In the content marketing industry, setting objectives can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, constantly raising the bar can incentivize your team to sustain your growth rate over long periods of time. But on the other hand, it can also incentivize your team to prioritize your company’s needs over your customers’ needs.

You might be thinking that this is the nature of content marketing today — in order to grow, you need to stay laser-focused on hitting your numbers. And, sometimes, to hit your numbers, you need to do what’s best for the business, even if it’s not the best move for your customers.

But contrary to popular belief, solely focusing on the results doesn’t actually produce results. Focusing on serving your customers is what produces results. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is famous for sparking this customer-centric movement. In 2015, he spoke at Goldman Sach’s Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, and a reporter asked him what were some of Apple’s biggest accomplishments from the past year. He responded, “We’re not focused on the numbers. We’re focused on the things that produce the numbers.”

In content marketing, one of the most influential things that produce the numbers is a passion for your craft. But, sometimes, we can get so obsessed with optimizing for results that we forget what actually generates the views and leads we desperately desire — compelling content.

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to set realistic marketing objectives that will help you craft audience-centric content, prioritize your customers’ needs, and hit your numbers, all at the same time. Read on to learn how to identify your marketing objectives’ purpose and process and why it’s just as important as the numbers you aim to hit.

Here’s a reality check for 2020 — only one-third of businesses make it to the 10 year mark.

No market demand, running out of cash, and getting out-competed are among the leading reasons businesses fail.

The good news? You don’t have to figure it all out on your own, because I’ve done a lot of the legwork for you.

When I served as the VP of Marketing at Sales Hacker (a publication and community for B2B salespeople), I uncovered strategies and processes that exploded our growth.

In fact, the results were outstanding: in just over a year, we were able to grow Sales Hacker’s traffic from 19,000 monthly organic sessions to over 100,000 monthly organic sessions.

That’s a 426% increase. As a result, Sales Hacker was acquired by Outreach, a sales engagement platform.

Now, I’m using that same exact process to lead SEO at Nextiva, and here is a snapshot of our organic keyword growth to prove that this really works:

If you’re looking to skyrocket your organic growth with an efficient SEO strategy in 2020, check out the five proven steps I’ve taken with both Sales Hacker and Nextiva to achieve tremendous results.

First things first: why is it so hard to stand out in search?

The goal of owning search rankings is simple: organic presence means qualified traffic, which leads to conversions, which turn into sales. In fact, marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13 times more likely to see positive ROI.

That’s not to say blogging is the only way, or the best way to do it — but it’s what works best for us.

Creating content can have a powerful long-term impact, too: over its lifetime, one compounding blog post creates as much traffic as six decaying posts.

Of course, in 2020, most companies get the importance of blogging. Nowadays, 55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.

Unfortunately, that leads to a new problem: the SERPs are getting a little overcrowded.

Keyword difficulty is rising. Almost every topic you can imagine already has dozens of guides and tutorials ranking against each other.

Most industries have become noisy, which makes it hard to stand out. Ultimately, it’s more important than ever to be intentional about your website and the content you publish.

Additionally, this viral tweet — which received commentary from several Google employees — suggests search results have gotten so competitive, personal websites have no chance of ranking anymore due to businesses going all-in on long-tail SEO, which takes away even the lowest search volume opportunities.

At Sales Hacker, we had an aggressive publishing schedule, with 4-5 new blog posts going live each week. They were all written by our community — we didn’t contract an agency or freelancers. Since we had more content than we could handle, we wanted to keep our contributors happy while ensuring all content was evergreen and actionable.

Let’s explore exactly what steps we took to achieve organic growth, and what you can do to stand out in 2020 and beyond.

1. Start with audience research.

When you need to take your results (such as traffic or leads) to the next level, it’s always a challenge. This challenge is easier to tackle when you already have a loyal audience — even if it’s a small one.

Why? Because you get to ask them what they like, what they dislike, and what they want more of. The thing is, we found that when people see you genuinely care about their interests, they’re more than happy to talk to you and share their insights.

The key to succeeding with audience research is setting strong goals for your research. This applies to surveys, interviews, and any other method you pick.

For instance, at Sales Hacker, I had the following five research goals on which I wanted to collect information:

• Brand messaging insight
• Audience development insight
• Content strategy insight
• UX and website navigation insight
• Email marketing insight

I set up 30-minute interviews with a sample of Sales Hacker’s audience: typically mid-to-senior-level sales roles, ages 25 to 44.

These are some of the questions I asked in these interviews, which you can implement into your own audience research process:

• What are your most common daily tasks?
• What are your top challenges in sales/business?
• How would you describe Sales Hacker to your grandma?
• Give us your best Sales Hacker Slogan.
• What is the main benefit of Sales Hacker?
• What is the main problem with Sales Hacker’s website?
• What would discourage you from subscribing to our email list?
• What type of content would you find helpful?
• What type of content is a waste of time?

These questions match my audience research goals outlined earlier. If you’ve set different goals, make sure to add interview questions that correlate with them.

Based on the answers I received from my recipients, I ended up with a list of topic clusters and understood the content types that were in highest demand.

I also learned that thought leadership content was the biggest loyalty driver, and that our audience would listen to our podcast if we launched one (which we did!).

Takeaway: Build a list of audience research goals and corresponding questions you can ask in surveys and interviews. Analyze results so you can find the content to focus on.

2. Run an SEO site audit.

Why an SEO audit? Think about it like this — if search engines can’t read your content, you’ll struggle to reach your target audience. On top of that, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

In other words, when you get your ideal readers to your website, you’ll want to make sure you don’t lose them right away.

An SEO audit involves crawling your website using a tool like Screaming Frog and then analyzing the data. Here are some things you should look for:

• Duplicate content
• Noindex pages or nofollow links
• Robots.txt file
• Improper redirects and redirect chains
• Broken media assets (video and audio files)
• Broken links
• URL structure
• Pages with long load times

Some of the issues I found with Sales Hacker was the lack of referring domains, non-optimized URLs, poor internal linking structure, poor site structure and navigation, and some branded search problems.

Once we had a list of issues, we tackled them one by one so we could set a strong foundation for our content creation and optimization going forward.

Takeaway: Download the SEO Audit kit which includes a guide and a checklist to work from. Alternatively, make a list of all the improvements you can make and start working on them as soon as you can.

3. Develop new content opportunities.

As I mentioned earlier, our audience research helped us identify the topics that help them progress in their sales careers the most. With these topics in mind, we looked for gaps in existing search engine results.

We did this for the topics we wanted to grow an authority in, including cold calling, best sales tools, channel sales, sales Excel templates, and more.

Here are some of the existing patterns we were seeing:

• Low-value round-ups
• Definition-based content
• Theoretical content
• Lack of focus on user intent
• Unengaged approach to sales templates
• Long introductions

I decided to go the opposite way and provide what our audience was asking for: getting to the point quickly with zero fluff, providing a great content experience, and offering mega-lists of tools and tips, with a highly actionable writing style.

This worked so well for us that we ended up earning a featured snippet for the’ channel sales’ topic, as well as some others, like BANT, customer success manager, and sales forecast modeling:

Takeaway: Based on the topics your audience is interested in, analyze the highest-ranking content on search. Brainstorm ways you can provide more values based on gaps that existing content has and on what your audience is looking for from you.

4. Update and optimize your existing content.

If you have an audience of any size, that probably means you also have a library of published content. Is it up to par? And is it serving your audience the best way it could?

Optimizing your past content is one of the most powerful ways to increase the mileage of the work you’ve already put into your blog.

We discovered that our audience doesn’t want to feel like we’re pitching them all the time, so the first thing we did was rework our content in a way that wasn’t sales-y, but to the point, actionable, and purely educational.

Some of our most successful updates have included:

• Making our lists longer and more comprehensive (example: best sales books)
• Building long-form guides on topics we’ve only touched on in the past (example: sales operations)

Here’s the before of the sales operations guide:

And here’s the after:

As a result, our existing content skyrocketed in search rankings.

Takeaway: Using Google Analytics, make a list of blog posts that are covering an evergreen, relevant topic, but get low search traffic. Update them one by one, starting with those that have historically had the highest conversion rate (for example, email signups) and work down from there.

Bonus: Use schema mark-up to own more search page real estate.

With zero click searches on the rise, it’s now up to savvy SEOs to find more ways to stand out in search results and fight for clicks.

One way to do that is by using rich schema mark-up to enhance your content in search results. Google recently deployed FAQ schema which allows websites to have their webpage FAQs displayed directly in the search results.

For instance, check out how we’re optimizing VoIP Call Center in the search results for Nextiva. The FAQs themselves display right on the search page. This is a powerful tactic for stealing more clicks back from Google.

You can use the rich schema generator to help you with this.

5. Tailor your homepage and navigation to your audience.

I believe that Sales Hacker’s homepage re-design (which happened in July 2017) was a huge growth accelerator.

Right after I took over Marketing operations for Sales Hacker, this is what the homepage looked like:

This version of the homepage likely made it difficult for people to take the actions we wanted them to, like finding the content they need or signing up for our email list.

The key approach to our homepage re-design, like with many other things we’ve done, was setting clear goals behind that process. In this case, these goals were:

• Showing people exactly what Sales Hacker is and what we do
• Making the process of signing up for the email list super simple
• Helping visitors find the content they want quickly and easily
• Showcasing social proof
• Improving internal linking

This obviously wasn’t just down to what the homepage looked like, but also our site structure and how we approached internal linking in general.

I’ve sketched a mindmap of the ideal new site structure with categories and subcategories. The taxonomy I had in mind would achieve the following:

• Increased engagement from natural site exploration from visitors
• The shortest possible path to the most important content on the site
• Landing page visibility from an increase of internal links pointing to them

Takeaway: Identify the single most important actions you want your visitors to take (lead generation, sales, etc.) and organize your homepage in a way that makes those actions obvious and the path to them uncluttered. Use a tool or simply pen and paper to draw a map of journeys on your website you want your visitors to go through based on their interests. Apply this not only to your homepage, but to any menus and content categorization you have on your blog.

Over to You

This process won’t give you results overnight. In fact, while the homepage updates may show some instant results from a user behavior point of view, most efforts to improve your organic presence will take months to bring significant improvements.

Remember — these steps outline exactly what we did to go from low organic presence to a highly authoritative sales community hub, which we ended up selling. It took us over one year, but we made a persistent, intentional effort in places we knew mattered most.

Want to grow at a rapid pace? Start with your audience and listen to their feedback. This way, you can take the right actions to reach even more of your target readers and customers and take your business to the next level.

Back in the late ’90s (way back when), SEO was in its infancy.

It was almost like the Wild West — anything goes.

Since the rules were loose, both white hat and black hat SEO tactics began to develop.

While white hat tactics are an ethical way of improving your organic traffic and search rankings, black hat tactics go against guidelines set by search engines in an unethical way.

However, as the industry has rapidly changed and search engine algorithms improved, it’s become harder to use black hat SEO tactics.

And thus a new, unethical strategy was born: negative SEO.

Below, let’s learn more about negative SEO from what a negative SEO attack looks like and how to avoid it.

Wait, did you say negative SEO attack?

A negative SEO attack is when a competitor uses mostly off-page tactics such as building unnatural links or duplicating site content to negatively impact your search rankings. Sometimes a negative SEO attack will involve on-page tactics through hacking your site to modify content.

So, you might be wondering, “How does someone do a negative SEO attack?” Below, let’s review negative SEO tactics and how to avoid them.

1. Building unnatural links.

One of the ways that a competitor can use negative SEO to attack your site is by building unnatural or spammy backlinks. Basically, this means they’ll send thousands of spam links to your site and/or send fake link removal requests.

If they send low-quality links to your site, they’ll usually use an interconnected group of websites that are used solely to link back and forth to other sites.

Their goal is to get your site penalized by Google for spammy links.

The second method that a competitor using negative SEO might use to impact your backlinks is to remove your best backlinks. Usually, they’ll reach out to a site using your name and request they remove the backlink.

To avoid these tactics, it’s important to keep track of your backlinks profile. There are plenty of sites you can use to check your backlinks including Ahrefs or Monitor Backlinks.

With these tools, you can monitor when your site gains or loses backlinks. If you suspect a bad link has been added, you can try to remove it by contacting the webmaster and requesting they remove it.

If that doesn’t work, you can use Google’s disavow list. When you submit links to Google Webmaster Tools through a disavow list, this tells them that these links shouldn’t be counted when considering rankings for your site.

Another method you can use to detect unnatural links is to check your website speed. If your website is suddenly taking a long time to load, you’ll want to ensure it’s not because someone is sending thousands of requests per second to your server.

2. Distributing duplicate content.

When there’s duplicate content on multiple websites, Google filters the content which can result in a loss of rankings of your web pages. Duplicate content forces Google to choose which one of the identical pages should rank, and they might not choose the original page.

While some similar content is inevitable, several identical web pages might negatively impact your rankings.

If someone wanted to attack your site, they could take your site content and redistributes it on several websites.

To avoid this, you can use tools to track if your site content is duplicated. Sites like Copyscape.com can detect if the content on your site is being used anywhere else. If you’re worried about being targeted by negative SEO tactics, you might consider checking to make sure your content is duplicated on a regular basis.

3. Hacking your website.

While most of these negative SEO tactics are off-page, sometimes a competitor will hack your site and use on-page methods to impact your rankings.

They could hack and alter your code, so you can’t tell something’s wrong unless you’re looking at the code.

Another way they could hack your site is by editing your robots.txt file. This file tells a crawler how to interact with your site, including what pages not to crawl. If a hacker can access this, they can use your robots.txt file to tell Google to ignore your most important pages or the whole site.

One way to avoid this is to set up Google Webmaster Tools email alerts. These email alerts will tell you if your site is being attacked by malware, pages aren’t being indexed, or you get a manual penalty from Google.

Additionally, you can protect from hackers by using two-factor authentication, strong passwords, creating back up files, and antivirus protection.

4. Generating negative reviews.

While having a variety of reviews can actually help your SEO, an overwhelming amount of negative reviews can impact your business’s reputation.

One negative SEO tactic a competitor can use is to flood your site with negative reviews because they’re easy to manipulate.

To avoid this, you should monitor your reviews and make sure you use them as an opportunity to respond and interact with your audience.

If you’ve spotted a fake review from someone who’s misrepresenting their identity or the connection to your business, you can flag them right on Google.

5. Creating fake social profiles.

Another tactic a competitor can use to impact your rankings is to create fake social profiles in your company’s name. This is done to ruin your reputation and spread false information.

To avoid this, when you come across fake profiles report them as spam before they start to get followers.

You can also use tools to track your social media mentions so you’ll be informed when anyone mentions your name or site on social media. Most social media automation tools should have this capability, so you’ll be alerted when a fake social profile is created.

Although negative SEO can seem like a scary concept, generally most websites don’t have to worry about it. The important thing is that you monitor your SEO health on a regular basis to make sure you notice an attack before it impacts your site.

When I was a child, I really wanted an Easy Bake Oven. Every time I saw a commercial for one, I was glued to the TV, marveling at the kids on the screen baking mini treats with their friends and parents. Seeing those ads, I knew they were made just for me.

In reality, though, the main — or primary — audience was my parents. I was the secondary audience.

As a child, I had no buying power, so I wasn’t going to be a good Easy Bake Oven consumer. I was the secondary audience for toy commercials. My parents, with the power to make purchase decisions, were ultimately the primary audience.

If you’re thinking: “But wait, aren’t primary audiences the customer to whom you’re marketing? If that’s the case, why wouldn’t toy commercials be for kids?” I hear you. And you’re right.

Secondary audiences are sometimes just as important to consider in your overall marketing strategy. If the toy manufacturers didn’t consider secondary audiences, for instance, I probably never would’ve gotten an Easy Bake Oven for my birthday.

Here, let’s explore why secondary audiences matter, as well as a few examples of secondary audiences. 

Secondary audiences, explained.

Primary audiences and secondary audiences are both of major importance. If parents or caregivers aren’t convinced a toy seen in a commercial is a useful product, the toy isn’t going to be purchased.

The person with the buying power and influence to make purchase decisions will always make up the primary audience.

So, what makes up a secondary audience?

Think about secondary audiences in the context of a toy commercial: if a child begs for a new toy, the parent or caregiver may be convinced to eventually buy the toy — which is why convincing a secondary audience to be on board with your product or service can be just as important as convincing the primary audience.

Let’s go over another example of a secondary audience, next.

Examples of a Secondary Audience

The holiday season is a prime example to consider when thinking about marketing to secondary audiences.

How do you shop for loved ones when gift-giving? You usually ask them what they want and go from there, right?

In this scenario, the loved one is the secondary audience, and you are the primary one. This is because you are making a purchasing decision on behalf of the person influenced to own the product.

Holiday ads with copy similar to “Great as a gift!” or “Perfect for that special someone!” are most likely marketing towards a secondary audience rather than a primary one.

Amazon even took it one step further and used the holiday to segment secondary audiences:

Source

Amazon choosing to market to their secondary audiences in a segmented fashion shows an effort to personalize messages to the masses. Remember, secondary audiences, in some cases, begin the buyer’s journey for the primary audience. So, Amazon decided to make that journey easier. 

Marketing to secondary audiences, then, is just as important as marketing to primary audiences. Primary audiences have the means in the decision-making process, and secondary audiences are customers who can influence that decision-making.

Businesses that can market to both audiences effectively have a better chance of boosting overall sales. Let’s distinguish between the two groups a little more, next.

Let’s say a business’s decision-makers were thinking about investing in a content management system to streamline the processes of the company, and asked their staff to present recommendations. In this scenario, the primary audience would be the decision-makers, and the secondary audience would be the staff.

An individual contributor who must convince their manager to purchase a specific software doesn’t have purchasing power, which means they’re not the primary audience. This person has influential power, so they’re a secondary audience.

Distinguishing primary and secondary audiences needs to happen to correctly market to both of them. Depending on the product, these audiences can influence the buying decisions of one another. Ultimately, marketing to secondary audiences can be incredibly beneficial in boosting overall revenue.

Do you remember in 2012 when Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for $1 billion?

It was a gamble. At the time of the acquisition, the platform was valued at half the purchase price, had 30 million users, and wasn’t generating revenue.

But as it turns out, Zuckerberg absolutely nailed it. Instagram blew up, and six years after the acquisition, Bloomberg estimated it was worth roughly $100 billion.

The application’s 100-fold increase in value was paralleled by an equally meteoric rise in popularity. Today, the platform has over 1 billion active users worldwide. People of almost every background and walk of life are represented on Instagram — making it prime territory for targeted advertising.

If you use Instagram regularly, you’re bound to have scrolled past advertisements. Maybe you’ve clicked on some — or perhaps you always breeze by them. They may seem obnoxious or impersonal, but the truth is a lot of careful consideration, effort, and money likely went into getting that advertisement on your feed in particular.

Ultimately, Instagram advertising is a fascinating process that involves competition, calculation, capital, and strategy.

Here, I’ll discuss how all those factors play into deciding how much you might end up paying for an advertisement on Instagram, so you can decide how to implement Instagram advertising into your overall budget spend in 2020.

As a social-media-savvy marketer, you should at least consider advertising on Instagram. It can be an accurate, effective means of reaching the right prospects at various stages in their buyer’s journeys. You can leverage the platform to raise brand awareness, guide consideration, or convert leads into customers.

If done right, your business stands to gain a lot from advertising on Instagram. But, how should you approach placing ads on the platform? What should your budget look like? And who should you be targeting?

You’ll need to answer those questions before coordinating your Instagram advertising campaign. But before you approach any of them, you have to understand how the platform calculates advertising costs. 

How are Instagram Ad costs determined?

Instagram ads are bought on an auction bidding system that ultimately dictates their prices. An advertiser starts by establishing his or her campaign budget, and submitting a bid. 

Budgets are exactly what they sound like — the total amount of money a company is willing to allocate for an entire campaign. A budget is structured either on a daily basis or by the total cost of a campaign lifecycle. 

Bids are the maximum amount of money a company is willing to spend on each user that completes the ad objective. That objective could include anything from viewing a video to clicking on a website link to downloading a mobile application.

Ultimately, objectives always revolve around improving brand awareness, driving consideration, or converting potential leads.

In an auction, Instagram determines which advertisement will create the most value for its users and selects a winner on that basis. That value is determined by three primary factors:

• The size of the advertiser’s bid
• How likely a user is to complete the specific action the ad is optimized for, otherwise known as estimated action rates
• How likely users are to be interested in the ad itself, otherwise known as ad quality and relevance

The winner gets to place their ad in the space their competitors were vying for. That “space” could be based on factors like age range, gender, or time of day. Advertisers are charged on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, and their ads remain posted until their budget runs out.

The amount of money it takes to win that auction is going to vary depending on demographics, time constraints, or strategic placement within the app. That variety of factors is another important aspect to consider.

What can make Instagram ad costs vary?

Age Range

Generation Z’ers, millennials, and boomers probably won’t engage with your ads in the exact same way. Different products and services are generally tailored toward different age ranges. A clothing brand selling pleated khakis and golf shirts will register more with mature prospects watching PGA Tour videos than 13-year-olds scrolling through SpongeBob memes.

Different age ranges’ financial situations and levels of disposable income also tend to vary. Additionally, they spend different amounts of time on the platform on average. That means certain age brackets will be more lucrative and, in turn, more competitive for Instagram ad placements.

Timeframe

Instagram ad prices fluctuate based on the time of day, day of the week, and time of year. There are specific times and days that work best for personal Instagram posts, and unsurprisingly, advertising prices follow similar trends. More users on the platform means more prospects to engage with your advertisement.

Cost-per-click also shifts as the year progresses. Different times of year come with different spending habits and industries of interest. Other companies could be less inclined to advertise during the dead of winter than the lead up to the holiday season. Circumstances change with the seasons — and Instagram ad costs typically follow suit.

Gender

In 2018, 51% of Instagram users were female, while 49% were male. In the United States, Though that difference may seem unremarkable, it can have some meaningful implications on how much Instagram ads cost. Remember — over a billion people use the application, so a 2% discrepancy isn’t trivial.

That difference — among other factors – partially accounts for slight cost discrepancies between Instagram ads targeting women and those targeting men. Though the gap in cost-per-click for men and women might be as small as a few cents, that price can add up quickly.

Ad Placement

The placement and type of advertisement within the platform impacts your Instagram ad’s cost-per-click. Ads in Instagram stories tend to be less expensive than feed placements.

However, some experts — including HubSpot Senior Marketing Manager, Jillian Hope — suggest designing unique ads for both stories and feed placements to get the most efficient results for your budget.

Ultimately, paying fair prices for ads that land on targeted prospects’ Instagram feeds or stories takes some finesse. There’s no definitive answer to how much Instagram ads cost.

You’re never going to go in completely sure of what you’re going to pay. The best you can do is understand the factors that could potentially shape the way you advertise on the platform and build your advertising strategy around them.

Emails and IMs and shared docs — oh my!

With all the different communication channels we use every day at work, it’s easy to miss their nuances. Sure, email seems like a good go-to, but it has its downsides. And what about Google Docs or Confluence pages? When should they be open vs. restricted?

Let’s be real: these are not questions that keep us up at night.

Nonetheless, choosing the right channel for the message is a great way to boost productivity and reduce the frustrations of working with others. That’s why we put together this handy-dandy guide to using email, chat, documents, and real-time communication.

You’ll notice a strong bias toward making information discoverable whenever it’s practical (and sometimes when it’s not) so as not to accidentally create information silos. But there’s no sense in overwhelming your colleagues with more information than they can absorb or need, either. So you’ll also find tips for walking the line between sharing and oversharing.

Communicating Via Email

Best for: Sharing content housed in shared docs or Confluence pages with the relevant people. That’s the ideal. But of course, we’ll still use email to forward articles to co-workers, communicate with people outside the company, etc. The main thing is not to use email for lengthly, in-depth discussions and decision-making – that’s a job for shared docs and pages.

For example:

• “Hey team, here’s that project brief I mentioned earlier. Please read through it in the next day or two and drop comments with your feedback. Thanks!”

And remember …

• If you find yourself in a long email thread, it’s perfectly acceptable to say, “Let’s move this conversation to Slack. I’ve created a room called <name> and invited you all” or “Let’s shift this to Confluence, I’ve moved all the content from this thread to a page”.

Here’s a handy-dandy email decision tree we made. Yeah, we mapped it all out.

Communicating Via 1-to-1 Chat

Best for: Quick discussions or questions with a single person. If you don’t need an answer urgently, let them know when you do need it so they can prioritize it appropriately. This is especially important when working with people several time zones away.

For example:

• “I can’t make the meeting, could you fill in for me?”
• “Hey, haven’t seen you in a while — how are you doing? How’s your evil cat? Did those scratches ever heal?”

And remember …

• Compose and send the whole message in one go. Don’t send “Hi!” and then wait for a response before sending the rest. This is distracting and time-consuming because now they have to wait for you to send the real message, and since their concentration is now interrupted, it’s hard for them to do much of value in the meantime.

Communicating Via Group Chat

Best for: Quick discussions or broadcasts to a group. Be mindful about sending messages that will trigger a pop-up notification for everyone in the room – e.g., the @here and @channel commands in Slack. Both should be reserved for things everyone really needs to know about right now.

For example:

• “Running late. My cat won’t come out from under the house.”
• “Anyone tried out that new JavaScript framework? Is it any good?”

And remember …

• There’s rarely a good reason to lock down chat rooms. Private rooms are just another silo, after all!

Communicating Via Shared Documents and Wiki Pages

Best for: Content that multiple people will collaborate on, or that is likely to change over time. If your work is in the early stages and you aren’t ready for feedback yet, put a prominent note or banner at the top of the page. Restricting access to the page often leads to the work being shared too late, when it’s hard to incorporate feedback. Plus, locked pages breed a culture of distrust.

For example:

• “Parental Leave Policy”
• “Platform Engineering team goals: FY19 Q3”
• “Photos of Atlassian cats”

And remember …

• Give your pages titles that convey context. “Project plan” might make sense in a certain page or folder hierarchy, but that information isn’t included when sharing the page with collaborators or notifying them of changes. So be explicit in titles, even if you end up repeating context from parent pages.

Communicating Via Internal Blog Posts

Best for: Internal announcements about point-in-time events and achievements that won’t be updated later. Yes, you could use email in such cases. But putting it on your intranet allows people to share their thoughts by commenting on the page. Nobody wants endless reply-alls of “Hooray!” and “+1!” cluttering their inbox.

For example:

• “Congratulations to Maria on her promotion to principal engineer!”
• “Cat-lovers club is meeting this Saturday (bring laser pointers)”
• “Jira 9.0 has shipped!”

And remember …

• When sharing, include a useful message so people can decide whether it’s relevant to them. “This is a wrap of our team’s experiment with remote work with lessons your team can learn from” is useful. “Check out this blog” is not.

Communicating In-person or Via Video Call

Best for: Anything that can be resolved faster by just talking, plus anything sensitive, difficult, or emotional. Being face-to-face is best so you don’t miss out on non-verbal signals like posture or facial expressions. If you’re spread across different offices, take advantage of all the recent advances in video calling. Tools like Zoom make it easy to fire up a video chat (even if you don’t have a Ph.D. in IT).

For example:

• “Do you have a few minutes to talk about the project’s scope? I’m not sure the discussion in Slack is getting us where we need to be.”
• “After yesterday’s incident, I’d rather you didn’t bring your cat into the office anymore.”

And remember …

• For quick, impromptu video calls, just take it right there at your desk. Jumping up to find a private room often takes longer than the conversation itself! The sound of you talking is no louder than any other conversations that happen in our work areas, so don’t stress about distracting your teammates. Putting your headphones on is considered polite, though.

There you have it! These guidelines help Atlassians be efficient and productive while upholding our “open company, no bullshit” value. Both of us (Penny and Sarah, your intrepid co-authors) have been with the company since we were just a few hundred people and can attest to how important open, smart communication practices have been as we’ve scaled. Now, as a team of a few thousand, these practices are more important than ever.

Each organization has its own unique culture around sharing information and using various communication channels. Use this guide as your starting point, and keep iterating to make your communication culture awesome.

Let’s talk about online advertising.

Specifically, banner ads.

You know the ones: when you’re scrolling through your favorite website, (Today, mine is The New Yorker), and are greeted with one of these beauties:

Source

Banner ads, also called web banners, are ads displayed on web pages. Generally, they’re more image-based than other digital ads to catch the web browser’s attention. They usually contain an image or short animation, like a gif.

The goal of a banner ad is to drive traffic to a website. This happens when a browser clicks on the ad.

Also, if your banner ad is a potential customer’s first introduction to your brand, it could make-or-break their perception of your company. Plus, sizing can impact whether or not someone sees the ad at all.

Ad effectiveness can be impacted if a banner ad is too small or too large, but the correct size adds to the positive impression an ad could leave on a web browser.

So, we’ve got the basics. Now, let’s go over the proper sizes for banner ads:

The first two sizes, 300 x 250 and 336 x 280, are for medium-sized and large rectangles, much like the smaller ads on the sides of blogs. The leaderboard sizing (728 x 90) will look like The New Yorker ad from above, and the last two sizes are aimed to act as headlines or billboards on the top or bottom of a page.

Sometimes, finding the proper size for a particular ad requires experimentation. Remember that this isn’t one-size-fits-all.

Play around with sizes before committing to one — for instance, a medium rectangle might be switched in favor for a half-page ad.

Ultimately, ad size is critical. If well-sized, your ad will look natural, professional, and eye-catching — however, if it isn’t well-sized, it could look clunky or awkward on the page.

Can’t decide on an ad size? To combat that issue, when the ad is ready to go live, think about testing potential ad performance to see which size performs better with audiences. This is a great case for an A/B test, a process that puts different versions on a trial run to see which one customers interact with better.

Software, such as content management systems, help track metrics. HubSpot’s ad management software, for instance, can show you the ROI on different ads, which helps brands make informed decisions about which ad type to use.

Lastly, when creating ads, keep in mind that sizes aren’t the only key to incredible ads. It’s also good to focus on ad design, copy, call-to-action, and branding. These design details can take an ad from looking okay to outstanding.

Banner ads work online as they do in real life: they’re meant to catch a consumer’s eye and spark interest in a product or service. They’re intended to increase traffic and sell a product early in the buyer’s journey.

The right sizing can accomplish all of this. If an ad is visual and interruptive, there’s a great chance of having an effective ad — sizing shouldn’t disrupt that process. When planning out targeted sites for customers, think about the kind of ads that work best with the platform and go from there.

As a millennial, social media has been around since I was in elementary school.

Myspace was created when I was nine years old. YouTube was founded when I was 11. And Facebook became available to the public when I was 12.

Although using social media has been a daily habit for me since I was in high school, it wasn’t until I became a marketer that I understood the power of it.

When I worked for a marketing agency, I’d spend days thinking of the best content to post and writing copy for different platforms.

During that time, I learned about and used tools to manage social media for several clients, including social media automation software.

Below, let’s learn more about social media automation, including how to automate your posts and the best tools for social media automation.

Automating your social media can be useful for developing a content plan, so you’re always prepared.

However, it’s important to note that social media automation tools shouldn’t be used in any dishonest or unethical way. For example, automation tools shouldn’t be used to write your social media posts — they should just be used for scheduling, reporting, and content ideas.

Similarly, you should never use automation tools to buy followers. Not only is that dishonest, but it can also reduce your engagement rate.

These social media tools are meant to free up your time so you can engage and personally interact with your followers, have authentic conversations, and strategize about what you post and when.

So, now that we know more about social media automation, let’s go over how you can use these tools to automate your posts.

1. Look at social listening tools.

Many social media automation tools can be used for social listening. Essentially, social listening is the process of monitoring what people are saying about your brand or industry online.

With automation tools, you can see brand mentions across all platforms in one place. Additionally, you can follow certain keywords, topics, or hashtags to see what’s going on in your industry. Moreover, social media automation tools can be used to follow your competitors. What’s the latest news? What are people talking about?

Ultimately, social listening tools can help you come up with ideas for social media posts or even product ideas.

2. Use chatbots.

Another way to use social media automation tools is to create chatbots. Chatbots can be used with sites like Facebook Messenger to streamline your marketing, provide customer support, and improve the customer experience.

For example, you can create automated replies or suggested replies to customer questions or comments. When a customer asks for your hours, for instance, your chatbot can automatically respond.

Additionally, you can use a chatbot to let customers know that you’ll get back to them in a certain amount of time and provide resources.

Ultimately, a social media chatbot should help customers with small issues, but escalate larger issues to a human.

3. Gain valuable insights across several networks.

Most social media automation tools provide analytics that can be helpful to your social media strategy.

For example, after using and connecting these tools to your social platforms, you can use the analytics to determine the best time to post. You can answer questions like, “When does my audience interact more?” and “What’s my engagement rate?”

A large benefit to automation tools is that you can get analytics such as impressions, reach, and engagement on all your social media platforms in one place. These reports make it easier to compare the success of a campaign across different platforms.

4. Produce content curation ideas.

While not all automation tools provide content curation, some of them do. This means that you can choose industries or topics that you think your audience is interested in. Then, the software will curate content that you can share and post on your social media platforms.

Some automation tools might draft a social media post for you, however, those should just be used as a starting point. You should write all your own social media posts.

Additionally, using the tactics mentioned above should help you get to know your audience better, facilitating more content ideas.

5. Engage with your audience.

One of the most important benefits of social media automation tools is that they can help you engage with your audience across several platforms in one place.

With this type of software, you can monitor brand mentions, replies, and messages. With all of these gathered in one place, it makes it easier to connect with your audience and helps your team respond in a timely manner.

6. Achieve consistent scheduling.

Consistency is one of the best ways to earn your follower’s trust and improve your online presence.

With social media automation tools, you can keep a steady queue of posts. This can help you plan ahead and spend more time on creativity and less time on the tedious posting tasks.

Additionally, you can use this software to schedule posts in bulk. Many automation software can be used to input a spreadsheet of posts and schedule them.

These are just some of the top ways to use social media automation tools. However, a human should still be interacting with the community, and planning creative, exciting content.

Social Media Automation Tools

1. HubSpot

With HubSpot’s social media tool, you can save time and prioritize your social interactions. This tool was designed to make it easy to share content from your marketing campaigns to all your social media platforms.

Additionally, you can manually publish content directly to LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. By connecting your blog and social media accounts, your new blog content will be automatically shared as soon as it’s published.

Furthermore, this software will give you suggestions on the best times to post and help you develop a nuanced social media strategy.

2. Buffer

Buffer was designed with collaboration in mind. That means you can use this software to draft and coordinate with your team, so you can orchestrate brilliant social media marketing campaigns.

Additionally, you can assign social conversations to the person on the right team, avoid duplicate responses by seeing who else is viewing a conversation, and leave internal notes. Many of these tasks can be automated, from tagging a post to assigning it.

Moreover, your team can use saved replies to reduce the amount of time they spend answering common questions.

Plus, with its reporting and analytics features, Buffer will give your team recommendations on how to grow reach, engagement, and sales.

3. Hootsuite

Besides regular scheduling and report features, Hootsuite also provides content curation tools to help you come up with and post content ideas.

For example, you can use a content library to organize all your content. That means you can save time with pre-approved posts so the team member scheduling content has a pick of posts to choose from.

Additionally, with the Hootlet extension, you can instantly post and share content you find online while you’re browsing or reading content.

Plus, by creating a social listening stream with hashtags or keywords, you can find compelling content to share instantly.

4. Sprout Social

With Sprout Social, your social media team can solve the three basic problems with manual social media management: overflowing inboxes, missed messages, and time-consuming tasks.

Before you get started, you’ll learn how to leverage this tool with dedicated training and easy onboarding, so you can use the tools immediately.

Then, you can use the tools to manage and measure conversations that can improve your engagement rate and brand loyalty.

The collaboration tools are one of the best features because you can integrate your customer support platforms such as Zendesk, HubSpot, and UserVoice.

Ultimately, Sprout Social can eliminate engagement obstacles and achieve social success, from community management to customer support.

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is one of the best automation tools to help you find the content that will perform the best.

With the content discovery, content research, monitoring, and influencer tools, your team can generate ideas, create high-performing content, monitor your performance, and identify influencers to work with.

Additionally, BuzzSumo gives you content examples and helps you find the questions your audience is asking.

Overall, this is one of the best tools to help you improve your content on social media.

Social media automation is a great way to eliminate day-to-day tasks so you can spend more time interacting with your audience. However, these tools shouldn’t be used to avoid responding to or engaging with your followers.

Marketers, welcome to 2020.

This year begins the next decade of our profession. We can’t predict everything that will change in the next ten years, but we can take a look at what’s happening today and use it to better understand the change that is ahead of us.

Since 2010, the marketing world has changed … a lot. In the early 2010s, social networks were only starting to gain traction.

Facebook reached one billion users in late 2012. Instagram was launched in 2010. Snapchat didn’t exist until 2011.

Customer acquisition costs were low because we had new distribution platforms with hundreds of millions of users and only the early adopters within the marketing community trying to reach them.

Fast forward to 2020. Social networks have grown into a foundational aspect of our culture. Facebook has three billion active users. The competitive landscape is fierce — there are countless disruptions happening across every industry. The old guard is getting taken down by companies who provide a better experience from end to end.

Digital marketing channels are overflowing with noise — average customer acquisition costs have increased by 53% over the last five years.

Buyers have changed, too. Ten years ago, businesses won because they sold a product 10 times better than the competition.

Today, businesses win and lose because of their customer experience.

Whether it’s downloading a piece of educational content as a prospect or filing a support ticket as a customer, your buyers want their experience with your company to be simple. More than simple — frictionless.

As marketers, we’re the architects of this experience. Every touchpoint we have with buyers is an opportunity to gain trust. Yet many of us only focus on a small part of the customer journey.

Close to 40% of marketers list their top priority in 2020 as generating leads. Only 5% listed customer retention as a focus area.

Today’s businesses need marketing strategies that support the entire customer lifecycle. Increasingly vocal buyers, easily replicable products, and eroding trust in businesses mean that a delighted customer base is more influential in driving growth than any marketer or salesperson.

Focusing on acquisition at the expense of retention is just one way many of us are missing out on a huge growth opportunity.

Ten years ago, closed-loop reporting was impossible for many marketers. Today, rich attribution is available to all, but not quite yet the norm. Currently, only 52% of marketers use some form of attribution reporting. We expect that number to rise this year, as more companies embrace a platform approach to their software, enabling robust integrations between systems of record and systems of engagement.

We hope this enables marketers to make better business decisions. One of the most important metrics to track is the return on investment of marketing activities. Only 35% of our respondents replied that it is “very important” or “extremely important” to understand the ROI of any given campaign.

That’s low, but I don’t think the outstanding 65% is avoiding it. They’re facing a technology barrier that’s preventing them from measuring their work. Most software that’s built for frontline marketers isn’t quite powerful enough to capture this, and software that is sophisticated enough requires heavy IT or developer support. That is starting to change.

Ten years ago, having a content marketing strategy really meant that you had a blog. This year, for the first time, video content has surpassed blog posts as the top content marketing investment. Video-based platforms like YouTube show no signs of slowing growth––it was the only bright spot in Alphabet’s recent earnings report. Even so, I still see video being used mostly in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey.

Marketers create case study videos, product reviews, and videos for the sales team to use, whereas blogging still dominates acquisition strategies. I encourage marketers to think about how we can use videos as an awareness tool — it’s a massive opportunity.

As we enter the next decade of marketing, only one thing is certain: more change is coming. To help marketers everywhere get a head start this year, we sourced innovative strategies from marketing managers, directors, VPs, and CMOs, at HubSpot, Litmus, and Crayon, and surveyed over 3,400 marketers across the globe. The resulting report is an in-depth look at the current state of marketing.

It outlines our efforts to connect marketing to business growth. And it emphasizes our commitment to the entire customer experience across marketing, sales, and customer support.

It’s a scary and exciting time for marketers everywhere. As you’re planning for the future, questions are inevitable. This report is here to help you answer them.

There are plenty of State of Marketing Reports out there, but this isn’t one of them.

This is Not Another State of Marketing Report, by HubSpot.

Picture the scene from the film The Social Network where a fast-talking Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake) glides into a lunch meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, Christy Lee, and Eduardo Saverin.

Sean confidently expresses how he envisions the company’s thrilling growth, impressing two out of the three start-up enthusiasts.

And then, right before his sudden departure, Sean offers a piece of advice to the crew, a recommendation that Eduardo passive-aggressively states was Sean’s biggest contribution to the company: “Drop the The. Just Facebook. It’s cleaner.”

Would The Facebook have been as successful as Facebook? Many will argue no. Sean’s influence led Mark to update the company’s name and further pivot the platform toward the minimalistic look we know today.

Many social networks have adopted a similar approach to naming their platforms. YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, and Instagram all mirror a short, one-word naming construct. Like Facebook, their names and branding remain memorable and engaging a decade later.

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to naming a company. The naming patterns that work for a social network may not necessarily work for your company. However, regardless of industry, selecting your company’s name can make all the difference to its eventual success.

Here, let’s explore the components of a “bad” name, so you can ensure you avoid these mishaps if you’re currently in the naming stage with your own company (or the re-branding stage).

‘The Facebook’ and Other Bad Names

Mark’s decision proves that a change as little as ‘The‘ can have a huge impact on branding and strategy. However, Facebook isn’t the only company that made tweaks to its name. In fact, many companies we embrace today underwent complete name changes or rebrands.

Google, the most popular search engine in the world, had a very different early name. The search engine’s first name was BackRub, referring to the way the search engine analyzed backlinks. The name was short-lived and Google was trademarked on September 15, 1997.

On July 6, 2006, ‘Google’ became a newfound verb in the English dictionary. Merriam-Webster announced it added Google as a transitive verb, meaning “to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (someone or something) on the World Wide Web.”

Shaping the English language is true brand goals.

Let’s consider another example — would you take a sip of Brad’s Drink? Probably not. But most of us have tried a Pepsi. You guessed it, they’re the same soda. In 1893, Caleb Bradham developed a drink recipe after formulating a unique concoction of cola nuts and spices. Proud of inventing a unique beverage he believed to be a healthy cola alternative, Caleb named the recipe Brad’s Drink, after himself.

Five years later, Brad’s Drink was renamed Pepsi-Cola after the pepsin enzyme that supports digestion. The brand later shortened its name to Pepsi in 1961 — which sounds much more refreshing, in my opinion.

And finally, Dunkin’ Donuts decided to rebrand after 68 years with the same name. Originally named Open Kettle, founder William Rosenberg served donuts and premium cups of coffee. After a brainstorming session with executives, William renamed his restaurant to Dunkin’ Donuts in 1950.

In 2018, the company announced it would shorten its name to Dunkin’. The name change was one of many steps to transform itself into the premier beverage-led, on-the-go brand. “Dunkin’ is a shorter, simpler, more modern version of who we’ve always been,” explained Dunkin’ U.S. CMO Tony Weisman. By shedding Donuts, the brand redirected focus on beverages, where profit margins are much higher than donuts. 

These accomplished brands found their former names limiting and sought to thrive with a brand refresh.

Names go beyond vanity — studies suggest that a name has a significant impact on a company’s bottom line. In fact, a report on behalf of the Society of Personal and Social Psychology, Inc. discovered stocks with easier-to-pronounce names performed up to 33% better those with names more difficult to pronounce.

What makes a name bad?

Defining what makes a “bad” name is just as complex as defining what makes a “great” one.

Names, like all words, vary in connotation and audience reception.

When brainstorming, it often feels that the “good” names have already been claimed. After all, over 627,000 new businesses open each year. This can make naming a business feel like a competitive, and almost impossible, process.

But this is the phase in the process where you can evoke your creativity and innovation. As you create, you must remain cautious of what will lead you toward selecting a name that you may later regret.

Here are the top four reasons you might end up with a “bad” name.

1. Not establishing your tone. Before diving into your brainstorm, it’s imperative that you select a tone that’s right for your brand and industry. The five tones that names typically fall under include modern, classic, playful, pragmatic, and emotional. Even Google learned quickly that their first choice, albeit playful, was not the right tone for the tech world at that time.

However, you can push your industry’s boundaries and select a tone that might stand out in your vertical. Apple, for example, selected an organic object as their name when the rest of the industry at the time was using tech-focused jargon and acronyms. If you do decide to go against the grain, be sure that the rest of your branding and marketing strategy strongly supports this direction.

2. Believing the shorter, the better. There’s a common misconception that a successful brand name should be short. This is not necessarily the case. In fact, locking down a short name may be costly, especially when securing domain names and social media handles.

For example, Uber’s first website was UberTaxi.com. In 2010, Uber purchased Uber.com from the owner, Universal Music Group. Still a new company, the rideshare start-up used equity to purchase the domain. Universal Music Group sold their stock back to Uber for a mere $1 million. Four years later, Uber’s worth was reported to be $17 billion.

Additionally, if you find that a similar business is already using the name or a similar name, you risk confusing your customers or possibly running into trademark conflict. Before deciding on a shorter name, be sure to conduct thorough research.

3. It’s complicated, literally. In the naming business, we encourage creatives to think outside of the box. In fact, story-driven business names allow for brands to connect with audiences and evoke connection. However, a name that is too complex can become problematic. A strong name is often easy to spell, hear, and pronounce. Complicated names will make it hard for customers to find you online, remember your brand, and share it with others.

In a report conducted by Prezi, 80% of consumers forget branded content after only three days. Consumers cited that there was simply too much content to retain. Make it easy on customers by brainstorming names that are easy to remember.

4. Loving a name too soon. Love is blind. And so is falling in love with a name early on in the process. Many times, we have a preference based on our assumptions, personal connection, or unconscious bias.

For instance, in the Summer of 2019, Kim Kardashian West renamed her Kimono shapewear brand to Skims after being accused of cultural appropriation. These are the real-world consequences of untested or misinformed name choices.

After brainstorming, it’s highly important to audience test. Audience testing will offer valuable insight into the names that will appeal to your target market. Your business may choose to run surveys through relevant forums, Facebook groups, and audience testing services to obtain relevant opinions on your business name ideas. As the results come in, you may discover that the name you initially loved does not have a positive connotation or resonates with key stakeholders.

The name you select is truly the cornerstone of your brand. It is your brand’s identity channeled in one or two words. A brand name is the foundation of your brand’s personality, therefore you must uncover one that reflects your company.

Now that you know what makes a “bad” name, you can move forward in selecting a strong business name — sans The.