Think about those brands you purchase from over and over, even when there are cheaper options out there. Why do you choose the ones you choose?

Do you usually fly on a particular airline? Do you buy your coffee from the same place every morning? Do you recommend a specific restaurant whenever out-of-towners ask for suggestions? Well, there’s a good reason for it.

The reason we stay loyal to brands is because of their values. The best brands strive to combine physical, emotional, and logical elements into one exceptional customer (and employee) experience that you value as much as they do. Nowhere are those values more visible than in the company’s mission statement.

When you successfully create a connection with your customers and employees, many of them might stay loyal to you for life. This helps you increase your overall profitability while building a solid foundation of brand promoters.

But achieving that connection is no easy task. The companies that succeed are ones that stay true to their core values over the years and create a company that employees and customers are proud to associate with.

That’s where company vision and mission statements come in.

What is a Vision Statement?

A vision statement describes where the company aspires to be upon achieving its mission. This statement reveals the “where” of a business. Below are some vision statements from well-known companies to give you a sense of how a vision represents a brand.

Vision Statement Examples

• Alzheimer’s Association: A world without Alzheimer’s disease.
• Teach for America: One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.
• Creative Commons: Realizing the full potential of the internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.
• Microsoft (at its founding): A computer on every desk and in every home.
• Australia Department of Health: Better health and wellbeing for all Australians, now and for future generations.
• LinkedIn: Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. 
• Disney: To entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling, reflecting the iconic brands, creative minds and innovative technologies that make ours the world’s premier entertainment company.
• Facebook: Connect with friends and the world around you on Facebook.

What is a Mission Statement?

If the above examples are vision statements, what’s a mission statement? A mission statement is, in some ways, an action-oriented vision statement, declaring the purpose an organization serves to its audience. It often includes a general description of the organization, its function, and its objectives.

As a company grows, its objectives and goals may be reached, and in turn they’ll change. Therefore, mission and vision statements should be revised as needed to reflect the business’s new culture as previous goals are met.

Both mission and vision statements are often combined into one comprehensive “mission statement” to define the organization’s reason for existing and its outlook for internal and external audiences — like employees, partners, board members, consumers, and shareholders.

With that in mind, what does a good mission statement look like? Check out some of the following company mission statements for yourself — and get inspired to write one for your brand.

Best Vision and Mission Statement Examples From Real Companies

1. Life Is Good: To spread the power of optimism.

The Life is Good brand is about more than spreading optimism — although, with uplifting T-shirt slogans like “Seas The Day” and “Forecast: Mostly Sunny,” it’s hard not to crack a smile.

There are a ton of T-shirt companies in the world, but Life is Good’s mission sets itself apart with a mission statement goes beyond fun clothing: to spread the power of optimism. This mission is perhaps a little unexpected if you’re not familiar with the company’s public charity: How will a T-shirt company help spread optimism? Life is Good answers that question below the fold, where what the mission means is explained in more detail, with links to programs implemented to support it: its #GrowTheGood initiative and the Life is Good Kids Foundation page. We really like how lofty yet specific this mission statement is — it’s a hard-to-balance combination.

2. sweetgreen: To inspire healthier communities by connecting people to real food.

Notice that sweetgreen’s mission is positioned to align with your values — not just written as something the brand believes. We love the inclusive language used in its statement, letting us know that the company is all about connecting its growing network of farmers growing healthy, local ingredients with us — the customer — because we’re the ones who want more locally grown, healthy food options.

The mission to connect people is what makes this statement so strong. And that promise has gone beyond sweetgreen’s website and walls of its food shops: The team has made strides in the communities where it’s opened stores as well. Primarily, it provides education to young kids on healthy eating, fitness, sustainability, and where food comes from. The sweetlife music festival attracts 20,000 like-minded people every year who come together to listen to music, eat healthy food, and give back to a cause — the sweetgreen in schools charity partner, FoodCorps.

3. Patagonia: Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

Patagonia’s mission statement combines both the values that bring them market success (building safe, high-quality products) and the values that contribute to a better world (philanthropic efforts to help the environment). For the people behind the brand, “a love of wild and beautiful places demands participation in the fight to save them.” In the name of this cause, the company donates time, services, and at least 1% of its sales to hundreds of grassroots environmental groups around the world.

If your company has a similar focus on growing your business and giving back, think about talking about both the benefit you bring to customers and the value you want to bring to a greater cause in your mission statement.

4. American Express: We work hard every day to make American Express the world’s most respected service brand.

Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.

— Simon Sinek (@simonsinek)
April 16, 2014

The tweet above is from Simon Sinek, and it’s one that we repeat here at HubSpot all the time. American Express sets itself apart from other credit card companies in its list of values, with an ode to great customer service, which is something it’s famous for.

We especially love the emphasis on teamwork and supporting employees, so that the people inside of the organization can be in the best position to support their customers.

5. Warby Parker: To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses.

Speaking of quirky, this “objective” statement from Warby Parker uses words that reflect a young and daring personality: “rebellious,” “revolutionary,” “socially-conscious.” In one sentence, the brand takes us back to the root of why it was founded while also revealing its vision for a better future.

The longer-form version of the mission reads: “We believe that buying glasses should be easy and fun. It should leave you happy and good-looking, with money in your pocket,” which further shows how Warby Parker doesn’t hold back on letting its unique personality shine through. Here, the missions statement’s success all comes down to spot-on word choice.

6. InvisionApp: Question Assumptions. Think Deeply. Iterate as a Lifestyle. Details, Details. Design is Everywhere. Integrity.

These days, it can seem like every B2B company page looks the same — but InvisionApp has one of the cooler company pages I’ve seen. Scroll down to “Our Core Values,” and hover your mouse over any of the icons, and you’ll find a short-but-sweet piece of the overall company mission under each icon. We love the way the statements are laid out under each icon. Each description is brief, authentic, and business babble-free — which makes the folks at InvisionApp seem like trustworthy, B.S.-free types.

7. Honest Tea: To create and promote great-tasting, healthy, organic beverages.

Honest Tea’s mission statement begins with a simple punch line connoting its tea is real, pure, and therefore not full of artificial chemicals. The brand is speaking to an audience that’s tired of finding ingredients in its tea that can’t be pronounced, and have been searching for a tea that’s exactly what it says it is.

Not only does Honest Tea have a punny name, but it also centers its mission around the clever company name. For some time, the company even published a Mission Report each year in an effort to be “transparent about our business practices and live up to our mission to seek to create and promote great-tasting, healthier, organic beverages.”

8. IKEA: To create a better everyday life for the many people.

The folks at IKEA dream big. The vision-based mission statement could have been one of beautiful, affordable furniture, but instead, it’s to make everyday life better for its customers. It’s a partnership: IKEA finds deals all over the world and buys in bulk, then we choose the furniture and pick it up at a self-service warehouse.

“Our business idea supports this vision … so [that] as many people as possible will be able to afford them,” the brand states.

Using words like “as many people as possible” makes a huge company like IKEA much more accessible and appealing to customers.

9. Nordstrom: “To give customers the most compelling shopping experience possible.

When it comes to customer commitment, not many companies are as hyper-focused as Nordstrom is. Although clothing selection, quality, and value all have a place in the company’s mission statement, it’s crystal clear that it’s all about the customer: “Nordstrom works relentlessly to give customers the most compelling shopping experience possible.”

If you’ve ever shopped at a Nordstrom, you’ll know the brand will uphold the high standard for customer service mentioned in its mission statement, as associates are always roaming the sales floors, asking customers whether they’ve been helped, and doing everything they can to make the shopping experience a memorable one.

10. Cradles to Crayons: Provides children from birth through age 12, living in homeless or low-income situations, with the essential items they need to thrive – at home, at school and at play.

Cradles to Crayons divided its mission and model into three sections that read like a game plan: The Need, The Mission, and The Model. The “rule of three” is a powerful rhetorical device called a tricolon that’s usually used in speechwriting to help make an idea more memorable. A tricolon is a series of three parallel elements of roughly the same length — think “I came; I saw; I conquered.”

11. Universal Health Services, Inc.: To provide superior quality healthcare services that: PATIENTS recommend to family and friends, PHYSICIANS prefer for their patients, PURCHASERS select for their clients, EMPLOYEES are proud of, and INVESTORS seek for long-term returns.

A company thrives when it pleases its customers, its employees, its partners, and its investors — and Universal Health Services endeavors to do just that, according to its mission statement. As a health care service, it specifically strives to please its patients, physicians, purchasers, employees, and investors. We love the emphasis on each facet of the organization, by capitalizing the font and making it red for easy skimming.

12. JetBlue: To inspire humanity – both in the air and on the ground.

JetBlue’s committed to its founding mission through lovable marketing, charitable partnerships, and influential programs — and we love the approachable language used to describe these endeavors. For example, the brand writes how it “set out in 2000 to bring humanity back to the skies.”

For those of us who want to learn more about any of its specific efforts, JetBlue’s provided details on the Soar With Reading program, its partnership with KaBOOM!, the JetBlue Foundation, environmental and social reporting, and so on. It breaks down all these initiatives really well with big headers, bullet points, pictures, and links to other webpages visitors can click to learn more. Finally, it ends with a call-to-action encouraging website visitors volunteer or donate their TrueBlue points.

13. Workday: To put people at the center of enterprise software.

Workday, a human resources (HR) task automation service, doesn’t use its mission statement to highlight the features of its product or how it intends to help HR professionals improve in such-and-such a way.

Instead, the business takes a stance on the state of enterprise software in general: There’s a lot of great tech out there. But at Workday, it revolves around the people. We love how confident yet kind this mission statement is. It observes the state of its industry — which Workday believes lacks a human touch — and builds company values around it.

14. Prezi: To reinvent how people share knowledge, tell stories, and inspire their audiences to act.

If you know Prezi, you know how engaging it can make your next business presentation look. According to its mission statement, the company’s clever slide animations and 3-dimensional experience aren’t just superficial product features. With every decision Prezi makes, it’s all about the story you tell and the audience that story affects.

15. Tesla: To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.

A car company’s punny use of the word “accelerate” is just one reason this mission statement sticks out. The main reason Tesla makes this list is because of how its mission statement describes the industry.

It may be a car company, but Tesla’s main interest isn’t just automobile sales — it’s promoting sustainable energy. And sustainable energy still has a “long road” ahead of it (pun intended) — hence the world’s “transition” into this market.

Ultimately, a mission statement that can admit to the industry’s immaturity is exactly what gets customers to root for it. And Tesla does that nicely.

16. Invisible Children: To end violence and exploitation facing our world’s most isolated and vulnerable communities.

Tenacity is hard to come by in the non-profit sector, and that’s what makes this mission statement so distinguished. Invisible Children is a non-profit that raises awareness around the violence affecting communities across Central Africa, and the company takes quite a confident tone in its mission.

The most valuable quality of this mission statement is that it has an end goal. Many companies’ visions and missions are intentionally left open-ended so that the business might always be needed by the community. Invisible Children, on the other hand, wants to “end” the violence facing African families. It’s an admirable mission that all businesses — not just non-profits — can learn from when trying to motivate their customers.

17. TED: Spread ideas.

We’ve all seen TED Talks online before. Well, the company happens to have one of the most succinct mission statements out there.

TED, which stands for “Technology Education and Design,” has a two-word mission statement that shines through in every Talk you’ve seen the company publish on the internet. That mission statement: “Spread ideas.” Sometimes, the best way to get an audience to remember you is to zoom out as far as your business’s vision can go. What do you really care about? TED has recorded some of the most famous presentations in the world, but in the grand scheme of things, all it wants is to spread ideas around to its viewers.

Here are 22 companies with really catchy slogans and brand taglines.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

99% of people check their email every day.

With a statistic like that, it’s not hard to see why email marketing is a go-to for marketing campaigns. What’s confusing, though, is that sometimes, email marketing ROI can look a little bleak.

An un-successful email campaign in a world where opening emails is such a big part of people’s lives can be confusing, and brings up an important question:

Where is the gap between consumers checking their email constantly, but not clicking on your brand’s message?

Before you pull the plug on email marketing completely, consider this — 73% of millennials prefer email communication when receiving marketing material.

Ultimately, the problem may not be the marketing channel, but the message delivery.

So, is email marketing dead? Or, is there something that can be done to enhance the email marketing experience — for consumers and marketers?

In the next section, we’re going to answer that question and why a marketing strategy makeover might be necessary for a struggling brand.

There’s no need to hold a funeral: email isn’t dead, just outdated.

If your brand’s email marketing strategy is currently struggling with bringing in high ROI, it could be because your strategy hasn’t been improved to reflect how email currently works.

Ultimately, if you’re not catering to your audiences, or if you’re not using metrics to appropriately measure and improve your email campaigns, you’re likely missing out on ROI — not because email marketing is dead, but because your strategy is outdated.

To improve your email marketing ROI in 2020, here’s what to retire:

Email Marketing “Dead” Practices

1. Impersonal subject lines

Email marketing starts before readers even open the email. Subject lines can make or break open-rate, a metric that tracks how many subscribers open your emails.

A major component of a successful campaign is targeting the customer by creating content that identifies with their lifestyle. In email marketing, this begins with the subject line.

As a consumer, if I see an emoji in a marketing email’s subject line, I immediately open it as opposed to others, because to me, this shows that the sender took a little extra time to personalize the message.

For instance, here’s a look at the promotion emails I’ve opened and engaged with:

Personalizing marketing messages makes readers feel connected to what’s being sold. Generally, making a subject line personal can be as easy as noting the holiday season or asking a question to get readers thinking.

Think about what in your email is the “must-know” takeaway, and create a short subject line that taps into emotions to get subscribers clicking.

2. Ignoring GDPR standards

In a nutshell, GDPR means making sure the reader gives clear, unambiguous permission to receive marketing emails. Full compliance with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) ensures that sending marketing emails is legal.

GDPR was created so consumers know their data is protected and being used by brands they have trusted with personal information. They opt-in to emails they’d like to receive from brands they’re interested in.

This is good news for marketers because it means your email campaigns will only be sent to users who are genuinely interested in your marketing messages. It also ensures your email marketing messages are compliant with the law.

Email marketing software should be GDPR compliant. If not, it’s time to choose new software. HubSpot has a great guide about navigating GDPR, incorporating these rules into strategy, and why the email marketing tools from HubSpot already follow the standards.

3. Using templates that aren’t mobile-friendly

The world is mobile now. When I check my emails in the morning, I’m checking from my phone, where I prefer to check my email.

Emails that aren’t mobile-friendly are probably raising your bounce rate exponentially due to poor user experience. Because it’s so easy to click away from something that’s unappealing, emails optimized for mobile should be an important step in the design process.

Apple’s iPhone is the most popular method for opening emails, with Gmail in second place. For some audiences, marketing emails that are stellar for mobile should take priority over emails for desktop, so the majority of readers don’t get turned away from desktop-friendly templates.

For businesses using email automation software, check the mobile previews as well as the desktop previews when drafting your email design. If the template being used interrupts comprehension or is just plain ugly on mobile, it might be a good idea to switch to something else.

4. Poor email design

We’ve talked a little about design, but it’s really imperative to take time designing emails that delight readers.

Emails lately have gotten snazzy. From animations to GIFs, and even embedded full-length videos, businesses are dipping their toes into exciting email marketing efforts to pull readers in.

Emails that have quick loading time, bold CTAs, and colorful visuals typically perform best. Consider this email I received recently from Adobe:

There are ways to include helpful information in emails without sacrificing the user’s experience, and it’s all about using visuals

Think about it — an email newsletter with an emoji in the title, a beautiful infographic, and a couple of lines of exciting copy before an engaging CTA is exciting to look at and read.

An email newsletter with long paragraphs, the same-old template and a CTA that hasn’t changed in years are … less than exciting, and probably leave readers clicking out of that email in favor of something that is.

Here are some examples of how email campaigns are stepping up design. In a nutshell, think about how every email can visually tell a story as much as words.

5. Not strategically using metrics

Tracking metrics helps fill in the gaps when looking at where to improve with marketing efforts. They break down the behavior of email subscribers. 

There’s been a lot of talk about metrics, and that’s because metrics drive results. They are the numbers behind the campaign. Metrics tell marketers a plethora of important details.

Metrics collect data on how many people are interacting with emails, when they are, who they are, and for how long. All of this information is important to know when planning because they lead to important marketing decisions.

For instance, let’s say a marketer who checks email marketing metrics regularly notices that the bounce rate is high, meaning that readers are opening emails but not engaging with them. This can stem from a variety of issues, but knowing the bounce rate tells the marketer what to focus on improving for the next marketing email.

Metrics save time by reporting on what’s working and what isn’t. To begin tracking metrics, consider what email software you use. Many have reporting and tracking built into their tools, as well as information about how that data is collected and interpreted.

Ultimately, the reasons you may not be seeing results is not because email marketing is dead — it’s because of how you’re email marketing. So, before you turn away from email marketing as a whole, think about ways you can beef up your strategy to compete.

Instagram Stories has extended the amount of time people spend in the app by approximately ten additional minutes. But, while that extra time means more attention and focus on your brand, it won’t translate to much if you can’t get that traffic back to your site.

If you have over 10,000 followers or you’re a verified user, you have an incredibly effective tool at your disposal — the swipe up link. This link enables you to post exciting content regarding a new product, service, or event, and then encourage those users to “swipe up for details.”

But with all that power comes some responsibility. How do you add a link to your story, and how can you use it to its fullest advantage? Let’s dive into that now.

How to Add a Link to Your Instagram Story

I used HubSpot’s official Instagram account for these instructions, since my personal account isn’t verified (I also, you’ll be surprised to hear, don’t have 10,000 followers … ).

1. Take a photo or upload one to your Instagram Story, and then click the icon at the top right that looks like a chain.

2. Here, click “+ URL” to add a link to a web page. If you were interested in linking your Story to your IGTV video, you could choose that option, instead.

3. Type the URL into the text box. When you’re finished, click “Done” in the top right.

4. When you’re ready to publish, click the “+ Story” button at the bottom right of your Story. Now, your published Story has a “See More” swipe up link.

Instagram Swipe Up Link Examples

1. @Detoxinista Recipes

Food bloggers such as @Detoxinista use Instagram Stories’ swipe up link to embed recipes on the platform. They wisely post images of delicious-looking food, which incentivizes users to swipe up to learn how to make it themselves. The link isn’t a direct advertisement, but users are directed to Detoxinista’s website, where they can find her cookbook and become familiar with her brand.

2. @Alifedotowsky Clothing Items

If you’re a Bachelorette fan, you might’ve noticed the growing trend among Bachelor and Bachelorette contestants to become product influencers and embed swipe up links in their Stories. As a fashion and style blogger, Ali often takes pictures or videos of outfits she’s wearing, with swipe up links so users can buy the items online. She also often incorporates discounts if users swipe up, further incentivizing a user to purchase an item from a brand’s website.

3. @Popsugarfitness Summer Sculpt Series

One of the most effective ways to use the swipe up feature is to offer your followers something of value, for free. @Popsugarfitness, for instance, introduced a Summer Sculpt series with a tempting offer — “Swipe Up for a 10-Minute No-Equipment Booty-Shaping Workout”. Who could say no to that? Ideally, as users obtain more value from your site, they’ll spend longer on it and become stronger brand advocates.

4. @Reebok Be More Human Campaign

Reebok created a powerful and timely campaign called “Be More Human”, celebrating women’s empowerment through fitness. On their Instagram Stories, they raise awareness for the campaign by showing famous women like Gigi Hadid or Danai Gurira, and when you swipe up, you learn more about Reebok’s campaign and how you can get involved. On the site there are opportunities to purchase t-shirts or donate money, but it’s evident Reebok is committed to staying focused on their messaging above all else, a noble pursuit.

In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone. The cell phone boasted a full touch screen, a slew of personalization options, and internet capabilities. These features were rare in the phone market before the iPhone, and having them all on one device was especially enticing.

Because of these innovative features, Apple built a reputation and loyal fan base in the first year of the iPhone’s release, earning the company a 3% market share.

Today, Apple has a 50% market share in the mobile phone industry. This means that half of phone owners globally own an iPhone.

As a business, knowing your market share tells you how you stack up against competitors. Ultimately, Apple needed to know its market share back in 2007, and continue to innovate and grow, to become a leader in the market today.

When we talk about raising market share, we’re talking about making informed marketing decisions that contribute to overall sales and customer retention. Here, let’s explore what it means to increase market share, and how you can do that, today.

What does it mean to increase market share?

To increase market share means increasing the effort you put into sales as a business, and using new or additional strategies to help you get there.

Market share is the percent of total sales in an industry generated by a particular company.

Simply put, market share is calculated by taking the company’s sales over a certain period of time, and dividing it by the total sales of the industry over that same period.

Basically, market share is how much you make as a company in the industry, and how that stacks up against others. So, to increase your market share, you need to make more sales than your competitors to increase your share in the industry.

Which is, of course, much easier said than done. How does one go about increasing market share? Let’s dive into that, next.

1. Find your niche and stick with it.

Your company should have a few characteristics that set it apart from the competition. For example, Apple’s logo and sleek design is seen on Apple’s entire suite of products.

Having that distinguishing brand characteristic — such as the Apple logo — enables people to more easily identify your company’s products across a line of similar-looking items. If your company is able to create a recognizable brand identity, while also producing higher-quality products or services than the competition (or products or services that serve a niche market), you’ll have a better chance of finding a larger piece of market share to capture.

For instance, I don’t know much about makeup, but I know a NARS blush when I see one because the design and logo of their products are so unique to the brand, and the quality of NARS products is undeniably good:

Source

This strategy increases market share for a business that has found success with a previous launch. If a consumer sees your mark on a product, they will know what they’re getting, which informs their purchase decision.

As a marketer, you also want to consider which marketing materials can help you increase market share. For instance, do you have a popular eBook or YouTube series? Continue to work with those avenues more frequently to expand the reach those products get.

2. Innovate as society does.

Sony’s PlayStation owns 68% of the home console market share. Since 1994, Sony has been finding ways to innovate and update their video game consoles faster than their competition. These innovations are necessary to stay current in the industry and increase market share.

For reference, here is a 1994 PlayStation console:

Source

And a 2014 PlayStation 4:

Source

While some design elements have stayed the same, such as the logo and base system design, upgrades have been applied to match the times.

Take, for instance, the controller. They’re both similar, but while the PS4 controller is wireless, has a power button, and battery life, PS1 controllers don’t. PS1 power buttons are large and can be found on the side of the console, whereas much smaller PS4 power buttons can be found on the controller and on the console itself.

This is because as more advancements have been made in the gaming industry, Sony has adapted accordingly. The company has a keen eye on what gamers want as years pass, earning them a high market share.

If you fail to innovate in a way that’s reflected on the times, your business may fall behind and be forgotten. (RIP, outdated Aatari consoles).

3. Engage with customers.

Customers know what they want to see, so one way businesses can increase their market share is by asking them.

A carefully crafted survey sent out to loyal customers with questions about design, updates, and features can help you visualize tangible ways to improve your product or service, and in turn, increase your market share.

You don’t have to only use surveys, either. Engaging with customers on social media, such as in an Instagram story, works as well. Skincare company Glossier does this effectively:

Source

Going to the source to ask what customers will spend their money on is a good campaign strategy for increasing market share. It’s a low-cost way to conduct market research and learn more about your place in the industry based on consumer perception.

4. Think about an acquisition.

You can increase market share through the acquisition of a company that aligns well with your own products or services. This requires a bit of research, but will ultimately end up in potentially gaining a larger market share.

Companies usually acquire companies to gain a larger market share or expand their suite of products. For example, Microsoft owns LinkedIn and GitHub. While the former (LinkedIn) can lead to an increase in market share among social media revenue, the latter (GitHub) can lead to an increase in market share among Cloud OS revenue.

Acquiring a competitor involves choosing the right company — one that will be a positive addition to your suite of products or services.

5. Continue to delight customers.

Netflix is no stranger to creating loyal customers. The platform is constantly adding more original shows and tightening its algorithm to cater to its customers. This constant refining of the platform led to a 2014 report that Netflix had a 90% market share in the streaming service market.

Having such a large market share due to these updates has helped Netflix even as more streaming services have entered the market. Customers have found themselves not wanting to cancel their Netflix subscriptions because they’ve found such deep value in it.

In short, Netflix makes its customers happy. I know I’m certainly happy when I can turn on the Netflix app and see most of my favorites displayed without needing to scroll further.

Netflix positioned itself as a leader in the industry. Don’t wait for customers to come to you for ideas — think ahead, not just of what they need, but what they’ll want as customer buying experience changes overtime.

In 2007, Apple completely revolutionized mobile phones and tripled their market share in a year. 13 years later, Apple is still a leader in the mobile phone market because of the ways they constantly improve their product and create loyal customers.

By looking at your market share and finding ways to increase it, you’ll find greater customer retention and a more stable position in your industry.

In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone. The cell phone boasted a full touch screen, a slew of personalization options, and internet capabilities. These features were rare in the phone market before the iPhone, and having them all on one device was especially enticing.

Because of these innovative features, Apple built a reputation and loyal fan base in the first year of the iPhone’s release, earning the company a 3% market share.

Today, Apple has a 50% market share in the mobile phone industry. This means that half of phone owners globally own an iPhone.

As a business, knowing your market share tells you how you stack up against competitors. Ultimately, Apple needed to know its market share back in 2007, and continue to innovate and grow, to become a leader in the market today.

When we talk about raising market share, we’re talking about making informed marketing decisions that contribute to overall sales and customer retention. Here, let’s explore what it means to increase market share, and how you can do that, today.

What does it mean to increase market share?

To increase market share means increasing the effort you put into sales as a business, and using new or additional strategies to help you get there.

Market share is the percent of total sales in an industry generated by a particular company.

Simply put, market share is calculated by taking the company’s sales over a certain period of time, and dividing it by the total sales of the industry over that same period.

Basically, market share is how much you make as a company in the industry, and how that stacks up against others. So, to increase your market share, you need to make more sales than your competitors to increase your share in the industry.

Which is, of course, much easier said than done. How does one go about increasing market share? Let’s dive into that, next.

1. Find your niche and stick with it.

Your company should have a few characteristics that set it apart from the competition. For example, Apple’s logo and sleek design is seen on Apple’s entire suite of products.

Having that distinguishing brand characteristic — such as the Apple logo — enables people to more easily identify your company’s products across a line of similar-looking items. If your company is able to create a recognizable brand identity, while also producing higher-quality products or services than the competition (or products or services that serve a niche market), you’ll have a better chance of finding a larger piece of market share to capture.

For instance, I don’t know much about makeup, but I know a NARS blush when I see one because the design and logo of their products are so unique to the brand, and the quality of NARS products is undeniably good:

Source

This strategy increases market share for a business that has found success with a previous launch. If a consumer sees your mark on a product, they will know what they’re getting, which informs their purchase decision.

As a marketer, you also want to consider which marketing materials can help you increase market share. For instance, do you have a popular eBook or YouTube series? Continue to work with those avenues more frequently to expand the reach those products get.

2. Innovate as society does.

Sony’s PlayStation owns 68% of the home console market share. Since 1994, Sony has been finding ways to innovate and update their video game consoles faster than their competition. These innovations are necessary to stay current in the industry and increase market share.

For reference, here is a 1994 PlayStation console:

Source

And a 2014 PlayStation 4:

Source

While some design elements have stayed the same, such as the logo and base system design, upgrades have been applied to match the times.

Take, for instance, the controller. They’re both similar, but while the PS4 controller is wireless, has a power button, and battery life, PS1 controllers don’t. PS1 power buttons are large and can be found on the side of the console, whereas much smaller PS4 power buttons can be found on the controller and on the console itself.

This is because as more advancements have been made in the gaming industry, Sony has adapted accordingly. The company has a keen eye on what gamers want as years pass, earning them a high market share.

If you fail to innovate in a way that’s reflected on the times, your business may fall behind and be forgotten. (RIP, outdated Aatari consoles).

3. Engage with customers.

Customers know what they want to see, so one way businesses can increase their market share is by asking them.

A carefully crafted survey sent out to loyal customers with questions about design, updates, and features can help you visualize tangible ways to improve your product or service, and in turn, increase your market share.

You don’t have to only use surveys, either. Engaging with customers on social media, such as in an Instagram story, works as well. Skincare company Glossier does this effectively:

Source

Going to the source to ask what customers will spend their money on is a good campaign strategy for increasing market share. It’s a low-cost way to conduct market research and learn more about your place in the industry based on consumer perception.

4. Think about an acquisition.

You can increase market share through the acquisition of a company that aligns well with your own products or services. This requires a bit of research, but will ultimately end up in potentially gaining a larger market share.

Companies usually acquire companies to gain a larger market share or expand their suite of products. For example, Microsoft owns LinkedIn and GitHub. While the former (LinkedIn) can lead to an increase in market share among social media revenue, the latter (GitHub) can lead to an increase in market share among Cloud OS revenue.

Acquiring a competitor involves choosing the right company — one that will be a positive addition to your suite of products or services.

5. Continue to delight customers.

Netflix is no stranger to creating loyal customers. The platform is constantly adding more original shows and tightening its algorithm to cater to its customers. This constant refining of the platform led to a 2014 report that Netflix had a 90% market share in the streaming service market.

Having such a large market share due to these updates has helped Netflix even as more streaming services have entered the market. Customers have found themselves not wanting to cancel their Netflix subscriptions because they’ve found such deep value in it.

In short, Netflix makes its customers happy. I know I’m certainly happy when I can turn on the Netflix app and see most of my favorites displayed without needing to scroll further.

Netflix positioned itself as a leader in the industry. Don’t wait for customers to come to you for ideas — think ahead, not just of what they need, but what they’ll want as customer buying experience changes overtime.

In 2007, Apple completely revolutionized mobile phones and tripled their market share in a year. 13 years later, Apple is still a leader in the mobile phone market because of the ways they constantly improve their product and create loyal customers.

By looking at your market share and finding ways to increase it, you’ll find greater customer retention and a more stable position in your industry.

When I was in grade school, Valentine’s Day was one of my favorite holidays. There were cards. There was the possibility that your crush actually liked you back. And, there was the chocolate — so much chocolate.

Little did I know that the roots of this holiday bore little-to-no resemblance to my childhood experience of it. We were never taught that Valentine’s Day actually originated with an arguably gruesome ancient festival, where there was no chocolate or exchange of cute, red-and-pink cards.

But love it or hate it, those are the types of things we associate with the holiday today. After all, there’s a reason roughly 114 million Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged each year — it’s what’s become expected of us.

So how the heck did we get from an ancient Roman festival to a holiday that compels many of us to spend no less than $147 on celebrating it? That story, it turns out, is thousands of years old — but we’ll try to condense it.

How Valentine’s Day Began and Evolved

Ancient Rome

Source: Christie’s

The roots of Valentine’s Day are cited by some sources to lie in the ancient Roman festival Lupercalia, largely because it took place annually on February 15 — the day after what is today the observed date of Valentine’s Day — and involved some very primitive forms of courtship and matchmaking. But it was also ancient Rome that saw the famous execution of a St. Valentine on February 14, around 278 A.D. According to legend, he wrote a letter on the night before his execution to his jailer’s daughter, whom he had befriended, and signed it, “From Your Valentine.”

Over two centuries later, Pope Gelasius ordered that Lupercalia be replaced with the February 14 observation of St. Valentine’s Day. That set the tone, some believe, for the day’s forthcoming tradition of exchanging “love messages,” perhaps in remembrance of St. Valentine’s farewell letter.

The Romans are also credited with constructing the idea of Cupid — a god of love often depicted with arrows that, as the legend goes, inflict love upon those who are hit by them. The Roman version of Cupid was adapted from Eros, a god of passion and fertility in Greek mythology. It seems that no one is quite sure when cupid became associated with Valentine’s Day, but the fact that both have origins in ancient Roman culture suggests that there may have been some very early overlap between the two.

Shakespeare (and Chaucer) in Love

Source: Internet Archive

When NPR’s Arnie Seipel set out to explore the history of Valentine’s Day, he found that it first became romanticized by classic authors like William Shakespeare in the late 16th century, and Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1300s.

Chaucer

Dartmouth English professor Peter Travis cites Chaucer’s epic poem The Parliament of Fowls, which was one of the first literary references to St. Valentine’s Day, or “Seynt Valentynes day,” as Chaucer spelled it. One such mention is made, Travis explains, alongside the line, “Now welcom somer, with thy sonne sonne, That hast this wintres weders over-shake.” In other words, when we celebrate love in the coldest depths of winter — in February, for instance — it’s so heartwarming that it makes summer feel less far away.

Shakespeare

Some literary historians credit Shakespeare for the permeation of love into popular culture with his composition of “Sonnet 18” — said to be written between 1593-1601 — a.k.a., “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” It’s unclear when or how this particular work became associated with Valentine’s Day, but like Chaucer, Shakespeare compares love to the seasons.

“While summer days may fade and fall into” colder months, writes Shakespeare analyst Lee Jamieson, “his love is eternal.”

Of course, Saint Valentine’s day is alluded to outright in Hamlet — written between 1599-1601 — when the character Ophelia recites a song about a young lady’s experience with the holiday, which includes lyrics like, “Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day,” and, “To be your Valentine.”

The 17th Century and Beyond

Source: American Antiquarian Society

By the 1700s, it’s said that Valentine’s Day made its way from Europe to the United States, which aligns with the establishment of the North American colonies between 1607-1770. It became traditional, according to HISTORY.com, “for friends and lovers of all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes.” That was more common in England, however, where the Industrial Revolution began earlier and eventually included the production of “fancy valentines [that] were extremely expensive to import.“

It’s said that one American woman, Esther Howland, was so intrigued when she received her first English valentine greeting in 1847, that she became infatuated with the idea of manufacturing them in the U.S. She was an early entrepreneur, and instinctively believed that there could be an American market for these formal, English-style greetings. After procuring materials like high-quality paper and lace from her father, a stationer, she created what many credit as the earliest American Valentine’s Day greeting cards.

Today, Howland is still honored with the nickname “Mother of the American Valentine,” with many citing her work as the start of a multi-million-dollar industry. But it didn’t happen overnight — let’s take a look at how her work paved the way.

A Brief Timeline of Valentine’s Day Marketing

1714

Charles II of Sweden begins communicating with flowers, by assigning a different message to each type. This tradition allegedly assigned love and romance to the red rose, setting the stage for this flower to be exchanged during the later, commercialized era of Valentine’s Day. However, it remains unclear if a specific brand is responsible for first marketing flowers as part of Valentine’s Day gift-giving.

1822

Source: The Chocolate Journalist

In England, where Valentine’s Day had by now already been celebrated with the exchange of gifts and cards for many years, the Cadbury chocolate company sells the first heart-shaped box of chocolates.

1849

In Massachusetts, Howland produces a dozen sample Valentine’s Day cards and sends them off with her brother to distribute during a sales trip for their father’s company — S.A. Howland & Sons — hoping to earn $200. Instead, he returns with 25X that amount, indicating a much higher-than-expected demand.

Here’s an example of a card Howland created around this time.

Source

1850

The first print advertisement for Howland’s cards appears in the Worcester Spy.

1866

Source: Evan Amos

Conversation candies are developed, when Daniel Chase — brother of New England Confectionery Company (NECCO) founder Oliver Chase — uses vegetable dye to print words onto confections.

1870

Howland incorporates her booming card business as the New England Valentine Company, operating out of her home via an assembly line that was largely comprised of her friends.

1879

Source: Viintage

The New England Valentine Company moves operations from Howland’s home to a Main Street factory in Worcester, Massachusetts. That same year, the company publishes the Valentine Verse Book, which contained 131 “verses” that people could cut out and paste inside of cards that came without a greeting — or those with a greeting that the buyer didn’t like.

1880 – 1881

Howland sells the New England Valentine Company to the George C. Whitney Company.

1888

Source: Worcester Historical Museum

Whitney has acquired at least 10 competitors, including Berlin and Jones, which had become New York City’s “largest manufacturer of Valentines.” Ten years later, the company moves to large-scale headquarters on Worcester’s Union Street.

1894

The Hershey Chocolate Company is founded, bringing what was previously “a European luxury product” to the U.S.

1902

Conversation candies become heart-shaped.

1906

American Greetings is founded, eventually becoming one of Whitney’s chief competitors.

Source: Vintage Recycling

1907

The Hershey Chocolate Company introduces its Hershey Kisses candy product. Interestingly enough, the product was allegedly named Kisses because whenever a piece of chocolate was dropped on the conveyer belt at the Hershey factory, it sounded like a kiss.

Source

1910

That January, a massive fire destroys much of Whitney’s headquarters. However, most of the Valentine’s Day products had already been shipped for the season, having little impact on that particular holiday.

Source: Period Paper

That same year, Hallmark is founded. Meanwhile, 1910 also saw the creation of Florists’ Telegraph Delivery — today known as FTD — which pioneered the remote ordering and delivery of flowers, providing a way to send them to far-away loved ones.

1913

Hallmark produces its first Valentine’s Day card.

1948

Source: Vintage Ads

The De Beers diamond company launches its “A Diamond is Forever“ campaign, sending the message that gifting high-end jewelry can be used as an expression of love.

1985

In the ’80s companies like Hallmark began launching more Valentine’s Day related commercials. In 1985, one commercial, which dubs Hallmark as “The Valentine’s Store” shows off all of the cards and heart-shaped products you can buy for your loved one in their locations.

1986

As if Kisses weren’t romantic enough based on their name, Hershey’s enforced them as a Valentine’s Day staple with one slight design tweak. The company began packaging Kisses candies in pink and red foil specifically for Valentine’s Day.

2004

As marketers continued to embrace new media, we saw an influx of high-quality and insanely high-budgeted commercials mark the holiday from the ’80s until now. One of the most iconic and beautifully shot commercials was a mini-romance drama, called “Le Film,” promoting Chanel No. 5 perfume.

In the ad, a man falls in love and runs away with a starlet, played by Nicole Kidman. In the end, she returns back to her life of fame. As she walks down the red carpet, he notes all the things he’ll remember about her, including the smell of her Chanel No. 5 perfume.

2005

Valentine’s Day begins to go digital. On February 14, 2005, YouTube — which originated as an online dating site — makes its debut. Co-founder Steve Chen still credits its invention as the brainchild of “three guys on Valentine’s Day that had nothing to do.”

Source: Wayback Machine

2013

Ride sharing company Uber rolls out “Romance On Demand,” allowing users to send flowers on Valentine’s Day via the app. This initiative would continue to progress, with on-demand skywriting becoming available the following year.

Source: Uber

2016

Well aren’t you accurate today, @netflix #HappyValentinesDay pic.twitter.com/pUK05gQ8Rs

— Tiffany Bukowski (@TheTiffy)
February 14, 2016

NetBase, a social media analytics platform, releases a Valentine’s Day Sentiment Analysis, measuring how people engage with and discuss the holiday on social media. In total, it measured nine million mentions of Valentine’s Day, with the vast majority of them mentioning a specific brand — Netflix. The top hashtag was #happyvalentinesday.

2017

In the earlier years of the Google Doodle, Google used Valentine’s Day to spread awareness of a rare species. In 2017, a series of Google Doodles shown in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day highlighted the stories of pangolins, the only mammal species with scales, as they give each other Valentine’s Day gifts or serenade their mates. Here’s one example:

Source: Time

While, at this point, Google didn’t need to market themselves with Doodles, this shows an early example of a brand that used its platform to creatively market another cause on the holiday.

2018 to Present Day

In recent years, we’ve seen Valentine’s Day marketing go completely digital with an emphasis on social media marketing. With these new opportunities, smaller companies that don’t have Hallmark’s budget can easily spread awareness of their own brands during the holiday. Here’s one example of an Instagram post which highlighted a fine Italian restaurant ahead of Valentine’s Day:

While these real dog’s mimicking Lady and the Tramp grabbed attention, especially from the animal lovers on Instagram, this post’s caption encourages audiences to interact with the brand. To learn more about this marketing campaign and eight others from recent years, check out this blog post. 

What Marketers Can Learn from Valentine’s Day Marketing

Like so many other holidays, Valentine’s Day has experienced a transition into pop culture that has shaped the way it’s perceived, discussed, and celebrated. Sure, it’s often accused of being nothing more than a money-making marketing holiday — just look at these numbers compiled by HISTORY.com. But next time you hear someone label Valentine’s Day as “Hallmark holiday,” you’ll have a wealth of historical information to respond with.

From our hearts to yours, Happy Valentine’s Day. We’ll be keeping an eye on its continued evolution. 

Click here to see more of our favorite modern Valentine’s Day campaigns.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in February 2017, but was updated in February 2020 for comprehensiveness and freshness.

When Charlie Jabaley, co-founder of the artist management and marketing firm Street Execs, released one of his first client t-shirt designs, the euphoric high he felt in the morning plummeted to a heartbreaking low by night.

He had only sold a total of eight t-shirts.

With famous clients like 2 Chains and Travis Porter, Jabaley’s pressure to succeed was already stifling. But this failed merchandising campaign had just jacked it up to suffocating. Instead of freaking out and sulking about his woes, though, Jabaley took a step back and breathed in some well-needed fresh air.

He decided to frame this embarrassing flop as an opportunity to learn. And after some deep reflection and analysis, he dug up a silver lining that would eventually lead to a multi-million dollar model for merchandise design.

The silver lining Jabaley plucked from the shambles of his failed campaign was realizing he needed to focus on his customers more. More specifically, he needed to understand their true preferences.

So rather than following the standard formula of merchandising — which was designing products based off a whim, buying hoards of inventory, and then marketing them — he broke conventional thinking by reverse-engineering the process.

Before he bought inventory, Jabaley would post merchandise designs on Instagram and use follower behavior and feedback to help him scrap unpopular designs and turn popular designs into merchandise.

By following his new method, Jabaley knew exactly what his customers wanted and what they were willing to buy, allowing him to solely focus on creating products that had proven demand, avoid wasting precious cash on unwanted inventory, and unload a huge amount of risk off the merchandising process.

Eventually, Jabaley’s method for determining which merchandise designs would sell, and which would not, helped him produce his first merchandising hit — a Dabbing Santa sweater that generated $2.1 million in only 30 days.

Image Source

Charlie Jabaley isn’t the first person to inform his product design using the public’s opinion, though. It’s actually a method that iconic brands like Budweiser, Pepsi, and Oreo have leveraged for years — a method called crowdsourcing.

Table of Contents

• What is crowdsourcing?
• Crowdsourced Marketing
• Crowdsourcing Examples
• How to Crowdsource
• Crowdsourcing Sites
• Crowdsourcing Jobs

What is crowdsourcing?

When businesses crowdsource, they ask the public for ideas, information, and opinions to help them craft better products and services. By crowdsourcing, companies can tap into a huge group of people’s expertise and skill sets, ensuring diversity of thought, expedited production, and cost-cutting, since they don’t need to hire new, in-house employees.

Companies who crowdsource usually break massive projects into individual tasks, which allows them to assign hundreds or thousands of people small jobs that they can work on by themselves.

 

To help you fully grasp the concept of crowdsourcing, here are some concrete examples of the practice in action.

 

1. Waze

Image Source

Waze is a community-based GPS traffic and navigation app. Their users, which has grown to over 90 million around the globe, report real-time traffic and road information, like police cars, accidents, road hazards, traffic jams, and the cheapest gas stations near your route. All of this crowdsourced information allows users to help each other reach their destinations promptly and safely.

2. Unsplash

What started out as Mikael Cho’s fun side project on Tumblr, taking half a day and $19 to create, eventually turned into his flailing startup’s top referral source and became its own standalone company — Unsplash.

Unsplash experienced hockey-stick growth because its service offered the ultimate remedy for a huge pain point in the content marketing space — free, unlicensed stock photos. And by using their initial boom in buzz and traffic to convince photographers to contribute free photos to their library as a way to market their art, Unsplash has successfully fostered a community of over 110,000 photographers, built a library of over 850,000 photos, and generates more than nine billion photo impressions per month.

3. Contently’s Freelance Rates Calculator

Contently, a content creation platform that also connects brands with freelance talent, built a freelance rates calculator to provide more transparency across the industry and help freelancers better negotiate their rates.

By combining their public freelance rates database, where freelancers anonymously submit the rate they received from various companies, with their platform’s own internal data, Contently has crowdsourced precious information from freelancers in order to help the entire freelance community earn a fair rate in the future.

4. Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl

“Time Machine” is arguably one of Doritos most memorable commercials, but you might be surprised that it had a budget of $300 and only took six hours to make. Well, that’s because it was created by an aspiring filmmaker who entered the spot into Doritos’ annual Crash the Super Bowl contest in 2014, and won the whole thing.

Frito-Lay, Dorito’s conglomerate, ran Crash the Super Bowl every year from 2007 through 2016, awarding the winner with a huge cash prize and airing their commercial during the Super Bowl. And by offering such a can’t-miss opportunity, which allowed them to tap into tens of thousands of people’s creativity, Doritos could associate some of the most unforgettable Super Bowl ads with their brand.

5. Airbnb

Airbnb is a popular travel website that acts as a broker for vacation rentals. In fact, 2 million people stay in an Airbnb every night. Its entire business model is based on crowdsourcing.

Anyone who wants to rent out a room or their entire apartment or house, can put up a listing on Airbnb. Then, people who are looking for a place to stay can go online and choose a rental from the listings.

All of the listings on Airbnb are crowdsourced from its audience. Without individuals who rent out their homes, there’d be no site.

6. PepsiCo

To do this day, one of the best examples of crowdsourcing is the “Do Us a Flavor” campaign by PepsiCo for its Lay’s brand. In fact, starting in 2012, PepsiCo has held a “Do Us a Flavor” contest in numerous countries every few years.

With this contest, consumers can suggest ideas for new chip flavors. The brand has received millions of ideas for the contest throughout the years.

To promote the contest, Lay’s will use social media to gather submissions and garner votes from the public. This contest has resulted in flavors such as “Cheesy Garlic Bread,” “Kettle Cooked Wasabi Ginger,” and “Southern Biscuits and Gravy.”

 

1. Design the job.

Once you’ve decided that you want to use crowdsourced material in your marketing campaign, you need to decide what the job will be.

Will you have consumers design an ad? Or perhaps they’ll help you create a new product, like Lays? Either way, your marketing team needs to design the job.

This means that you’ll have to decide what you want your audience to do, and create an avenue for them to submit their entries. Once you know what you want them to create, you’ll have to come up with the rules, terms, and reward for winning the contest (if it’s a contest).

If you aren’t sure what you want your audience to do, there are a lot of jobs that you could use crowdsourcing for, including:

• App development
• Copywriting
• Editing
• Ad design
• Product creation
• Photography
• Transcription

2. Create the promotional materials.

Now that you’ve created the job and the terms of service so to speak, it’s time to get the word out there about your job. But before you start posting on social media, you’ll want to create the creative assets to promote the campaign.

For example, Lays used Facebook to promote the “Do Us a Flavor” campaign. The company changed its profile and cover photo to advertise the campaign. Additionally, there were several posts on social media and its website that went over the rules.

Before you can promote your campaign, you’ll have to create these materials. Write your social media ads, create your images, write the press release for your website, etc.

3. Choose a promotional strategy.

So, you have the job all figured out, you’ve created your assets, and now you have to decide how you want to promote the campaign.

This means choosing the best channel(s) to communicate with your audience. Will you be posting your assets on your website? If so, will it be on the home page?

Then, you’ll want to decide which social media channels you want to promote the campaign on. You should use your social media metrics and buyer persona to figure out where your audience is. If you mostly have a Gen Z audience, for example, perhaps you’ll want to promote on Tik Tok. On the other hand, if you have a millennial audience, Instagram might be the best place.

Overall, it’s important to make sure you’re communicating with your audience where they’re at.

4. Manage the results.

Now that you’ve started your campaign, the results should start pouring in.

To manage the submissions, make sure you have a system in place. For example, will you have one or a team of employees responsible for saving and organizing submissions?

Or perhaps you’re having your audience email submissions to a dedicated email.

Either way, having a system in place will help you keep everything organized so it’s easy to pick a winner when the time comes.

5. Produce the final project.

The time has come. You’ve received all the results and now it’s time to pick a winner. Typically with crowdsourced campaigns, the winner is determined by a public vote.

If you’re going with a vote, make sure you set up polls and surveys so your audience can vote.

Once the winner is chosen, it’s time to promote the final campaign. For example, if you were choosing a new logo, you can start using the logo right away on social media, your website, and promotional materials.

 

If you’re a freelancer looking for work or a brand looking for talent, or you’re looking for crowdfunding, check out the following crowdsourcing sites.

1. Fiverr

Fiverr is a freelance service marketplace that empowers freelancers. Instead of being a platform where freelancers search for jobs posted by brands, Fiverr is a place where brands search for freelancers with the expertise and skills for which they’re looking. Most freelancers on Fiverr offer skills and expertise in graphic design, digital marketing, writing & translation, video & animation, music & audio, programming & tech, business, and lifestyle.

2. Upwork

Similar to Fiverr, Upwork is a freelance service marketplace where freelancers create profiles, and then brands can hire them for short-term tasks, recurring projects, or full-time contract work. Most freelancers have skills and expertise in web development, mobile development, design, writing, administrative work, customer service, sales, marketing, accounting, and consulting.

3. CrowdSource

Trusted by brands like Target, Coca-Cola, and Major League Baseball, CrowdSource has trained, tested, and qualified a community of over 200,000 freelancers who can provide copywriting, content moderation, data entry, and transcription expertise and skills. Brands can also search for freelancers by the agency, marketing, publishing, retail, and service provider industries.

4. Contently

Contently is a content creation software that connects enterprise brands with freelance talent, so they’re constantly on the lookout for freelancers who can fulfill their clients’ needs, as well as their own.

If you’re a freelance creative looking for gigs with some big brands, you can register as a freelancer on Contently’s platform and create a free portfolio. You’ll need to get approved and complete their training before you can work with any of their clients, but once you do that, you’ll be apart of their freelance network.

If you’re a brand looking for freelancers to help you craft original stories, check out Contently’s platform here.

5. Skyword

Similar to Contently, Skyword is a content creation software that also connects enterprise brands with freelance talent. If you’re a videographer, writer, photographer, or designer, you can create a portfolio that Skyword’s clients will have direct access to.

If you’re a brand looking for freelance talent, check out Skyword’s platform here.

6. Kickstarter

One of the major forms of crowdsourcing is crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is when consumers fund a project or venture by donating money to the cause.

Kickstarter is one of the most popular crowdfunding sites where any creator can connect with possible crowdfunders. This means that they can post their project and anyone can donate.

Typically with crowdfunding, the people who donate money become stakeholders and might be able to work with the creator as crowdsourced talent, and get a benefit of the proceeds.

7. Patreon

Another way for content creators to get crowdfunding is through the site Patreon.

Patreon is essentially a membership platform that allows content creators to have subscribers. Subscribers pay a monthly fee for the content — providing the creators the money they need to produce their project.

Typically, the patrons of a project get a lot of perks and exclusive rewards for being a subscriber.

 

Crowdsourcing Jobs

If you’re interested in working a crowdsourced job, check out the following gigs you could find in each of the job categories below.

Marketing

• Writing
• Videography
• Design
• Photography
• Animation
• Web development
• Mobile development

Editing Jobs

• Copy editing
• Content evaluation
• Content moderation
• Proofreading

Administrative

• Virtual assistant
• Customer service
• Usability testing
• Audio transcription
• Social media post categorization
• Image and video processing
• Image categorization

Data Jobs

• Data entry
• Data research
• Data categorization
• Data processing
• Data verification and clean up

Research Jobs

• Information gathering
• Price checking
• Product display checking
• Business location verification
• Web research
• Google searching
• Odd Jobs
• Making deliveries
• Cleaning
• Dog walking
• Survey taking

Crowdsourcing is an innovative way for marketers to get their audience engaged with their campaigns. It’s also one of the only ways consumers get to interact with a brand and help make important product decisions.

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

Let’s get right down to it: The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords.

Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic terms, they’re associated with more qualified traffic and users that are typically further down their path of intent.

The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process — one that’s made all the more simple and quick when you use the right tools to perform your keyword research.

Download our free SEO template here to organize your keyword research into an actionable plan for your site. 

In this post, we’ll cover the nine best tools out there for performing keyword research for your website content. Before we get started though, let’s briefly go over two important things to consider as you do your research: relevance and (if applicable) location.

Keyword Relevance

Relevance is the most important factor to consider when choosing the right keywords for SEO. Why? Because the more specific you are, the better.

For instance, if you own a company that installs swimming pools, it’s likely that you’d attract more qualified prospects by targeting a keyword such as “fiberglass in-ground pool installation,” rather than “swimming pools.” That’s because there’s a good chance that someone searching for “fiberglass in-ground pool installation” is looking for information on installation or someone to perform the installation … and that could be you!

Sure, optimizing for “swimming pools” has its place. But there’s no doubt that this keyword will attract a much more generic audience that may not be looking for what you have to offer. Go for the relevant, long-tail keywords instead.

Location-Based Keywords

Another major factor to consider when optimizing for the right keywords is location-based searches. When looking for contractors and services in their specific area, search engine users will usually include their location in the search. So, “fiberglass in-ground pool installation” becomes “fiberglass in-ground pool installation in Boston, MA.”

If you operate in one geo-location, you may want to consider adding location-based keywords to all of your pages, since traffic from other locations isn’t going to be very much help to you. If your business operates in several geo-locations, it is also a wise choice to create a separate web page dedicated to each location so you can make sure your brand is present when people are searching for individual locations.

Now, how do you choose the right keywords for your business? We certainly don’t recommend guessing, for obvious reasons. Instead, there are many ways to research and find long-tail keywords that are right for your business.

Here are nine awesome free and paid keyword research tools you can use to quickly and easily identify strong long-tail keywords for your SEO campaign.

Free Keyword Research Tools

1. Google Keyword Planner

Google has a few tools that make it easy to conduct keyword research, and their free AdWords tool called Keyword Planner is a great place to start — especially if you use AdWords for some of your campaigns. (Note: You’ll need to set up an AdWords account to use Keyword Planner, but that doesn’t mean you have to create an ad.)

When you input one keyword, multiple keywords, or even your website address into Keyword Planner, Google will spit out a list of related keywords along with simple metrics to gauge how fierce the competition is around each one and how many searches it gets on both a global and local search level.

It’ll also show you historical statistics and information on how a list of keywords might perform — and it’ll create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together. Since it’s a free AdWords tool, it can also help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your AdWords campaigns.

Image Credit: Google

Unfortunately, when Google transitioned from Keyword Tool to Keyword Planner, they stripped out a lot of the more interesting functionality — but you can make up for it somewhat if you take the information you learn from Keyword Planner and use Google Trends to fill in some blanks.

Which brings me to the next tool …

2. Google Trends

Google Trends is another free tool from Google. It lets you enter multiple keywords and filter by location, search history, and category. Once you enter that information in, it’ll give you results that show how much web interest there is around a particular keyword, what caused the interest (e.g., press coverage), and where the traffic is coming from — along with similar keywords.

The best part about Google Trends is that it doesn’t just give you static keyword volume numbers like most keyword research tools. Instead, it generates colorful, interactive graphs that you can play with, download, and even embed on your website. It’ll also give you more dynamic insight into a keyword with information like relative popularity of a search term over time.

Interestingly, its data doesn’t include in repeated queries from a single user over a short period of time, which makes results cleaner. It also groups together searches that it infers to mean the same thing, like misspellings.

One way to use Google Trends? If you’re trying to decide between two keyword variations for your latest blog post title. Simply perform a quick comparison search in Google Trends to see which one is getting searched more often.

3. Keyword Tool.io

Keyword Tool is pretty rudimentary online keyword research tool, but if you’re just looking for a list of long-tail keyword suggestions related to one you already have in mind, then it can be useful. It’s also totally free — to use the most basic version, you don’t even need to create an account.

What Keyword Tool does is use Google Autocomplete to generate a list of relevant long-tail keywords suggestions. The search terms suggested by Google Autocomplete are based on a few different factors, like how often users were searching for a particular term in the past.

This type of suggestion tool can help you understand what people are searching for around your topics. For example, bloggers might use a tool like this to brainstorm blog post titles that’ll do well in search.

Again, all the free version does for you is generate other keyword suggestions in alphabetical order — it doesn’t tell you anything about search volume or cost-per-click (CPC). To get that information, you’ll have to upgrade to Keyword Tool Pro. The Pro version will also let you export the keywords and use them for content creation, search engine optimization, CPC/PPC, or other marketing activities.

Paid Keyword Research Tools 

4. Term Explorer

Price: $34/mo. for Basic; $97/mo. for Pro; $499/mo. for Agency

Term Explorer offers probably the deepest research reports of any keyword research tool on the market. From one single seed term, you can get over 10,000 keyword variations.

Best of all, the tool does a great job of keeping the results as relevant as possible and pulling through lots of supporting metrics with them.

It’ll give you data for all the results on page one of search engine results pages (SERPs), including the number of results, link strength, trust score, and keyword difficulty. To help you get a handle on your competitors, you can use the tool to research domain age, page ranking, and links, as well as the word count, page rank, links, outbound links, and the number of keyword occurrences in title, URL, and headers for individual webpages. You can also export all this data into a CSV for your own analysis.

Image Credit: Term Explorer

Note: If you only plan on using it a few times a day, there is actually a free version of this tool that’ll do five tiny keyword jobs and five keyword analyses per day, with no queue priority.

5. Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool

Price: $99/mo. for Standard; $149/mo. for Medium; $249/mo. for Large; $599/mo. for Premium

The keyword difficulty tool from Moz is one of the most useful components of their paid suite. It’s a fantastic resource for analyzing the competitiveness of a keyword and for unearthing low-hanging fruit.

When you input a keyword into this tool, it’ll find the top 10 rankings for that keyword. Then, it’ll assign that keyword a “Difficulty Score” based on the pages that currently rank for that word. You can look at search volume data for your keywords, then pull up the SERP to see the top 10 results for each term.

Image Credit: Moz

Want to do some competitive keyword analysis? You can use the tool to see who else is ranking for your targeted keywords, along with information like each site’s page authority and the number of root domains linking to their page.

You can also export all this data into a CSV for your own analysis.

6. SEMrush

Price: $69.95/mo. for Pro; $149.95/mo. for Guru; $549.95/mo. for Business

SEMrush is a competitive research tool that lets you keep an eye on on your competitors’ keywords to find opportunities to bump them out for a top position in Google’s and Bing’s organic search results. You can compare a number of domains against one another to evaluate the competitive landscape, including their common keywords and positions in Google’s organic, paid, and shopping search results.

Position tracking is kind of like a sophisticated version of Google Trends, letting you see a keyword’s position in SERPs and analyze the history of rises and drops. Their colorful, visual charts are also super helpful for more quickly understanding trends and analyzing results.

Image Credit: SEMrush

7. Ahrefs

Price: $99/mo. for Lite; $179/mo. for Standard; $399/mo. for Advanced

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer is similar to SEMrush, but with some extra bonuses and a much more intuitive design.

For example, it’s able to estimate how many searches become real page visits. Not all of them do so, since Google gives instant answers for some queries. With Clicks and Clicks Per Search metrics, you’ll figure out traffic-generating keywords and skip dead-end options.

When it comes to the number of relevant keyword suggestions, Ahrefs goes the extra mile. It runs the biggest database – 5.1 billion keywords for over 200 countries – which means it can detect opportunities other tools could be missing.

Ahrefs can also help you with competitive research. Their Site Explorer tool lifts the veil on competitors’ keyword strategies, while Content Gap lets you compare competitor keywords with your own to identify your might-have-beens.

Ahrefs will also email you about even the smallest ranking progress of your competitors. Backlinks have a direct impacton ranking, and backlink research is one of Ahrefs’ strongest muscles.

Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, say that Ahrefs is his #1 go-to tool for backlink analysis: “I’ve tested over 25 link analysis tools and none come close to Ahref’s in terms of index size, freshness, and overall usability.”

8. Accuranker

Price: $19.95/mo. for Beginner; $29.95/mo. for Pro 300; $44.95/mo. for Pro 600; $74.95/mo. for Pro 1K

Accuranker is a keyword rank tracking tool with a key differentiator: It’s lightning fast while being extremely precise. So if you’re used to spending hours monitoring the rank progression of your keywords, this’ll end up saving you a ton of time.

Other advantages of this tool? It has built-in proxies to get a quick glance at whose ranking within the SERPs for any given keyword. If you plan to report keyword metrics to your manager or your team, you’ll like its scheduled weekly reports feature.

Image Credit: Accuranker

It’s also one of the best rank trackers out there that offers highly localized search engine rankings for your keywords. So if you’re marketing your business to an international audience, it’s a great tool for analyzing which pages are ranking in different countries.

Finally, it has integrations available with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Social Monitoring, and YouTube so you can keep an eye on statistics and estimated search traffic for your keywords straight from your AccuRanker dashboard.

9. HubSpot

HubSpot also has its very own Content Strategy tool within the Marketing Hub. The Content Strategy tool helps you identify and research topics, find keywords or subtopics to go after, and ultimately help grow your content presence for generating more organic traffic over time.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can access the Content Strategy tool, click on Content > Strategy. 

 

10. Serpstat

Price: $69/mo. for Lite, $149/mo. for Standard, $299/mo. for Advanced, $499/mo. for Enterprise

Serpstat provides you with a list of historically profitable keywords used by competitors to make them rank high in search results. It also figures the value of your keywords using different factors, like number of search results and cost-per-click. 

The software will offer suggestions for more suggestive keywords as well as provide long-tail keywords, which are low-volume keywords related to your business. Plus, if your business is international, you can adapt keywords to different countries in the tool’s database. 

Finally, with Serpstat, you can check the relevancy of your webpages and analyze the trends that might be attractive to browsers. 

Serpstat will be extremely useful to you if you want full analyses of keywords that work well for competitors. It’s also a great tool for making sure your page has a lower chance of losing a favorable ranking on SERPs. 

Now that you know about all these great tools, get out there and start discovering your best keywords for SEO.

What tools and methods do you use to find long-tail keywords? Share your favorites with us in the comments below.

So, you’re in the business of starting a business.

You’re looking for the freedom and flexibility that comes with only answering to yourself.

You’re planning to take life by the reins and your industry by storm.

In other words, you want to get your own freelance business going.

Starting a freelance business is an exciting prospect. Perks like setting your own hours and pursuing your passion are certainly attractive — but a lot of effort, strategy, and planning goes into earning those benefits.

It’s a tough road with a lot of confusing twists and turns, so it helps to have a map.

Let’s explore some key points you’ll have to address using a roadmap to starting a freelance business.

1. Understand what you want out of your business.

Before you set your big freelance business plans in motion, you need to know a lot about yourself and why you’re starting your business in the first place.

Ask yourself some of the following questions — Why are you doing this? Is it to be your own boss? To set your own hours? To pursue your passion? All of the above?

And how much time and effort are you willing to put in? Is this going to be a side hustle? Are you going to keep your day job?

You need to know the answers to all of these questions — and quite a few more — before you can really commit to starting your own freelance business. You can’t actually know what you’re doing if you have no concept of why you’re doing it in the first place.

2. Have a solid picture of your personal financial situation.

The idea of dropping everything to pursue your passion on your own terms is starry-eyed daydream material. That’s why you need to be careful.

It’s easy to romanticize the image of you walking out of your office with a big smile on your face, knowing that you’re about to do what you’ve always wanted without anyone to answer to.

It’s a lovely concept, but you can’t get carried away. You need to ground yourself, and understanding your personal finances is a crucial part of that.

Familiarize yourself with personal and business-related expenses and understand how long your savings can sustain you. Take a good hard look at your financial situation, and identify a point where you might jump ship if things don’t go according to plan.

Take all of that into account and use it to set a monthly income target. There are a lot of helpful resources online — like the Boundless Freelance Target Income Calculator — that can walk you through the different factors you must consider when calculating how much you’ll need to make.

Understanding your personal finances will help you get a clear picture of what you can expect going forward, and give you a concept of how to handle the issues that are going to arise.

3. Make sure you’re really in it.

If you want to succeed as a freelance business owner, you have to be all the way in. You need to find and maintain a special kind of motivation.

You have to ask yourself some burning questions, including — Am I ready to commit as much as I possibly can to this? Is this exactly what I want to do? Do I have a comprehensive plan? Do I genuinely believe in that plan? Am I willing to fail?

When it comes down to it, you have to believe in yourself, believe in your business, understand it might not pan out, and know you’re willing to stay the course to successfully start a freelance business.

4. Set measurable goals.

You’ll need to set benchmarks to make sure your business is making progress and that you, personally, are staying the course. It’ll also help your confidence to know that you’re consistently reaching milestones you’ve set for yourself.

Make sure the goals you’re setting are SMART — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. Also be sure to set different kinds of goals — specifically short-term, long-term, and ongoing.

A short-term goal may be something like getting your website up and running with a certain number of monthly visitors within three months.

A long-term goal could be reaching a target in annual revenue within three years.

Lastly, an ongoing goal might be dedicating a specific number of hours to client outreach each week.

Make sure these goals are reasonable and outline a solid trajectory for your business. Keep careful track of them to have a better understanding of what you’re doing well, and what you could be doing better.

5. Sort out the business-end of the business.

You’ll want to handle the nitty-gritty administrative and legal ends of your freelance business before really getting started.

That could mean taking steps like formally organizing a business entity, getting a picture of your tax exposure, and familiarizing yourself with what your business contracts might look like.

You should also have a plan in place for cash management. How and when money comes can be unpredictable in freelancing. You should have some concept of how you intend to maintain enough cash to stay afloat.

Additionally, consider building infrastructure that helps you manage your sales, marketing, and customer service. A CRM is a great way to do that. Consider adopting one and letting it serve as the backbone for a lot of your business operations.

The main point I’m getting at here is that there’s a side to starting a freelance business that isn’t particularly fun or exciting. But you won’t get to enjoy the fun and exciting stuff without addressing it first.

Be sure to work out aspects like accounting, how your business is going to function on a day-to-day basis, and how you’re going to save and manage your money before really launching into your freelance business.

6. Start figuring out your buyer personas.

As per HubSpot’s own definition, a buyer persona is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

In other words, it’s the kind of person you think you’ll be selling to.

You’ll want to start by conducting general research about your target audience. Get a feel for who your customers and prospects are. You should consider reaching out to those people for surveys and interviews. This will help you understand what kind of buyer is right for your business.

From there, you’ll want to whittle down your base a bit. Pick out commonalities among the potential buyers you’ve identified. This could include considering factors like demographics, how they like to be contacted, behaviors, and interests.

Once you’ve identified trends within your audience, develop personas based on the different patterns you see. For instance, if you’re a caterer, you may notice that 40-to-50 year old women booking their childrens’ birthday parties or other family events make up a significant portion of your business. Use that information to develop a buyer persona specific to those qualities.

Give that group a name and boom! You have a buyer persona.

That’s a very high-level overview of the process, if you’d like a more in depth perspective on how to go about developing one of these personas, check out this article.

7. Determine pricing.

When determining pricing, it’s important to consider how you plan on charging clients.

Will you be hourly? Will you charge a flat fee? Will you use project quotes? It’s important to settle on how you’ll be making money before you start actually making it.

Once you’ve landed on your pricing structure, start figuring how much your services are going to cost. You can start by researching industry averages. You should be able to find some solid figures online. Sites like Payscale and Glassdoor are good places to start.

Additionally, take a look at How to Calculate Hourly Rate for Freelance Marketers & Consultants for some initial estimates.

It could also help to reach out to other professionals in your space to see what they charge and how those price points are working out for them.

Bear in mind, this isn’t an exact science. Finding the right price for your services will probably take some trial-and-error. You should keep experimenting until you get it right.

8. Create and maintain an online presence.

You’re going to need to get a website up and running as soon as possible. That’s going to be your first point of contact with a lot of your customers.

Having a great-looking website that’s easy to navigate assures potential customers that your business is legitimate and professional.

A well-structured, visually appealing website can also distinguish you from other freelancers in your space. You can use it to give your prospects a picture of your services, portfolio, and pricing.

Additionally, you’ll want to establish a solid social media presence. Outreach through social networks is becoming essential to any kind of business — and freelancers are no exception.

A robust social media presence is incredibly important when it comes to engaging with existing customers to keep them interested in your business.

Create and develop profiles across a variety of social networks. The more likes and followers you can gather, the more trustworthy and established your business will look.

9. Network, network, network.

You can’t conduct business without contacts. That’s like trying to drive a car without gasoline. But networking is much easier in theory than in practice.

It takes a lot of energy, and it’s often difficult to know where to begin. There’s no doubt it’ll be tough, but the success of your business could hinge upon whether or not you put in the effort to network effectively.

You should start by identifying where your target buyers are hanging out — both online and offline. Then, you can use that information to develop a marketing and networking strategy that meets them where they are.

Attend local meetings relevant to your industry to make personal outreach to potential prospects and fellow professionals in your space. It also helps to stay active on online forums about the areas your business covers.

Be sure to use social media to keep consistent contact between you and your potential buyers, as well as you and your fellow professionals.

Like I said, you can’t conduct business without contacts, and it’s not easy to establish those relationships. It’s also difficult to maintain those connections once you have them, but don’t get discouraged.

If you make smart, dedicated efforts to reach and connect with prospects and fellow professionals, you should be able to establish a productive network for your business.

Take a look at How to Master Non-Awkward, Effective In-Person Networking for more networking tips.

10. Market yourself effectively.

You should develop a solid content marketing strategy. Blogging is an essential part of that process. When you do, be sure to write content that is generally relevant to your field — not just specific to your own business.

You want to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. That can give you the kind of credibility your business needs to stand out.

You want to show that your business is legitimate. The best way to do that is to demonstrate that you really know what you’re talking about when it comes to your area of expertise.

You’ll also want to write up content offers to attach to your blogs to convert website visitors into leads. A content offer is an asset like a whitepaper or an eBook with information relevant to your field.

You can use content offers to attract and log contacts. In order for a reader to download your content offer, have them fill out a contact form. In doing so, you’re identifying that reader as a potential lead.

You should also be actively promoting content on social media — and it doesn’t always have to be your own. You can actively post other thoughtful content from other outlets in your industry. By doing this, you can let your followers know that you’re staying educated about and on top of industry trends.

Your content marketing strategy can shape your reputation. If you create and promote enriching content that your readers will get a lot out of, you’ll stand out as an authority in your industry.

11. Maintain relationships and boost your reputation.

One of your first priorities will always be preserving the client relationships you establish. You have to do everything in your power to delight your customers and keep them close.

This means keeping consistent contact and providing exceptional customer service.

Positive word of mouth can be a huge boost when starting a freelance business. Happy customers can provide that, and even happier customers will go out of their way to offer it.

If you can, get testimonials from those kinds of clients to display on your website.

 

And it should go without saying, but everything on this means nothing if you don’t do your job well. Do good work. Put in as much effort as you can. Be professional and consistent with what you do. And keep your customers happy.

12. Stay persistent when unexpected difficulties arise

You must be prepared to stay the course, if you want to make it. Odds are you won’t see stellar results right away, and it will probably take a lot of time and effort before you do.

You have to set yourself up for success and do everything you can deliver on the goals you set for yourself. You’ll hit snags. Some things won’t go well. You’re bound to deal with at least a few hard times.

In spite of all that, you have to be professional, persistent, and do all you can to best serve your customers. That’s going to put you in the best possible position to make it.

It’s not going to be easy. But if your head and heart are in the right place, it’s going to be worth it.

Ann Handley is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and has been named by IBM as one of the seven people shaping modern marketing.

She’s also the world’s first Chief Content Officer, and is a LinkedIn influencer with almost 400K followers.

Needless to say, I was thrilled when she agreed to speak with me about the current and future trends in marketing at the 2019 Conex in Toronto.

Along with marketing trends, we also talked about new approaches marketers can use to solve old problems. Because, while much has changed in marketing over the last few years, one thing remains consistent — businesses still need to connect with their audiences.

Here, let’s explore Ann Handley’s take on pathological empathy, “snackable” content, and rising above marketing mediocrity.

Have Pathological Empathy For Your Consumer

One of the key concepts Handley has pioneered is “pathological empathy.”

Rather than simply segmenting customers by their behaviors or demographics and trying to appeal to them on those grounds, Handley wants marketers to get under their skin: “When I say pathological, I mean really understanding, sort of getting inside their skin … to get a sense of who are they and how can you best engage with them emotionally.”

Ultimately, engaging with a consumer on an emotional level is one of the most sure-fire ways to guarantee a successful marketing campaign. (I dare you to watch Android’s “Friends Furever” video, the most-shared video ad of 2015, without tearing up.)

This next-level empathy opens the door to a new approach to content creation. Handley poses the question this way — “How do we create the kind of marketing content, assets, campaigns that will actually touch their hearts … and maybe open their minds?”

Slow Down

In order to build pathological empathy, you need time. However, in a fast-paced marketing environment where everything moves at the speed of light, time is the most precious and limited commodity.

Counterintuitively, this only proves Handley’s point:

“I’m on a mission to get marketers to slow down. Instead of approaching their job with an ‘as-soon-as-possible’ mindset, I think it’s much more valuable at certain key strategic moments to slow down.”

Handley says that by slowing down the marketing process at these strategic moments, marketers can better execute on building relationships and converting leads.

“I think what we’re missing is that opportunity to say, ‘All right, what are the moments where we really need to think more strategically? Where should we slow down to fuel faster growth later?'”

Speak to Your Audience as Peer-to-Peer, Not Brand-to-Target

In addition to slowing down the marketing process at critical points, Handley suggests that marketers speak to their audiences from a peer-to-peer perspective, as opposed to brand-to-target.

While marketers instinctively want to talk about what sets their brand and products apart, that’s not a message that can connect with customers.

Handley told me, “We love our products and services and we understand on an implicit basis what value they bring to your customers or your prospects. But I think that we don’t always communicate that as effectively as we could. We’re not always leading with our hearts. We’re not always touching people in a way that will engage them emotionally.”

Next time you’re constructing a web page or writing landing page copy, you might ask yourself — Would I, and my colleagues, like it designed this way? Would we keep reading? Would we click the link?

Of course, you’ll want to A/B test and use focus groups to ensure you’re meeting your audience’s needs, but it doesn’t hurt to consider your own opinions and interests, or the opinions and interests of friends and family, when creating and promoting marketing materials.

Be a Resource for Your Audience

Handley told me marketers should be a resource to their prospects and offer them value. Part of this shift requires connecting with customers personally. You might try social media, but alternatively, consider putting a twist on an old marketing stand-by — the email newsletter.

As Handley says, “Newsletters are vastly undervalued and they’re a huge opportunity that we’re not doing well.”

Handley mentioned that, unfortunately, most marketers tend to focus on the “news” aspect of a newsletter, and forget the “letter” part of the equation.

The “news” aspect means marketers use their newsletters as a distribution strategy and focus on providing updates about their own brand — but they fail to use the “letter” portion to engage with and connect to their audience.

Handley notes that when writing newsletters, marketers tend to speak in the plural, but their audience is one person at home or on their phone. Handley says that by simply writing their newsletters as if they are talking to one person, marketers can go a long way toward building that personal connection.

Handley says, “The person who was sitting on the other end of that email … It’s one person. They’re not sitting there with a thousand other people. So why do we communicate to a thousand people? That’s because we’re still thinking about it as news and not as a letter.”

Don’t Create “Snackable” Content

Video is another area where marketers are misreading the situation and losing out on chances to meaningfully connect with consumers. Handley pushes back on the notion of “snackable content,” and the idea that consumers are demanding it more.

“Our impulse as marketers has been to make it shorter and shorter and shorter to try to get people more involved. But from a consumer standpoint, I don’t think that that’s what our customers want.”

Rather, Handley thinks that this demand for shorter content was always there but never supplied.

She told me, “I don’t think they want shorter and shorter and shorter. They don’t want lighter and more snackable … The way that we as consumers are consuming content has been to think about the value that it gives us.”

Handley cites Netflix as a prime counterexample that disproves the idea that consumer attention spans are getting shorter, or that “snackable” content is king.

“In a world of snackable, why does somebody sit down for hours at a time to watch the last season of Stranger Things? It’s because we want to — we want it on our terms, number one. But secondly, we have all the attention span in the world if it’s something that we care about.”

Handley doesn’t think viewers’ attention spans are getting shorter or that they are seeking out shorter content. Instead, viewers are just more discerning about what content they consume.

That suggests marketers shouldn’t shy away from longer video pieces, as long as these videos are about something that can connect with their target audience.

Rise Above “Marketing Mediocrity”

Businesses that fail to connect with customers fall into what Handley terms “marketing mediocrity.” Handley says it’s critical for businesses to rise above it. But how does a business know if their marketing is mediocre?

“If people are not interested in you, if they are not here for you, if they are not thinking, ‘I can’t wait to see what they come out with next,’ then that’s a problem.”

Handley says marketers should ask themselves what would happen if they went away.

How would your email list react?

Would any of your audience members write your team to ask where you went?

Handley relates a personal story about her bi-weekly newsletter to drive the point home: “I usually mail Sunday mornings and I had a busy week … [s]o I didn’t mail until Sunday afternoon at four o’clock. And I got so many emails from people saying, are you okay? What happened? And so that to me was, it wasn’t just personally gratifying. [T]he big lesson there is … if you didn’t show up, would people say, ‘Hey, what happened?'”

Do Less and Obsess

In 2020, there are innumerable changes happening in the world of marketing. I asked Handley what her single most important piece of advice to marketers would be, and she told me, “do less and obsess.”

Handley suggests that marketers “do less and obsess” and focus on the fundamentals, and “create less with more intention.”

Handley also has some thoughts about content calendars. Handley suggests that marketers “do less that has more impact” rather than strictly abiding by a content calendar.

“I think content calendars are amazing … I’m just saying, don’t let it run your strategy.”

In the Future, a Customer’s Experience Will Dictate Your Strategy

Finally, I asked Handley if she has any ideas on how we’ll be consuming content 10 years from now. While she thinks video is here to stay, she rejects the idea that the word is dead.

“I hate binary choices like that. It’s not a matter of words or images. It’s both. To your question, what does this mean for us five years from now? think it’s a better integration and, and perhaps more interactivity.”

Handley’s seemingly counterintuitive advice is based on marketing fundamentals, some of which today’s marketers might be forgetting as they become more enmeshed with new technologies.

It’s easy to get caught up in current trends, but knowing your target audience and creating an experience they can truly enjoy remains the paramount goal of marketers. By taking a step back from today’s hot new marketing trend, we can get a better sense of how to use new technologies and strategies to deliver a valuable experience to our customers.