With all the algorithm updates, changing content preferences, and memes sprouting up on social media, it can be more challenging to adapt your marketing strategy to the channel than it was acclimating to the awkwardness of puberty.

Despite its perpetual evolution, though, social media will always have one constant — people. For the most part, human behavior has stayed the same for thousands of years, which means the principles of psychology are unwavering. So if you want to succeed on social media, you need to focus more on the people using it than the trends changing it.

To help you develop an audience-centric social media strategy, we’ve compiled 15 insightful quotes about social media from executives, marketers, and even celebrities. Read on to get inspired.

1. “People want to go on the Internet and check out their friends so why not build a website that offers that? Friends, pictures, profiles, whatever you can visit, browse around, maybe it’s someone you just met at a party. I’m not talking about a dating site. I’m talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.” – Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network

2. “It’s a dialogue, not a monologue, and some people don’t understand that. Social media is more like a telephone than a television.” – Amy Jo Martin, author of Renegades Write The Rules

3. “We get to live in a time that we get to use social media as a tool. It’s not just a face on a piece of paper, and that’s what makes you someone’s favorite model. We can have a very similar sense of humor as someone, and that’s why we’re their favorite model, or our personal style, off the runway, is why we’re their favorite.” – Gigi Hadid, fashion model

4. “I’m very active on social media and see the huge impact it has on engaging with fans and being able to have a voice.” – Stephen Curry, professional basketball player for the Golden State Warriors

5. “A lot of people who are ‘social media’ stars aren’t considered to be ‘real’ stars, and people underestimate the amount of work it takes to edit and upload a video every single day and document your life like that.” – Shawn Mendes, singer

Social Media Marketing Quotes

6. “When I hear people debate the ROI of social media? It makes me remember why so many businesses fail. Most businesses are not playing the marathon. They’re playing the sprint. They’re not worried about lifetime value and retention. They’re worried about short-term goals.” – Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia

7. “A large social-media presence is important because it’s one of the last ways to conduct cost-effective marketing. Everything else involves buying eyeballs and ears. Social media enables a small business to earn eyeballs and ears.” – Guy Kawasaki, Chief Evangelist, Canva

8. “Facebook is a discovery model platform. Its primary goal is to make the audience happy. So you’ll only get ROI if you create quality content for your audience.” – Kelly Hendrickson, Facebook Lead at HubSpot

9. ‘Instead of getting discouraged when a promising tweet doesn’t rack up the likes and retweets, pay attention to the clicks and check how long people stay on the page after coming from social. If your post is generating strong engagement, don’t worry so much about the superficial stats.” – Tallie Gabriel, Producer at Unthinkable Media

10. “When pitching to press outlets, you need to help drive traffic through social to make it worth the effort of PR professionals. In addition to traditional outlets, publications are now generating traffic from native content within social platforms. So if you want to engage with members of the press and PR professionals today, you need to analyze their social media pages to learn what kind of content they’re sharing — before pitching.” – Ryan Bonnici, CMO at G2Crowd

Funny Social Media Quotes

Quick Note:

We found these quotes on Pinterest. The authors are unknown, but they’ll still give you a good laugh.

11. “What happens on social media stays on Google forever.”

12. “Being famous on Instagram is basically the same thing as being rich on Monopoly.”

13. “Tumblr is currently the only social media network that your parents haven’t ruined.”

14. “I log off because I’m bored. I log back on in five minutes because I’m bored.”

15. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, plus a social media overreaction.”

More than likely, your company’s social media strategy revolves primarily around Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Perhaps, if you’re trying to attract a younger demographic, you use Snapchat, too.

But sticking to those platforms alone could mean a major missed opportunity — Pinterest.

Pinterest now attracts 150 million people per month. Additionally, its growth supersedes traditional social network success stories — millennial use of Pinterest in particular has increased more than any other social network, even Snapchat.

There are a few categories that people often turn to Pinterest for before looking anywhere else — hairstyles, for instance, or healthy dinner recipes. Additionally, if you search “Motivational quotes” and then click “Images” on Google, you’ll find yourself bombarded with a myriad of intricately designed quotes from Pinterest’s website.

In short, there are certain topics that do exceptionally well on Pinterest, and it’s critical you know which categories those are, so you can enact a brand strategy that enables your business to find success on the platform.

Keep reading to learn the seven most popular Pinterest Categories of 2019, and which ones your business should pin to.

Pinterest Categories

1. Travel

Whether you’re looking for a tourist-free island to visit or need fall weekend getaway ideas, it makes sense you’d start with Pinterest. And, in fact, most people do — two times more travelers use Pinterest vs. top online travel agency sites.

On Pinterest, Travel + Leisure has 7.3 million monthly viewers, and the Travel Channel has 2.9 million monthly viewers. Whether you’re a travel agent or blogger, you can likely attract a good deal of brand awareness by posting envy-inducing images of faraway destinations on the site.

2. Health and wellness

One of Pinterest’s most popular categories in 2019 can likely be attributed, at least in part, to the new buzz around self care, the success of boutique fitness studios like SoulCycle, and the rising popularity on Instagram of hashtags like #healthyliving. Whether a user is searching for organic smoothie recipes, yoga clothing, or weight-lifting exercises, Pinterest is a viable opportunity to showcase your products or services related to health and wellness. In fact, the search for “healthy habits” increased on Pinterest within the last year by almost 500%.

3. DIY home renovation projects

In 2018, 83% of home-related searches on Pinterest were “day-to-day DIY projects”. Nowadays — perhaps in part due to the rising popularity of HGTV shows, which prove how minor adjustments on a home can have major impact — people are more inclined to make home improvements themselves, and turn to Pinterest for home décor inspiration. If you’re in the business of interior design or home renovations, you might consider posting design tips, color themes, or simple DIY projects on Pinterest.

4. Women’s style

If you own a retail boutique or design your own clothes, it’s critical you take advantage of Pinterest’s audience — which, while there are increasing sign-ups from men, is still primarily women. For instance, Jo-Lynne Shane, a lifestyle and fashion blogger, took advantage of Pinterest to promote her brand by creating a “30 Days of Fall Fashion” special series of posts. She found her traffic quickly doubled, and she now has 5.9 million monthly viewers on Pinterest. From tortoise earrings (+679% in search volume in 2019) to biker shorts (+1323%), it’s undeniable women’s fashion is still as relevant on Pinterest as ever.

5. Beauty

I, like many of my friends, research all my new hairstyles on Pinterest before entering a hair salon. If you’re a hairstylist, makeup artist, or manicurist, then, it’s a major missed opportunity not to post photos of your clients’ before-and-after shots on Pinterest. Additionally, the Pinterest community is 2.4x more likely to experiment with different makeup vs. women on other platforms, and searches like “standout lip color” and “powder dip nails” increased by over 400% in the past year. Along with posting your own images, you might consider using Pinterest to keep up-to-date with trends in your industry, and see what type of looks clients could want in the future.

6. Food and drink

Sometimes, the easiest way to decide what you want to cook for dinner is to peruse images of recipes online — which is why Pinterest is an incredibly popular avenue for food and drink-related content, with over 23 billion recipes and dining ideas posted. You’ll find everything from food blogger’s recipes to a restaurant’s signature dish. If you work in the food industry, it’s critical you use Pinterest as an opportunity to connect and engage with other foodies, and to share recipes (or find inspiration for yourself).

7. Motivational quotes

Type “Motivational quotes” into Google, and then click “Images”. My guess is, plenty of your results come from Pinterest. And, while I’m willing to bet “motivational quotes” isn’t your business in-and-of-itself, this is still an interesting opportunity for increased brand awareness.

For instance, let’s say you’ve written a blog post about successful women in leadership positions. You might consider taking some of those women leadership quotes, and designing them on a template before posting them to Pinterest. Now, they’re likely more easy-to-uncover in Google’s Image Search, and could lead users back to your site. Additionally, offering fun, inspiring quotes is a good way to make your brand seem more helpful.

Featured image courtesy of Refinery29.com

In high school, one of my friends was determined to find the perfect time to post her Instagram photos to maximize the amount of likes she got. She was surprisingly scientific about it, posting at different times of the day and jotting down each of her posts’ “likes per minute.”

After weeks of testing, she figured out which post time raked in the most likes, and, from then on, she could easily get 200 likes on all her Instagram posts.

My friend’s rather scientific method to maximize her Instagram likes still makes me chuckle to this day. But since I’m a marketer now, her desire to build a strong Instagram presence also resonates with me.

To build a sizable Instagram following, you need to create compelling content that your audience actually craves. But if you don’t post your content at the right time, most of them will never see it.

So how do you figure out the optimal post time for your specific audience?

The best way to find an ideal posting time is by testing the timing of your posts to see which post time generates the most audience engagement.

But if you don’t have enough resources or time to conduct your own tests, Sprout Social, a social media management platform with over 24,000 customers, has you covered. Last year, they analyzed their customer data to see what time and day their social media posts generated the most engagement. They also segmented the data by social network and industry.

Looking at their aggregate customer data for Instagram, you can see that the following days and times — in Central Daylight Time (CDT) — are ideal for generating the most engagement on the social network:

As stated above, although 2 – 3 PM is considered the best time of day to post on Instagram, the day of the week on which you post can change how much engagement you actually get at 2 – 3 PM.

Why? Think about the little differences in your daily mood and routine — the ones you might not realize you have — and how they affect your behavior. The same goes for everyone following your Instagram account. Here are some additional insights about optimal post timing from data by Sprout Social to show you what I mean:

• Posting at 5:00 AM CDT from Tuesday to Friday generates some of the highest engagement — people usually check their phones right when they wake up.
• Posting from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM CDT during the weekdays also generates a lot of engagement — people usually check their phones during lunch or when they start to run out of mental energy toward the end of the work day.
• If you want to post on the weekends, post on Saturday around 11:00 AM CDT when people eat brunch or hang out with their friends.

So, when Instagramming, don’t go by this time range alone. Consider both the day of the week and the industry you’re in (we’ll talk about the latter in just a minute).

Best Time to Post on Instagram for Each Day of the Week

On average, here are the best times to Instagram during the week:

• Sunday: 10 AM – 2 PM CDT
• Monday: 11 AM – 5 PM CDT
• Tuesday: 5 AM, 9 AM – 6 PM CDT
• Wednesday: 5 AM, 11 AM, *3 PM CDT
• Thursday: *5 AM, *11 AM, *3 – 4 PM CDT
• Friday: *5 AM, 9 AM – 4 PM CDT
• Saturday: 11 AM CDT

* = particularly high levels of engagement

Want some easy marching orders based on this data? Post to Instagram between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM CDT from Tuesday to Friday. You’ll get the most consistent engagement that way.

The general data above about optimal post timing is a great starting point for growing an engaged Instagram audience. But if you want to get more granular, here are the best times to post on Instagram if your organization is in the technology, B2C, education, healthcare, and non-profit industries, according to Sprout Social’s research.

Best Times to Post on Instagram for Technology Companies

• Best Time: Wednesday at 10:00 AM CDT
• Most Consistent Engagement: Wednesday to Friday from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM CDT
• Best Day: Thursday
• Worst Day: Sunday

Best Times to Post on Instagram for B2C Companies

• Best Time: Saturday at 11:00 AM & 1:00 PM CDT
• Most Consistent Engagement: Everyday from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM CDT
• Best Day: Wednesday
• Worst Day: Monday

Best Times to Post on Instagram for Educational Organizations

• Best Time: Monday at 8:00 PM CDT
• Most Consistent Engagement: Weekdays from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM CDT
• Best Day: Monday
• Worst Day: Sunday

Best Times to Post on Instagram for Healthcare Companies

• Best Time: Tuesday at 1:00 PM CDT
• Most Consistent Engagement: Tuesday to Friday from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM CDT
• Best Day: Tuesday
• Worst Day: Saturday & Sunday

Best Times to Post on Instagram for Non-Profit Organizations

• Best Times: Tuesday at 3:00 PM & 9:00 PM, Wednesday at 3:00 PM & 4:00 PM, Thursday at 2:00 PM & 3:00 PM, and Friday at 10:00 AM & 2:00 PM,
• Most Consistent Engagement: Weekdays from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM
• Best Day: Tuesday
• Worst Day: Saturday

Every brand’s audience is different. To build a sizable, engaged Instagram audience, you need to know who your followers are. And one of the best ways to get to know your audience and capture their attention is by knowing exactly when they like to surf the app. 

In the world of marketing, it seems like there are always new tools, tips, tricks, and trends to discover and incorporate into your marketing strategy. How is it possible to keep up with them all?

As a marketer myself, I often wish I had a better sense of all of the tools available to me — and what sets each of them apart — so I can make more informed decisions on how to create and optimize content.

Luckily, I have the privilege of working on a team of 150+ other marketers who specialize in different functions than I do. And because of that, I was able to curate this list of the top 61 tools every marketer should know about and use in 2019.

The list of recommended tools below is sorted into different sections so you can get a better sense of what tools are available for different functions of the job. At the end, you’ll see the whole list of 61 tools that you can skim and bookmark for later. Nearly 50 of them are free marketing tools, which means the product offers either a free version with limited resources or a select group of tools inside the product that are yours to use at no charge.

Enjoy!

Your List of the Best Marketing Tools to Build Your Strategy in 2019

Marketing Automation

Automation is nothing new to marketers. Whether you want to save time doing marketing tasks or simply cut time wasted doing those daily tasks like saving emails and files to spreadsheets, having a tool that makes your life easier and saves you time is ideal.

While there are lots of automation tools out there for specific fields or verticals (for example, the HubSpot workflows tool for marketing automation), there aren’t many tools that allow you to automate the various different tools you use throughout all aspects of your life.

Wouldn’t it be nice to link lots of tasks between different apps together? Like posting your Instagram photos to all your social networks or linking your app reminders together. With IFTTT you can!

IFTTT (IF This Then That) is a service that allows you to create chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. These “if this then that” applets are triggered by a wide range of other web-based services at the choice of the user. Some of the web-based services that work with IFTTT include Gmail, Google Drive, Facebook, Twitter, Fitbit, and much, much more.

Sounds great, right? Check it out.

Data Reporting

Most tools that automate some of your marketing strategy will also provide reports that allow you to see and present your campaigns’ performance to other employees in your company. What if you want a more holistic look at the health of your marketing?

From the efficiency of your content calendar to the effectiveness of your lead-generation methods, Digital Marketing Tuner offers a helpful overview of all of your latest marketing activities.

Developed by OverGo Studio, an inbound marketing agency and HubSpot Agency Partner, Digital Marketing Tuner guides you through a brief survey where you can submit basic information about your company’s content volume, email open rates, website traffic, and more. The tool then sends you a detailed report in which you can better visualize your team’s strengths and weaknesses so you can make even better decisions for your company moving forward.

Closing Deals and Tracking Relationships

You and your sales team want to sell your product or service — not fight with messy spreadsheets, cluttered inboxes, or clunky tools that slow you down. That’s why using a Customer Relationship Management System — also known as a CRM — is essential. Not only will it help your sales team manage relationships, but a CRM will also give you a place to deliver those leads you generated to your sales team.

CRMs are such an essential part of any good marketing and sales team that we think everyone should have one. That’s why the HubSpot CRM is completely free.

HubSpot CRM automates the tasks salespeople hate and takes minutes to learn — not months. That means doing more deals and less data entry.

Check out the HubSpot CRM Now

Collaboration

In any marketing team, the inevitable happens: there’s a million files and pieces of content between everyone on your team without one place to keep it all. Organization on any team — let alone a marketing team — is essential. That’s why it’s important to have a collaborative organization tool to keep you sane.

Dropbox is the perfect tool to keep your team organized and your files under control. With cloud-based software to keep your files accessible anywhere at anytime, Dropbox helps your team store all of its files in a central location. Dropbox makes it easy to collaborate, too. With tools like Dropbox Paper, which allows you to write and collaborate in real time on the same doc — and sharing tools for shared folders and files, you’ll be organized and ready for any project that comes your way.

Get Dropbox for Your Team Now

Other Collaboration Tools:

• Google Drive
• Box
• Trello

Content Creation

In the world of content creation, there are admittedly tons of different tools you could use to create various types of content. Whether it’s social images, logos, blog posts, or ebooks — the options and tools are endless.

That said, a newcomer among the Adobe Suite of tools is winning the hearts of many marketers, including this one, for its ease of use to create stunning webpages, awesome videos, and eye-catching graphics. The best part? It’s completely free and impossibly easy.

Adobe Spark is a suite of three web or mobile apps – Spark Page, Spark Post, and Spark Video — that allows marketers to easily create graphics, webpages, and videos in a variety of themes in minutes.

You can completely avoid the hassle of page layout, video editing knowledge, or a CMS and start creating content that looks remarkable immediately. For example, we use Spark Page at HubSpot to create some of our online guides and promote them with Spark Videos and Posts. You can too!

Check out Adobe Spark

Other Content Creation Tools:

• Venngage
• Piktochart
• Canva
• Recordit
• Kap
• Adobe Color CC

Video Marketing

It’s 2017 — haven’t you heard? Video is the thing everyone is talking about. But how do you actually implement it into your marketing?

Maybe your strategy is just to put a YouTube video embed on one of your blog posts or landing pages. But then what happens? Someone else’s ad plays on your landing page before your video even begins. That’s bad for your conversion rates, brand, and your user. Luckily, there’s a solution.

Wistia is a powerful video hosting platform that allows you to host your videos on your website — ad free — with a guaranteed smooth playback and responsive player. Wistia also helps you prove the ROI of your video efforts by offering you video analytics and key metrics to fine-tune your video marketing efforts over time. Ready to take your video marketing to the next level?

Try Wistia for Free Now

Other Video Tools:

• Vidyard
• Vimeo
• YouTube

Content Distribution and Brand Awareness

While it might seem like a given, when it comes to getting your content distributed online, there really is king that we’d be remiss if we’d different mention:

I know, I know. Google isn’t “exactly” a new or a fascinating tool that you didn’t already know about. That said, within the same parent company is another important distribution channel that many marketers often forget when they’re strategically distributing content for the sake of brand awareness.

YouTube is becoming more and more important to marketers lean more heavily on video-based content. While, of course, you should continue to optimize your text-based content for search engine optimization, don’t forget to consider YouTube as an important channel as well. Not only is YouTube great for hosting your videos and getting them shared across social networks, it’s also important to optimize your videos for search to get found on YouTube as well.

Other Distribution and Brand Awareness Channels:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Linkedin
• Product Hunt

Continuing Education and Learning

A challenge all marketers face is the need for continuous learning over time. With new tools and methods changing all the time, it’s essential to stay on top of the trends and changes. Luckily, there aren’t a shortage of tools and platforms for you to learn new tactics or techniques and take necessary classes.

HubSpot Academy, for example, is a great place to go anytime you need to get up-to-date information on the latest marketing best practices, find answers to your questions, get certified in a new area of expertise, or renew certifications on subjects that you’re a little rusty on.

Bookmark your HubSpot Academy portal today

Other Ongoing Education and Learning Tools:

• Lynda.com
• Udemy
• Codecademy
• Skillshare
• General Assembly

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

When it comes to your bottom-line goals, you probably want a few tools for not only attracting prospects to dedicated marketing campaigns, but just as importantly, converting those visitors into leads and customers.

Thanks to a drag and drop interface, Unbounce lets you quickly build mobile responsive landing pages without developer assistance. The tool also integrates with a number of different CMS platforms and tools.

With Unbounce Convertables, you can also launch targeted overlays on top of any web page, each with a dedicated call to action. Customizable triggers and targeting rules give you control over who sees your offers and when, so you can serve the most relevant offers to the right audience.

Try Out Unbounce Now

Other CRO Tools:

• Hotjar
• Optimizely
• Leadpages
• HubSpot Landing Pages Tool (try it below)

Event Marketing

Whether your team holds monthly customer and prospect events, yearly conferences, or just occasional community outreach parties and events, it’s important to have the best event marketing tool up your sleeve when the time comes to use it. After all, in-person events are some of the best ways to interact with potential customers and create a brand experience that prospects, customers, and your community will remember.

Eventbrite is an efficient, easy-to-use tool tons of marketers rely on not only to manage the logistics (like ticketing) of events but also to promote their events. Eventbrite lets you create an event landing page and allows you to set up your ticketing and payment for the event all within the same platform. The best part? Eventbrite is always free if you’re hosting a free event!

Check Out Eventbrite Now

Other Event Marketing Tools:

• Picatic
• Facebook
• AddEvent

Innovation and Efficiency Tools

If you’re on the search for new marketing tools, chances are you’re not just looking for the hammer and the nail in your toolkit. Instead, you might be looking for new and innovative solutions to try out and experiment with in your marketing. Sound about right?

As marketers, you’ve probably used forms — whether on your site or in a survey — more than a few times. But have you ever started to get bored with the same old, robotic form type?

Typeform is the tool you need to try if you’re looking for new ways to interact with your prospects and customers while giving them a positive, human-centered experience. Typeform isn’t just another survey tool. It’s a conversational, interactive typeform that feels more interactive than a standard form. Use it to host survey content, lead forms, or even create content with it by putting together quizzes and more.

Try Using Typeform in your Marketing Today

Other Innovative Tools to Try:

• Giphy
• Todoist

Keeping Up with the Latest Industry News Tools

Reading this post alone won’t end your career-long pursuit for the latest tools, trends, and marketing techniques. That’s why keeping up with the latest industry news is a full part of your job as a marketer.

Product Hunt, a tool meant for finding the latest tools and products, is a must for any marketer trying to stay on top of the industry and find new channels to promote their own product launches. Product Hunt is a daily feed of launched tools, letting people upvote what they think is interesting. Pro tip: when you sign up for Product Hunt, set it as your homescreen in your browser so you’ll always have a reminder to keep an eye out for what’s new. Who knows? You might even decide to use some of the featured tools yourself!

Sign Up for Product Hunt Now

Other News and Timely Tools:

• Flipboard
• Pocket
• Your choice of online news sources or magazines

Lead Generation

If you’re in the mood for demand generation, you probably have you eyes on the prize: converting anonymous website visitors into contacts with email addresses that you can successfully nurture. While landing pages are a must for some things, sometimes you want a shorter, simpler user experience to capture lead information.

HubSpot’s free marketing tools can help do just that. The moment a lead shares their email, you’ll know who they are, where they work, and what pages they visited — all in real time. When they view an offer or check your pricing, you’ll be ready to follow up right away.

And with simple but powerful analytics, you’ll learn more about what’s working and what’s not — like which traffic sources or pieces of content are driving the most conversions. It’s a risk-free way to find out what inbound marketing can do for you. No budget necessary.

Try HubSpot’s Free Marketing Tools

Lead Nurturing

In the world of lead nurturing, the tools and techniques used are constantly involving. While some aspects of nurturing remain the same, like using email to nurture contacts down your funnel, for example, the content and positioning you use is ever-changing. It would be easy for us to introduce a set of standard workflow and automation tools (like HubSpot’s, for example) you can use to nurture your contacts down the funnel. But if you’re looking for something a little more innovative for actually creating nurturing content, we have a new tool for you to try.

Vidyard is a great tool for creating and hosting awesome video content in your nurturing flows and otherwise. At HubSpot, for example, we’ve even started using Vidyard to create unique, customized nurturing videos specific to our audience and product. What makes Vidyard so great is its variety of video tools that you can use to create remarkable content.

From Vidyard’s live feature to its studio content creation products to its free tool – ViewedIt — Vidyard is an excellent tool if you’re a marketer looking to jump on the video bandwagon and start integrating video into all of your content.

Check out Vidyard Today

Online Advertising

If your team is making investments into PPC ad campaigns on platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, it’s probably a bit of a hassle to manage all the different ad campaigns you’re running across each different network. Besides just managing them, you then have to try and report on the results of all of them. What a struggle. Luckily, there’s a tool for that.

AdStage takes the hassle out reporting on all of the PPC campaigns you’re running and puts it all in one place. AdStage helps you automate, create, and manage your campaigns across all of the major PPC platforms, then allows you to report on your results. With visual features and powerful automation tools, AdStage is a must for PPC experts and newbies alike.

Check out AdStage

Other Online Advertising Tools:

• HubSpot Ads Add-On
• Perfect Audience
• Google Ads
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• AdRoll

Project Management

File management and organization is one thing, but how do you manage all of the moving pieces of a marketing campaign or project? There are many different tools you can use for project management, but only one sticks out when it comes to the number of integrations and features at the price of — oh yeah — free!

Trello is a great project management tool for small teams and individuals. With it’s Kanban-style setup and fun user interface, Trello lets you set up to-do lists and tag individual cards with due dates, members, labels, and more. You can attach files, links, images, and more to your cards and easily get a full-view of any project that you’re working on. At HubSpot, we use Trello daily to manage our team campaigns and individual to-do lists. Want an example of how we do this? Check out our guide to managing marketing campaigns in Trello.

Get Trello — It’s Free!

Other Project Management Tools:

• HubSpot Projects Tool (one of many tools in the HubSpot Marketing Platform)
• JIRA
• Asana
• Airtable

Search Engine Optimization

Whether its keyword research, content optimization, or checking your current page rankings, every marketer needs a go-to tool for planning what content to create and how to optimize it for SEO. Google Analytics and SEMrush our great tools for planning which keywords to rank for, but how do you make sure the content you create actually meets your goal once it’s created?

Ryte is the ideal tool marketers can use to make sure their SEO efforts are having a real impact on their marketing strategy.

Check out Ryte now

Other SEO Tools:

• HubSpot Content Strategy Tool
• Google Analytics / Keyword Tool
• Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Moz

Social Media

Social Media Managers know the pain of posting that perfect social media post only to have a follower find a typo a minute later and call you out. For marketers, using a social media tool to schedule all of your posts (so you catch those typos beforehand) is a must. But it also helps to get the right analytics from your social posts, especially on channels where it can be hard to get that information.

Iconosquare is the perfect tool for marketers to grow their brand on Instagram with easy-to-use analytics. It’s not always easy to know what’s working and what’s not on Instagram. But, as the second most popular social channel and one that’s quickly approaching first most popular among some age groups, it’s a channel that marketers can’t afford to miss out on. Try Iconosquare now to maximize your Instagram analytics and optimize your brand Instagram channel for success.

Try Iconosquare Now

Other Social Media Tools:

• Buffer
• Hootsuite
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Linkedin
• HubSpot Social Inbox (one of many tools in the HubSpot Marketing Platform)

Team Communication

Where would your work day be without accessibility and communication between you and your colleagues? Probably pretty frustrating. Marketers can’t shy away from communication when it comes to aligning with team members and across the company, so having the right team communication tools is necessary every single day.

I’d be given a lot of slack if I didn’t make the world aware of this tool.

Slack is a powerful messaging app that allows you and your teammates to quickly message back and forth without the hassle of email. But it’s not just AOL instant messenger 2.0. Slack has powerful features and integrations that make it possible for you to integrate all of your other daily tools — like Trello, Gmail, Giphy, and so many more — right where you’re already communicating. You can start channels between different teams or just chat with specific colleagues. Slack makes remote and in-person work possible and easier than ever.

Get Slack today. Seriously. Do it.

Another tool to mention, though slightly different in purpose, is Shift. If you’re running multiple email account and multiple extensions and applications, this is a great way to organize everything.

A cool part of Shift is that, in addition to compiling your email inboxes, it also allows you to manage other applications, such as HubSpot Sales, Grammarly, and Asana.

Other Team Communication Tools:

• HipChat
• Google Chat
• Join.Me
• Zoom
• Skype

Website Optimization

As marketers, sometimes it feels like we’re constantly making educated guesses about how our site visitors are going to interact with our content. While we might design a page to draw our user’s eye to a spot on a page, how do we ever really know where their focus is so that we can improve that experience?

Hotjar is a new and easy way to truly understand what your web and mobile site visitors are looking at when they interact with your site. WIth its visual heatmap tools, you can understand what users want, care about, and interact with on your site. Hotjar visually represents visitors’ clicks, taps and scrolling behavior, giving you the ability to find hot areas for growth and conversion rate optimization.

Convinced? Try Hotjar. It’s Free!

Other Website Optimization Tools:

• HubSpot Website Platform
• Optimizely
• Unbounce

Get the Full List of Tools

* = Free Marketing Tools

We’ve covered a lot of tools for every part of your job on this page. But sometimes, it’s just helpful to see the full list. Here is our list of the top 61 marketing tools you need to know about. You’ll see an asterisk (*) next to each free marketing tool that has either a free account with limited features or a select group of free functions within the product.

Top 61 Tools Every Marketer Should Know About
AddEvent	Hootsuite*	Piktochart*
Adobe Color CC*	Hotjar*	Product Hunt*
Adobe Spark*	HubSpot Academy*	Recordit*
Adroll	HubSpot CRM*	SEMRush*
Adstage	HubSpot Marketing*	Skillshare*
Ahrefs	Iconosquare	Skype*
Airtable*	IFTTT*	Slack*
Asana*	JIRA	Todoist*
Box	Join.Me*	Trello*
Buffer*	Kap*	Twitter*
Canva*	Keywords Everywhere*	Typeform*
Codecademy*	Leadpages	Udemy*
Dropbox*	LinkedIn*	Unbounce
Eventbrite*	Lynda.com	Venngage*
Facebook*	Moz*	Vidyard*
Flipboard*	OnPage.org	Vimeo*
General Assembly	Optimizely	Wistia*
Giphy*	HipChat*	YouTube*
Google Ads	Pocket*	Zoom*
Google Analytics*	Picatic*
Google Drive*
Digital Marketing Tuner*

You’ve got all the tools you need, but are you looking for a place to start putting them all together? Check out our free marketing blueprint. It’ll walk you through creating your own marketing plan and teach you how to use all of these tools together.

Cached pages is an undeniably useful tool when you come across a web page that is performing poorly, or temporarily down for some reason.

At its most basic, Google crawls web pages and then makes raw HTML copies of them — a cached page. This can enable you to view a website that is slow or not responding, and it can also help SEO experts figure out indexation issues with a site.

If you’ve come across a page that isn’t responding, or if you want to make sure your site is being properly indexed, keep reading to figure out how cached pages can help you solve both.

1. In Google’s search box, type the website or page you’re trying to see. Beside the green URL, click the down arrow. Select “Cached”.

2. You are now viewing the cached page.

2. Alternatively, type the word “cache” in front of the web page’s URL. i.e. “cache:https://examplesite.com“.

 

It’s important to note, the cache is the part of the website written in plain HTML — it doesn’t also save JavaScript. Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, John Mueller, verifies this, stating on his Twitter:

JavaScript content is typically inaccessible from the cache, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t indexed — to check how a Google bot views your website, try using the Fetch and Render tool in Google Search Console instead.

Next, let’s explore how you can use Google Cache.

1. Use Google Cache if you’re on a web page that is slow or unresponsive.

If you’re trying to find information on a website but it seems the page is down (or just slow), you might try alternating to the Google Cache version. Of course, the page might not look aesthetically identical, but you’ll be able to see the HTML from the last time a Googlebot crawled the page.

2. Use Google Cache to check when a particular page was last visited by a Googlebot.

If you want to know the last time a Googlebot visited a certain page, but don’t have access to server logs, you can now see when the page was last visited by checking out the Cache version of the page. It can be helpful to see the last time the page was successfully fetched by a bot — if you’ve made changes that make the page unresponsive, you might need to know which changes you need to un-do.

3. Check how your website is indexed online.

You might be curious to see whether your website is cached online. If it’s not cached, there are a few potential reasons — first, you’ll want to check there is no content=”noarchive” attribute in the source code of the page. If the page is non-indexable or blocked from crawling, it won’t be cached. Alternatively, if a page is new, it might take a little while for the cache to become available.

If it’s not able to be cached, it’s still visible online. But if you want your site viewers to have the option of viewing it in a cache-version if your site is slow or unresponsive, you might consider digging deeper to figure out what the problem is.

With over 3.5 billion search queries on Google everyday, paid Google search — where you pay Google to advertise your content on SERPs for relevant keywords — is one of the most popular and effective types of online advertising. However, there’s enormous demand for the top ad rankings for a lot of keywords, and all your competitors are duking it out to win the top keywords in your industry. So are you supposed to compete?

Over the past three years, HubSpot has spent millions of dollars and ran over 1,200 controlled experiments on acquiring free CRM users through Google advertisements. We’ve gleaned a ton of new insights and processes along the way, so we want to share them with our fellow marketers to help everyone save their time, budget, and frustrations.

Read on to learn the eight-step process we use to optimize Google Advertising costs. And if you’re new to Google ads, check out the basics of Google Adwords in the section below. If you already know the fundamentals, feel free to skip it.

Google Adwords 101

Keywords

From a fifty-thousand foot view, you win ad impressions on Google by bidding on keywords. In other words, you’re asking Google to show your ad to a user when they type a specific search query into their search engine. These search queries are called “keywords”.

For example, if you’re advertising a free CRM, you might want your ad to show up on Google when users type “free crm” into the search engine. Every other brand who wants to win those impressions will set their bids, and based on that and various other factors, Google may choose to display your ad to its users.

Ad Groups

An Ad Group organizes your keywords into different groups. For example, if we had a “Competitors” campaign, we’d have a “HubSpot Marketing Competitors” ad group and a “HubSpot Sales Competitors” ad group. Within each of these ad groups, we might bid on keywords that consists of our competitors’ brand names plus each product we both sell.

Quality Score

Aggressively bidding on keywords is not enough to win impressions. You could bid $10 per click while your competitor bids $5 per click, and you could still lose that auction if they have a high enough quality score.

Your quality score is a metric that measures how positive and relevant of an experience you are creating for the searcher. A lot of signals are taken into account, a few of which are your landing page experience and click-through rate. This means organizations can’t acquire the top ranking for any keyword they want just because they have the biggest ad budgets. Their content has to be relevant.

Google’s top priority is providing their users with a great user experience, so they’d rather give an impression away for free than make $100 per click if the loss in revenue means they can provide a better user experience to their users.

Match Types

Google Ads offers four types of match types: broad match, modified broad match, phrase match, and exact match. Here’s a rundown of each of them.

Broad Match: With broad match, the user just needs to type in one of the words within your keyword or a “variant” of it, which can sometimes be somewhat irrelevant, and your ad could show up on their results page. For example, if you bid on “free crm software”, your ad could only show up for “crm software” and “adobe software.” Be careful with broad match, though. Bidding on these type of keywords is the easiest way to burn through a ton of cash without producing substantial results.

Modified Broad Match (MBM): MBM allows you to lock in specific keywords within a phrase. For example, bidding on “free +crm +software” will display your ad on a Google search for “no cost crm software” and “easy crm software”, but not on “adobe software”.

Phrase Match: With phrase match, your ad will appear when Google users search for the phrase that you’re bidding on, as well as instances where your phrase is before, after, or in between other keywords in the search query. For example, if you bid on “free crm software”, your ad will show up on Google for “free crm software for small business”, but not for “free software crm.”

Exact Match: Exact match is exactly what it sounds like. If you bid on “free crm software”, your ad will only show up if users search for “free crm software” on Google, in addition to other close variants.

Now that we know the basics of Google Adwords, let’s get back on track.

The 8-Step Process HubSpot Uses to Optimize Google Advertising Costs

1. Pick your keywords.

When you first launch your Adwords campaign, start small. Come up with a list of 5-10 keywords and start bidding using modified broad match. For example, if you’re working on a campaign for a free CRM, the keywords “Free CRM”, “CRM Software”, “CRM Reviews”, “CRM Comparison”, and “Best CRM” would be good to start with. Modified broad match will be more expensive than exact match, but it gives Google greater flexibility to display your ads on more search queries than exact match will.

In addition to building a “unbranded” keyword list, like the one above, you’ll also want to build a “branded” keyword list (i.e. “HubSpot CRM”). You should do this for two reasons:

1. More clicks: You’re probably thinking, “HubSpot already has the #1 spot on Google for the keyword ‘HubSpot CRM.’ Why would they pay for it?” What you’re thinking is true, but studies show if you also win the top ad spot on the SERP where you’ve already won the top organic ranking, you’ll receive significantly more clicks. And given the amount of ads Google displays above the fold these days, I have no doubt in my mind this is accurate.
2. Competitor blocking: If we don’t bid on and win “HubSpot CRM”, one of our competitors will. Even if we bid aggressively, our competitors can still sneak a win, like the example below.

2. Set up your campaigns.

There isn’t a cookie cutter approach to campaign structure, but I’m a strong proponent of a 1:1:1 campaign to ad group to keywords setup. In other words, I like to put one keyword in each ad group and one ad group in each campaign. Setting up your campaign like this can clutter your account from an organization standpoint, but here are two reasons why it’s worth it:

1. When you use Adwords, you usually set daily budgets at the campaign level, so this type of campaign set up allows for more flexible spending, which is important because your keywords’ ROI can get maxed out. Adwords is an auction, so if you want to win more impressions, you have to bid more. At a certain point, the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) required to win more impressions won’t be worth it anymore, so you’ll want to allocate your budget elsewhere, which you can do more precisely if you categorize each keyword into its own campaign.
2. Since Google sets your quality score at the keyword level, you’ll want to set up an ad group for each individual keyword, which are sometimes referred to as swim lanes. By setting up swim lanes for each keyword instead of putting them all in the same ad group, you’ll avoid the unfortunate situation of a few underperforming keywords dragging down the quality score of the entire ad group. If each keyword has its own ad group or swim lane, you can just pause the underperforming keywords’ campaign and no harm will be done anywhere else.

3. Craft your ad copy.

One of the most effective levers you can pull to boost your quality score is Click-through-Rate (CTR). And one of the most effective levers you can pull to boost your CTR is crafting compelling ad copy. One of the most important principles of writing Google Ads copy is that you need to signal to Google and their users that your ad is relevant to what they’re searching for. For example, if you’re bidding on the keyword “CRM Software”, you’re going to design a completely different ad and landing page than if you’re bidding on the keyword “CRM Reviews”.

4. Set up your ad extensions.

There are a lot of useful Google ad extensions, but if there’s one you should always launch with, it’s sitelinks. Sitelinks are the 4-6 links under most Google ads. They take up a significant amount of real estate, boost your CTR, and, best of all, you don’t have to pay any extra money when people click on them.

5. Setup “negative” keywords.

Negative keywords inform Google that you don’t want to bid on a keyword if the user enters a specific word alongside your keyword. There are a lot of different use cases for setting up negative keywords, but here are three big ones to look out for:

1. Irrelevance: I helped market a pre-workout at my last company called “volcaNO”. Needless to say, I didn’t want our ads to show up on Google for the keyword “volcano lava”, so I tagged “lava” as a negative keyword.
2. Competing with yourself: Remember, Adwords is an auction. So if you have one campaign bidding on “CRM Software” on MBM and another bidding on “Free CRM Software” on exact match, you’ll be competing with yourself if a user searches for “free crm software”. Tag “free” as a negative keyword in the “CRM Software” campaign to avoid cannibalizing your own clicks.
3. Low quality: To understand who your business’ ideal buyer is, talk to sales about the type of people who aren’t good fits for your products or services and try to filter them out.

6. Find your top performing keywords.

After you run your campaigns for a while, it’s time to optimize them. The most important Adwords tab in regards to optimizing your campaigns is the “search term report”. The search term report lists out the exact search queries that you’ve paid for for a given keyword. Remember, if you bid MBM on “free crm”, you’re going to show up on Google for the keywords “free crm for SaaS companies”, “best free crm”, “free crm to replace excel”, and potentially thousands of others. The search term report will help you filter out your top performing keywords.

If you notice a specific search query performing particularly well, tag it as negative keyword so you don’t bid it against your other keywords, and then break that keyword out into its own campaign. This is the time to double down. You’ll give that keyword its own budget, it’s own ads, it’s own display URL, and if you have the bandwidth, even it’s own landing page.

7. Look for negatives on demo data.

Most people know about negative keywords, but they often overlook negatives on demo data. For example, maybe you notice men under 25 or woman over 60 aren’t converting (all of this data is available in Adwords). You can exclude these segments by adding negatives or bid modifiers to them, which we’ll explain below.

8. Setup bid modifiers.

A bid modifier lets you adjust your bids for specific criteria without having to change the targeting of your campaign or ad group. For example, if you see mobile converting 50% worse than desktop, you can add a -50% bid modifier on mobile clicks. That’ll lower your ad’s bid on mobile impressions, lead to less placements of your ad on mobile, and optimize your budget. Other cool bid modifiers include:

• Age & gender
• Locations
• Hours of the day
• Days of the week
• If someone has visited a page on your site in the last X days
• If someone is on a lead list

The only silver bullet to Google Adwords is testing and learning.

While the process above is what has worked best for HubSpot’s paid acquisition team, the only way to know what works best for your business is to test and learn. So feel free to implement our strategy as a starting point, but we highly recommend you monitor your data closely and develop a process that’s more tailored to your own business.