Why Digital Media is Killing TV Advertising
In 2018, research conducted by the Leichtman Research Group found that 78% of households still watch traditional satellite or cable TV.
Looking at that statistic, you wouldn’t think that TV viewing is on the decline — but it is, and with it, TV ad spend.
For instance, considering research from the same group in 2018, you’ll see 69% of homes in 2018 were subscribed to a video streaming service — which is up from 52%, just two years prior.
On top of all that, internet usage itself has risen to over four billion users since last year. That number encompasses over half of the global population, with China, India and the United States ranking ahead of all other countries in terms of internet users.
Traditional TV viewing has dropped dramatically since 2012, particularly among 18-24 year olds. In the next few years, we’re going to continue to see a decline of TV viewing — and with it, a steep drop-off of traditional TV advertising in favor of using digital media as the preferred advertising platform.
Here, I’m going to explain why.
The Decline of TV Advertising
TV advertising spend actually climbed 16% from 2010 to 2017, according to analysis by ARK Investment Management. And yet, conversely, TV viewing decreased in that time by 20%.
In years past, TV was the only form of media you could use to reach a massive market during prime hours — but now, people aren’t watching as much.
The way we see it, there are a few components to this shift.
First, a study by Omnicom Media Group’s Hearts & Science agency found that nearly half of Millennials and Gen Xers are no longer viewing video content on traditional TV.
Instead, they are choosing to view content on newer streaming platforms — Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and YouTube TV, which have been taking over the viewing space.
In fact, on average, they’re consuming 30 hours of video content on streaming platforms per week. This makes these generations “unreachable” through traditional advertising methods, particularly since most streaming platforms, like Netflix, don’t allow brands to advertise on the site.
Additionally, when these audiences do watch regular TV, they aren’t solely engaged in the show — for instance, on commercial breaks they’re likely to pull out their phones or other devices, so they might not remember or watch TV commercials at all.
If these losses continue as projected, by 2023 viewing hours could be less than half what they were in 2010, and cut in half again by the year 2028.
ARK’s research suggests that if marketers begin to take these dropping viewing hours into account and continue to shift their budgets toward digital methods, the United States’ TV ad revenue could plummet to less than half its current levels over the next 10 years.
The Rise of Digital Advertising
In contrast, online streaming platforms have been experiencing massive growth. For example, YouTube TV increased its viewership by more than 10X between 2010 and 2017.
Even social networks like Facebook and Twitter are creating their own versions of video streaming.
In addition, in 2019, digital ad spending will surpass TV ad spend, and traditional ad spend, for the first time ever. It’s also projected that by 2023, digital will exceed two-thirds of total media spending.
But why exactly is this happening? Why the shift? Let’s dive into that further. Here, I’ll outline five reasons digital ad spending is surpassing traditional.
1. Digital media is cheaper.
The cost difference between TV advertising and digital marketing methods is tremendous. A 30-second TV ad — which may or may not reach your ideal audience — will cost you over one-third of a million dollars … plus setup costs.
In contrast, while you need to hire employees to conduct SEO and potentially invest in SEO products, SEO itself is free, and can help you organically reach your target audience over the long-term. PPC and email marketing have cheap set-ups, and could cost anywhere from a few cents per click to a few dollars.
Frankly, that sort of disparity — while it makes sense logistically — is fairly ludicrous.
2. Digital marketing allows for better segmentation.
Traditional TV advertising lets you broadcast to anyone who turns on the channel. To reach a specific audience to whom your product will appeal, you need to guess what sort of TV programming could appeal to your ideal demographic — it’s difficult to apply or collect any audience-specific analytics.
With TV advertising, the closest you can get to understanding a TV channel’s audience is through ratings like Nielsen ratings or the Gross Ratings Point. These ratings are used to estimate the percentage of the desired demographic on a particular channel through statistically relevant sampling.
The downside to TV ratings like Nielsen is that, 1) these are estimates, not exact numbers; and 2) as an advertiser, you still need to pay to broadcast to anyone who views that channel, not just your intended demographic. It’s a wide-net strategy.
Digital media methods, however, are able to mine personal data on a more individual level, allowing for dramatically greater personalization. You’re searching for a “green Columbia jacket?” Well, my company has that jacket, and we’ve applied the right filter to catch your search term on Google instantly.
If you don’t buy the jacket today, that’s okay — we can use retargeting to show you an ad on your social networks about our green Columbia jacket, and remind you of your interest in the future.
Plus, we can create different ads for different segments — hikers looking for sturdy Columbia jackets in the summertime, versus skiers who need athletic cold-weather jackets.
TV can’t say the same — it’s estimates and wide-nets all around.
3. Digital marketing is more agile.
Leading off the last point, digital media advertising methods allow you to track, measure, and make adjustments necessary to optimize your ads — in real time. Everything from adjusting a few words, a color, or a filter can be done quickly, and cheaply.
Every change you make to your digital marketing campaigns or content can be made quantifiable by tracking CTRs and conversion rates to identify exactly where something needs to be tweaked, and how — and, again, you’ll see quickly if you made the right choice.
TV ads, in contrast, need time to see if they’ll pan out, and they can’t be adjusted easily … or affordably. You can make multiple versions upfront of the same advertisement to air in different regions, but beyond that, it’s clumsy and expensive to make tweaks and adjustments.
4. Video ads are online now, too.
TV used to be the king of storytelling — in a short span of time, you’d get a scene, a protagonist, a problem, and a solution. Internet initially just used banner ads, which, while annoying, were effective — but only in the short-term.
Eventually, digital advertisers had to figure something else out. Slowly, they started to determine more versatile methods — images, images in slide decks, and video.
Users are already increasingly shifting toward the internet and internet content as their preferred method of entertainment. Online video ads are a powerful threat to TV because it’s ultimately a familiar type of storytelling, and on the platform preferred by consumers.
5. Advertising follows attention.
As mentioned earlier, viewing has shifted from traditional media to digital. And ultimately, where attention shifts, advertising should follow. In 2019, brands will need to consider digital methods if they want to reach their target audience, many of whom are using online streaming services more than they’re using their cable box.
Why TV Is Still Around
I’m going to play contrarian for a moment, here.
Digital media seems to be killing TV advertising, but maybe it’s not — or, at least not entirely. Research by WARC suggests that consumers actually pay more attention to ads on TV than they do on YouTube or Facebook. In fact, TV held more than twice the active viewing than YouTube, and 15 times more than Facebook.
Ultimately, TV still works for advertising. It’s often effective to diversify the channels on which you promote your products or services — and TV is one of those channels. So, while digital media may be killing TV advertising’s spot as the #1 channel, it likely won’t go entirely by the wayside.
However, we’re going to say it again — where attention shifts, advertising follows. Despite research suggesting things aren’t as dire for TV ads as you might think, the numbers are still pretty clear on at least one front: more consumers are shifting toward viewing content online.
This means, as marketers, you need to be devoting more of your budget to where your audience is. TV doesn’t have to be cut entirely — and probably shouldn’t be — but finding the right mix of digital and TV is critical for finding success in this new age of online-first viewing.
13 Clever Ways to Get More Comments on Instagram This Month
If you’re not a total Instagram addict like me, you might go a day or two without checking your app. And when you check your feed, you might notice that some posts from friends were shared mere minutes ago, while others might be a few days old.
So, what gives? Why isn’t your Instagram feed chronological anymore?
Like many other social networks, Instagram’s algorithm changed.
In this post, we’ll give you a quick rundown of what’s new with the algorithm, along with tips on how to create the most engaging posts possible to get more comments on Instagram — which help you jump higher in the feed and get discovered by new users.
Guide to the Instagram Feed Algorithm
In June 2016, Instagram announced it was changing its algorithm to show users content they cared about first — no matter when it was posted. This could make it tougher for social media marketers to get organic Instagram posts seen because most users were missing 70% of the content on their feeds.
Shortly after Facebook began to prioritize posts of users’ friends and family in 2018, Instagram followed suit. Its algorithms began prioritizing brands and advertisements less heavily.
But brand posts with natural engagement can sometimes defeat these algorithms. There are a few factors that influence a post’s ranking on the Instagram feed, and the number of likes and comments a post achieves is one of them. Here’s what matters when it comes to ranking on an Instagram user’s feed:
- The number of Likes and comments a post has
- If that user has interacted with your content in the past
- How recently you posted
If your organic Instagram posts get engagement from your followers, it creates a positive feedback loop: the more people like and comment on a post, the greater likelihood it will appear on the Explore tab, where users who don’t already follow you can check out your popular content.
Before we jump into strategies for attracting more comments, there are a few things you need to do:
1. Make your account public.
Make sure new followers can find your content by opening your account. Navigate to your profile, tap the Settings gear icon in the upper right-hand corner, and toggle the Private Account button to the Off position.
2. Enable push notifications.
Turn on push notifications so you can quickly reply to or like your followers’ comments. Remember, the more users interact with your account, the higher on their feeds your content will appear.
Navigate to your profile, tap the Settings gear icon in the upper right-hand corner, tap Push Notification Settings, and choose which Instagram actions you want to be notified for.
3. Curate engaging content.
People aren’t going to comment on uninteresting content, so enlist one team member to manage the scheduling and editing of Instagram content, but open it up to a larger team to source different photos, videos, and ideas to keep your Instagram feed fresh and interesting.
4. Develop an Instagram editorial calendar.
Figure out an Instagram publishing cadence that works for you — and we recommend posting no more than once per day. Remember, timing is a factor in the algorithm, so you don’t want posts from earlier in the day to get lost in the shuffle. Download our social media content calendar to keep track of what you’re posting across other social platforms so you’re not repetitive and you’re covering all of your bases.
Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s dive into strategies for getting more comments (and likes) on Instagram.
13 Ways to Get More Comments on Instagram
1. Host a giveaway or contest.
A fun and easy way to get followers to comment on your Instagram posts is by hosting an Instagram contest or giveaway. You could post on Instagram promoting the contest, then ask users to enter by commenting on your post. You could make your contest a weeklong campaign, where users have to comment each day. You could even incorporate user-generated content (UGC) and ask followers to post their own photos and to tag/mention your brand in the post.
Here’s an example of an Instagram contest we ran for our attendees at INBOUND 2016, HubSpot’s annual marketing and sales event:
Social Media Examiner has a great guide for running Instagram contests — check it out here.
2. Host an Instagram takeover.
Instagram takeovers are a fun way to get fresh content on your Instagram and to work with colleagues and influencers. They’re a smart way to generate more Instagram engagement, too.
Takeovers involve one Instagram user taking over another’s feed, usually for a day, and posting from their point of view. Takeovers are often done from the perspective of:
- A colleague
- An influencer
- Another organization in your industry
These takeovers help generate more Instagram comments whether it takes place on your account or you’re taking over another account. Here’s an example of a takeover we hosted with our friends over at WeWork. WeWork was able to share brand and member stories to a whole new audience of HubSpot’s engaged followers.
WeWork closed the takeover with a call-to-action (CTA) to follow its Instagram account — where new followers will start liking and commenting on new posts. And over at HubSpot, we enjoyed comments from WeWork fans and others interested in the takeover.
Takeovers are a win-win for hosts and guests. Learn how to host one with help from Buffer.
3. Ask users to engage in the comments.
A simple way to get more Instagram comments is to ask for them.
Post content on Instagram that lends itself to sharing, and ask users to answer a question or tag their friends and coworkers in the comments. It’s a fun and easy way to interact with your audience, and it helps you garner more comments, too.
Here’s an example of an Instagram post we shared in which we asked our followers a question. You can caption posts with simple questions like “Agree or disagree?” or “What’s your advice?” to prompt responses and earn more comments.
4. Post something funny, surprising, or provocative.
In a study of what makes content go viral, research revealed some of the most viral internet moments also provoked high-arousal emotions. Among the most common were posts that created anticipation, surprised the viewer, and provoked curiosity and uncertainty. Emotions that incited feelings of joy were also among the most common, so think about content you could share on Instagram that makes people feel an emotion so strongly that they’re compelled to comment on it.
Is there content you could post about a surprising fact, a happy moment, or an intriguing industry trend? It doesn’t need to be specifically about your brand, either — content that’s enjoyable for a broad audience will likely attract more comments.
It can be silly, too — here’s our teaser video for our April Fool’s Day prank about “gorilla” marketing that attracted a lot of attention — while building anticipation and a sense of surprise.
5. Post videos.
Time spent viewing videos on Instagram increased 40% in 2016, and now, users can post videos up to one minute in length. Post this engaging content to get followers to stop scrolling through their busy Instagram feeds and watch your video — and make sure it’s intriguing. Your audience wants more video content — especially on social media — so if you share something compelling and ask viewers to comment on it in the caption, they’ll most likely do it.
6. Use relevant hashtags.
When you post your content with relevant, popular Instagram hashtags, your posts appear in searches for those hashtags and the Explore tab. In fact, posts with at least one hashtag typically attain more than 12% more engagement. Influencers and interested users might organically comment when they see you talking about topics they’re also interested in, or you could combine some of the strategies above to generate engagement.
Ask followers how they celebrated #SundayFunday, acknowledge a #ThrowbackThursday, or use one of the hundreds of hashtags relevant to your industry or your content to get new audience members involved in the conversation. We did this with Earth Day hashtags in the example below:
Here’s a guide to finding and using Instagram hashtags, as well as a massive list of the most popular hashtags you can use.
7. Publish at the right time of day.
There’s a lot of debate over the best time of day to post on social media, and that’s because the answer varies depending on your industry, your followers, and what type of content you’re posting.
Our best advice is to test out your engagement rates on Instagram when you post at different times throughout the week, and determine your publishing schedule based on the results.
Whether it’s bright and early on Monday morning or later in the afternoon, try to figure out the time when your followers are more willing to stop and leave a comment to maximize the engagement of your posts each day. Use a social media content calendar to track scheduling and results.
8. Post photos of people’s faces.
Let’s face it — selfies are fun. And as it turns out, they’re good for your Instagram strategy, too.
An analysis of more than 1 million Instagram posts by Georgia Institute of Technology and Yahoo Labs found that posts with human faces are 32% more likely to attract comments — and 38% more likely to garner likes.
There isn’t a ton of insight into why this is, but the researchers suspected that it’s partly because faces are effective sources of nonverbal communication that people respond to — even as infants.
Post Instagram content featuring selfies, group shots, and candid photos, and see if your audience likes the human side of your brand, too.
Here’s an example of how HubSpot incorporated Ellen Degeneres’ face into an inspirational quote post:
9. Post photos of animals.
There isn’t a lot of research to back this one up, but you know as well as I do that animals on social media are powerful. Animals have been popular on the web for a long time, and animal influencers can earn just as much money as human influencers on Instagram.
Whether you have animals in your office or a cute picture of a coworker’s pet, try posting lighter, fun content on Instagram accompanied by a furry friend to see if your audience likes commenting on animals, too.
Here’s a great example where an Instagram user tells people to tag someone that loves puppies:
10. Respond to the comments you get.
Just like other forms of social media, responding to comments can give your audience a sense of community and make you look like you’re actually interested in what they have to say. When users get a comment in response, they might continue the comment thread.
Additionally, when others see that your account is responding to comments, they might comment on the post as well to join in on the discussion or ask a question about your post.
11. Use relevant emojis to make captions eye-catching.
While hashtags work to pull your post into searches, emojis will gravitate people’s eyes to your captions. More eyes on your captions might mean more engagement, comments, and likes for the overall post.
When using emojis, be sure they make sense for what you are posting and seem appropriate for your company. Two to three emojis can be colorful and interesting, but don’t go overboard with too many of them.
Here’s an example where HubSpot accompanied an infographic with a caption that had an emoji in it:
12. Post more frequently.
Like many other social media platforms, posting more frequently will make your account look active and up-to-date. If you only post once in a while, your posts might get drowned out by others in the Instagram feed.
If you post regularly and at optimized times of the day, more people will see your posts. This could result in more people following you and ultimately commenting or reacting to your regular posts.
13. Promote a future Q&A and ask fans to comment with their questions.
Now that we have features like Instagram Stories and IGTV, we can host and promote live Q&A’s which might be published with these tools. If you’re planning to interview someone over a live feed, publish a few standard posts to promote the event.
For each promotional post, ask users to comment with a question that they’d like to ask the person who’s being interviewed. Depending on the interview subject, you might see a flood of question comments from users. Along with more comments, this strategy will also allow your followers to feel like they’re directly engaging with and contributing to your content.
Engagement Is Key
Likes, comments, and video views are valuable on Instagram because they influence where your posts sit in the feed. Additionally, your content will be discoverable on the Explore tab if a lot of users interact with your posts — so test out these methods for attracting more responses on Instagram. For more ideas, check out our guide to Instagram for business.
Paid Media, Explained in 400 Words or Less
An effective content strategy doesn’t rely on only one tactic.
Generating qualified leads requires you to regularly publish compelling, valuable content, explore guest blogging opportunities, identify co-marketing campaigns, and devise a strategy for promoting said content.
Ultimately, by sponsoring content, you’re able to reach audiences that might not have come across you otherwise.
While content is a fairly general term, it’s important to note that there are different types of media that can be leveraged in the process. Knowing the differences between paid and other forms of media — earned and owned — is critical to the success of your lead generation efforts.
To help you effectively execute on sponsored content, we’ll walk you through different types of media, examples of paid media, and some strategies on how to best leverage them for your company.
The Difference Between Earned, Owned, and Paid Media
Combining earned, owned, and paid media will help you attract, nurture, and close leads, but what do those terms really mean? And when it comes to your company’s content strategy, how do they fit into the equation?
While all three media efforts are important to your overall goals and should converge in your strategy, there are still distinct differences.
Earned Media
Quite simply, earned media refers to media exposure you’ve earned through word-of-mouth. Whether it was the fantastic content you’ve distributed, the influence of your SEO efforts, the customer experience you’ve delivered, or a combination of all three, earned media refers to the recognition you receive as a result.
You can earn media by getting press mentions, positive reviews, reposts, recommendations, etc. You can also facilitate earned media by helping journalists and content writers author their articles, or contributing your own thought leadership content to industry publications.
Thanks to the rise in popularity of social media platforms like Twitter and Quora, it has become easier for content writers and journalists to reach out to your business for quotes and insights to mention in their articles. This type of accreditation helps build trust around your expertise.
At Influence & Co., we earn most of our media through press mentions with our partners and our own guest-contributed content. For example, our co-founder, John Hall, has a regular column on Forbes, where his contributed content helps to drive both traffic and leads for our company.
So whether you’re earning mentions on external sites or you’ve earned an opportunity to contribute to them regularly, this type of media helps to fuel the top of your funnel and introduce you to new leads.
Owned Media
Owned media is content you’re in full control of. Think of content for your company website, your blog, and your social media accounts.
While owned media content can take on a variety of forms — blog posts, case studies, whitepapers, etc. — the primary goal of this content is to continue providing value to leads as they move down the funnel. These assets offer a more controlled — but not overly promotional — message about your company.
So if you’re looking to warm up leads that you’ve generated with earned media or win over some more, it’s important that you’re focusing on producing these educational, valuable resources. At the end of the day, this content can help leads determine whether or not working with you is the right choice for them.
Paid Media
While today’s media influx may make it difficult to get your company’s message heard organically, it also brings with it an influx of methods to promote it. Paid media serves as a method for promoting content and driving exposure. And there are variety of paid techniques you can use to amplify your owned media and help you win more earned media.
For example, social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pinterest offer advertising options that can be leveraged to boost your exposure. We’ve found that LinkedIn and Twitter are the most effective promotion platform for our audience of B2B marketers, but you can utilize a similar strategy on Facebook or Pinterest. It all depends on where your target audience is the most active and engaged with your brand.
Paid Media Strategy
As I mentioned before, combining these elements can prove to be really powerful in terms of generating and engaging leads. To help illustrate this, let’s dive into two examples of content promotion tactics that my company has successfully utilized to amplify our owned media.
Sponsored Media
LinkedIn: Sponsored Updates
Our marketing team utilizes sponsored updates on LinkedIn to promote our gated content. We set a budget for each campaign; target users based on interest, industry, and job title; and deliver a link to a landing page with a relevant piece of gated content.
Our reasoning behind promoting gated content via sponsored updates verses our blog content goes back to the idea of delivering the right content to your audience, through the right medium, at the right time. We’ve found that when our audience is on LinkedIn, it’s the perfect time to serve up a piece of gated content.
For example, when looking at the performance of our sponsored posts, we found that the offers that linked straight to a landing page converted at a 500% higher visitors-to-leads conversion rate than sponsored posts that link to blog content.
Promoted Media
Twitter: Promoted Tweets
We’ve also recently seen success with promoting tweets that have the most engagement. For instance, we promoted this tweet about our “5 Unexpected Content Marketing Trends from CMI’s 2016 Report” blog post after we saw that it was garnering a lot of initial engagement. It generated an additional 111 clicks to the post with only $50 in ad spend.
Promoting tweets is a great way to boost the reach of your most engaging tweets and get them in front of a new audience. To determine whether a tweet is worthy of promotion, we ask ourselves two questions:
- Did it perform well? When a post is performing well organically, it will automatically perform better than your other posts when you sponsor them. Our rule of thumb is to only promote the top 1-3% of tweets that have gotten the most engagement recently.
- Is the content you’re promoting converting well? If we’re considering promoting a tweet, we look at the piece of content it references to determine the conversion rate of that piece. If it didn’t perform well, we try to pick a new tweet that links to a high-performing piece of content or look at how we can optimize the blog post for better conversion before putting dollars behind promoting it on social media.
Paid Media Examples
There are a variety of paid media avenues on Facebook. First, you can experiment with paid targeted advertising that shows up on users’ news feeds. These are often single space ads. Alternatively, you can buy carousel ads: these are a swipeable series of images in a single ad space, allowing advertisers to tell a better story and showcase more products.
Image Courtesy of Facebook.
Besides the homepage, there are many different options for ad placements, like Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Suggested Video, Facebook Right Column, and Messenger Inbox.
Facebook ads are often incredibly tailored to your marketing goals: you start by setting your objective, choosing your ideal audience, deciding where to place your ads, and setting a budget, and so on to increase the likelihood of attracting your target market.
Much like Facebook, LinkedIn offers sponsored content or updates in and around users’ feeds across devices. They also offer Sponsored InMail, where advertisers can deliver content to target audiences through their Messaging feature. The sponsored messages only deliver when the user is live on LinkedIn, meaning that the paid message will pop up in her chat box at the bottom of the screen, drawing her attention to the offering and increasing your chances of being noticed.
There are multiple Twitter ad campaigns to choose from, each designed to solve a specific problem: increasing brand awareness or engagement, growing your follower count, incentivizing website clicks, increasing app installs, or quickly promoting a new offer.
After setting your ads objective, advertisers then choose the audiences to target, bid on the cost per interaction, and select which tweets to sponsor. Promoted Tweets are paid, placed ads on users’ Twitter feeds, search results page, promoted trends, or through official Twitter advertising partners. (We walked through this strategy in greater depth above.)
YouTube
Youtube is a versatile platform when it comes to its paid media — it can be anything from bumper ads (six second ads), Google Preferred (non-skippable, mid-length ads), TrueView InStream (skippable, long format ads), or TrueView Action (video format with a CTA). Alternatively, you might consider partnering with content creators on YouTube to promote your brand.
Image Courtesy of YouTube.
PPC
Pay-Per-Click — or PPC — is a paid search results strategy that charges advertisers for each click a promoted result receives. These paid search ads are the first few hits on a keyword’s search results page and are marked with a green “Ad” label. Since most search engine users don’t tend to look beyond the first few hits — let alone beyond the first results page — they can be an effective way to boost awareness and drive traffic to your site.
Display Ads
This type of paid media is likely the most recognized, as pop-ups, wallpaper ads, banners, and video ads can be found on almost every web page on the internet. They are usually pretty affordable on a cost-per-click basis and are an excellent way to increase brand awareness and recognition. The problem with display ads is that because they are so prolific, users tend to ignore them or even block them entirely.
How HubSpot’s Paid Team Leverages Their CRM
When you think about it, advertisers have an endless list of tools at their disposal.
For instance, we might build our ads directly within Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google. Perhaps we have a budgeting tool that helps us properly allocate our ad spend. Additionally, maybe we use a tool like SEMRush to do keyword research.
There’s a number of interesting reporting options out there. And I’m willing to bet when you’re working on your ads strategy, you’re leveraging much more than just the tools within the social media networks to find success.
We’re no different here at HubSpot. Everything from keyword research tools to Microsoft Excel and HubSpot’s own ads tool is booted up to aid us in reaching you with the perfect ad at exactly the right moment in your buyer’s journey.
But when people ask me, “What tool has the biggest impact on your ads strategy?” — without a doubt, it’s our CRM. Here, I’m going to explain why.
Why Advertisers Should Leverage Their CRM
When I take a look at my most successful ad campaigns, they have a few things in common.
First, they’re highly targeted. I’m not just blasting an ad out to any random group. Instead, I’m taking a look at our CRM data, and using it to create very specific segments of leads that will go into my audiences.
Second, my ad and the offer behind it is tailored to the audience I’m targeting. I don’t ask every single lead to buy our software, and I don’t target people who are ready to speak to our sales team with HubSpot Academy Lessons or introductory blog posts. Knowing where a lead is in their buyer’s journey, what content they’ve already interacted with, and what touchpoints they’ve already had with our brand is critical for success.
Third — and maybe most importantly — my most successful ads have clear next steps outlined for each lead that converts. You don’t see ROI on your ad spend if you don’t continue to work with the leads that come in through your ads. Whether you’ll pass them off to the sales team for direct outreach, or enter them into a nurturing flow, next steps need to be outlined from the start when devising an ad campaign.
These three components are hallmarks of any sound journey-based advertising strategy. If I feel confident about those three components of my ad campaign — my targeting, my offer, and my lead nurturing — then we push forward.
This is where a CRM comes into play. A CRM is vital for helping ensure each of those three components are working in sync.
Your CRM gives you a full overview of your customer’s experience with your brand. No tool is better for gathering deep insights on your leads. With these insights, you can start to create ad campaigns that feel personalized to each person who interacts with them.
Additionally, you can use your CRM to create better alignment between your marketing and sales teams to ensure everyone has complete insights into which campaigns your customers are interacting with.
Every interaction, both online and offline, will start to feel like a natural next step along the buyer’s journey. In short, the CRM is an advertiser’s dream.
But how do you properly use it to work seamlessly with you ad strategy?
Using Your CRM in Your Ad Targeting
Your ad has no chance of being successful if you don’t get your targeting right. Your ad content could be incredibly high-quality and engaging, but if you’re targeting the wrong group of people, it’s all for nothing.
Your targeting options are extensive. At the highest level, you can target your ads using either third-party data or first-party data.
Simply put, third-party data is aggregated data on large groups of people made available on advertising platforms. First-party data, on the other hand, is information that you’ve collected directly from your customers. Maybe it’s information they’ve submitted on a lead ad form, or the specific blog posts that they’re visiting on your site. Because this data comes directly from your customers, it’s extremely powerful when leveraged in your audiences.
Your CRM aggregates all this first-party data together into one place. Essentially, it’s a one-stop shop for everything you need to create highly targeted audiences.
When I’m creating audiences for HubSpot’s ad campaigns, I’m constantly leveraging data within our CRM. I do this to ensure the ads you see are contextual, and relevant — not just promoting HubSpot for the sake of doing so. It’s a better experience for you, and it ensures we’re spending our ad dollars wisely.
For example, we have two groups of leads — those who download a piece of content on HubSpot.com or subscribe to our blog, and those who sign up for our free tools. From these two “base groups”, we can start layering on additional information.
For the leads who subscribed to our blog, we might look at what content they’re regularly consuming, or information we know about the company they work for, in order to ensure the ads they see reflect the topics around which they’ve demonstrated interest.
For instance, if we know we have a group of blog subscribers who frequently read our Sales blog — and run a Sales team at mid-sized software companies — chances are they could be interested in a Sales Hub case study about a current customer who looks just like them. We could even go a step further and see who has visited our Sales Hub product page.
In just a few simple steps, we’re able to take a group of leads who are interested in our content, and use the data in our CRM to create a highly targeted audience for an upcoming ad campaign.
For free users of our software, CRM data is just as valuable for ads targeting. For this group, information on their job roles and the content they’re consuming is just as valuable, but we can also start to explore how they’re using our product. Just like we track website activity within our CRM, we also track product usage.
For example, if someone signed up for our free CRM, I’ll look at how often they use the tool. If they’re actively using the tool and seeing value, we might decide not to target ads at them. If we think they’d find value in our paid product based on their product usage, we might target them with ads that are specific to which tools they use the most.
On the other hand, If they aren’t using the CRM at all, we might explore how we can help them find value in the tool. To do this, we’ll mine our CRM for information on what led to them to signing up for the free tools in the first place. Were they looking for a way to manage their deals pipeline, or were they interested in exploring our free email marketing tool? Knowing this, we can start to recommend educational content through HubSpot Academy, which can help them find success within the tool.
Additionally, let’s not forget about the power of lookalike audiences or exclusionary audiences. A lookalike audience is an audience type provided by the networks — essentially, a network like Facebook will take one of your existing audiences and go out and serve your ad to similar individuals.
Lookalikes are powerful, and they automatically expand your advertising reach. Best of all, they become more powerful when paired with highly targeted audiences built off CRM data.
It’s also critical you’re strategic with how you use exclusion audiences. These can be used in a number of different ways. For example, almost every ad I run excludes our current paying customers. There are also key events that a lead could take, where I’ll hold off on targeting them for a few weeks at a time to ensure we’re not negatively impacting their buyer’s journey. By doing this, I’m making sure I’m spending my ads budget wisely and efficiently.
Remember, lookalikes can also be used for audience exclusion. For example, we’ve created lookalikes in the past off of lists of leads that weren’t performing well, and excluded them from our ads targeting.
The targeting strategies above are only possible through leveraging the data we’ve collected within our CRM. In practice, we’ll start with broad groups of leads, and continue to layer on audience conditions, filters, and lookalikes until we’ve reached a group of leads in our CRM that we believe will be highly interested in the ads we have to offer.
Leveraging Your CRM in Your Follow-Up
Too many people I speak with about ads talk about an ad campaign as an isolated marketing action — something that occurs independently from your email marketing, your content marketing, or even your sales process. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Few things can hamper your success with digital ads like ignoring the context under which someone will see your ad.
For example, consider this — what if in the same day, one of your leads has an ad targeted at them, a marketing email sent to them, and a sales rep call them? Chances are that lead is sick of hearing from you. What’s even worse is if the ad, email, and sales call all speak to different offers. Not creating alignment across each interaction your leads and customers have with your brand is a quick way to drive potential business away.
Luckily, your CRM gives you everything you need to create ads that fit perfectly into every stage of your buyer’s journey. By leveraging your CRM, you can see how each lead interacts with your content across all channels, ensuring you don’t miss obvious opportunities or overwhelm your leads.
Your CRM is useful when crafting your ads strategy to align with other marketing efforts, but it becomes essential when determining how you’ll follow-up with and nurture the leads that convert on your ads. Each lead’s experience will be unique, and the follow up that they receive after converting on your ad should reflect their experience.
Obviously, if they’re downloading an e-book through your ad, ensuring that they receive that content offer is step one. But what if that’s the third e-book they’ve downloaded this month? The nurturing flow that someone enters should look a lot different for a first time e-book downloader compared to someone who regularly interacts with your content, and shows high-buying intent.
HubSpot customer Airstream does a great job of leveraging their CRM data to ensure their customers receive follow-up that is relevant and actionable for them. Once a lead converts on one of their ads, they use CRM data to send an automated follow-up email — delivering not only the content offer promised within the ad, but the location of their nearest Airstream dealer. Without leveraging their CRM, Airstream’s follow-up wouldn’t be as contextualized to each person who converts on their ads.
We use lead scoring within our CRM to ensure leads that convert on our ads receive a follow-up message tailored to their experience with our brand. Based on their score, they might enter into a nurturing campaign, or get passed to our sales team. The experience will be different for each lead, but by leveraging the CRM, we’re able to ensure that our teams are aligned, and everyone who interacts with that lead has full insight into what their experience with our brand has been so far.
Using Your CRM to Determine ROI & Ad Spend
Lastly, the CRM is essential for helping us calculate the ROI of our ad spend. One of the great things about running your marketing and sales efforts out of the same tool, is that ROI calculations are simple.
Attributing an ad campaign to a closed deal can be done without having to hop between multiple systems, helping you avoid mistakes when measuring the success of your ad spend.
Additionally, when I’m calculating ROI, I often exclude the three most recent months of leads that converted on my ads. Why? Because those leads just entered the system. They’re still being nurtured into SQLs, and they haven’t had enough time to close. Figure out how long your sales process usually takes, and consider excluding the leads, and the ad spend that brought them into your CRM, from your ROI calculation until later on.
Another piece of data within your CRM that is invaluable to advertisers is conversion data. I use this to help me strategically plan my ads budget. When determining ad spend, it’s important to keep the ROI of your ad spend in mind. The problem is that far too often, you might not have enough purchase data to determine what your ads budget should be. If this is the case, take a look at a combination of your sales and marketing data captured in your CRM.
For instance, let’s say you know your sales team can convert one out of every 10 leads that convert on a form, and you know that about 20% of your website visitors will convert on a form.
Doing some simple math, you can determine that you’ll need 50 clicks on your ads to generate one new customer. If you also leverage your CRM to understand what that one customer is worth to you, or their lifetime value, you can start to make smarter, more accurate decisions on what your ad spend should be.
Ads are one of the most powerful tools for a marketer, but only when executed properly. Using your CRM, you can provide your customers with targeted, contextual ads that help them make educated buying decisions, and move them through their buyer’s journey.
The Ultimate Guide to Integrations and Why Your Business Needs Them
Have you ever found yourself working on a project in which you had to toggle between multiple software and applications? Perhaps you had to plug data from one system into another or rewrite the same content over and over again to ensure it was in multiple locations.
Although few people have the time or patience for this type of tedious work, it’s highly common and often critical to your business’s success — these mundane tasks need to get done.
What if there was a way to connect your software to the applications you use in a way that successfully brings them together? This would mean all of your information and data would live in a central location with no manual entry required, even if those applications don’t actually come with the software itself … sound nice?
Well, good news! This type of solution exists … it’s called an integration.
Integrations are a complex topic to understand. So, let’s simplify the concept with the help of an analogy we can reference throughout this guide. Let’s pretend you want to plug your MacBook laptop into your TV using a connector cable so you can watch reruns of Friends on Netflix on the big screen. And integration kind of works like this — I’ll explain more as we go.
Back to our analogy: If your software is your laptop, you’ll use a connector cable, or integration, to then watch Friends on the TV, or application.
Now, let’s run through some commonly asked questions about integrations to help you get a better grasp on what they are, how they work, and why your company needs them.
Why use integrations?
Integrations solve and simplify your need for new software as your business grows and evolves. They allow you to keep the system you’re currently using by simply adding connections to third-party applications to enhance system functionality and provide additional features you may need but aren’t able to build within your software. You can keep your current laptop and TV, and simply use the connector cable to watch Friends on the big screen.
By leveraging integration connections across your systems, you can power your business to achieve a much wider range of tasks on your software as you enhance its functionality. This is especially helpful as your business expands since your needs are bound to change.
Although your software may have the functionality you need when you start your business, you’re likely going to want additional applications to provide the features you end up needing later on, as you grow.
There are many types of integrations, each of which have specific functions to help meet different needs. The easiest way to think about the various types of integrations is by category. Some integrations have several functions, meaning they could technically fit into many categories because they serve more than one main purpose. Other integrations have one specific function.
Who needs integrations?
Integrations are helpful tools for virtually every business, no matter the size or industry. There are integrations suited for every type of company (startups, SMBs, and enterprise companies) with any purpose (advertising, analytics, or content).
If you sell software, as we do at HubSpot, you’ll find yourself not only using connections for your internal software but also for your customers to use along with your software. This is because your software may not have every feature and function your customers need to run their business. So, by adding an integration, they’ll get that added feature or function while continuing to use your software.
Referring back to our analogy, without the integration, or connector cable, your laptop wouldn’t be able to communicate with your TV to allow you to watch Friends on the big screen. You need that integration, or cable, to allow for added functionality and watch the show on TV — without it, this wouldn’t be possible.
How do you get integrations?
Integrations are almost always located in some type of marketplace, where customers can review and browse all of their options. The HubSpot Integrations & Application Marketplace is an example of this. Our marketplace allows visitors to search and learn more about the various integrations and their functions, and then connect HubSpot to their integration of choice.
(No, you can’t go to Best Buy to pick up your integration as you would with your connector cable to watch Friends on your TV… you’re right, the example doesn’t quite work here.)
How do integrations work with APIs?
API stands for application programming interface. An API is an interface that software uses to receive information (whether that’s data, servers, applications, etc.).
All of the integrations we’re going to discuss below are built on APIs. By building integrations on APIs, you can connect your integrations to your software and use them in tandem with one another. The integration allows for the flow of information to and from apps and devices in real time — APIs allow them to talk to one another.
Think about this in terms of our analogy from above: The application is the TV, the programming allows your laptop to communicate with the TV, and the interface is how you (the user) are able to interact with the application (by watching Friends on your TV). In this example, the API is the port on the side of your laptop in which you actually insert your integration (the cable) to then connect your laptop to your TV.
Integration vs. iPaaS Solution
If you’ve heard of integrations before, chances are you’ve also heard about iPaaS, or Integration Platform as a Service. The difference between the two is an important distinction to make when determining which one you need for your business. While an integration is a one-to-one, direct connection solution, an iPaaS solution is not.
Instead, iPaaS is a cloud-based platform that connects your applications and systems — whether that’s in the cloud or on-premise — between an organization and third-party software without the use of middleware.
So, if you look for an integration solution on your software’s marketplace and don’t find the connection you’re looking for, then you’d turn to an iPaaS solution to solve your need for that connection. There are a few integrations available today (called “connector integrations”, which we’ll cover an example of below) that can help you build custom integrations..
So, which integrations should you actually use? Let’s look at a list of some of the most popular integrations available.
Popular Integrations
The following integrations are categorized by business need to help you browse through your options. (Almost all of these integrations fit into multiple categories, as they have functions that allow them to do multiple things. Below, we placed them in the category they’re best suited for.)
It’s important to note these are just some of today’s popular integrations — there are hundreds of more integrations to learn about and choose from as your business grows. The list we’ve compiled below is of integrations that connect with HubSpot. This isn’t to say these HubSpot integrations don’t also work with other software. In fact, most of these integrations are compatible with dozens of programs in addition to HubSpot.
Let’s take a look.
Advertising Integrations
Advertising integrations help you market to and reach your target audience. Data about the success of your ads and/ or the leads obtained from them is automatically added to your HubSpot CRM so you can learn more about the people who interact with your ads and nurture them into customers.
1. Facebook Ads
The Facebook Ads integration allows you to connect your Facebook Ads account to HubSpot. This integration gives you the ability to attribute your ads directly to the contacts who interact with them. It also allows you to review real data about which ads impact your bottom line. This simplifies the reporting process for all of your Facebook Ad efforts.
2. AdRoll
Different businesses and products have various buyer personas. The AdRoll integration gives you the opportunity to create personalized retargeting ads for different lead segments in your HubSpot contacts. You can personalize several parts of the ads, such as content and formatting, that will best relate to your prospect. This allows you to focus on your audience’s attributes so you can effectively reach your prospects — you can gather intricate details about your prospects from your CRM via the integration so you’re able to successfully retarget them.
3. Instapage
If you’re not a developer, creating your website’s landing page might sound like an overwhelming task. The Instapage integration provides a straightforward option for anyone who wants to create and personalize their landing page and then send lead information straight to HubSpot. These details are automatically placed under the associated contact in HubSpot for you— meaning, there’s no need to perform this transfer manually.
ABM Integrations
ABM stands for account-based marketing. These integrations help you leverage your account and audience data so you can tailor your messaging, CTAs, and marketing strategies to close deals and attract customers.
1. OrgChartHub
The OrgChartHub integration allows you to efficiently build customer organization charts without ever leaving HubSpot. You can create customer organization charts while in HubSpot so you’re able to easily identify unknown contacts, visualize key stakeholders, and customize your sales personas without manually sending any of this information back and forth.
2. CaliberMind
With the CaliberMind integration, you’ll be able to look at your cross-channel account engagement and create alerts for your reps about which deals they should focus on closing to meet quota. The integration takes your contacts directly from HubSpot and automatically matches them to their associated accounts so you don’t have to.
3. Metadata
The Metadata integration provides account-based advertising services. You can automatically identify specific target accounts and contacts from HubSpot to create personalized advertisements at scale to help you close more deals and reach your target audience more effectively.
Analytics and Data Integrations
These integrations help you measure your success across a number of analytics platforms. You can look at your data in different ways and ensure all of this information is well-organized in HubSpot so your team can review it at any time. These integrations help you learn more about which of your efforts are working and which ones need to be modified.
1. Databox
With the increase of remote employees across businesses and the number of people who access their work while on-the-go, having the ability to review and manage your key performance indicators (KPIs) from anywhere can be quite helpful. The Databox integration provides you with access to all of your analytics data in HubSpot from a wide variety of sources including Google Analytics, SEMRush, mobile, desktop, Facebook, and more.
2. Hotjar
In a world where many website visitors are uninterested in completing forms and providing their personal information, Hotjar is a great way to learn about who your visitors are and what they’re looking for on your site. The Hotjar integration gives you insight into who your website and mobile visitors are and what their needs consist of directly from HubSpot.
3. Klipfolio
The Klipfolio integration shows you your most important metrics in real-time and creates easy-to-read dashboards in HubSpot so you can track and analyze performance across all of your platforms from one location. This allows you to improve your data transparency and reach your targets faster.
Calling Integrations
Whether it’s a meeting with fellow employees or your prospective and current customers, calling integrations will make all phone and video call interactions simple. Your contact’s information and details about the call will be recorded in HubSpot for easy access. This also provides sales reps and support team members with the necessary background information to assist the prospect or customer appropriately.
1. UberConference
With UberConference, it takes just seconds to schedule your meetings with colleagues and prospective customers so you can focus on tasks that require more attention. The integration allows you to schedule meetings quickly and easily without ever having to leave your HubSpot portal.
2. Aircall
Phone calls remain one of the most effective ways to interact with your prospective and current customers. Whether it’s a sales or support call, the Aircall integration allows you to manage your call flows and attentively assist your leads and customers all within HubSpot so your contact’s information lives in one, central location.
3. CallRail
The CallRail integration is a call tracking and analytics system which allows you to customize segments and actions based on your specific calls with prospects and customers. All of your call and text data will automatically be added and organized in HubSpot under the associated contact so you don’t have to manually enter any data.
Connector Integrations
Connector integrations provide you with access to dozens of applications which sync to HubSpot to save you time and add functionality. Some connector integrations offer a wide range of applications and some have more specific types of applications. Additionally, some connector integrations can assist in creating a custom integration to suit your needs.
1. Automate.io
The Automate.io integration connects to HubSpot to give you access to over 80 applications. By syncing with these apps, you’ll be able to transfer data to them to create customized integrations so you can manage all of your data in a way that works for your business all within HubSpot.
2. Zapier
The Zapier integration allows you to automatically connect your software to over 1,000 applications. It links your apps to HubSpot for you in just a few clicks to save you time. There’s no coding required and your apps will be able to begin sharing data in an easy-to-read workflow format in your HubSpot portal.
3. PieSync
The PieSync integration provides real-time, two-way contact sync. This means every time you add a contact to HubSpot, it automatically syncs to an application (such as Google Contacts or Outlook), and vice versa — you don’t need to worry about any importing or exporting, expediting and simplifying your contact syncs.
Content Integrations
Content integrations help you create, design, and share custom content for your website. They also help you learn about who’s interacting with the content and how they’re interacting with it. That information is then synced to HubSpot so you can organize it and add it to specific contacts.
1. Beacon
If your website has a collection of blog posts, the Beacon integration might be a good option for you. The integration ensures your content looks professional and allows you to drive more leads by getting more value out of your existing content — it connects to HubSpot to automatically convert your blog posts into downloadable content such as eBooks.
2. briX
The briX integration connects to HubSpot so you can design and personalize web pages for your site. You don’t need a background in web design or coding to create beautiful pages — the drag-and-drop template and 100+ customizable features make it easy to organize your content in any way you choose. This integration is ideal for easily designing and personalizing web pages directly from HubSpot.
3. Belch.io
Customized landing pages, web pages, and emails provide a professional look and feel for your visitors, leads, and customers while interacting with your business online. The Belch.io integration connects to HubSpot so you can personalize and brand all of these things in just minutes. It’s a great option for anyone without a background in coding or web development who wants to design and customize their site pages and emails to complement their brand all from HubSpot.
Customer Success Integrations
Customer success integrations connect to HubSpot to make your internal and external interactions with employees (cross-team) and customers straightforward. They simplify communication and help you share information and/or data when you need to.
1. Slack
The Slack integration is a digital workspace and communication tool that allows you to connect and talk with your team members. The integration is ideal for team collaboration and coordination from anywhere. By connecting the integration to your software, you can use Slack’s and HubSpot’s features in either the application or the software so you don’t have to waste time toggling back and forth — the same information will be found in both locations in real time.
2. Zendesk
Zendesk offers a ticketing system to keep track of customer inquiries and allows you to keep details about all of your customer interactions in one place. It helps you provide consistent customer experiences among your fellow employees and customers.
By connecting HubSpot to the Zendesk integration, you’ll be able to bring the work of your sales, marketing, and support teams together in a central location. It also allows these departments to communicate with each other while in HubSpot as well.
3. LiveChat
The LiveChat integration allows you to communicate with potential customers in real-time when they need assistance or guidance while on your website from HubSpot. Whether it’s a question about your product or the need for help in the checkout process, LiveChat allows you to walk them through the information they need to help you boost conversions and build strong relationships with prospects and customers.
Ecommerce Integrations
If you have an online store, ecommerce integrations are a great way to learn about what your customers and visitors are doing while they’re on your website. By connecting these integrations to HubSpot, you’ll know when your visitors are most frequently abandoning your site or their carts so you can create re-engagement content to regain their interest.
1. Shopify
The Shopify integration allows you to easily incorporate all of your ecommerce data and customer data within HubSpot. It automatically syncs customer, product, and deal information in HubSpot under the associated customer’s profile, so your entire team can view all of these details in one location. You can also create cart abandonment nurturing tactics, re-engagement ads for your website from HubSpot once you connect the integration to the software.
2. Typeform
The Typeform integration helps you create and design web and mobile forms for your leads. You can create contact forms, sign up forms, quizzes, and more, and all of your responses will automatically be sent directly to HubSpot so you can easily review your results and responses and compile them under the associated contact in HubSpot.
3. Magento
The Magento integration helps you create and send upsell, cross-sell, and reorder emails as well as develop abandoned cart nurturing tactics to boost your conversions. It automatically sends all of your customers’ ecommerce-related data, as well as emails between you and your customers, straight to their respective HubSpot contact record.
Email Integrations
Email integrations help you track a prospect’s interactions with sales reps, personalize your email automation with certain contacts, and measure the success of your email campaigns among your target audience — all from HubSpot.
1. MailChimp
The MailChimp integration allows you to sync HubSpot with your email service provider. You can build email campaigns and rest easy knowing the Intelligent Error Handling feature will continue engaging your contacts even if a syncing error occurs between the software and application. By connecting MailChimp to HubSpot, you’ll have the ability to automatically add contacts from HubSpot into your application’s email lists and vice versa so you never have to do it manually.
2. Privy
Privy helps you make more sales and turn more prospects into delighted customers. The integration uses targeted pop-up ads, banners, bars, and more to help you boost conversions and decrease page abandonment. It also automatically syncs all of your new leads from your website to HubSpot so the software can help you nurture them and convert them into customers.
3. Front
The Front integration is a collaborative inbox, meaning all members of your team can see and access your contacts, review deals, and see all activity history while working in HubSpot. All of these details are automatically synced in Front and your CRM. This helps you improve your customer experience and ensure it remains consistent no matter which employees your customers work with.
Event and Webinar Integrations
Whether it’s an in-person event, a webinar, an online meeting, or a video conference, the following integrations simplify every aspect of hosting an event. They allow your contacts to book meetings with you and you can update all information related to your contacts post-event or meeting in HubSpot.
1. Eventbrite
Eventbrite helps you use inbound marketing tactics to attract more prospects and customers to your in-person events. Once connected to your software, the integration automatically takes data from your contact lists in HubSpot to help you uncover effective ways to connect with your target audience, face-to-face.
2. GoToWebinar
No matter the type of event you’re hosting, the GoToWebinar integration automatically syncs all of your registrant and participant information in HubSpot under the associated contact. You’ll never have to worry about manually importing data about your webinar contacts again — instead, you’ll have more time to focus on the event itself.
3. Setmore
The Setmore integration simplifies appointment scheduling for you. It automatically imports your booked appointments (and information about the customer who booked the appointment) to HubSpot under the correct contact’s profile so you don’t have to do it manually.
Lead Generation Integrations
Lead generation integrations help you transition early-stage leads into delighted customers. All of your leads’ information will automatically be synced to HubSpot so you can view it at any point during the buyer’s journey. This is helpful to learn more about your target audience and to manage customer information so your sales and support teams can refer to it if needed, all from one location.
1. WordPress
The WordPress integration helps you optimize and align your WordPress website with the data about your contacts and business goals you have in HubSpot. Your HubSpot account and all of your growth tools will automatically be connected to your WordPress site so you can work to attract, engage, and delight site visitors and customers on your site from either WordPress or HubSpot.
2. Unbounce
The Unbounce integration helps you with the lead capturing and nurturing processes. You can create lead generation forms and send all data collected about your leads directly to HubSpot. At any point in time, you can take this data about your leads and use it to create campaigns. You’ll also have the ability to export any data in just seconds from your Unbounce account and share it anywhere.
3. SurveyMonkey
With the SurveyMonkey integration, you can create and distribute custom surveys to your prospects and customers, collect all data obtained, and view your responses within HubSpot. This is ideal because you can then segment and organize all your contacts based on their survey responses to easily manage the type of content and/or follow up they receive.
Live Chat Integrations
By adding live chat integrations to your website, you’ll be able to communicate with prospects in real time and nurture them into customers. You can answer their questions, respond to their concerns, and assist them in their purchase decisions. Then, this data is compiled into HubSpot under the specific contact it belongs to so you can follow up appropriately.
1. Intercom
The Intercom integration allows you to capture new leads and prospective customers with the help of live chat on your website. Intercom allows you to convert more leads by actively engaging with them at any time while they’re on your website once connected to HubSpot. You can then qualify your leads with custom bots, talk with them directly, and track them — and then you can have all of this information automatically organized under their contact in HubSpot.
2. ManyChat
Once connected to HubSpot, the ManyChat integration allows you to automate your messenger marketing so you can easily organize, nurture, and track your leads from the software. You can also take any HubSpot form and submit information obtained from it by sending custom field data to HubSpot Form Submissions.
3. Drift
The Drift integration provides live chat for your website so you can assist your leads in real time form HubSpot. The integration allows you to watch and save all of the lead’s activity on your site in HubSpot under the correct contact. Additionally, your sales reps can use Drift to customize their outreach and follow-ups based on that activity to improve the chances of conversion.
Sales Integrations
Sales integrations help you bring your sales tools, tactics, and prospects’ information together using HubSpot. You’ll be able to keep your marketing, support, and sales details in a central location for all teams to access, analyze, and refer to as needed.
1. HelloSign
Once connected to HubSpot, you’ll automatically be notified of any action a prospect takes on any document you send them with the HelloSign integration. Examples of the actions you’ll be notified about include when a prospect or customer receives, opens, or signs the document. Then, this activity data is sent to the contact it belongs to in HubSpot so reps know where the prospect or customer is in the buyer’s journey and how they should go about following up with them.
2. Salesforce
If you’re a Salesforce user, you can automatically sync all of your contacts’ information from the database into HubSpot once connected to the Salesforce integration. This allows you to work with reps to get strong lead intelligence and revenue reporting. You can mesh your marketing and sales work, content, and information so you and your team can access any information from either system at any point in time.
3. PandaDoc
When it comes to sales work, there are many tasks involved that don’t necessarily include the process of actually closing a deal. The PandaDoc integration automatically organizes and reviews information from HubSpot about your prospect to help you with non-selling tasks like creating and sending quotes, proposals, and contracts.
Social Media Integrations
Understanding your social media following is a huge part of successful marketing. Social media integrations help you learn about your followers, understand the type of content they interact with and share, and automate specific parts of your social media strategy.
1. Facebook
With the Facebook integration, you can automatically connect your business’s Facebook account to HubSpot. Schedule Facebook posts ahead of time analyze and measure post’s performance. This integration is ideal if you want to manage your Facebook marketing strategy alongside your other social media marketing strategies directly from HubSpot.
2. LinkedIn
By connecting your LinkedIn account to HubSpot through the LinkedIn integration, you can easily engage with your network and communicate with all of your contacts from HubSpot. You can also auto-publish your blogs and share specific content with your followers to nurture them into leads and customers. This integration is also great for tracking engagement along with all of your other social media channels and marketing efforts all from HubSpot’s social media tool.
3. Twitter
Schedule Tweets ahead of time, monitor Twitter streams, view Tweets and Twitter interactions of your competitors, and monitor accounts that are important to your brand from HubSpot with the Twitter integration. All information about your current and new followers will be added to your contact lists in HubSpot so everything is organized appropriately.
Video Integrations
With the rise of video and video marketing in business today, integrations that help you incorporate this media on your website have become quite useful. They allow you to create and implement videos on your site pages and forms as well as measure the success of your video marketing efforts.
1. Wistia
The Wistia integration provides you with the ability to integrate videos on your website, and then incorporate HubSpot forms with those videos to improve video engagement (and hopefully, conversion) rates. If any lead converts on a video, their information is automatically sent to HubSpot so you’ll have their video-viewing data paired with their contact details.
2. YouTube
The YouTube integration connects your YouTube channel to HubSpot. This way, you can easily report on your video and channel success and compare this data to that of your other social platforms using HubSpot’s analytics and social media tools and dashboards.
3. Promo
With the Promo integration, you can choose from over three million clips, templates, and music options to use to create a video for your site directly from HubSpot. You can easily throw in custom messaging, branding, or logos to personalize the video for your business based on a specific prospect’s needs and interests, found under their specific contact in HubSpot.
Get Integrated to Grow Better
Integrations have the power to enhance all aspects of your business. No matter the software you use to run your company, you can find integrations that can help simplify your processes, optimize your efforts, and empower your fellow employees. So, find the right integration marketplace for your software and begin connecting to the applications suited for your business needs.
SEO vs. PPC: When to Optimize and When to Pay for Traffic
Let’s say you have an amazing new product — you’ve created a software that recommends the perfect pizza toppings for your personality, and you’re excited to share your business with the world.
Unfortunately, you have no idea how to share this revolutionary product with as many of your target users as possible.
Many small businesses are faced with a similar problem of getting found by the right audience — it doesn’t matter how accurate your pizza bot is in determining whether or not you like pineapple on your pizza, if users can’t find you.
There are two popular search strategies by which organizations solve this problem — Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC). But which method is right for you and your pizza software company? Is it better to pursue an organic-first approach and find consumers through search engine rankings, or is it better to invest in an advertisement at the top of a keyword results page?
Here, we’ve explored what each of these two acquisition strategies do and provided some descriptive statistics to help you decide whether you’re business is best suited for SEO or PPC — or both.
What is SEO?
Just as you turn to your favorite search engine to look up a new marketing acronym or where to get good pizza, so do your consumers. By investing in SEO, or search engine optimization, you’re increasing the likelihood of your target audience finding you when they search for things related to your product or service.
It’s important to build a Google presence if you want your organization to succeed, and by increasing your rank among search results you’re improving your online visibility and domain authority. In other words, by building up the content on your site, optimizing for keywords on which to rank, publishing your NAP (name, address, and phone number), and more, Google is more likely to think your site is relevant and push your link higher up on a keyword’s search results page.
What is PPC?
PPC, or pay-per-click, is a form of search engine marketing (SEM) where an advertiser pays a publisher (such as Google or Facebook) every time the ad is clicked. This model allows advertisers to only pay when consumers interact with their listing — meaning you attract people who are interested in your offer.
This method is mostly associated with search engines as advertisers bid on search keywords relevant to their target markets. You may have noticed that the top search results are tagged with an “Ad” marker. The higher the keyword search volume, the more advertisers need to pay.
If an organization does not have the domain authority to get their website ranking on search engines organically, PPC can help businesses stay competitive in a crowded market and quickly get in front of their target consumers.
SEO vs PPC Statistics
PPC
1. The top 3 paid advertising spots get 46% of the clicks on the page. According to Power Traffick, the top three links on a search engine results page (SERP) capture almost half of all traffic for that keyword. This data supports the PPC method as it involves buying ad space at the top of the SERP.
2. Businesses make, on average, $3 in revenue for every $1.60 they spend on AdWords. PPC is a relatively inexpensive way to experiment, and there is a solid average ROI for investing in paid search ads.
3. More than 615 million devices use Adblock. As a consumer, Adblock is amazing: it stops all those eerily targeted ads from popping up on your Facebook feed. However, as a marketer, it can be frustrating to invest in PPC if huge numbers of your target consumers will never see your ad. Additionally, this number is growing quickly: ad blocking has grown 15-30% in the last four years.
4. PPC Ads can boost awareness by 80%. In spite of ad blockers, PPC is still effective in increasing your brand’s reach and awareness.
5. Google’s algorithm updates don’t affect PPC. While not a stat per se, a big benefit of PPC is that it’s immune to Google’s changing SERP ranking algorithm. In 2018, Google reported that they had updated their algorithm 3,234 times! If you’re using the SEO method, you have to adjust your content optimization to rank better according to the updated algorithm requirements.
6. 63% of people reported that they would click on a Google ad. A high CTR is the goal driving both PPC and SEO, and if the majority of surveyed consumers report that they would click into a paid search ad, it is a compelling statistic for investing in PPC.
7. 75% say it’s easier to find what they’re looking for from paid ads. The reason the first page of search results — especially the few few hits — get the vast majority of clicks is due to the combination of ease of use and finding what the searcher is looking for. Bidding on target keywords through PPC accomplishes both of these needs: the paid ads are easy to find at the top of the SERP and they answer the question of the searcher.
SEO
1. Nearly 80% of users ignore paid ads in search results. People tend to prefer organic links more than paid ones, and of the links search users click, about 70% are organic.
2. Search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%. Organic search is one of the most effective marketing channels, often being a consumer’s first point of contact with an organization.
3. SEO drives 30% of traffic, and 20% of revenue. SEO ROI accumulates over time as content creators establish authority and visibility. Prospects often visit a website more than once before filling out a form or making a purchase, so ranking higher for more keywords increases the likelihood of conversions over time.
4. 36.2% of consumers recognize links that are paid advertisements, but don’t click on them. Many search users aren’t able to differentiate between paid ads and organic links — in fact, only half of searchers correctly identify ads. In spite of this, consumers are still preferring the organic links over the PPC ones.
5. 88% of searches for local businesses on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours. Local SEO has excellent SEO — the number of local searches are increasing by 900% in two years, and by optimizing content and web pages for nearby audiences, organizations can see remarkable growth.
6. One in ten blog posts are compounding. This means that organic search increases their traffic over time, and as the number of visitors aggregates, so does the number of conversions. Historical content is a critical part of both SEO and customer acquisition strategy.
7. Organic SEO is about 5.66 times better than paid search ads. HubSpot’s co-founder, Brian Halligan, ardently believes in an organic-first strategy for its longevity and strong conversion performance. According to HubSpot’s inbound marketing philosophy, paid outbound marketing interrupts audiences with outreach they don’t want, whereas organic optimization draws in consumers with content they love.
Ultimately, whichever strategy you choose will depend on your business’s needs, budget, and mission. Oftentimes, organizations will invest in both to see which strategy will help them grow better.
6 of the Best SEO Link Building Software Solutions in 2019
All search engine algorithms are driven at least in part by links, which makes link building an essential aspect of SEO. It’s also a cost-effective marketing principle that, when done right, allows you to essentially advertise on other reputable websites for free, while gaining high-quality referral traffic.
The term “link building” refers to the process of creating links on other websites to increase search engine rankings and drive referral traffic back to your site. You can embed links to your site within various forms of content — including, but not limited to, blog posts, infographics, articles, press releases, and images.
Link building is one of the most important SEO practices today, and using the best link building software is essential to getting it right.
Here, we’re going to explore six of the best SEO link building software solutions. But first, let’s dive into the importance of link building.
The Important Role Links Play
If you’re a marketer, you want to increase your business’s online presence, but that’s nearly impossible to do without a fair number of quality inbound links pointing to your site. Online, links are the infrastructure that people rely on to reach you. Ignoring them is like building a brick-and-mortar store without any roads leading to it.
In a 2017 survey of online marketers, nearly three-quarters of respondents said they believe that link building is a critical SEO factor. It helps establish you as an authority in your area of expertise by connecting your website to highly reputable and credible sites in the same niche.
As you build your brand with quality backlinks from credible sites, Google will trust your content more and, eventually, you’ll see your website’s organic rankings increase.
Ultimately, links enable you to build brand recognition, and increase trust among your clients. By link building with high-quality sites, you also generate higher-quality leads that are more likely to follow the path to becoming loyal clients.
However, not all link building is created equal. I preach white hat link building, and we transparently showcase our link building process on our site. We believe that if you create useful content, websites will gladly link to you — and our methodology supports that.
The success of your link building campaign will naturally boost your brand’s relationship with other brands and their websites. Customers can more easily connect with other great products and services, and your network of links will boost your website’s value in the eyes of the search engines that crawl, index, and rank it.
Link Building Best Practices
The bare-bones definition of link building is strategically acquiring links pointing back to your website to increase organic rankings and potentially drive referral traffic.
However, successful link building is more than that — it also means carefully considering where you place your links, the type and format of the links, the links’ anchor text, and how diversified the backlink portfolio is.
I’ve found these best practices to be effective parts of an overall link building strategy:
- Create awesome content: While there are several best practices you should follow, it all starts with surrounding your links with stellar content. High-quality content is the most important part of the value you can bring to online users. The more valuable and engaging your content is, the more likely you can earn coveted spots on popular websites. That includes making your content easy to read but full of valuable information like stats, quotes, and other trustworthy data.
- Keep links relevant: The links should also lead back to high-quality and relevant information on your site. Search engines emphasize relevance, which is another reason it’s important to target websites within your industry. For example, if your site offers professional cleaning services, linking to a site offering cleaning equipment would be more relevant than linking to a sports equipment company.
- Less is more: As you aim for quality, you’ll realize that placing a few links on high-quality sites is much more effective than placing a larger number of links on suspicious or spammy sites. For instance, with the right social media management tools, you can make the most of your link building software on the most visible online platforms. It’s all about quality over quantity. I also recommend diversifying your link portfolio to have a mix of different kinds of links.
- Build relationships: Popular blogs are quickly becoming the place we go for reliable, relevant news for just about any industry. Take advantage of the existing audiences on blogs in your industry by commenting on posts or even guest blogging if you can. Blog comment links won’t pass any clout, but it will grab the author’s attention. If you are adding value, that will make it easier to partner up on content opportunities. Similarly, developing strong ties with industry influencers and reputable authors can help you add to your arsenal of well-placed links.
- Aim for resource pages: One of the more proven link building strategies is to get links included on a popular resource page. Websites often list helpful links and resources for specific topics, such as a recipe page on a food blog centered on a particular restaurant. If you have a recipe or related content to share, you can reach out to the website’s author to ask if he or she could include your links on the page. If it’s a good fit for the page and your brand, it can turn into a home run.
SEO Link Building Software
While there are many different ways to execute a successful link building strategy, one constant is the need for the right software for SEO link building to accomplish your goals. There are several to choose from, though — so how do you know which one is best?
Don’t worry. Here, we’ve compiled some of the best SEO link building software programs in 2019.
1. HubSpot
HubSpot’s link builder tool can assess the number of links and their overall contribution to your company’s SEO efforts — which means you can use the tool to measure the effectiveness of your links. First, you need to open a HubSpot account to get a clear picture of all your metrics. Then you can track domains linking to your website, see the total number of links to your site from those domains, and view the sites linking to your competitors so you can add them to your list of inbound link targets.
HubSpot’s link building software is part of a larger set of Marketing tools that HubSpot offers.
2. Mailshake
Mailshake is a simple-to-use software that sends email requests for link building, guest posting, and networking opportunities. The software allows you to choose from a collection of message templates, personalize your favorite, and send. This strategy improves the effectiveness of your email campaign as well as your business’s overall efficiency.
In addition to saving you time, Mailshake allows you to monitor replies, clicks, and more. The tool costs $29 per month to use, making it an affordable link building software solution for marketers who are just starting out with their cold email outreach.
3. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a powerful, well-rounded SEO software that provides several link building treats. With Ahrefs, you can analyze backlinks and referring domains, narrow them down with filters, and even secure your profile against suspicious links. The full suite of options lets you do anything you need your SEO link building software to do.
Ahrefs also features a speedy crawler that crawls over four million pages with no delays. Find link prospects by viewing your competitors’ data — including their top linked pages, new links, broken links, and more. To access Ahrefs, sign up for a seven-day trial, and then choose the plan that fits your needs and budget best after the trial expires.
4. Check My Links
Check My Links is a free Google Chrome extension that crawls through any web page to check for broken links. It’s one of the fastest link checkers you can use, and registers and reports all of the broken links on a website within 20 to 30 seconds. This gives you a significant advantage when reaching out to websites to promote links.
After checking a site with Check My Links, you can compile the broken links that are most relevant to your subject matter and propose replacing them with your own functional links. Hopefully, the site’s owner will appreciate you pointing out the broken links and offering a solution, and will update the post with your replacement links ASAP.
5. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is another popular software among SEO experts. It’s able to automatically monitor link building profiles and generate accurate reports. Screaming Frog’s most notable value is that it enables you to thoroughly understand your backlink profile as well as the other various factors that impact your website’s current search ranking. As a link building software, it also ensures that all of your links are working correctly.
Screaming Frog has a free and a paid version, both of which highlight any broken links and generate reports. However, for $149 per year, you can enjoy all of the software’s features along with unlimited website crawling.
6. ScrapeBox
ScrapeBox is a comprehensive link building software that pulls links out from search engines that match your keywords. It’s most useful if you want to analyze your competitors’ link profiles to gain insight into where you should target your link building efforts. You can even scrape hundreds of proxies to be used in other link building SEO software.
ScrapeBox offers several important advantages for your link building campaign, including the competitive edge of seeing into other brands’ link profiles. It also offers you the option of adding custom search engines and collecting not only the usual URLs, but all of their proxies, as well.
Link building is essential for the success of any online business, which you can measure by the volume of targeted traffic to your website. By following proven best practices and investing in the best SEO link building software, you can ensure that both traffic and prosperity remain high.
500+ Journalists Agree: These Are the Worst PR Tactics in 2019
Spend any amount of time searching the hashtag #PRFail on Twitter and you won’t struggle to find journalists lamenting about all of the bad PR pitches they received this week.
The relationship between journalists and PR professionals is complicated. While PR professionals need the media in order for their job to function, it’s also true that to some degree, journalists rely on PR professionals to deliver newsworthy story ideas directly to their inboxes.
Even though there are some #PRFail horror stories with shockingly bad tactics, these instances are still the minority.
PR pros usually teeter on a fine line between professionally offering content of value to a journalist — and rubbing them the wrong way.
Since PR professionals rely so heavily on their relationships with media contacts, it’s important to be professional in communication efforts and not bite the hand that feeds you, so to speak.
My team at Fractl has been earning top-tier coverage in the media for our clients for over six years, and we have always been interested in learning how to establish real, trusting relationships with media contacts to better serve our clients.
In an attempt to uncover what methods of communication really irks journalists, we surveyed 500+ journalists, editors, and freelance contributors to learn the most offensive email pitch pet peeves in 2019.
Let’s dive into those, now.
Journalists’ Top Ten Email Pitch Pet Peeves
1. Receiving an irrelevant pitch.
The most offensive PR practice as reported by over 500 journalists — by far — is receiving a pitch that is irrelevant to the writers’ beat.
A message to all PR practitioners: stop doing this.
Receiving an irrelevant pitch is easily the number one complaint from journalists. If a writer covers sustainable beauty, don’t pitch them about your sustainable fashion clients. There’s a better writer you could target.
Alternatively, if a writer covers personal finance, don’t pitch them your bitcoin related content unless their author archives suggest it’s highly relevant to something they’ve expressed interest in before.
Do your research, and then do it again. You might be certain that content you’re offering is relevant to a certain publication, but check to make sure. For example, Bustle.com covers all sorts of women’s interest topics. At first glance, you might think it’s a good fit to pitch a piece of content detailing female millennials favorite trendy diets. But you’d be wrong. This publisher is adamant about not covering anything related to diets or body shaming.
Research pays off.
2. Receiving too many follow-ups.
How many follow-ups becomes too many follow-ups? When is it okay to send a follow-up email? What should you include in a follow-up email? We asked journalists these questions and we found that online writers, editors, and freelance contributors prefer zero or one follow-up emails — and want to receive it an average of three to seven days after you’ve sent your initial pitch.
3. Receiving a pitch that is too self promotional without a real story.
Lastly, one bad PR practice to avoid is pitching a journalist a “story” when in reality you’re just hoping they’ll cover your client without offering anything to them that could be considered newsworthy.
For the most part, journalists aren’t interested in quoting someone in your organization without any context — nor do they want to write about new products or company updates.
It’s important to make sure you’re offering something of value to writers and editors.
Create compelling, newsworthy content that would appeal to their readership, and tie it back to your client’s goal or mission. Then, once you have a relevant pitch, reach out.
One popular content marketing format is using data to tell a story. Delve into an existing data set, run a survey (like we did in this article), or analyze trends in order to speak out about a common issue within your niche. Bring something truly interesting to the table and journalists will be that much more likely to cover your content (and your client).
Advice from Top Tier Journalists
We asked hundreds of journalists from top online publishers like TIME, CNN, The New York Times, Bustle and more the following question: “If you could give 1-3 points of feedback to the people pitching you, what would you say?”
Read their industry advice and feedback in the flipbook, below.
The Top Ten Worst PR Tactics
To summarize our findings in their entirety, these are the top ten worst pet peeves regarding PR pitches with which journalists struggle:
- Hasn’t researched your work / Irrelevant to your beat
- Hasn’t researched the publication you write for
- Too many follow-ups
- Self-promotional without a real story
- Cold calling
- Mass email blasts
- Generic angle to a common story
- Lack of cooperation or transparency (i.e. broken embargoes)
- Not personalized
- Copy of a press release
Remember — even if you avoid the ten bad practices above, it’s still not guaranteed that your pitch will be well-received.
The first step to earning press mentions for your client is to create a survey, study, or interactive so compelling, newsworthy, or surprising that a writer can’t resist covering it.
The second step is to build an outreach list full of online writers and editors that often cover the niche your content falls into to ensure the content is relevant to their audience.
The third step is to neatly and succinctly pack the most interesting data into an email pitch that communicates the gist of your content without being too self-promotional or generic.
Follow these steps, and you’ll be well on your way to building positive, mutually beneficial relationships with the media.
19 of the Best Landing Page Design Examples You Need to See in 2019
How do you convince your visitors to take the plunge on your website?
There are so many elements that a top-notch landing page needs, and making those elements the “best” they can be often depends on what your landing page goals are.
Take form length, for example. It’s just one of the many components you need to optimize, but best practices will tell you that both short and long forms perform well — it all depends on whether you want to generate a lot of (potentially) lower-quality form submissions, or a smaller number of higher-quality submissions.
So if you’re looking to up your landing page game, it’s helpful to know what goes into a great landing page and see a few examples of these nuanced elements in action.
Click one of the links below to jump to that section of the article:
Surprisingly, when I started doing research into landing page examples, I realized there are hardly any sites out there with modern, impressive landing page designs that are more than just a sign-up form on a homepage. So, we decided to compile a list of landing pages we love ourselves.
One big caveat here: I don’t have access to the stats for these pages, so I can’t tell you how well they convert visitors, leads, and customers. Still, these examples — even those that are no longer active on the business’s website — have some of the best combinations of those nuanced landing page elements I’ve ever seen.
Obviously, if you feel inspired to try any of these tactics on your own site, the only way to know whether they’ll work for you for sure is by testing them out for yourself.
Landing Page Examples
- Shopify
- Muzzle
- TransferWise
- Airbnb
- Teambit
- Wistia
- Webflow
- Nauto
- Industrial Strength Marketing
- Inbound Emotion
- Velaro Live Chat
- IMPACT Branding & Design
- Unbounce
- Bills.com
- Trulia
- Landbot
- Webprofits
- H.BLOOM
- Conversion Lab
Sign-Up Landing Pages
1. Shopify
Like many of the other landing pages in this post, Shopify’s trial landing page keeps it simple. The user-oriented headline is just a few words, for example, and the page relies on simple bullets, not paragraphs, to communicate the trial’s details and benefits. There are only a few fields you need to fill out before you get started. All of this makes it easier for you to get to the point: selling online with their tool.
2. Muzzle
Landing pages help users decide whether or not your product or service is actually worth their precious time and energy. What better way to clearly and straightforwardly communicate your value proposition than by confronting visitors with the very problem your app solves?
Muzzle, a mac app that silences on-screen notifications, fully embraces this show don’t tell mentality on their otherwise minimal landing page. Visitors to the page are greeted with a rapid-fire onslaught of embarrassing notifications in the upper left of the screen. Not only is the animation hilarious, it also manages to compellingly convey the app’s usefulness without lengthly descriptions.
3. TransferWise
TransferWise allows you to send and receive money in different currencies, and its landing page, shown below, separates each individual action so you’re not distracted by options that don’t apply to you.
If you want to send money, the transfer form is right there on the right for you to fill out. To receive money, simply click to the middle tab, and to sign up for TransferWise using your debit card, click to the far-right tab.
Each tab on this landing page produces a different call-to-action based on what you’re signing up for — each of them in a vibrant green box to highlight your next step after your three possible starting points.
4. Airbnb
To help convert visitors into hosts, Airbnb offers some enticing personalization: an estimated weekly average earnings projection based on your location. You can enter additional information about your potential accommodations into the fields to get an even more customized estimation.
If you visit the page already convinced, the clear call-to-action at the top of the page makes it easy to convert on the spot.
5. Teambit
Whimsical isn’t usually the first word that comes to mind when you think of HR software, but Teambit’s illustration-heavy landing page is exactly that. A simple, one-field form is accompanied by a delightful office full of animal characters — all of whom are very pleased with Teambit, in case you were wondering. An animal cartoon appears beside each informational section of the landing page, keeping visitors scrolling down to learn more.
Teambit’s landing page is perfect proof that you don’t need to have a conventionally “fun” product or service offering to create a fun landing page.
[Click here to see the whole landing page.]
6. Wistia
First up is Wistia’s landing page for their Free Wistia Account. Right off the bat, you notice the one-field form to create your account — the blue, minimally patterned background contrasts nicely with the bright white form field.
The length of the form field combined with the prominent placement eliminates nearly all friction to create an account … but if you’re having doubts, you can always scroll below to read answers to top FAQs. By separating these two sections with stark color contrast, Wistia makes it much easier for you focus on converting.
7. Webflow
Webflow, a design tool for web developers, packs a lot of information into just a GIF and three form fields. Having the entire sign-up form on a single line is a nice touch here — not only does it make the page shorter, but filling out each box from left to right shows users how close they are to clicking the fourth blue button and getting started for free.
The animated GIF below the form is visible in the same frame on the website, so users can see how the product works and sign up without scrolling or clicking over to a new page.
Ebook Landing Pages
8. Nauto
Nauto, a data platform for self-driving cars, helps make autonomous driving safer for companies who manage fleets of self-driving vehicles. Naturally, its customers would need all kinds of information to sell them on this platform. Nauto has it, packaged into a super-simple ebook whose landing page gives you both a brief contact form and some preview statistics to prove why this resource is so important.
At the top of the page, shown above, a warm photo of a car’s interior hugs the lead-capturing form. The green “Download Now” button might’ve even been on purpose (on the road, green means go, after all).
Scroll down, and you’ll see another “Get the eBook” CTA to remind users what’s waiting for them. You’ll also see three jarring statistics about car accidents to entice users to learn more. Check it out below.
9. Industrial Strength Marketing
Right off the bat, this landing page pulls me in with a compelling, punchy header: “Don’t Make Me Zoom.” It directly speaks to a common experience most of us have had when we’re browsing on our phones or tablets — and it’s a little sassy, too.
But that’s not the only thing keeping me interested in this landing page. Notice how the color red is strategically placed: It’s right at the top and bottom of the form, drawing you even closer to the conversion event.
Plus, this design is meta to boot: It looks and works great on mobile, too. Keep in mind that a lot of visitors will be accessing your landing pages on their smartphones or tablets, and if the design of your website doesn’t work well for them, they might give up and leave your page.
The folks at Industrial Strength Marketing made the fonts and form field big enough so that visitors don’t have to pinch-to-zoom to read and interact with the content, for example.
10. Inbound Emotion
Even if you don’t speak Spanish, you can still appreciate the conversion capabilities of this HubSpot partner site. My two favorite features of the page? The form stays in a fixed, prominent position as you scroll through the site. I also love the hands that serve as directional cues toward filling out the form and sharing the page with others.
11. Velaro Live Chat
Sometimes the smallest details make the biggest difference. They’re what make Velaro Live Chat’s landing page awesome, for example.
That small PDF symbol over the feature image helps set expectations for what format the download will be in. The arrow in front of the subheadline helps further direct your attention to important copy they want visitors to read. Like IMPACT, they also have an auto-checked box to subscribe to their newsletter on their form — which, if turned into an opt-in check box, is a great way to increase subscribers. All of these small, seemingly insignificant details help bring together a solid, admirable landing page design.
12. IMPACT Branding & Design
Full disclosure: IMPACT is a HubSpot partner — but that’s not why they’re included here. IMPACT’s landing pages have long been a source of design inspiration. I love the simple layout of the page, from the large headline copy and detailed featured image, to the outline that surrounds the form, to the colors and fonts that are very pleasing to the eye.
The free guide IMPACT is offering for download here also doesn’t emphasize the download itself in the blue button that allows you to submit your filled-out form. Rather, IMPACT is inviting you to “generate more conversions” — putting the focus on what you stand to gain as a result of reading the guide.
Landing Pages to Learn More
13. Unbounce
It’s no surprise Unbounce is near the top of this list — they’ve actually written the book on creating high-converting landing pages. Although there are lots of amazing things about this landing page, the two that I absolutely love are: 1) The use of a chat window instead of a classic form, and 2) the detailed — but well packaged — information below the form.
The first helps direct attention to the goal of the page — for you to fill out the form — in a way that’s unobtrusive and feels less like a chore. The second gives this page an SEO boost (search engines will have more content to crawl) and assuages any worry from folks who need to know more about a piece of content before handing over their information, all while not distracting people from the chat window.
14. Bills.com
Often, people think landing pages are static pages on your website. But with the right tools, you can make them interactive and personalized.
Take the example below from Bills.com. To see if you’d benefit from their consultation, you answer three questions before you are shown a form. It starts with this one:
Then, you answer two more questions, like the one below:
And here’s the final landing page form where you fill out your information:
I’m not sure how the algorithm works (or if there’s one at all), but while I was filling it out, I had some anxiety about not qualifying. Once I found out I did, I was excited to fill out the form, which I’m sure most people who are in debt and using this tool are. By making this offer seem more exclusive before the form appeared on the landing page, I’d bet that Bills.com increased conversions pretty significantly.
15. Trulia
Trulia did something very similar to Bills.com with their landing page. It starts with a simple form asking for “an address” (which sounds less creepy than “your address,” although that’s what they mean). Below this simple form field is a bright orange button that contrasts well with the hero image behind the form, and emphasizes that the estimate will be personalized to your home.
Of course, the address itself won’t be enough to estimate the value of a home. It just denotes the home’s neighborhood. That’s why the next page follows with more questions about the property itself, like number of beds and baths. Below, you see the copy “Tell us where to send the report” — with a disclaimer that, by entering this information, you’re agreeing to connect with a real estate agent. This is a great example of a company giving value to their visitors from the get-go, while setting visitors’ expectations about what will happen as a result.
16. Landbot
Landbot, a service that creates chatbot-based landing pages, puts their own product front and center on their chat-fueled landing page. Visitors are greeted by a friendly bot — complete with emojis and GIFs — who encourages them to provide information in a conversational format, instead of via a traditional form.
17. Webprofits
For a little contrast … what about long landing pages? With just a few tricks, you can make even the longest landing page feel short. Webprofits’ landing page below shows us how.
Right at the top, there’s a prominent CTA button to learn more — with a nice contrast against the background so it stands out, and a downward arrow to encourage scrolling. By not putting a form field up front, they help reduce friction and create an opportunity for visitors to learn more before being presented with a conversion option.
They also make it easy for you to figure out what Webprofits actually does. The rest of the page offers detailed information about what you’ll get when you give over your information. Plus, it includes strategic CTAs throughout to take you back to the top to fill out the form, like “Let’s Talk.”
18. H.BLOOM
Sometimes, you’ve just got to stop and admire a landing page for being beautiful. Using high-resolution photography and lots of white space, H.BLOOM’s landing page is a pleasure to look at.
Aside from its beauty, the page has some great conversions elements: an above-the-fold form, clear and concise description of what’ll happen when you fill out the form, and even the bright orange “Submit” button. The only thing we’d change up? The copy on the “Submit” button — that could be more specific to the offer at hand.
19. Conversion Lab
While I wouldn’t typically include an example of a homepage with a form on it in a post about landing pages, this website is special. The homepage is the entire website — the navigation links just take you to the information below.
When you click “Get Help With Landing Pages,” the entire site moves over to make room for the form. Here’s what it looks like before you click:
And, when you click that CTA, check out how the form appears:
I love how you don’t have to leave the page to fill out the form, yet the form won’t feel intrusive to casual website visitors.
Landing Page Ideas
A well-optimized landing page can transform prospects into leads by gathering information that can help you better understand, market to, and delight visitors. Since landing pages are crucial for conversions, it’s important to make sure they’re well planned, designed, and executed.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating landing pages:
- Appealing aesthetics: Giving your landing page color and a clean UI can only help. Visitors will want to learn more about your products and see evidence of the value you’re offering. Take a look at #10 on our list — Inbound Emotion — for a great example of a stunning web page.
- Less is more: Let the offer or images do most of the talking, but be sure to include any and all descriptive headlines and supporting text to make your landing page clear and compelling. This goes for just about all the components on the page: try white space, simple copy, and shorter forms.
- Keep visitors on the page: By removing the main navigation or any distracting backlinks, it’s less likely there will be any lead generation friction that could cause visitors to abandon your page.
- Social Sharing: A simple way of getting visitors to engage with your landing page is including social media sharing buttons so that they can spread your content to their social followings. After all, customers are the center of your marketing flywheel.
- A/B testing: Landing pages are important to get right, and since consumer psychology can sometimes be surprising, it’s always better to experiment with different versions of your pages to see which has the highest conversion rate (CVR). Test the positioning of the offer, kinds of CTAs, or even the color scheme.
- Call-To-Action: The CTA is where the meat of the landing page is, or the tipping point where prospects become contacts. CTAs could ask visitors to subscribe, download, fill out a form, share on social media, and more — but, overall, CTAs are necessary for getting your audiences more engaged with your offering. To generate leads, CTAs should be bold and eye-catching, but most importantly, they need to effectively communicate value.
An example of a creative CTA is Landbot — seen here at #16 — who has a chat box landing where their CTA is responding in the chat.
A Simple Guide to Marketing ROI [Formula & Examples]
Whenever you launch a new marketing campaign, you should test whether the cost of the project is helping or hurting your company. To determine something’s profitability, many marketers look at ROI — or return on investment. At the most basic level, ROI compares the amount of money you spend on a project with the amount of revenue you gain from it.
Ever wonder why we never saw a third sequel to the Jim Carrey classic, Bruce Almighty? One major reason could be the disastrous ROI of 2007’s Evan Almighty.
A few years after 2003’s Bruce Almighty grossed over $484 million, a sequel was made that starred The Office‘s Steve Carell.
In 2007’s Evan Almighty, God, played by Morgan Freeman, commands Carell to build an arc like the biblical figure, Noah. The movie’s marketing, award-winning cast, and special effects might have seemed promising at the time. But its production costs led to it having the biggest budget of any comedy film at $250 million. After the studio, cast, and crew spent huge amounts of time and money on the film, it only made a dismal $67 million in its first two weeks of release.
In comparison, Bruce Almighty, which had a budget slightly over $80 million, made nearly the same amount in its opening weekend.
While this example looks at ROI on an incredibly large scale, the strategy of measuring your returns can be incredibly helpful to marketers or small businesses as they learn which tactics are and aren’t worth repeating.
Determining one overall marketing ROI benchmark is challenging because all marketing tactics are different. When dealing with an online ad strategy like PPC, where ROI data is usually tracked automatically, you might be able to easily see how your ad’s return compares to others that are similar. Platforms like Google Ads also have years of extensive data to back up their reported 800% ROI benchmark.
When you’re dealing with other strategies, like content marketing, it might be hard to tell if your blog posts, podcasts, or videos are leading directly to a purchase — especially when the content isn’t on or linked directly to a landing page.
In fact, the Content Marketing Institute says that determining ROI has felt like a mystery to marketers for decades. Although the invention of tracking URLs and other technology has helped to determine the success of content, CMI still suggests looking at ROI from a long-term perspective and factoring in non-financial gains including audience growth.
For most businesses, one good way to set a “good ROI” benchmark for each marketing strategy is to look at the return from similar tactics you’ve tried in the past, as well as your current sales numbers. That information should help you create ROI benchmarks and goals that are realistic for your company.
When it comes to calculating marketing ROI, here’s a simple formula you can follow:
To use the marketing ROI formula, you’ll need to identify the following things:
- Number of leads: How many people converted to a lead?
- Lead-to-customer rate: What percentage of leads became a customer? If 12 out of 100 leads become a customer, your lead to customer rate would be 12% or 0.12.
- Average sales price: The average price of your product. An average can be helpful if you occasionally apply discounts or alter pricing in other ways.
- Cost or ad spend: How much did you spend on creating and promoting the marketing campaign? Here, you can factor in costs including ad spend, hourly wages of people who put time into the project, or costs related to producing content.
If you’re terrible at math, don’t worry. HubSpot customers can access an ROI calculator programmed with the same formula in our CRM.
Aside from looking at hard revenue, you might also want to consider other non-financial elements when determining if a marketing strategy is successful. These could include follows or likes on social media, unexpected traffic to your website, or even a sense of increased trust from your customers. While these things don’t offer an immediate financial return, they might indirectly boost purchases or customer relationships later on.
In this post, we’ll give you a few tips on how to determine financial ROI for six common marketing strategies. We’ll also describe a few fictional small-business marketing scenarios to show you how to use the ROI formula.
Marketing ROI Examples
Written Content
In our 2018 State of Inbound Report, we saw that 82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI in their Inbound Marketing strategy.
Although it might cost less to produce a blog post than a video, written content can still cost you time and money. If blogging is part of your marketing strategy, you’ll want to calculate time-related costs, production costs, and promotional costs into your total spend. To translate time into a dollar amount, track the number of hours that an employee spent on the project, then multiply that number by their hourly wage.
For example, if a blogger is paid $20 an hour and takes four hours to write a promotional post, your total cost will be $80 in labor plus any costs related to promoting the post.
If your blog links to a landing page, you’ll want to use a tracking URL instead of a basic page URL so you can see how many visitors are coming to the page directly from the blog.
Through tracking visits, leads, and customer conversions related to a blog post or article, you can see how efficient your strategy is. If you’re creating content that generates ROI, but realize that writing time is taking too long, you might want to look for ways to streamline that process. If you’re not getting ROI, you might want to make other adjustments to your plan or pivot to a new marketing strategy.
Example
A law firm that focuses on housing-related cases wants to gain more clients. They write five blog posts about tenant rights. Each post includes a tracking URL that links to a landing page where prospects can request a free legal consultation.
The firm spent $900 paying employees to draft five blog posts and $100 to promote it. The posts result in eight leads — four of which become clients. The firm made an average of $2,000 per client.
Here’s how their ROI would be calculated:
[((8 x 0.5 x $2,000) – $1,000) ÷ $1,000] x 100 = $700
If this rate of return works for the firm, they might want to continue the strategy as is. If they like the strategy but want to increase the ROI, they might try creating a video to see if it’s more effective or try to churn out posts at a higher frequency.
Email Marketing
While some might think email is outdated, it’s actually still a key marketing tool. In fact, a business can make $38 dollars for every dollar they spend on an email. Although the ROI may depend on how big a mailing list is, the type of ad in the email, or the audience the email targets, this marketing strategy still might be worth a company’s time.
While you might not need to track production time for a linked ad or CTA in an email, you’ll still want to be tracking the traffic it drives to your site. Like the written content example above, we suggest using a tracking URL.
Here’s an example of how a company might measure ROI of email marketing.
Example
A local dog daycare offers a weekly e-newsletter to customers and those who sign up on their website. An organic dog food company pays them $100 to place an ad that links to a purchasing page for their newest product.
Because the ad is linked with a tracking URL, the dog food company can see that it drove 50 visitors to their product page. Of those visitors, 20 placed the dog food in their cart and 17 purchased it. That ROI formula would look like this:
[((20 x .85 x $20) – $100) ÷ $100] x 100 = $240
After seeing how much money they gained from the newsletter, the dog food company might continue to place ads in that weekly email. They might also want to branch out to other dog-related emails.
Video Marketing
A whopping 83% of marketers say video gives them strong ROI. But like any type of content marketing, you’ll need to spend time and money on producing videos. You might even need to buy or rent film equipment or editing software.
As you script and produce a marketing video, use these tips to film it affordably. You’ll also want to keep track of the total cost of labor, equipment, and promotion.
You should be sure to identify ways that you’ll measure your video’s effectiveness. For example, if you upload a video to social media platforms, you should include a tracking URL in the post caption that leads to the product’s landing page. This way, you can see how many visitors were driven to the page because of the video post.
Example
A sales AI software company is launching a new product that automates many menial tasks within the sales process. The company has a landing page for demo signups, but they haven’t generated many leads. They think it’s because the average sales person isn’t understanding what this AI technology can do to help them.
The team decides to make a demo video to show sales reps how the software works and how it can help them cut down on time-consuming tasks. The video is shared on LinkedIn along with a tracking link to the demo signup landing page. The video is also placed on the landing page itself.
It cost the company $300 to buy video supplies and $200 in labor to produce the video. After it was circulated, it resulted in five demo signups which lead to three purchases of the $2,000 product.
Here’s their formula:
[((5 x 0.6 x $2,000) – $500) ÷ $500] x 100 = $1,100
Since they made $1,100, the software company might continue making demo videos. Now that they’ve already made a one-time purchase of supplies, they also wouldn’t need to calculate that cost into ROI of future projects.
Sponsored Content
When a brand doesn’t have time or bandwidth to produce their own branded media, they might pay another person, publisher, or company to create sponsored content. While staffing someone outside of your office will cost your company money, you might want to think of the extra hours your team will have to do other productive projects if they don’t have to create content.
While you don’t need to track labor costs of your own employees, you will want to use the ROI formula to see how the payment for the sponsored content compares to the amount of money you gained from the campaign.
Example:
A boutique wants to promote their new line of summer dresses, but they don’t have time or equipment to make a video. They connect with a local fashion influencer and pay her $300 to do an Instagram video titled, “The Best Summer Dresses for 2019.”
They tell the influencer to place a tracking URL to the online store in her bio. She also directs viewers to the bio in the video’s caption. Through the tracking link, the boutique can see that they’ve gotten 50 visits. Of those visits, 30 people put an item in their cart. Ten purchased one of the $50 dresses.
They use this formula to calculate their ROI:
[((10 x 0.33 x $50) – $300) ÷ $300] x 100 = -$45
Because they lost money on this, the boutique might want to move away from influencer marketing and invest on in-house strategies.
If they realized they gained more of a social media following, or more traffic than usual, they might still want to continue with the influencer. But to see if they can improve ROI, they might have her post the same video and link on more social platforms to see if gains more traction.
PPC Campaigns
With pay-per-click, you’re paying for every click your ad gets, even if it doesn’t lead to a sale. While Google says its advertisers get a strong ROI, small businesses still waste 25% of their budget on poorly managed PPC campaigns. After your ad is launched, you’ll want to closely monitor ROI and wasted spend to learn from and avoid major losses on an ad.
There are a number of tools that can help you monitor and manage live PPC campaigns. You can also use our ROI formula to look at your ad’s performance. Here’s an example that shows you how:
Example:
An online gardening store wants to use a PPC ad to spread awareness of a new line of luxury lawn mowers — which cost $1,000 each.
On their first campaign, where the price isn’t shown, they spent $1,000. Of the visitors they received, three placed the item in their cart and one made a purchase. In the next campaign, they included the price. They spent a total of $500. Of their web visitors, 12 placed the lawnmower in a cart and seven purchased it.
To see how the PPC ad’s script change impacted ROI, the garden store could use the formula for both campaigns. They could count users who carted the product as a lead.
First Campaign: [((3 x .33 x $1,000) – $1,000) ÷ $1,000] x 100 = -$1
Second Campaign: [((12 x .583 x $1,000) – $500) ÷ $500] x 100. = $129.92
From this comparison, the company is able to see how price transparency can cause more qualified leads to click on the ad. They also might realize that price transparency helps them avoid paying for the clicks of people who can’t afford the lawn mower.
Paid Social Media Promotion
If a company has an audience that regularly uses social media, like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, they might want to consider boosting one of their posts so it’s promoted on newsfeeds of target audiences.
With most social promotions, you’ll be able to set a goal or audience target, a time limit, and a budget. Tracking your ROI can help you determine if the social boost strategy is working, as well as the types of posts that lead to the best return.
Example
A lifestyle publication is trying to gain web subscriptions, which cost $10 a month. They decide to offer a one-month free trial to pull in leads. They create a post about the trial for Twitter which includes a tracking URL that leads to the free-trial landing page.
They boost the post for four days with a budget of $25 per day. In the timespan of the posted boost, they’d received 100 visitors and 20 signed up for a free trial. Of the 20, four become paid subscribers.
Here’s the calculation:
[((20 x .2 x $10) – $100) ÷ $100] x 100 = -$60
Because the publication lost $60 and still has to honor the free subscriptions they gave out, they might decide to avoid boosting posts on this platform. If they haven’t given up on a boosting strategy just yet, they might try paid promotion on another social platform next time.
Best Practices of Measuring Marketing ROI
When it comes to marketing, determining ROI can seem tricky. While more traditional PPC and social media ads can provide more specific rates of return, it can still be challenging to link hard revenue numbers to marketing content like videos and blogs.
Regardless of which marketing strategy you’re using, monitoring the following factors can help you determine if your campaigns are really successful:
- Time: How much time did it take to create the marketing materials?
- Production Costs: Track the total cost of supplies, services, and software needed to create the campaign.
- Promotional Costs: Did you spend anything for promotion? If so, add that to your total costs.
- Page Analytics: Use a tracking URL to determine if your content is driving traffic to your product’s landing page.
- Non-Financial Returns: Did you gain any social media engagement, unexpected traffic boosts, or other bonuses from your campaign? If so, this could still be helping your level of brand awareness.
For more on content-related ROI, check out this step-by-step guide that offers tips on how to track it and a list of tools that can help you. As you gain more customers, you might also want to check out this infographic that dives into ROI associated with great customer experiences.
