question that piques interest, you’re inviting viewers to click.

4. Include a customer or user testimonial.

The reason consumers love websites like Yelp so much is that it’s an entire platform of customer reviews about a product or service that help consumers make more informed decisions.

For instance, check out this ad for TriNet:

Source

“Learn how one CEO imagines passion in the people who work there.” — this copy effectively notates a powerful key player of business and caters to thought leadership.

The headline, “These Employees Know Their Work in Making a Real Difference in the World,” is a powerful sentence that plays to emotions — it makes readers think, “Am I making a difference in the world? How are they? I should click on the ad and find out.”

By letting satisfied customers speak for you, you can deliver an ad message that’s personalized and relatable. Additionally, having that boost of a real-world interpretation of your product or service makes you more reputable.

5. Evoke a sense of urgency in your copy.

Using a tone that’s urgent makes consumers feel like they need a product in their life. Take this ad, for example:

Source

This copy carries a sense of urgency to download the whitepaper. The caption introduces the ad and says what the ad doesn’t, saving space for more copy, and making sure all the important things are included.

Notice how the ad copy mirrors a CTA. To create urgency in your advertisement, you might consider using call-to-action language, such as “Learn,” or “Discover,” which engages browsers in a way that’s professional and knowledgeable.

6. Use data points.

Numbers are informative. Statistics and data visualizations get the mind moving and bring numbers to life. And the best part is, numbers aren’t just for ads about sales or data points.

these are a few of my favorite things 👀

— 22 Words (@22Words)
September 19, 2019

For instance, this promoted tweet has nothing to do with statistics or data collection. It’s a blog post for an Amazon round-up of bags, plants, and more knick-knacks.

As a consumer trying to waste time on social media, a blog post about 30 A-plus purchases from Amazon sounds like music to my ears. The relatable language of “100x Again” is a clever way of including numbers that are convincing without confusing or boring the audience.

Ultimately, numbers make an ad seem impressive, show research, and also connect with a younger crowd, making an ad more clickable.

When planning out your ads, consider whether or not you would be engaged if you saw it, and use tools that help achieve that vision.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Oftentimes, turning an idea for an advertising campaign into reality isn’t exactly simple.

Among other things, you must get buy-in from other teams, earn approval from leadership, negotiate your budget, and present a clear path for return on investment (ROI).

The best way to clearly share your proposal (and its costs, stakeholders, the amount you expect to earn, etc.) is with a concrete and detailed advertising plan.

Follow Along With HubSpot’s Free Ad Plan Template

An advertising plan will help you formulate and organize your thoughts and ideas so you can ensure your campaign is an effective one, too. 

In this post, we’ll highlight the major sections you should include in your advertising plan so you can guarantee your next campaign is a success.

Pro Tip: HubSpot created the following advertising plan template for you to download so you can organize your advertising campaign — it’s broken down into relevant sections and can be shared with your stakeholders when it’s completed.

Download this Advertising Planning Kit

Now let’s dive into how you can prep your ad plan. 

How to Prepare an Advertising Plan

Before you jump into your tactical advertising ideas, the first step in the process is to provide those reading your ad plan with a high-level overview of your initiative.

1. Provide an overview of your advertising plan.

Specify the following elements so anyone reading your plan will have a basic understanding of what your campaign is and what you’re trying to accomplish:

• Campaign Name: Make the campaign name catchy, unique, and easily identifiable so your team can get behind it.
• Campaign Description: What is the purpose of your campaign? Explain in 2-3 paragraphs what the inspiration behind your campaign is, how it aligns with your company initiatives, what customer problems you’re solving, and what the final deliverables of the campaign will be.
• Target Audience: Ideally, who’s on the receiving end of these ads? You can be specific to age, sex, region, or any number of demographics, or name which of your buyer personas you’re targeting.
• Advertising Platforms: How will you be getting your message across? Here, identify the platform you’ll be using, since you’ll get more into the details of what the actual ads will look like in a later section.
• Goals and ROI: Explain what the end goal of your campaign is. Most ad campaigns are intended to produce a direct profit or return on investment, so if that’s your goal, identify that number. If your campaign goal is something else — event sign-ups, product awareness, etc. — be sure to identify and quantify it.

2. Choose your platforms.

Here’s where you’ll provide more detail on the advertisements themselves and on which platform they will be promoted. For each ad you intend to run in this campaign, you should provide the following:

• Platform name
• Ad type
• Description of the ad
• Timeline
• Budget

For example, your content in this section might look like this:

Platform #1: YouTube

• Advertisement Type: Video
• Description of Ad: A 15-second pre-video ad. The video will be an animated look at our new app with a link to the app store at when someone clicks.
• Timeline: July 1 – July 31
• Budget: $10,000

3. Develop your timeline.

Working on an ad campaign takes a ton of time and resources, so everyone involved will want to know what tasks they’re responsible for, when they’re due, and how long they have to do them. In this part of your advertising plan, list the tasks that are due, when they are due, and who’s responsible for accomplishing them.

4. Outline your budget.

Because ROI isn’t guaranteed, the budget can be the toughest part of your advertising project to get approved — which is why it’s important to break up your requests by line item and present them in your plan.

Rather than simply stating, “We need $65,000 for this project”, organize your budget into a detailed visual, like the example below.

Download this Template for Free

Naturally, you can (and should) expect questions and pushback on certain line items.

For example, you may be asked to find another designer or video freelancing team who can complete the job for less money. So, arrive at meetings prepared to defend which costs are necessary for the campaign’s success and which expenses can be reconsidered.

5. Explain your DACI framework.

The DACI framework outlines who the key contributors in the project are and what each of their responsibilities entail.

Here’s how a DACI framework is broken down:

• (D)river: As you might have guessed, this person is the project’s main driver or directly responsible individual. (Chances are, this will be either you or your direct manager.) The driver will coordinate all of the moving pieces of the project, seeing it through from inception to wrap-up.
• (A)pprover: This will be the person who must approve a project and is typically a director, VP, or manager. They’ll give feedback, recommendations, or approval on the overall project and have a final say in all project deliverables.
• (C)ontributors: Contributors will be the individuals who are responsible for creating one or more deliverables for the project. In an advertising campaign, this can include copywriters, video producers, animators, designers, and digital advertising specialists.
• (I)nformed: These are employees who are kept in the loop as the project goes on. Examples include the department heads and the managers of project contributors. These people have no direct responsibilities but benefit from knowing about the project and its status.

Your DACI framework should include the name of each stakeholder, his or her contact information (email, phone, and/or Slack handle), and that person’s responsibility or deliverable.

This framework makes project delegation crystal clear for everyone involved.

6. Provide additional resources.

This will act as the appendix of your advertising plan. Share the ad campaign that inspired this one with your readers, link to the product page you’ll be promoting with this initiative, or link to your company’s brand style guide — this way, designers and writers get a refresh on how to create externally-facing content.

7. Host a campaign kickoff meeting.

After you complete the outline, hop on a call with your team to explain the campaign concept, timeline, and deliverables. Compile all of them in HubSpot’s advertising project pitch deck and present your advertising plan. Then, open up the floor for any questions and suggestions with project contributors.

Over to You

Now that you know how to write your advertising plan, it’s time to lay your ideas, budget, and timeline out in HubSpot’s Advertising Plan Template. Download it for free to get your advertising campaign project plan off the ground.

(For further inspiration, take a look at The 18 Best Advertisements of All Time.)

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

As marketers, we’ve become experts in our target audiences. We know their typical demographic, what they like, the platforms they spend time on, and what they value in a product.

But unlike sales reps — who talk to and learn from our biggest prospects each day — we don’t always know tiny, but crucial, details about the brands or people we most want to sell too. This might be why only 28% of salespeople say marketing is their best source of leads.

So, how do we bridge the gap to better help our sales teams sell to high-priority clients? The answer to this question could be account-based marketing (or ABM).

Rather than just marketing to a broad target audience and hoping someone calls your sales reps, ABM is a strategy where sales and marketing teams align from the start to create campaigns that cater to their most qualified leads and current customers.

For example, as part of an ABM strategy, sales reps might offer marketing teams data from customers, prospects, and those that didn’t buy a product so that the marketers can create a targeted campaign that amplifies why their product is valuable and how it can help targets navigate daily pain points.

While inbound marketing is vital for pulling general audiences and demographics to your site, service, or store, account-based marketing can help you to reel in prospects or qualified leads that are most likely to buy your product.

To show you just how beneficial account-based marketing can be, while also informing you of the challenges it comes with, here are 36 stats you should know in 2020.

36 Account-Based Marketing Stats to Know in 2020

General ABM Stats

• 67% of brands leverage account-based marketing. (HubSpot)
• “Researching Accounts” and “Identifying Target Contacts” are the top two tactics used by marketers within an ABM model. (HubSpot)
• Just one year ago, the top five account-based tactics were sales development rep outreach, digital advertising, direct mail, marketing email, and events. (TOPO)
• Additionally, marketers strongly agree that personalized content (56%) and advanced data management (43%) are keys to ABM’s success. (Forrester)
• Most organizations intentionally only pursue 38% of their target accounts at one time. (TOPO)
• By 2019, 55% of marketers rated their ABM strategy as “established” compared to just 43% in 2018. (Forrester)
• Companies dedicated 29% of their marketing budgets to ABM in 2019. (Engagio)
• It’s estimated that ABM budgets saw an average increase of 41% in 2019. (TOPO)
• 57% of professionals say their companies target 1,000 accounts or under with ABM. (TOPO)

Source

• At the beginning of 2018, only 18% of adopters had two years of experience in account-based marketing. (TOPO)
• In 2018, 18% of account-based programs were run against current customers (larger organizations with more than $1 billion in revenue ran about 50% of these programs. (TOPO)
• The most common metric marketers use to track ABM is revenue won. (HubSpot)
• Two other metrics marketers most commonly track to measure ABM efforts are the number of pipelines created and account engagement. (Engagio)
• In 2019, 7% of marketers reported a decrease in dedicated headcount for ABM teams, showing that this strategy is going mainstream and being implemented within regular processes. (Forrester)
• In 2019, 40% of the average marketing team was dedicated to ABM. (Engagio)
• 57% of marketers say their organizations have implemented ABM for more than one year. (TOPO)

Source

Benefits and Challenges of ABM

• Marketing and sales teams that take an ABM approach together can be up to six percent more likely to exceed their revenue goals than teams less ABM-advanced. (Forrester)
• 62% of marketers say they can measure a positive impact since adopting ABM. (Forrester)
• 80% of marketers say ABM improves customer lifetime values, while 86% say it improves win rates. (TOPO)
• 87% of account-based marketers say that ABM initiatives outperform other marketing investments. (ITSMA)
• One in five accounts targeted through ABM becomes considered a qualified sales opportunity. (TOPO)
• Organizations with a strong Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — which is similar to a buyer persona — achieve 68% higher account win rates. (TOPO)
• More than two-thirds (69%) of top-performing account-based organizations now have a dedicated account based leader. (TOPO)
• 70% of companies that started account-based initiatives in the first six months of 2019 have dedicated ABM leaders. (TOPO)
• 42% of companies that missed their account-based objectives don’t have dedicated leadership. (TOPO)
• The most common challenge with ABM is delivering a personalized experience. (HubSpot)
• The top three challenges of implementing ABM are creating a scalable strategy for multiple accounts, producing customized content, and coordinating programs across marketing, sales development, and sales teams. (TOPO)

Source

ABM Technology

• By 2021, over half of all sales phone calls will be analyzed by software. (TOPO)
• The conversational intelligence market was estimated to grow by 3x in 2019. (TOPO)
• Voice assistants will account for at least half of automated data entry by mid-2020. (TOPO)
• An estimated 55% of sales data entry was eliminated by automation by 2020. (TOPO)

Smarketing Benefits and Challenges

• Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams experience 36% higher customer retention rates. (MarketingProfs)
• The most common measurement of success for content marketing programs is Total Sales. (HubSpot)
• 85% of marketers with an SLA think their marketing strategy is effective. (HubSpot)
• Only 7% of salespeople said leads they received from marketing were very high quality. (HubSpot)
• Only 28% of salespeople said marketing was their best source of leads (HubSpot)

Creating an Effective ABM Strategy

As a marketer, it’s important to know what makes ABM techniques successful and how they differ from other target audience marketing tactics.

Additionally, you’ll want to learn about the companies you’re interested in marketing to, similar to how you learn about a target audience. For example, before creating an ABM campaign, you’ll want to learn about the pain points of companies in your industry, company missions, and what their top decision-makers value in a product or service.

Once you discover valuable data about the accounts you’d like to market to and feel ready to create a campaign, check out our Ultimate Guide to Account-Based Marketing.

Social media is always shifting and changing, so if you are still running on the same strategy as you have in years past, now is the time to start thinking differently.

The social media landscape today is incredibly different than it was in 2019. Primarily, the global pandemic of 2020 has meant that more people than ever are online.

More people than ever are on social media, and additionally, they’re paying attention in ways that are unprecedented, as suggested by an April 2020 Statista report, which showed that global social media usage has increased by a whopping 44%.

This means there is a lot of opportunity, but also a need for additional caution during a time when emotions are higher and tolerance for brand mess-ups are likely lower. Here, let’s cover what still works when it comes to social media marketing, what’s working better than ever — and what you should leave behind in 2020.

1. First off, pause and re-evaluate your upcoming social media posts.

This is something you already should have done this year, but it’s also something you should keep doing as part of your strategy for any crisis. Take a hard look at what you have scheduled and see if the imagery, the voice and tone, and messaging are right for the current situation. If they aren’t, put those pieces of content on pause until it makes more sense. Then consider how you can revisit a campaign. Hotels.com did a great job with this.

The company needed to change everything in their approach to social media as a result of global bans on travel. The previous Hotel.com ad that they shared in social featuring their mascot, Captain Obvious, contained imagery of people getting close on vacation, a message that would not resonate well in the current climate:

The company quickly pivoted and developed a new video that makes more sense, and shares an important social message:

2. Next, think about how you can shift your messaging to be more helpful or human.

If you work for a brand that is used to a strategy heavily geared toward push marketing, this is the time to start being more human than product-centric. Some companies will be able to do this better than others. If you work for a company that sells yoga pants, your marketing may not need to change as much as a restaurant or an airline. But even then, the best companies aren’t doing the hard sell on their products.

Lululemon is a fantastic example of a company that understands that people need a few more virtual hugs and encouragement than normal, and they acknowledge that in their posts:

3. Adjust your messaging and stop campaigns that could come across as insensitive.

When basketball player Kobe Bryant died in an aerial crash in early 2020, Planters immediately paused their #RIPMrPeanut campaign, which featured Planters’ mascot, Mr. Peanut, falling to his death in an explosion. The company knew the backlash could be strong and halted the campaign to be sensitive to their audience:

Additionally, Google is well-known for its annual April Fool’s jokes, but they realized that this year there might be backlash that plays out in social media over what might seem flippant when much of the world is feeling more stress and fear than normal.

In general, make sure you are paying attention to current events and are ready to pull your posts at a moment’s notice if need be. That’s more important than ever in a climate where emotions are already high.

4. Start placing more emphasis on connection over content.

We are more connected than ever, but for the first time in modern history, as a global society, we’re more apart than ever before as well, with so many people working from home, far from their families, and unable to travel. Even an act as simple as going to the store might be impossible or feel harrowing to people in your audience.

This is a time when pushing content out may be less meaningful for your audience than connecting with them directly.

For example, HubSpot has shifted our Facebook strategy to embrace the method of asking questions that get people talking and thinking:

Additionally, Canva reshares and responds to their customers regularly, winning them even more love for their product:

5. Keep or start being more empathetic — in your messaging, your content, your responses.

In a time when people may feel more vulnerable, it’s important to adjust your brand voice to take that into account. Exploiting a crisis situation is never a good idea. Alternatively, you’ll want to ensure your brand comes across as friendly, helpful, and empathetic.

For instance, sustainable shoe company Allbirds donated shoes to workers on the front-lines of the healthcare crisis. Not only are they directly being helpful, but their messaging and interactions are empathetic and caring:

At a time when many hotels are closed, it’s somewhat hard to stay top of mind. The Sheraton Commander in Cambridge shared a photo on Instagram that is both heartwarming and and full of care:

Coca-Cola took a wildly different tactic altogether. They have a Twitter audience of 3.3 million followers, and are one of the largest brands on the platform. During this time, they’re choosing to avoid posting about their product at all, and are instead resharing tweets that will inform and help people:

6. Stop being spammy.

This goes hand in hand with empathy and engagement. Brands that are using a push strategy for their marketing in social will not have the same results as companies that are taking a more engaging approach.

Be thoughtful of how often you are posting, and where you might have advertising that could be seen as intrusive. Adjust content to fit three main categories: how you can be informing, engaging, or entertaining your customers and fans.

7. Keep up the great social customer service.

Be cognizant of how your audience might be feeling when responding. They may need a bit more care and patience.

Nespresso has made adjustments to their customer care and are responding with well-wishes for customers as part of their customer service efforts:

While the nuances of social media today may be a little different, the foundation of your great social media strategy still remains the same. To learn more, you can take the HubSpot Social Media Certification course, which has been recently updated with new interviews and information to help build the best marketing strategy for your business.

Asking “How is everyone?” at the beginning of every meeting isn’t always the best way to encourage connection and team bonding. Sometimes, you need to take it a step further with an ice breaker.

The best ice breakers have the power to strengthen coworker bonds, stimulate better brainstorming sessions, and create an atmosphere of inclusivity. But it’s easier said than done, and the wrong ice breaker questions can lead to awkwardness or even increased tension.

To get the most value out of your team bonding moments, we’ve compiled a list of the best ice breaker games for the workplace. Next time you get together with your team, use one of these games instead of asking “How is everyone”, and you’re sure to hear some better, more insightful responses than “I’m good.”

Ice Breakers for Meetings

1. One Word Game

The One Word ice breaker allows you to provide initial context into a meeting’s topic, and get everyone in the right mindset for discussion.

To play, you’ll want to divide meeting participants into smaller groups. Then, tell them to think for a minute or two, and then share with their group one word that describes X.

For instance, let’s say you’re leading a meeting on culture. Tell the groups to describe work culture, or your office culture in particular, in one word. Once they’ve shared with their groups, you can invite them to share their word with the entire room.

This game encourages everyone to think about a certain topic in smaller groups ahead of time, which could increase participation during the meeting.

2. Pop Quiz

To successfully loosen everyone up and get them in the right mindset for a meeting, you might consider putting a short Pop Quiz on the board.

If your goal is simply to encourage team bonding, your quiz can be more fun — like, “Match the lyrics with this 80’s song”. However, you might also use the Pop Quiz as an opportunity to introduce participants’ to the meeting’s theme.

If you’re discussing company changes, for instance, maybe you’ll start by quizzing team members on company history facts (i.e. “What year was this company founded?”).

3. Birth Map

Place a map and a set of pins at the front of a large conference room before a big meeting. As people walk in, ask them to place a pin where they were born or raised.

As the map fills up with pins, people will learn about how diverse their teammates might be. Allow some time at the end of the meeting for your colleagues to walk up and look more closely at the map.

Quick Ice Breakers

4. Would You Rather

A classic game played at summer camps everywhere, “Would You Rather” is actually an excellent, quick ice breaker for the workplace. Next time you’re settling into a meeting or team bonding outing, take turns going around the table and asking each person a “Would You Rather” question.

Here are a few “Would You Rather” questions to get you started:

• Would you rather only have summer or winter for the rest of your life?
• Would you rather go on a hike or see a movie?
• Would you rather never use social media sites and apps again, or never watch another movie or TV show?
• Would you rather have a horrible short term memory or a horrible long term memory?

5. 18 & Under

18 & Under is an engaging and unique way to encourage team members to share fun or interesting stories with one another. Before a meeting, simply go around the room, and ask each person to share one accomplishment they had before they turned 18.

Undoubtedly you’ll get some of lesser importance, like “I bought a skateboard,” but you never know what hidden skills you might discover in your colleagues.

6. Two Truths and a Lie

One of the more classic ice breakers in the list, Two Truths and a Lie can be used anywhere from family parties to company events. To play, you simply ask each person to brainstorm three “facts” about themselves — two of the facts will be true, and one will be a lie.

For instance, I might say, “I once auditioned for the TV show Zoom. I have three brothers. I ziplined in Switzerland once.” Coworkers can take turns guessing which is the lie. (FYI, I have two brothers, not three, so that’s the lie. Unfortunately, I did audition for Zoom.)

Two Truths and a Lie is a fun and engaging game, and more importantly, it can help your team learn facts about one another, so they can begin forming deeper bonds.

Ice Breaker Games for Small Groups

7. Fun Questions

Asking fun questions is an easy and effective ice breaker game. To play, simply go around the room and have each person provide an answer to a fun question. The questions are up to you, but if you’re stuck, here are a few ideas:

• If you’re stranded on a desert island and have the option of bringing three items with you, what three items would they be?
• If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?
• What was the first concert you ever went to?
• If you could have any celebrity over for dinner, who would it be and why?

These questions serve two purposes — first, they allow your coworkers to get into a sillier, more creative mindset. Second, they encourage conversation on topics typically reserved for outside the office, which enables members of your team to get to know one another on a deeper level.

Meg Prater, the managing editor of the HubSpot blog, says “When I first started including ice-breaker questions in our weekly team stand-up meetings, the experience was … cringeworthy. It felt like exactly what it was: organized fun. But we kept at it. I listened to feedback and tried to incorporate it into better ice breakers.”

She continued, “For example, some folks on our team don’t watch a lot of T.V. and felt a little excluded when we’d fall down a rabbit hole of shows we were binging. Keeping the ice breakers inclusive keeps everyone engaged. Now, our ice-breakers can take 15+ minutes to get through and yield some of our biggest laughs and revelations of the week.”

8. Personality Quiz

This ice breaker can promote team bonding, and it’s one of the easier options in the list. Simply choose a brief personality quiz on your phone or computer (if you’re stuck, here’s a list), and pull it up on a projector or send the link to everyone.

Once everyone has completed the personality assessment, have each colleague mention one thing they agree or disagree with in their results. This game allows your team members to gain a new perspective on their peers, and it’s also a fun and easy way to get an interesting conversation started.

9. Who is it?

Have everyone write a unique, strange, or unexpected fact about them on a piece of paper. Then, put the pieces of paper into a hat and mix them around. Pull from the hat and read each fact.

Allow the team to try and guess who wrote it. After they guess, ask the employee who wrote the fact to identify themselves and give any further context if necessary. This could be a great way to get to know surprising new things about your teammates.

10. Marshmallow Challenge

Tom Wujec, a business visualization expert, initially presented his Marshmallow Challenge at TED. To play, you simply divide your team into groups of four and give each group 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and a marshmallow. Whichever team can build the tallest structure, wins — the trick is, the marshmallow must be on top.

There are a few reasons this game works as both a great ice breaker and a team-building exercise. First, the most successful teams are the groups of people who don’t spend time competing for power.

The game forces your colleagues to work collaboratively when brainstorming potential solutions. Second, the Marshmallow Challenge encourages people to think quickly and offer alternative solutions when their initial idea fails.

With the Marshmallow Challenge, you can strengthen your team’s brainstorming and problem-solving skills, and your team can also have some fun. A win, win.

11. Scavenger Hunt

At HubSpot, we conduct a scavenger hunt for new hires on the first day of their training. It’s fun and encourages collaboration, but additionally, it can help employees learn their way around the office.

Fortunately, you can conduct a scavenger hunt for your team even if they’ve worked at your office for years.

Simply split up your team into groups, and give each group a short list of items to find — if you work in a smaller space, maybe you can hide some funny items around the office ahead of time. You might even provide incentive for the winning team, like a $50 Amazon gift card.

A scavenger hunt is also an exceptional opportunity for cross-department interaction. Consider reaching out to managers’ from other departments, and creating groups of employees who don’t often get to work together.

12. No Smiling

This game is simple and meant to energize your team. Get your colleagues in a circle and ask one volunteer to sit or stand in the middle. Tell the volunteer that they can not laugh or smile, regardless of what happens. Then have each other colleague take turns telling the volunteer a work-appropriate joke.

The goal of the volunteer is to hear a joke from every colleague around the circle, while the goal of the other team members is to make the volunteer laugh.

This icebreaker can be helpful in new-employee or management training to lighten the pressure of starting a new job. It can also be helpful as a way of lightening the mood on teams that regularly deal with stressful projects or situations.

13. This is Better Than That

Aside from being a fun team activity, this might be great energizer for sales employees or others that regularly pitch, market, and sell products.

Ask your team to find four to seven items around the office and bring them to one room. These items could be something they use daily, like a pen or a chair. However, you should encourage them to find items that are more odd or unique. This will make the game more challenging.

Line the items up and split the group into sub-teams. Task each team with picking an item they would use to survive if stranded on a desert island.

Tell team members that they cannot pick more than one and must assume it is the only item they will have on that island. Allow the teams time to deliberate and then ask them to present the item they chose and why.

Virtual Icebreakers for Dispersed Teams

14. Choose Your Favorite

For this icebreaker, all you have to do is answer the question about your favorite things. You’ll ask your team to choose their favorite movie, song, T.V. show, etc. The question can change every week.

This icebreaker helps your team get to know each other even when they work remotely and can spark conversation on what everyone likes or dislikes.

15. Trivia Game

If you’re looking for a remote icebreaker that’s more of a game, and less discussion based, you can host a trivia game.

Kahoot is a trivia platform you can use for free (hosts up to 10 people). To get started, all you’ll need to do is sign up for a free Kahoot account.

Then, you can choose a featured trivia game to play. To run this remotely, you’ll want to share your screen with your team. Everyone will need to have a separate device to use so they can enter the game and submit their answers.

16. Share an Embarrassing Photo

This is one of my favorite icebreakers because it’s a fun way to get to know your team. For this game, have everyone bring in an embarrassing photo and tell the story behind it.

Doing this is a great way to build connection remotely. To show the photos, you can have your team members share their screen or send a file to the team leader who will have them pulled up.

To make this more interesting, you can have people guess whose photo it is before your team member shares their story.

17. One Word Pulse Check

For this icebreaker, have everyone on your team go around and share a word or phrase that represents how they feel that day.

Christina Perricone, the HubSpot Website blog and Pillar Page manager, says this is her favorite icebreaker.

“The person sharing gets to decide whether or not to elaborate, and everyone listens without response. The purpose of the exercise is to give people a chance to release and/or reveal emotional setbacks, obstacles, wins, highlights, or anything else that might be impacting how they show up to work that day. It provides a space for participants to bring their entire self to work and it gives the team context for how to support that team member that day,” Perricone adds.

Icebreakers can seem cringeworthy, but are actually a great way to build trust within your team. Even if you work remotely, team bonding is an important part of running a productive, effective team.

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

If you clicked on this post hoping to read something like “If you spend $1,000 dollars on digital advertising a month, you’ll hit your marketing goals easily!” I’m sorry to disappoint.

When it comes to ad spend, there just isn’t a perfect answer for every business. I know, it sounds like a cop-out, but I promise you it’s true.

Now, you might be thinking, So, why am I even reading this post, anyway? 

While I can’t tell you how much money you should spend on digital ads this year, I can walk you through a framework to help you decide on your own optimal ad spend.

Ultimately, here’s what you should think about when deciding how much you should spend on digital advertising:

1. How much investment is needed in order to hit my revenue goals?
2. What percentage of my marketing budget can I realistically afford to spend?
3. What is the lifetime value (LTV) of my average customer?
4. How well am I converting website visitors into leads, and leads into customers?
5. How much money am I spending on each bid?

At the end of this post, you’ll know how to use historical data to determine how much money you need to spend to hit your business goals and how to optimize your efforts to get the most out of each advertising dollar. Sound good? Let’s jump in.

1. How much investment is needed to hit revenue goals?

So — where do you start?

Well, the primary goal for most businesses is to generate sustainable long-term revenue growth. That’s why, when determining how much to invest in digital advertising, you should work backward from your company’s revenue goals.

Working backward can help you determine how much revenue your digital ads are responsible for bringing in, which can inform how much investment you need to make that goal reality.

Here’s what this might look like:

It all starts at the top with your business goal, which is most likely to increase revenue. You’ll have many departments working together to achieve this overarching goal, including marketing, sales, and customer service. By taking a look at historical performance across your business, you can identify what percentage of revenue each department is able to deliver.

Within marketing, you’ll have multiple objectives that feed into marketing’s responsibility, including paid, owned, and earned objectives. You’ll launch a number of initiatives to support this business goal, including paid media campaigns.

To understand this concept, let’s walk through an example. Let’s say your business has the goal of increasing revenue by $100,000 this year. From historical performance, the business makes the marketing department responsible for 50% of this goal. Great — now, what initiatives are you going to launch to bring in that $50,000 revenue?

Well, digital ads are going to be only one of the many tactics you launch, all of which will need investment. Based on the historical performance of your ad campaigns, you know that you have an average $2.50 return on ad spend (ROAS). This means, for every $1 advertising dollar you invest, you make $2.50.

If you think that your other marketing campaigns on owned and earned channels can impact 75% of marketing’s overall goal, that leaves 25% for you to hit with ads, or $12,500. Divide this by your ROAS of $2.50 and you’ll find that you need to invest $5,000 throughout the year to hit your revenue goals.

2. What percentage of your marketing budget can you realistically afford to spend?

Now, do you actually have $5,000 to spend on your digital ads? If you do, then great — you can continue to sustain long-term revenue growth with your existing advertising strategy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you simply don’t have the advertising dollars you need to make the impact you want.

Or, maybe you’re experimenting with digital advertising for the first time and don’t have historical data on ad spend and ROAS to inform your decision. What do you do then?

It’s a difficult question to answer honestly, but you need to ask yourself: “How much money do I actually have?” Take a look at your cash flow and profit to get a grasp on how much money is realistically available for digital advertising investment.

If you set a budget that you can’t afford, the long-term success of your campaigns, and sustainable growth, is doomed from the start. That’s why it’s important to start off with a budget that you’re comfortable with and can commit to in the long-run.

But don’t worry — even if you have a limited budget, that doesn’t mean you can’t use paid media as part of your greater marketing mix. Ultimately, before jumping right into ads, you want to further optimize other business metrics to get the most out of each and every advertising dollar.

3. What is the lifetime value (LTV) of your average customer?

Lifetime value is a prediction of the profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. Simply put, LTV answers how much money you will make from a single customer over time.

To calculate LTV, take the average yearly revenue your average customer brings you and multiply it by the average lifespan of a customer.

For example, if your average customer pays you $500 a year, and stays with your company for six years, we can say the average lifetime value of a customer is $3,000. But let’s not forget how much it costs to service a customer. If you factor in that it costs you $50 to service that customer each year, or $300 over their entire lifetime as a customer, you can say the average lifetime value of your customers is $3,000 minus $300, or $2,700.

Now, the higher your lifetime value, the more money you can realistically spend to acquire a new customer. If you’re feeling strapped for advertising dollars, consider taking steps to increase your customer’s LTV.

There are a ton of best practices for increasing customer lifetime value which I won’t go into detail in this article. But to get you started, think about things like your business’s subscription and pricing models. Launching marketing initiatives to move the needle on LTV will, in turn, make your digital ads more successful and less costly.

4. How well are you converting website visitors into leads and leads into customers?

Now that you have an average lifetime value for your customers, you can work your way backward to see what your monthly advertising budget should be. We’re going to walk through this example focused on the value of a form conversion, but you can apply the same approach to whatever conversion points you’re optimizing your ads for.

You’ll want to consider two things to figure out your advertising budget:

• Your average conversion rate: The rate at which website visitors to your site convert on a form and become a lead.
• Your average lead-to-customer rate: The rate at which leads become paying customers.

Let’s say you run an IT Solutions company, and you want to advertise for your upcoming webinar on network security. You dig into the performance of your landing pages for past webinars and learn that you have a 7% webinar conversion rate and that your lead-to-customer rate is 10%. So if ten people sign up for your webinar, you can expect that one person will become a paying customer.

What are these numbers for your business? Are they lower than you’d like? If so, that means that your advertising dollars are not being spent as efficiently as they could. To increase your landing page conversion rate, consider testing your calls-to-action and adding social proofing.

And to convert more leads into customers, you could use email automation to nurture your potential customers towards making a purchase. There’s a lot you can do here, but for the purpose of this exercise, just know that if you have low conversion rates, pouring more money into your underperforming ads isn’t the best use of your resources.

5. How much money are you spending on each bid?

To make the most of your ad spend, you want to bid less than your expected return. LTV, conversion rate, and lead-to-customer rate can be used to determine what your maximum bid should be using this equation.

Maximum Ad Spend = LTV x Conversion Rate x Lead-to-Customer Rate

Let’s jump back to our webinar example to see this in action. If you divide one new customer by your lead-to-customer rate, you’ll see that we need 10 webinar signups to yield one new customer.

Next, divide the number of webinar signups we need by the average conversion rate. Using our 7% webinar conversion rate, we find that you need roughly 143 clicks on your ad to generate one new customer. If that customer is worth $2,700 to you, we can start to calculate how much you should spend per click on your ads.

If we ignored all the other costs of acquiring a new customer, then your break-even bid would be your customer lifetime value, divided by 143, the number of clicks you need to generate one new customer. This means you could bid $19 per click on your ad and break even.

Follow this process for your previous ad campaigns. Were you bidding too much? If you were, then that means that your advertising budget wasn’t being used effectively to reach your revenue goals.

Improving your ad copy, keyword strategy, targeting, and more all play a role in how much you’re spending. Here’s another helpful blog post to learn how to optimize your digital advertising costs.

Reevaluate Spend to Maximize Impact

Your advertising budget should bend and flex to meet the evolving demands of your business over time. Taking an experimental mindset when reevaluating your spend will help you identify the most profitable initiatives in your strategy and adjust the way that you budget.

Additionally, it’s important to keep in mind that there are plenty of free, organic-driven opportunities to increase brand awareness and sales on social media. If you’re strapped for cash but want to use social media for business growth, take a look at our Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide for free alternatives.

Lastly, a word of advice: I’d recommend reevaluating your spend no more than on a quarterly basis. That way, your campaigns will have enough time to bring in reliable results, but you’ll still have enough time to adjust your investment accordingly to meet your end-of-year goals.

If you or your team want to level up their digital advertising know-how, check out this free Ads Training Course to learn today’s best practices for succeeding with digital ads on search engines and social media.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

The other day I was shopping online for a Nintendo Switch, a popular handheld gaming console.

The popularity of the console has made it extremely difficult to find one — stores like Best Buy and Target were out of stock.

This meant that I had to reach outside of my comfort zone when browsing. I scoured Google to find an ecommerce option that carried the Switch.

Even though I was desperate to reach my goal, I was very selective about where to shop. As a consumer, website design is one of the biggest factors I take into consideration when choosing where to spend my money.

If the website design isn’t committed to user experience, I immediately deem the company as unprofessional. I’m not alone, either. In fact, 48% of people use website design as a deciding factor when determining the credibility of a business.

If you’re wondering about the usability of your ecommerce website, this post is here to help. We’ll go over some ways you can improve the design of your website, as well awesome examples that put these tips into practice.

Before you upload your next product page, take a look at these pointers below to help.

1. Make the website user-friendly.

When it comes to ecommerce websites, user-friendliness is a must. Customers have to be able to easily navigate through your website to make purchases.

Take the Daily Harvest website, for example. The homepage clearly states the purpose of their product and the CTA to “Get Started” is a quick link to explore purchasing:

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The homepage also has a dropdown menu so customers can easily navigate towards what they’re looking for. Dropdown menus keep a website organized and reduce the busyness of a homepage.

2. Ensure a secure checkout process.

If shopping is available on your website, make sure your customers know their credit card information is secure. There are a couple of ways you can do this. First, as shown on the website for beauty company Billie, you can include this in an “info” button:

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Info buttons are useful if you want to display secure checkout information but want to avoid crowding checkout pages. However, if you want to state checkout security more visibly on your website, like in a paragraph at the top of your “Place Order” page, that could be helpful to website visitors who may be wary of purchasing online.

3. Add filtering options for your products.

As a consumer, I love filtering options, which can help me easily find products or services. That’s why they’re a must for your ecommerce website: Customers who know exactly what they want can find it without having to sift through too many options.

Take this filter list from The Little Market, for example:

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The fair trade home decor website has pages and pages of offerings, so this specific filtering system helps consumers find what they’re looking for based on multiple categories.

When you design your filtering system, make sure you make the categories broad enough to fit all of your products, but specific enough to be helpful to customers. For example, a website for a record company that sells merchandise might have filtering options based on artists, genre, or the label’s apparel.

4. Include customer service capabilities on your website.

Customer service capabilities can include an automated chatbot that answers FAQs about your product or service. Alternatively, you can have a fully-fleshed out support section of your website that offers more information about your products, like this one from camera company Fujifilm:

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This section provides free information about how to use the various cameras the website has available, including downloadable manuals and software for photo editing. It’s helpful to provide resources like these to customers if you sell a product or service that might have features that need a little more explaining, like a camera, or automated software.

5. Have the right CMS.

Choosing the correct software to help you manage your ecommerce site is just as important as fine-tuning the customer experience. Software should be able to support all of the functions in this list and be easy to use for you and your team.

For instance, does your CMS allow you to create a responsive webpage, like in this screenshot below?

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HubSpot’s CMS software is accessible for marketers, web designers, and IT specialists. It supports responsive designs, customer service chatbots, forms, and lets you manage all of those in one place.

If you’re in the market for a CMS, take a look at The 8 Best CMS Systems Today & How to Choose.

6. Jazz up product descriptions.

If you want to continuously delight customers, make your product descriptions fun and engaging. The thrilling website copy shouldn’t stop with your homepage — make sure you carry the personality of your brand throughout the content of the entire site. Take this tumbler product description, for example:

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“No glass, no problem,” describes the appeal of the product right out of the gate in an appealing way. The description then goes to explain highlights about the product, and ends with a hook to really sell the anchor to customers: “Forego clunky coolers and bring perfectly chilled wine wherever life leads you.”

Feel free to use a similar method when describing your company’s offerings. First, start with an engaging introduction. Then, spotlight some essential features of your product that sets it apart from customers. Finally, give a visual about how the product will enhance the quality of the customer’s life.

7. Integrate social media on product pages.

Social media icons on your ecommerce website? Absolutely. Social media buttons improve the visibility of your brand.

For instance, if I wanted to share the print below on my Twitter account, the buttons make it easy for my followers to click the link if they’re interested in learning more:

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Social media sharing options give shoppers the opportunity to share your products with their circle of friends and family, giving you exposure to a larger audience.

For more information about social media marketing, check out this ultimate guide.

8. Include the customer voice for your products.

The voice of the customer is important to display on your site. It gives prospects an idea of how the product or service can help them from other customers, which likely seems more trustworthy than a product description from the company itself.

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This testimonial from a sales specialist gives HubSpot’s Sales Hub software credibility. It proves that the software works for SMBs and provides data about how. As a big plus to adding testimonials on your site, if you contact loyal customers about giving one for your product or service, they’ll feel like their voice matters to your company.

9. Make your website responsive for mobile devices.

Did you know that by 2021, it’s expected that smartphone purchases in the U.S. will increase to over $350 billion? This is up from $148 billion in 2018. This is why making sure your ecommerce site is responsive for mobile is imperative to delighting customers.

More and more consumers are completing purchases on their smartphones, so having a site that’s optimized for a phone screen makes purchasing easy and delightful for customers. For an example, let’s look at Chicago-based coffee retailer, Dollop Coffee Co. Here’s what the shopping tab looks like on desktop:

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Products are labelled clearly, the photos are large and clear enough to be seen by desktop browsers, and the navigation is simple to understand. Comparatively, let’s look at the same tab on mobile:

Notice how in the mobile responsive design, the photos are smaller, and four products are displayed in a different format than the desktop version. These small changes make navigation on mobile as easy as on desktop.

Now that you’re equipped with some tips for stellar ecommerce web design, let’s look at how some of these practices look in-action with some stellar examples of ecommerce website designs.

Best Ecommerce Website Designs

Let’s look at some websites that are using some of the techniques listed above to delight their customers and offer a well-rounded shopping experience.

1. Bandcamp

Tactic: User-friendly site design

Bandcamp is a website where record labels and independent artists can share and sell their music. On select Fridays, Bandcamp gives 100% of their profits to musicians. Bandcamp’s service calls for a website design that’s easy to use for consumers and artists:

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This is the band page for Chicago-based band Frankie Cosmos. Notice how Bandcamp’s site design makes it easy for the page to be personalized to the group’s brand. Additionally, there’s multiple options to purchase the record using Bandcamp’s tools, as well.

Bandcamp’s user-friendly website encourages consumers to explore without having to learn the ropes.

2. Yelp

Tactic: Robust filtering options

Yelp’s website is expansive — it’s a platform for consumers to leave reviews about shopping experiences, and a chance for business owners to increase their visibility and connect with customers.

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The filtering options on Yelp makes finding what’s intended an easy venture for customers. They can choose their own adventure, and look for options based on vicinity, business type, hours, price range, and more.

If your website hosts a multitude of services like Yelp, think about how you can expand your filter options to fit the needs of customers.

3. Scoop N Scootery

Tactic: Compelling product list

For Boston-based ice cream shop Scoop N Scootery, website design is a piece of ice cream cake. The website is an incredible branding tool. It keeps the spirit and personality of the business consistent, right down to the menu:

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This interactive and fun take on the menu engages a first-time visitor while giving them a taste of the business’s brand.

4. SimpliSafe

Tactic: Customer support options

SimpliSafe offers home security systems, and the company website is a helpful homebase for questions about home security, cameras offered by the company, and the features of each.

SimpliSafe’s website also boasts a Help Center:

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This Help Center offers a form for more information about cameras, extra reading about products, and is organized in a clear format. If one of the goals for your website is to improve customer service capabilities, the SimpliSafe Help Center is a great place to look for inspiration.

5. Rothy’s

Tactic: Engaging product descriptions

Shoe company Rothy’s has fun with their product descriptions. Rothy’s footwear is made from recycled water bottles and boasts a heightened sense of comfort. For a new line of sandals, the team at Rothy’s focused on comfortability and warm weather:

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This product description uses compelling copy to relate to the reader. Additionally, when mentioning the senses, the short paragraph helps users imagine the emotions owning the shoes will give: happiness, relaxation, and stylishness.

Evoke the emotions of consumers with your product descriptions. Chances are, many are visiting your ecommerce website for the first time, so give customers copy that makes them want to know more.

This afternoon, I’ll try my hand once more at purchasing the Switch. I’ll be looking at the design of websites for clear purchase instructions and secure checkout options. I’ll also be searching for a certain type of model, so having filtering options will be a huge plus.

When you think about your ecommerce website, what are some of the standout features? Where are some areas you can improve upon the design? Take these into consideration when you’re redesigning, and your customers will find themselves delighted by your website.

Happy website building!

Have you ever found yourself working on a project in which you had to toggle between multiple software and applications? Perhaps you had to plug data from one system into another or rewrite the same content over and over again to ensure it was in multiple locations.

Although few people have the time or patience for this type of tedious work, it’s highly common and often critical to your business’s success — these mundane tasks need to get done.

What if there was a way to connect your software to the applications you use in a way that successfully brings them together? This would mean all of your information and data would live in a central location with no manual entry required, even if those applications don’t actually come with the software itself … sound nice?

Well, good news! This type of solution exists … it’s called an integration.

Integrations are a complex topic to understand. So, let’s simplify the concept with the help of an analogy we can reference throughout this guide. Let’s pretend you want to plug your MacBook laptop into your TV using a connector cable so you can watch reruns of Friends on Netflix on the big screen. And integration kind of works like this — I’ll explain more as we go.

Back to our analogy: If your software is your laptop, you’ll use a connector cable, or integration, to then watch Friends on the TV, or application.

Now, let’s run through some commonly asked questions about integrations to help you get a better grasp on what they are, how they work, and why your company needs them.

Why use integrations?

Integrations solve and simplify your need for new software as your business grows and evolves. They allow you to keep the system you’re currently using by simply adding connections to third-party applications to enhance system functionality and provide additional features you may need but aren’t able to build within your software. You can keep your current laptop and TV, and simply use the connector cable to watch Friends on the big screen.

By leveraging integration connections across your systems, you can power your business to achieve a much wider range of tasks on your software as you enhance its functionality. This is especially helpful as your business expands since your needs are bound to change.

Although your software may have the functionality you need when you start your business, you’re likely going to want additional applications to provide the features you end up needing later on, as you grow.

There are many types of integrations, each of which have specific functions to help meet different needs. The easiest way to think about the various types of integrations is by category. Some integrations have several functions, meaning they could technically fit into many categories because they serve more than one main purpose. Other integrations have one specific function.

Who needs integrations?

Integrations are helpful tools for virtually every business, no matter the size or industry. There are integrations suited for every type of company (startups, SMBs, and enterprise companies) with any purpose (advertising, analytics, or content).

If you sell software, as we do at HubSpot, you’ll find yourself not only using connections for your internal software but also for your customers to use along with your software. This is because your software may not have every feature and function your customers need to run their business. So, by adding an integration, they’ll get that added feature or function while continuing to use your software.

Referring back to our analogy, without the integration, or connector cable, your laptop wouldn’t be able to communicate with your TV to allow you to watch Friends on the big screen. You need that integration, or cable, to allow for added functionality and watch the show on TV — without it, this wouldn’t be possible.

How do you get integrations?

Integrations are almost always located in some type of marketplace, where customers can review and browse all of their options. The HubSpot Integrations & Application Marketplace is an example of this. Our marketplace allows visitors to search and learn more about the various integrations and their functions, and then connect HubSpot to their integration of choice.

(No, you can’t go to Best Buy to pick up your integration as you would with your connector cable to watch Friends on your TV… you’re right, the example doesn’t quite work here.)

How do integrations work with APIs?

API stands for application programming interface. An API is an interface that software uses to receive information (whether that’s data, servers, applications, etc.).

All of the integrations we’re going to discuss below are built on APIs. By building integrations on APIs, you can connect your integrations to your software and use them in tandem with one another. The integration allows for the flow of information to and from apps and devices in real time — APIs allow them to talk to one another.

Think about this in terms of our analogy from above: The application is the TV, the programming allows your laptop to communicate with the TV, and the interface is how you (the user) are able to interact with the application (by watching Friends on your TV). In this example, the API is the port on the side of your laptop in which you actually insert your integration (the cable) to then connect your laptop to your TV.

Integration vs. iPaaS Solution

If you’ve heard of integrations before, chances are you’ve also heard about iPaaS, or Integration Platform as a Service. The difference between the two is an important distinction to make when determining which one you need for your business. While an integration is a one-to-one, direct connection solution, an iPaaS solution is not.

Instead, iPaaS is a cloud-based platform that connects your applications and systems — whether that’s in the cloud or on-premise — between an organization and third-party software without the use of middleware.

So, if you look for an integration solution on your software’s marketplace and don’t find the connection you’re looking for, then you’d turn to an iPaaS solution to solve your need for that connection. There are a few integrations available today (called “connector integrations”, which we’ll cover an example of below) that can help you build custom integrations..

So, which integrations should you actually use? Let’s look at a list of some of the most popular integrations available.

Popular Integrations

The following integrations are categorized by business need to help you browse through your options. (Almost all of these integrations fit into multiple categories, as they have functions that allow them to do multiple things. Below, we placed them in the category they’re best suited for.)

It’s important to note these are just some of today’s popular integrations — there are hundreds of more integrations to learn about and choose from as your business grows.

The list we’ve compiled below is of integrations that connect with HubSpot. This isn’t to say these HubSpot integrations don’t also work with other software. In fact, most of these integrations are compatible with dozens of programs in addition to HubSpot.

Let’s take a look.

Advertising Integrations

Advertising integrations help you market to and reach your target audience. Data about the success of your ads and/ or the leads obtained from them is automatically added to your HubSpot CRM so you can learn more about the people who interact with your ads and nurture them into customers.

1. Facebook Ads

The Facebook Ads integration allows you to connect your Facebook Ads account to HubSpot. This integration gives you the ability to attribute your ads directly to the contacts who interact with them. It also allows you to review real data about which ads impact your bottom line. This simplifies the reporting process for all of your Facebook Ad efforts.

2. AdRoll

Different businesses and products have various buyer personas. The AdRoll integration gives you the opportunity to create personalized retargeting ads for different lead segments in your HubSpot contacts. You can personalize several parts of the ads, such as content and formatting, that will best relate to your prospect. This allows you to focus on your audience’s attributes so you can effectively reach your prospects — you can gather intricate details about your prospects from your CRM via the integration so you’re able to successfully retarget them.

3. Instapage

If you’re not a developer, creating your website’s landing page might sound like an overwhelming task. The Instapage integration provides a straightforward option for anyone who wants to create and personalize their landing page and then send lead information straight to HubSpot. These details are automatically placed under the associated contact in HubSpot for you— meaning, there’s no need to perform this transfer manually.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Integrations

ABM stands for account-based marketing. ABM integrations help you leverage your account and audience data so you can tailor your messaging, CTAs, and marketing strategies to close deals and attract customers.

1. OrgChartHub

The OrgChartHub integration allows you to efficiently build customer organization charts without ever leaving HubSpot. You can create customer organization charts while in HubSpot so you’re able to easily identify unknown contacts, visualize key stakeholders, and customize your sales personas without manually sending any of this information back and forth.

2. CaliberMind

With the CaliberMind integration, you’ll be able to look at your cross-channel account engagement and create alerts for your reps about which deals they should focus on closing to meet quota. The integration takes your contacts directly from HubSpot and automatically matches them to their associated accounts so you don’t have to.

3. Metadata

The Metadata integration provides account-based advertising services. You can automatically identify specific target accounts and contacts from HubSpot to create personalized advertisements at scale to help you close more deals and reach your target audience more effectively.

Analytics and Data Integrations

These integrations help you measure your success across a number of analytics platforms. You can look at your data in different ways and ensure all of this information is well-organized in HubSpot so your team can review it at any time. These integrations help you learn more about which of your efforts are working and which ones need to be modified.

1. Databox

With the increase of remote employees across businesses and the number of people who access their work while on-the-go, having the ability to review and manage your key performance indicators (KPIs) from anywhere can be quite helpful. The Databox integration provides you with access to all of your analytics data in HubSpot from a wide variety of sources including Google Analytics, SEMRush, mobile, desktop, Facebook, and more.

2. Hotjar

In a world where many website visitors are uninterested in completing forms and providing their personal information, Hotjar is a great way to learn about who your visitors are and what they’re looking for on your site. The Hotjar integration gives you insight into who your website and mobile visitors are and what their needs consist of directly from HubSpot.

3. Klipfolio

The Klipfolio integration shows you your most important metrics in real-time and creates easy-to-read dashboards in HubSpot so you can track and analyze performance across all of your platforms from one location. This allows you to improve your data transparency and reach your targets faster.

Calling Integrations

Whether it’s a meeting with fellow employees or your prospective and current customers, calling integrations will make all phone and video call interactions simple. Your contact’s information and details about the call will be recorded in HubSpot for easy access. This also provides sales reps and support team members with the necessary background information to assist the prospect or customer appropriately.

1. UberConference

With UberConference, it takes just seconds to schedule your meetings with colleagues and prospective customers so you can focus on tasks that require more attention. The integration allows you to schedule meetings quickly and easily without ever having to leave your HubSpot portal.

2. Aircall

Phone calls remain one of the most effective ways to interact with your prospective and current customers. Whether it’s a sales or support call, the Aircall integration allows you to manage your call flows and attentively assist your leads and customers all within HubSpot so your contact’s information lives in one, central location.

3. CallRail

The CallRail integration is a call tracking and analytics system which allows you to customize segments and actions based on your specific calls with prospects and customers. All of your call and text data will automatically be added and organized in HubSpot under the associated contact so you don’t have to manually enter any data.

Connector Integrations

Connector integrations provide you with access to dozens of applications which sync to HubSpot to save you time and add functionality. Some connector integrations offer a wide range of applications and some have more specific types of applications. Additionally, some connector integrations can assist in creating a custom integration to suit your needs.

1. Automate.io

The Automate.io integration connects to HubSpot to give you access to over 80 applications. By syncing with these apps, you’ll be able to transfer data to them to create customized integrations so you can manage all of your data in a way that works for your business all within HubSpot.

2. Zapier

The Zapier integration allows you to automatically connect your software to over 1,000 applications. It links your apps to HubSpot for you in just a few clicks to save you time. There’s no coding required and your apps will be able to begin sharing data in an easy-to-read workflow format in your HubSpot portal.

3. PieSync

The PieSync integration provides real-time, two-way contact sync. This means every time you add a contact to HubSpot, it automatically syncs to an application (such as Google Contacts or Outlook), and vice versa — you don’t need to worry about any importing or exporting, expediting and simplifying your contact syncs.

Content Integrations

Content integrations help you create, design, and share custom content for your website. They also help you learn about who’s interacting with the content and how they’re interacting with it. That information is then synced to HubSpot so you can organize it and add it to specific contacts.

1. Beacon

If your website has a collection of blog posts, the Beacon integration might be a good option for you. The integration ensures your content looks professional and allows you to drive more leads by getting more value out of your existing content — it connects to HubSpot to automatically convert your blog posts into downloadable content such as eBooks.

2. briX

The briX integration connects to HubSpot so you can design and personalize web pages for your site. You don’t need a background in web design or coding to create beautiful pages — the drag-and-drop template and 100+ customizable features make it easy to organize your content in any way you choose. This integration is ideal for easily designing and personalizing web pages directly from HubSpot.

3. Belch.io

Customized landing pages, web pages, and emails provide a professional look and feel for your visitors, leads, and customers while interacting with your business online. The Belch.io integration connects to HubSpot so you can personalize and brand all of these things in just minutes. It’s a great option for anyone without a background in coding or web development who wants to design and customize their site pages and emails to complement their brand all from HubSpot.

Customer Success Integrations

Customer success integrations connect to HubSpot to make your internal and external interactions with employees (cross-team) and customers straightforward. They simplify communication and help you share information and/or data when you need to.

1. Slack

The Slack integration is a digital workspace and communication tool that allows you to connect and talk with your team members. The integration is ideal for team collaboration and coordination from anywhere. By connecting the integration to your software, you can use Slack’s and HubSpot’s features in either the application or the software so you don’t have to waste time toggling back and forth — the same information will be found in both locations in real time.

2. Zendesk

Zendesk offers a ticketing system to keep track of customer inquiries and allows you to keep details about all of your customer interactions in one place. It helps you provide consistent customer experiences among your fellow employees and customers.

By connecting HubSpot to the Zendesk integration, you’ll be able to bring the work of your sales, marketing, and support teams together in a central location. It also allows these departments to communicate with each other while in HubSpot as well.

3. LiveChat

The LiveChat integration allows you to communicate with potential customers in real-time when they need assistance or guidance while on your website from HubSpot. Whether it’s a question about your product or the need for help in the checkout process, LiveChat allows you to walk them through the information they need to help you boost conversions and build strong relationships with prospects and customers.

Ecommerce Integrations

If you have an online store, ecommerce integrations are a great way to learn about what your customers and visitors are doing while they’re on your website. By connecting these integrations to HubSpot, you’ll know when your visitors are most frequently abandoning your site or their carts so you can create re-engagement content to regain their interest.

1. Shopify

The Shopify integration allows you to easily incorporate all of your ecommerce data and customer data within HubSpot. It automatically syncs customer, product, and deal information in HubSpot under the associated customer’s profile, so your entire team can view all of these details in one location. You can also create cart abandonment nurturing tactics, re-engagement ads for your website from HubSpot once you connect the integration to the software.

2. Typeform

The Typeform integration helps you create and design web and mobile forms for your leads. You can create contact forms, sign up forms, quizzes, and more, and all of your responses will automatically be sent directly to HubSpot so you can easily review your results and responses and compile them under the associated contact in HubSpot.

3. Magento

The Magento integration helps you create and send upsell, cross-sell, and reorder emails as well as develop abandoned cart nurturing tactics to boost your conversions. It automatically sends all of your customers’ ecommerce-related data, as well as emails between you and your customers, straight to their respective HubSpot contact record.

Email Integrations

Email integrations help you track a prospect’s interactions with sales reps, personalize your email automation with certain contacts, and measure the success of your email campaigns among your target audience — all from HubSpot.

1. MailChimp

The MailChimp integration allows you to sync HubSpot with your email service provider. You can build email campaigns and rest easy knowing the Intelligent Error Handling feature will continue engaging your contacts even if a syncing error occurs between the software and application. By connecting MailChimp to HubSpot, you’ll have the ability to automatically add contacts from HubSpot into your application’s email lists and vice versa so you never have to do it manually.

2. Privy

Privy helps you make more sales and turn more prospects into delighted customers. The integration uses targeted pop-up ads, banners, bars, and more to help you boost conversions and decrease page abandonment. It also automatically syncs all of your new leads from your website to HubSpot so the software can help you nurture them and convert them into customers.

3. Front

The Front integration is a collaborative inbox, meaning all members of your team can see and access your contacts, review deals, and see all activity history while working in HubSpot. All of these details are automatically synced in Front and your CRM. This helps you improve your customer experience and ensure it remains consistent no matter which employees your customers work with.

Event and Webinar Integrations

Whether it’s an in-person event, a webinar, an online meeting, or a video conference, the following integrations simplify every aspect of hosting an event. They allow your contacts to book meetings with you and you can update all information related to your contacts post-event or meeting in HubSpot.

1. Eventbrite

Eventbrite helps you use inbound marketing tactics to attract more prospects and customers to your in-person events. Once connected to your software, the integration automatically takes data from your contact lists in HubSpot to help you uncover effective ways to connect with your target audience, face-to-face.

2. GoToWebinar

No matter the type of event you’re hosting, the GoToWebinar integration automatically syncs all of your registrant and participant information in HubSpot under the associated contact. You’ll never have to worry about manually importing data about your webinar contacts again — instead, you’ll have more time to focus on the event itself.

3. Setmore

The Setmore integration simplifies appointment scheduling for you. It automatically imports your booked appointments (and information about the customer who booked the appointment) to HubSpot under the correct contact’s profile so you don’t have to do it manually.

Lead Generation Integrations

Lead generation integrations help you transition early-stage leads into delighted customers. All of your leads’ information will automatically be synced to HubSpot so you can view it at any point during the buyer’s journey. This is helpful to learn more about your target audience and to manage customer information so your sales and support teams can refer to it if needed, all from one location.

1. WordPress

The WordPress integration helps you optimize and align your WordPress website with the data about your contacts and business goals you have in HubSpot. Your HubSpot account and all of your growth tools will automatically be connected to your WordPress site so you can work to attract, engage, and delight site visitors and customers on your site from either WordPress or HubSpot.

2. Unbounce

The Unbounce integration helps you with the lead capturing and nurturing processes. You can create lead generation forms and send all data collected about your leads directly to HubSpot. At any point in time, you can take this data about your leads and use it to create campaigns. You’ll also have the ability to export any data in just seconds from your Unbounce account and share it anywhere.

3. SurveyMonkey

With the SurveyMonkey integration, you can create and distribute custom surveys to your prospects and customers, collect all data obtained, and view your responses within HubSpot. This is ideal because you can then segment and organize all your contacts based on their survey responses to easily manage the type of content and/or follow up they receive.

Live Chat Integrations

By adding live chat integrations to your website, you’ll be able to communicate with prospects in real time and nurture them into customers. You can answer their questions, respond to their concerns, and assist them in their purchase decisions. Then, this data is compiled into HubSpot under the specific contact it belongs to so you can follow up appropriately.

1. Intercom

The Intercom integration allows you to capture new leads and prospective customers with the help of live chat on your website. Intercom allows you to convert more leads by actively engaging with them at any time while they’re on your website once connected to HubSpot. You can then qualify your leads with custom bots, talk with them directly, and track them — and then you can have all of this information automatically organized under their contact in HubSpot.

2. ManyChat

Once connected to HubSpot, the ManyChat integration allows you to automate your messenger marketing so you can easily organize, nurture, and track your leads from the software. You can also take any HubSpot form and submit information obtained from it by sending custom field data to HubSpot Form Submissions.

3. Drift

The Drift integration provides live chat for your website so you can assist your leads in real time form HubSpot. The integration allows you to watch and save all of the lead’s activity on your site in HubSpot under the correct contact. Additionally, your sales reps can use Drift to customize their outreach and follow-ups based on that activity to improve the chances of conversion.

Sales Integrations

Sales integrations help you bring your sales tools, tactics, and prospects’ information together using HubSpot. You’ll be able to keep your marketing, support, and sales details in a central location for all teams to access, analyze, and refer to as needed.

1. HelloSign

Once connected to HubSpot, you’ll automatically be notified of any action a prospect takes on any document you send them with the HelloSign integration. Examples of the actions you’ll be notified about include when a prospect or customer receives, opens, or signs the document. Then, this activity data is sent to the contact it belongs to in HubSpot so reps know where the prospect or customer is in the buyer’s journey and how they should go about following up with them.

2. Salesforce

If you’re a Salesforce user, you can automatically sync all of your contacts’ information from the database into HubSpot once connected to the Salesforce integration. This allows you to work with reps to get strong lead intelligence and revenue reporting. You can mesh your marketing and sales work, content, and information so you and your team can access any information from either system at any point in time.

3. PandaDoc

When it comes to sales work, there are many tasks involved that don’t necessarily include the process of actually closing a deal. The PandaDoc integration automatically organizes and reviews information from HubSpot about your prospect to help you with non-selling tasks like creating and sending quotes, proposals, and contracts.

Social Media Integrations

Understanding your social media following is a huge part of successful marketing. Social media integrations help you learn about your followers, understand the type of content they interact with and share, and automate specific parts of your social media strategy.

1. Facebook

With the Facebook integration, you can automatically connect your business’s Facebook account to HubSpot. Schedule Facebook posts ahead of time analyze and measure post’s performance. This integration is ideal if you want to manage your Facebook marketing strategy alongside your other social media marketing strategies directly from HubSpot.

2. LinkedIn

By connecting your LinkedIn account to HubSpot through the LinkedIn integration, you can easily engage with your network and communicate with all of your contacts from HubSpot. You can also auto-publish your blogs and share specific content with your followers to nurture them into leads and customers. This integration is also great for tracking engagement along with all of your other social media channels and marketing efforts all from HubSpot’s social media tool.

3. Twitter

Schedule Tweets ahead of time, monitor Twitter streams, view Tweets and Twitter interactions of your competitors, and monitor accounts that are important to your brand from HubSpot with the Twitter integration. All information about your current and new followers will be added to your contact lists in HubSpot so everything is organized appropriately.

Video Integrations

With the rise of video and video marketing in business today, integrations that help you incorporate this media on your website have become quite useful. They allow you to create and implement videos on your site pages and forms as well as measure the success of your video marketing efforts.

1. Wistia

The Wistia integration provides you with the ability to integrate videos on your website, and then incorporate HubSpot forms with those videos to improve video engagement (and hopefully, conversion) rates. If any lead converts on a video, their information is automatically sent to HubSpot so you’ll have their video-viewing data paired with their contact details.

2. YouTube

The YouTube integration connects your YouTube channel to HubSpot. This way, you can easily report on your video and channel success and compare this data to that of your other social platforms using HubSpot’s analytics and social media tools and dashboards.

3. Promo

With the Promo integration, you can choose from over three million clips, templates, and music options to use to create a video for your site directly from HubSpot. You can easily throw in custom messaging, branding, or logos to personalize the video for your business based on a specific prospect’s needs and interests, found under their specific contact in HubSpot.

Get Integrated to Grow Better

Integrations have the power to enhance all aspects of your business. No matter the software you use to run your company, you can find integrations that can help simplify your processes, optimize your efforts, and empower your fellow employees. So, find the right integration marketplace for your software and begin connecting to the applications suited for your business needs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sent businesses scrambling to pause plans, edit emails, and cancel campaigns. And while everybody seems to know what not to publish these days, many marketers are asking: what should we put out into a world in the throes of a crisis?

It’s a conundrum facing countless creators across the globe.

They’re wondering how to be empathetic without being disingenuous. How to offer value without seeming opportunistic. And how to be there for their audience without adding to the noise.

These are important questions to ask at a time like this. Essential, in fact. But underpinning all of them is a much simpler question that gets to the very heart of what content marketing has always been about. A question that every creator staring at a blank canvas right now should be asking: how can we help?

Because now, more than ever before, audiences are seeking help.

Increasing Engagement Rates

Entire industries have been forced into hibernation in recent weeks, but this does not mean audiences’ appetites for helpful content has gone away. On the contrary. Consumers are increasing searches for valuable information and engaging with businesses at record rates.

According to an analysis of anonymized data from HubSpot’s global customer base, engagement with marketing emails, website traffic, and live chat sessions have all been on the rise, with email open rates an eye-catching 25% higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Meanwhile, traffic to HubSpot Academy, our free online training program, has more than doubled in recent weeks, and our Marketing Blog has experienced a 40% increase in weekly organic traffic.

The pandemic has triggered a striking surge in the very thing that many marketers care about most: audience attention. And such a high level of interest in the content companies are sharing, coming at such a sensitive time, places a huge responsibility on marketers to deliver materials that are not only relevant to the current moment, but genuinely impactful, too.

Those that fall short run the risk of doing damage to their reputation — according to Edelman, “71 percent of consumers agree that if they perceive that a brand is putting profit over people, they will lose trust in that brand forever.”

But those that succeed will leave a lasting impression on their audience — according to Gartner, brands that meet consumer’s needs at this time can “re-establish trust through customer-centric actions.”

So, it is not only engagement rates that are high during this crisis. The stakes are high, too. And a situation this unique requires a unique strategy to match.

When a Crisis Descends, Pause Before Planning

When times of crisis strike, the first thing marketers should think about is what not to do. Planned projects, campaigns, and announcements should be reviewed and postponed if possible. For those assets that are released as planned, it’s likely they’ll need a new tone that’s appropriate for the new environment.

Marketers should examine every article, email, ad, and social media post scheduled to be published to ensure that the tone of each asset is empathetic and respectful.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it’s because, in many cases, it is. No one team can manage a company-wide content audit alone.

Communications teams have expertise in developing messaging, social media teams have deep connections to their online community, email marketing teams have a strong understanding of brand tone, and customer-facing teams, including sales to service, have their fingers on the pulse of how customers are feeling — all of these teams should be consulted on content strategy during a crisis to ensure that a consistent and helpful approach is adopted across every touchpoint with the public.

At HubSpot, before we began creating new content for the new environment, we significantly reduced the frequency of our social media posting, dialed back the promotion of a major product launch (CMS Hub), and created a centralized set of guidelines on how we as a company should be communicating during this crisis.

Making such sweeping adjustments on short notice isn’t simple, but for us, two things helped make it easier.

First, we have an established decision-making process for crisis communications that minimizes confusion in the moment.

Second, by centralizing all of our customer interactions in a shared CRM, we’re able to see what communications customers are getting and roll out adjustments quickly to marketing, sales, and service.

Creating New Content in Times of Crisis

When it comes to creating new content during a crisis, marketers’ sole focus should be on delivering work that is genuinely helpful to their audience, without being opportunistic or adding more noise to a topic that has already been widely covered by others.

According to research conducted by Edelman, 85% of people expect companies to use their power to educate their audiences during the COVID-19 crisis. For some companies, that could mean writing in-depth articles that offer expert advice on relevant topics or aggregating publicly available information to make it more accessible for readers.

Intuit, for example, did this well when they teamed up with GoFundMe to create a Small Business Relief Initiative and when they built an interactive tool to help small businesses learn if they are eligible for government-provided financial relief.

We saw similarly helpful content from Care.com, whose team leveraged their deep knowledge of caregiving best practices to share expert advice on the precautions for families and caregivers facing the global health crisis.

These powerful examples directly address the situation at hand. But for other companies, providing helpful content could mean offering an alternative to the cacophony of crisis-centric content flooding feeds all day, every day.

For example, NPR has unsurprisingly witnessed a spike in listenership to its news shows as people seek up-to-date, reliable information as the pandemic evolves. But it has also seen a 120% increase in weekly visits to its Tiny Desk Concerts — an entertainment series — indicating that audiences are not only interested in information directly about the crisis, but are also desiring content that provides an escape from it.

This should make content marketers feel encouraged.

It suggests that help can take many forms in the midst of a crisis and that there are multiple ways creators can add value to the lives of their audiences at this time.

For marketing teams that don’t have the necessary resources to create new content given the trying economic environment, there are still creative ways to adapt to audiences’ needs. Gathering together old content that’s relevant to the current situation, updating it as needed, and presenting it as an easily digestible ebook or content series can be efficient ways of overcoming resource shortages.

At HubSpot, we did just this when we published a new landing page featuring all of our articles about remote work to offer some timely support to companies and employees adjusting to the new normal of working from home.

During times of crisis, there are a number of ways for marketers to approach new content creation — some that directly address the unique environment at hand, others that look to complement the new patterns of behavior that are emerging — but the one thing that should be consistent is an honest effort to help.

Choose Channels Carefully, Distribute Delicately

Marketers have an abundance of options for how they distribute their work, but just because we can publish content on multiple channels doesn’t always mean that we should.

Our research tells us that marketing email send volumes have increased significantly in recent weeks, meaning that subscribers’ email inboxes are even busier than usual. As well-intentioned as a new article or video might be, if it isn’t distributed delicately and at a considerate cadence, it could end up doing more harm than good in a company’s efforts to help audience members.

Marketers should reserve their most intimate communications channels, like email and push notifications, for key content updates during a crisis and adopt more subtle distribution approaches for their more niche materials.

For example, an SEO-optimized article that’s easily discoverable through search may be a more appropriate way to share certain new content offerings than a direct email or paid social media post, both of which could come across as excessively promotional or tone-deaf.

At HubSpot, when the pandemic was declared, we cut our social media posting by approximately 50% in the first week and reduced the number of ads we were sending to avoid overloading our audience with information at a time when there’s already a lot to process.

And when we developed a new educational content series, Adapt 2020, we made clear to potential subscribers what type of content to expect, as well as where and when it would be distributed.

The Adapt series became the cornerstone of our content strategy during the current crisis and provided a powerful proof point of the value of the diverse app ecosystem that’s deeply integrated with HubSpot’s suite of tools.

With Looker we’ve been able to share regular updates on shifting trends in sales and marketing, with Canva we’ve been able to quickly design on-brand assets to promote upcoming webinars, and with Slack we’ve been able to collaborate with confidence on all of the elements that make up the weekly content series.

With distribution channels and cadence established with our subscribers, we have been able to turn our attention towards monitoring how the crisis and the needs of our audience are evolving from week to week.

Adapt Early, Adapt Often

Crises are unpredictable by nature. And what was deeply valuable to audiences last week, may be irrelevant by the next. To provide helpful content for the duration of a crisis, marketers should prepare to continually evolve their strategy in line with their audiences’ shifting needs.

Choosing the right metrics to monitor is key to not falling behind the pace of change. Creators should closely monitor metrics that indicate engagement — such as ‘average time spent on page’ for articles and show-up rates for webinars — to gain an insight into whether or not their new content is resonating with audiences. And from there, they can use those learnings to look for ways to improve the relevance and helpfulness of their next offering.

At HubSpot, we initially focused on delivering content aimed at helping businesses to set up virtual events and adapt to the new normal of remote work.

We then quickly shifted focus to creating content to help businesses take advantage of new relief measures available by publishing the pricing and packaging changes we’ve made along with an overview of the U.S. Stimulus Package.

Following that, we shifted focus to creating content to help businesses adjust their medium- and longer-term strategies and prepare for the post-pandemic economy.

We have never witnessed such sudden and dramatic shifts in what audiences need, and the marketers that are nimble enough to adapt their strategy quickly are the ones most likely to provide meaningful help for the duration of the crisis at hand.

And by doing so, they stand to establish long-lasting levels of loyalty with their audience.

What Content Marketing Has Always Been About

It’s no secret that consumers’ trust in companies has been dwindling in recent years. According to HubSpot Research, 55% of people no longer trust the companies they buy from as much as they used to, and 71% do not trust sponsored ads on social networks.

However, times of crisis create unique environments and unexpected outcomes, one of which can be the recovery of some of that lost trust, and the deepening of long-term relationships between consumers and companies.

Audiences are turning in record numbers to businesses for resources, information, and support. Customers are taking to social media to rally support for their favorite businesses. And content marketers are returning to first principles and re-establishing helpfulness at the heart of their strategies.

There are many challenges facing businesses at this time — content strategy is just one of them — but I am hopeful that marketers adopting the advice outlined here will see their efforts rewarded in the form of closer relationships with the audiences, and the fulfillment of knowing they’ve provided help when it’s been needed the most.

After all, that’s what content marketing has always been about.