I’m obsessed with fall and I don’t care who knows it. Give me a deliciously divisive seasonal latte, a freshly fallen leaves scented–candle, and ask Alexa to turn up the “Spooky Sounds,” because fall is here and I am here for it.

Brands also love fall. It gives them the chance to use all those skeleton puns they’ve been eagerly saving up (I would make a skeleton joke here, but you wouldn’t find it very humerus.), and send us lots of emails with “More treats less tricks!” in the subject line.

This month’s ad round-up isn’t all spooky and pumpkin-based (for the sake of your sanity), but it does feature some clever spins on traditional Halloween marketing, as well as some creative print ads and tear-jerkers. Read on to see what made the cut.

10 of the Best Ads from October

1) Svedka

If you’re a consumer in 2017 with internet access, you’ve probably been haunted by the ghost of a late night online window shopping spree. But instead of a regular old revenge-seeking ghost, this particular brand of haunting comes in the form of targeted ads. Spooky.

In a valiant seasonal attempt to transform targeted ads into more of a treat than a trick, Svedka Vodka teamed up with the folks at Toronto-based agency Bensimon Byrne to unleash a spooky curse on vodka devotes. Lured by the promise of seasonal cocktail recipes, those who dared to click were actually shown the video below:

2) Common Sense Media

There have been plenty of cautionary articles and ads warning that our phones are turning us into zombies with rapidly declining attention spans, but none of those had Will Ferrel in them. To highlight the havoc our favorite devices can wreak on family time — especially family dinners — Common Sense Media enlisted Goodby Silverstein & Partners to create a funny series of PSAs featuring the comedian as a phone-addicted dad.

3) Mars

Trick-or-treat anticipation typically leads candy companies to up their ad budgets with some pretty formulaic, chocolately close-ups, but Mars decided to think outside of the jack-o-lantern (sorry) with a series of satisfyingly weird short films.

In the spot for Skittles below, Floor 9.5, director Toby Meakins and writer Simon Allen built the creepy short around the concept of being followed from the front.

4) Bud Light

To introduce American BBQ-favorite Budlight to UK consumers, Anheuser-Busch InBev created the ultimate millennial lifestyle ad — with a refreshing twist of self-awareness. The SNL-esque parody features every trope we’ve come to expect from beverage ads, plus some absurd add-ins sprinkled in for good measure, like a pet rabbit and a bearded guy in a Bud Light-branded kimono.

5) La Cimade

In these simple, stunning ads from French human rights organization La Cimade, the struggle of refugees to survive is strikingly juxtaposed with Olympic athletes’ drive to win. The series of ads, created and directed by Josiane Paris’ Valentin Guiod and adam&eveDDB London’s Min-Hyung Choi, were developed after Paris won the bid for the 2024 Olympics. The goal was to raise awareness of the ongoing refugee crisis, and remind the French people that preparing for the Olympics is hardly the biggest challenge they currently face.

6) Tile

In their debut ad campaign, Tile offers an emotional (and adorable) take on the true value of their Bluetooth tracking system. In the spot, a bedraggled and clearly beloved stuffed panda toy wanders the streets, seeking out his lost owner. After a long and melancholy journey, Tile’s tracking system saves the day (of course). The charming campaign was produced by Deutsch and Smuggler director Mark Molloy.

7) Kansas City

In a unique effort to pitch Kansas City, MO as the location for Amazon’s second HQ, the mayor of Kansas City, Sly James, purchased and reviewed over 1,000 Amazon products. The hilarious stunt was orchestrated by Kansas City-based agency Barkley, with help from the Mayor’s own communications team. Whether or not it helps Kansas City make their case to Amazon, the spot was undoubtedly a quirkly way to set the city apart from the pack.

8) L.L.Bean

To promote their new brand facelift and “Be an outsider” tagline, Maine-based retailer L.L.Bean worked with The VIA Agency to develop a campaign that encouraged people to go outside — literally. They took out a full-page ad in the New York Times that could only be viewed in outdoor sunlight, thanks to some very special ink.

Image via:
Adweek

9) KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

Flying coach or economy class is effective and cost-efficient, but we all know it’s a far cry from luxurious. To coax travelers over to the more comfortable (read: expensive) side of air travel, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines distributed VR headsets to economy class airline passengers. The virtual reality experience gave passengers the opportunity to see how their flight could have been on a KLM plane.

10) eir

Irish telecom company eir pulled a delightfully oddball stunt to illustrate their “no more black spots” promise to mobile users. With help from agency Rothco, they replaced every single dot in an issue of The Daily Mail Magazine with a brightly colored dot.

Image via:
Adweek

When you’re selecting cover photos, shared images, and other social media assets, knowing the basic image dimensions might not cut it.

What if you want to make sure a certain part of your cover photo isn’t obstructed by your profile photo? And what’s the difference between shared link thumbnails, or in-stream photos — are the dimensions different for those?

As it turns out, sizing images correctly for social media is no simple task. Even just for Facebook marketing, photo dimensions vary according to where and how it’s shared — from cover photos, to timeline images, to profile pictures.

But if you’re looking for a detailed guide on social media image sizes, you’re in luck — this infographic from Spredfast has you covered. It’s a valuable resource to keep on-hand for the next time you’re designing or selecting visual content for your social channels. And for quicker reference, scroll down to see a written list of essential social media image dimensions.

So, without further ado — let’s get visual.

Social Media Image Sizes: Quick Reference

All dimensions below are in pixels, width x height.

Facebook

With
2 billion daily active users, Facebook continues to
outpace other social media channels. The images you use here are crucial — choosing a lower-quality one can make or break your engagement. Pro tip: The way images display on your
own timeline might look different.

• Cover image: 828 x 315
• Profile image: ≥180 x 180
• Shared image: 1200 x 900
• Shared link preview image: 1200 x 628

Twitter

Twitter, meanwhile, is often the social network of choice for users to talk
about you. It’s where customers ask questions, leave praise, and request help. But, the format and display have changed several times in the course of its history, so here are the image dimensions you need to know.

• Header image: 1500 x 500
• Profile image: 400 x 400
• Timeline image: 506 x 253

Google+

Don’t be fooled: Google+ is still an important place for brands to maintain a consistent presence, even if you think it might not get as much attention as other social media channels. The last thing you want to do is to have users stumble upon your profile there, only to find months (or more) of radio silence and distorted visual content. Plus, remember: Where there’s Google+, there is Google, indicating a connection to the search giant itself. Here’s how to visually optimize that presence.

• Profile image: 250 x 250
• Cover image: 1080 x 608
• Shared image: 506 pixels wide
• Shared video: ≥506 x 284
• Shared link image thumbnail: 150 x 150

Instagram

Given that Instagram’s bread-and-butter is visual content, you’ll want your presence on this channel to match that foundation, especially in terms of quality. And with over
700 million daily active users, you’ll want to look your best. Here are the dimensions that can help.

• Profile image: 110 x 110
• Image thumbnail: 161 x 161
• Shared images: 1080 x 1080
• Shared videos: 1080 pixels wide

Pinterest Image Sizes

Here’s a fun fact:
90% of content posted on Pinterest consists of external links. For that reason, it’s worthwhile to leverage Pinterest for referral traffic — but it still has to catch your audience’s eyes. Here are the dimensions to make sure your Pinterest presence maintains visual quality.

• Profile image: 180 x 180
• Board cover image: 214 x 100
• Pin preview: 238 pixels wide

LinkedIn

Love it or hate it, LinkedIn is
the social channel for digital professional networking. And depending on your industry, it can still be a good vehicle for traffic and discovery, especially within the B2B sector. Plus, if you’re using it for recruiting purposes, it’s important to present well on a job that several people use for research on job listings, as well as employer culture, location, and more.

• Banner image: 1850 x 200
• Profile image: 400 x 400
• Cover image: 1536 x 768
• Shared image: 350 pixels wide
• Shared link preview: 180 x 110
• Logo image: 400 x 400

YouTube

Here’s another network where visual content reigns supreme — not to mention, one with more than
one billion users. Make sure your own visual assets match that underlying purpose and philosophy — not just with the videos you share on there, but with the profile presence you maintain.

• Channel cover images: Varies by viewing platform
• Channel icon: 800 x 800
• Video thumbnail: 1280 x 720

Tumblr

Tumblr has been called many things: a blogging platform, a social network, and a content-sharing center where marketers and consumers alike can, well, share whatever they want. And with
372.5 million blogs currently registered on the site, you’ve got company — so shape up and make sure your visuals fit the right dimensions.

• Profile image: 128 x 128
• Image post: 500 x 750 | 1280 x 1920 maximum

Snapchat

At long last, we arrive at Snapchat: yet another social media channel known primarily for its visual assets. When it comes to using this network for marketing purposes, dimensions are fairly uniform, whether you’re simply looking to use a geofilter, or you’re hoping to share an
ad or sponsored lens.

• Geofilters, ads, and lenses: 1080 x 1920

First and foremost, I need to give credit where credit is due.

The idea for this post spawned from Steve Rayson’s incredibly interesting and well-researched post, “We Analyzed 100 Million Headlines. Here’s What We Learned.”

Yes — I even borrowed the headline structure.

But if you haven’t read Steve’s post, I suggest doing so immediately. It offers excellent insights and data points on not only headlines and their importance, but also, on content marketing and social media in general.

In addition to all the valuable and actionable information about headlines, I was struck by how much we can learn from analyzing chunks of data like this. Couple this new zeal for writing a data-backed piece with our goal of getting published on the HubSpot Marketing Blog, and here we are: analyzing the 39 most-shared HubSpot Blog posts over the last year, and sharing what we found.

Couple that new zeal for writing a data-backed piece with our goal of getting published on the HubSpot Marketing Blog, and here we are. Over the past year, my team at WSI analyzed HubSpot’s 39 most-shared blog posts — and now, I’m sharing what we found.

What We Learned From the HubSpot Blog’s Most-Shared Posts in 2017

Marketing Reigns Supreme

As many consumers of HubSpot content know, the company separates its blog into three main categories: marketing, sales, and customer success.

It’s probably no surprise, but of HubSpot’s 39 most-shared posts of the last year, 38 of them come from within the marketing category. A single post from the sales blog made it onto the list, coming in as the 13th-most-shared HubSpot blog post in the last 12 months. 

The folks at HubSpot likely already know this about their blog. Readers and potential customers, in turn, learn that at HubSpot’s core is the concept of inbound marketing — and the Marketing Blog serves as a go-to resource for this type of information.

The takeaway here for businesses, agencies, and marketers is to become acutely aware of which content your audience is most interested in reading. Which type of content and topics does this audience engage with and share the most? If you don’t know, find out. Then, create more of that goodness.

Numbers, and Years, and Words … Oh, My

If you thought I was going to link and talk about Rayson’s excellent post on headlines — and not discuss headlines — you were way off.

At WSI, we analyzed a much smaller dataset than Rayson did, but still got some fascinating results — specifically, around certain attributes.

Those attributes include numbers, years, and total words — as evidenced by the above section header. Of the 39 posts in question, just under half contained a number in the headline. Seventeen posts had nine words or fewer in the headline, and 11 used a year. 

The longtail: It lives.

Perhaps more telling, however, is the fact that only seven posts had none of these characteristics. Here’s the breakdown:

As you can see from the chart above, out of the 39 most-shared HubSpot blog posts of the year, very few contained no year or number, and had more than nine words in their headline. Fourteen posts included at least one of the headline attributes — a number, a year, or fewer than nine words in their respective headlines. And, 18 out of the 39 most shared blog post headlines combine at least two of these three headline attributes.

Want to see similar results? Consider crafting post headlines with numbers, years and fewer than nine words. Have a look at the title of this blog — you might notice that we included two out of the three.

The Infographic Lives

Perhaps you’ve heard rumors that infographics are dead. Whether it’s because they’ve been overdone or have just lost their luster, we’ve personally noticed that people seem to love talking about the downfall of the infographic.

But based on our analysis of HubSpot’s 39 most-shared posts of the year, I think the rumors of the infographic’s demise are greatly exaggerated. 

Here’s my proof: 13 of the top 39 most-shared HubSpot posts — just over 33% — included infographics. I don’t know about you, but to me, it sounds like readers still like to digest facts and data via infographic format … and share them, too.

Specifically, if you have plans to include guest blogs on your site, try to target those who are offering infographics, as many of the ones published on HubSpot blogs are from third parties.

In the End …

I hope you take away at least two things after reading this post.

1) Actionable Insights

After analyzing HubSpot’s most-shared blog posts, we were able to determine some common elements that you can leverage within your blogging strategy, to help make a difference in shares and engagement. Hopefully, the process of reviewing HubSpot’s 39 most-shared posts of the year has shown you what works well on an industry-leading blog, and how you can find out what’s working on your blog, too. And, seeing as blog.hubspot.com has 4.5 million monthly views, we’d like to think this outlet leads by example.

2) Inspiration

Second, I hope you feel motivated to create a similar analysis, and a blog post based on the results. When creating this post, we saw how much can be learned from some research and graphs.

Using BuzzSumo, for example — which we’ve used on the WSI blog before — to gather the social share and engagement data, and Canva to make the charts, you, too, can share some actionable best practices with your fellow marketers.

Make no mistake: I’m not saying it’s easy to put a post like this together. But, it’s not as daunting as it might seem.

If there are any other patterns or trends you’ve noticed that can make a blog post more engaging, feel free reach out to WSI on Twitter or Facebook — we’d love to hear about it.

As of March 2017, Facebook had 1.28 billion active users each day, and over 85% of those users were outside of the U.S. and Canada.

With such a large portion of the world using Facebook, marketers everywhere know Facebook is an ideal place to reach and engage new audiences.

You’ve probably heard these stats before. After all, Facebook is a no-brainer for marketers. And if you’re trying to reach new audiences, you probably know paying for Facebook Ads is a great way to do that.

That said, knowing a channel is effective is far different from creating an effective ads strategy for your unique brand. With more and more marketers advertising on Facebook each quarter, its harder than ever to build a strategy that will stand out from your competitors and generate the return on investment (ROI) your brand needs.

But if you’re ready to start putting budget behind your Facebook advertising strategy, it’s important to fully understand how your ads efforts affect your business’ bottom line. Otherwise, how else do you justify your ad spend?

Fortunately, with help from Socialbakers, a global leader in social media marketing analytics, we put together a data-packed report and how-to guide to help you build a better Facebook Ads strategy, benchmark your success, and improve the ROI of your ad spend.

First, we’ll teach you how to calculate your paid social ROI so you can benchmark your ad spend against your industry and region. Then, use your calculations and compare them to the benchmarks in the full ebook. We’ll also help you create a strategy for your Facebook ad campaigns along the way.

Ready to set a killer Facebook ads strategy and get the latest industry data on social ROI? Get the full-length guide now.

How do you begin measuring social media ROI?

Why measure your ad spend ROI? It’s pretty simple. If you want your ads to make an impact on the rest of your marketing funnel, you have to measure what it’s driving and how much of a return you’re getting, which will ultimately frame where marketing dollars are best spent for future campaigns that drive the best results, leads, conversions, customers, etc.

Let’s look at an example. Say your cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is typically $100 per customer. Your boss wants you to run a Facebook ad campaign to generate new customers and gives you a budget of $1000. You run your first campaign and generate eight new customers from it. Was it worth it or not?

How to Measure ROI:

Measuring return on investment is pretty simple. You simply take the amount you spent (cost) and divide it by your returns*.

*The “returns” you’re measuring will vary based on your ad objective type. If your goal is to generate more leads, you divide your costs by the number of leads you generate. The same is true for customer acquisition ads, app install ads, website clicks, etc.

In the above example, you’d take the amount you spent ($1000) and divide it by the number of new customers your generated (8). That would mean you acquired eight new customers at a cost of $125 per new customer. If your boss tells you your typical CAC is $100 per customer, you know that the return you got from that ad campaign is higher than your typical CAC.

ROI = Total amount of the investment / total return

If your ad campaigns are generating a lower return on investment than other strategies, it likely means you need to optimize your strategy to lower your costs. You can do this in a number of ways, like optimizing your ad copy or focusing your targeting strategy. Get more tips in this full-length ebook.

The example we just used assumed that you already know a benchmark to compare your campaign results to. But what happens if you don’t already have that information?

In this Facebook Ads Optimization ebook, we have brand new data that details typical ad spend by campaign type and region to give you a starting point for benchmarking the success of your ad campaigns.

Ready to get started? Download the ebook, “How to Use Data to Optimize Your Facebook Strategy” now.

When Brian McGrory, Editor-in-Chief of The Boston Globe, gave a talk at HubSpot’s Cambridge office this summer, he told us a story about a crucial leadership lesson he learned during his early days as head editor.

At night, Brian would answer emails before bed, and it became a daily routine for a few years. He enjoyed his nightly ritual. But when he pictured a young reporter seeing one of his emails at 11 PM, it irked him.

Brian didn’t expect his colleagues to reply until the next day. But he realized that once he sent the emails, his reporters would think, “oh crap, my Editor-in-chief just replied to my email!” Then, they’d stop whatever they were doing and spend a ton of time and effort crafting the perfect response.

From then on, Brian quit answering his emails at night. He knew it would disrupt his employees’ evenings and could even ruin a good night’s sleep. Unwinding from work is pivotal to avoid burnout. And if Brian wasn’t empathetic about his late-night emails, his employees might’ve started to dread their jobs.

Empathy is a vital leadership skill. Not only does it allow you to experience your employees’ feelings about their role and your company, but it also enables you to perceive your brand from a customer’s perspective.

If you’re an empathetic leader, you can infuse more purpose into your employees’ work and refine your company’s culture. You can also market and sell the way your prospects buy and create products that actually fulfill their needs.

Leaders make critical business decisions every day, and any lack of empathy on their part can produce unhappy employees, self-serving marketing and sales processes, and inferior products.

Luckily, if you’re a leader, you can teach yourself how to develop more empathy. Check out our curated list of Goodreads’ top ranked books about empathy, and add your favorites to your reading list.

7 Books That’ll Help You Develop More Empathy

1) Mindsight: Transform Your Brain with the New Science of Empathy

2) The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society

3) Well-Designed: How to Use How to Use Empathy to Create Products People

4) Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy

5) The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill

6) Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It

7) Empathy

1) Mindsight: Transform Your Brain with the New Science of Empathy by Daniel J. Siegel (2009)

Goodreads Rating: 4.11/5.0

“Mindsight” is the integration of brain science and psychotherapy. And if you master it, you can boost your self-awareness to unprecedented levels.

In his engaging book, Dr. Daniel Siegel uses interactive examples and case studies from his clinical practice to teach you how to observe the inner-workings of your mind, allowing you to understand why we think, feel, and act the way we do, and how you can literally rewire your brain. Self-awareness is crucial for developing empathy — once you understand yourself, you can understand others.

Amazon Editorial Review: “’Mindsight’ is a literary MRI: a mind-blowing book that will change the way you think about the way you think.” — Arianna Huffington, Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post

2) The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans De Waal (2009)

Goodreads Rating: 3.96/5.0

As an economics major, the theories I learn are based on the assumption that humans are inherently selfish. And if you examine the great recession and other financial scandals, this assumption seems pretty legitimate. Vicious greed motivated these senseless acts. But was this selfishness innate? According to psychology professor Frans De Waal, it wasn’t. By examining social behaviors in animals, his book delves into empathy being a natural instinct for many animals (including humans), empathy’s survival value in evolution, and how adopting this optimistic and accurate view of human nature could vastly improve society. In other words, we’re wired to feel for each other.

Amazon Editorial Review: “The lessons of the economic meltdown, Hurricane Katrina, and other disasters may not be what you think: Biologically, humans are not selfish animals. For that matter, neither are animals, writes the engaging Frans de Waal, a psychology professor with proof positive that, like other creatures who hang out in herds, we’ve evolved to be empathetic. We don’t just hear a scream, it chills us to the bone; when we see a smile, we answer with one of our own. The Age of Empathy offers advice to cutthroat so-called realists: Listen to your inner ape.” — O, The Oprah Magazine

3) Well-Designed: How to Use How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love by Jon Kolko (2014)

Goodreads Rating: 3.95/5.0

In the age of extreme consumerism, we obsess over whatever’s new. Product teams can start prioritizing bells and whistles over actual consumer needs, which hurts and underwhelms customers. So how do we reorient and develop products that solely focus on the customer? We need to understand the emotional connection between the customer and product.

In his insightful book, product designer Jon Kolko shows you how to leverage a deep understanding of consumer needs and feelings to repeatedly build successful, emotional resonant products. He walks you through a four-step process that leading companies use to design products that evoke positive emotions, change behavior, and create deep engagement. Whether you’re a designer, product developer, or marketer, this book will revolutionize the way you analyze and develop your products.

“Great companies are made through great products, and increasingly, great products are made through design. Kolko demonstrates that product managers must learn to think like designers; they need to embrace intuition, emotion, and most importantly, empathy. This insightful book is a must-read.” — John Maeda, design partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; author, The Laws of Simplicity and Redesigning Leadership

4) Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy by Dev Patnaik (2009)

Goodreads Rating: 3.85/5.0

Top business strategist Dev Patnaik knows people are wired to care. And he knows many of the world’s top companies are too. In his thought-provoking book, Patnaik places readers inside huge organizations like IBM, Target, and Intel to witness the power of empathy in business. As he covers how organizations excel when they channel empathy and the emotion’s economic and personal benefits, he unveils the unlimited potential our society could reach if business leaders saw the world through each other’s eyes and cared more about others.

Amazon Editorial Review: “Wired to Care will convince you that businesses succeed with their hearts as much as their heads. Dev Patnaik has given us just what we need for the lean years ahead.” — Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point

5) The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill by Karla McLaren (2013)

Goodreads Rating: 3.79/5.0

Backed by findings in neuroscience, social psychology, and healing traditions, The Art of Empathy suggests empathy not only forges human connection, but it also helps us shine in every other area of our life. Karla McLaren’s captivating book will teach you how to genuinely perceive and feel other people’s experiences and drastically improve your social and emotional life.

Amazon Editorial Review: “Karla McLaren illuminates the rich, textured landscape of emotional intelligence. And in ‘The Art of Empathy’, Karla wisely explores the most important of all human feelings: empathy, the glue of all positive human relationships.” — Peter A. Levine, PhD, Author of Healing Trauma, and Freedom from Pain

6) Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It by Roman Krznaric (2010)

Goodreads Rating: 3.77/5.0

By meeting and interviewing actors, activists, designers, nurses, bankers, and neuroscientists, Roman Krzanric uncovered the six life-altering habits of highly empathic people. His lessons will teach you how to meaningfully connect with others, which will fulfil yourself and the world around you.

Amazon Editorial Review: “I thoroughly enjoyed the book — as much for its inspirational stories of super-empathizers, as for its creative ideas on increasing empathy in everyday life. We would all do well to expand our circle of empathy and to build upon our sense of common humanity in order to take action to improve society.” — Jill Suttie, Psy.D., Greater Good

7) Empathy – Harvard Business Review (2017)

Goodreads Rating: 3.82/5.0

To help people learn about the human side of professional life, Harvard Business Review curated over 10 original articles about empathy and turned it into a book (way to repurpose!). Empathy is part of a four-book collection that teaches readers how to improve their emotional well-being at work. After reading it, you’ll understand what empathy is, why it’s important, how to handle the obstacles that make you less empathetic, and how to identify when you or a colleague offers too much empathy.

The intimidators. The slackers. The credit-takers. The “I actually have another favor to ask”-ers.

We’ve all encountered a difficult colleague in some form or another. In fact, experts estimate that between 6o and 80 percent of reported difficulties at work are caused primarily by strained relationships with coworkers.

Research shows that getting along with the people you work with is vitally important — for your company’s overall productivity, and your own personal sense of happiness and fulfillment. But working closely in potentially stressful situations doesn’t always bring out the best in people, so it’s important to know how to address and de-escalate conflicts before they impact your quality of life — or compromise your job.

You can’t control how other people act, but you can control how you respond to their behavior. To help you tackle your next tricky coworker situation with empathy and professionalism, the folks at NetCredit put together this handy list of strategies. Check out the infographic below, and keep these methods in mind whenever a colleague starts to get under your skin.

Think about the last time you were on a conference call with someone in a different location. Did you run into any communication challenges — technical, or otherwise? Did you find yourself trying to speak up but failing to get a word in? If there were multiple people on that call, did you find that everyone was able to participate?

Remote meetings are becoming increasingly commonplace. Not everyone you work with is able to sit down in the same room with you. For many of us, most of our meetings now include remote employees or team members from across the globe.

That’s the trend we started to see at HubSpot. As we expand globally, more and more of our meetings and teams are spread out across our different offices. That doesn’t just mean waking up early or staying up late to have a call with colleagues in Sydney. It means learning to work with our colleagues in a completely different (and potentially challenging) way. 

After talking to other companies with growing numbers of remote employees (including Zapier CEO Wade Foster), our marketing team decided to do “Remote Week.” 

We had 3 goals for Remote Week:

• To work more effectively as a highly distributed team, and help pave the way for more effective collaboration across geographies for HubSpot as a whole.
• To cultivate empathy for full-time remote workers.
• To improve our communication with remote workers, and be at our best when working remotely.

And we had a couple of rules:

1. Everyone on the team must be remote for the week. They could work from anywhere they wanted, but they could not be in a HubSpot office.
2. Everyone must have an internet connection and be able to join meetings with video.
3. No one should postpone or reschedule any meetings. They should try all different types of meetings while remote: 1:1s, team meetings, cross-functional meetings, etc.

After a week, we gathered feedback from everyone who participated, and discovered some common trends that will help us more effectively manage our remote employees moving forward.

Lessons From Remote Week

1) For larger meetings, you need a facilitator.

For meetings on the larger side, it can be a real challenge to ensure everyone’s voice gets heard. Everyone is talking, side conversations happen between people in different locations, and before you know it the meeting is over and you didn’t get the chance to weigh in on the discussion. 

This is where the team facilitator comes in. The job of the facilitator is twofold: 1) Make sure everyone gets a chance to talk. 2) Recognize when side conversations happen so you can make sure these are shared with the full group.

To make sure everyone gets a chance to talk, it’s important to notice when someone is trying to get a word in and keeps getting overlooked. A good way to spot this is to have the facilitator keep a lookout for “the goldfish face”: the face someone makes when they keep opening and closing their mouth before they get the chance to actually say anything. By having a facilitator picking up on this and prompting participants to speak in turn, the issue can be eliminated.

Another issue with large remote meetings is side conversations that happen with people in the same location. For example, my team is spread out across Cambridge and Dublin. There are often side conversations that go on between the teams in Cambridge and Dublin by muting the call to say something to their colleague sitting next to them.

One effective way that we learned to solve this is making everyone go in a different room (even if they are in the same location) to give everyone a fair chance to speak and to make sure these side conversations derail the main discussion.

2) Take advantage of spontaneous discussions.

When you are physically in the same location as your colleagues, you have the opportunity for spontaneous conversations throughout the day. Whether it’s a morning recap of the latest Game of Thrones episode, or a quick chat to hash out the details of a problem that couldn’t be solved over email, these unplanned face-to-face meetings bring us closer to our colleagues and help us discover new perspectives. 

During our remote week, we knew we needed a way to recreate the beauty of these spontaneous conversations. In practice, it takes a bit of effort. It means you have to be open to hoping on a quick, unplanned video call to answer a question or clarify the details of an email.

We also are big proponents of recording a quick video over Loom to communicate something when your team isn’t all available for a live call. In fact, I have woken up to many Loom recordings from my team in Dublin to explain a detailed analysis or the latest experiment they wanted to run.

Having regular, open communication like this is key to avoiding any miscommunications and making sure your team still feels like a unit even if they do not see each other face to face.

3) Find your ideal routine, and stick to it.

In the morning I wake up, shower, get dressed, walk my dog, and catch the bus. I get to work, make my tea, do some morning reading, respond to emails, and start my day. I have my morning routine, and I have another routine at the end of the day to wrap up.

We are creatures of habit — having a clear routine gives us structure and enables us to be productive. And that’s doubly true for remote workers. 

At the beginning of Remote Week a lot of us found that our routine was just off. We woke up and then were unsure what to do next. Do we start responding to emails? Do we work on that next experiment? Do we make breakfast? Workout? What do we do first? At the end of the day, we had the same conundrum. When do we stop working? Should we have dinner, and then go back to work?

Even when you work remotely and don’t have to get into the office by a certain time, it’s still important to have a routine. Though it took us all a couple of days to figure out how to structure our time during Remote Week, we eventually all figured out our own individual rhythms to ensure we were getting our work done without burning out.

4) Remain visible within your team even if you aren’t actually visible.

If you are one of the only remote workers on your team, it can be easy to get heads down on your work and lose out on the regular communication that goes on with the rest of the team. Something that our team became very aware of during Remote Week was finding a way to remain available and visible to our colleagues even when we weren’t directly in touch.

There are a couple of key you can stay on your team’s radar, even when you’re not in sight. One of them is through participation in team meetings. When you’re remote, it’s extremely important to speak up and share your thoughts during big discussions. 

Another way to remain visible is to participate in group discussions over chat. At HubSpot we use Slack for our communications, and have cross-team channels devoted to everything from work-related projects to out-of-office interests, like yoga and dogs. It’s easy to not participate in those discussions, but it’s way more rewarding and valuable to share your ideas, the latest interesting article you read, or even what you did that weekend.

Even if you can’t be physically visible in the office, it’s important to stay visible within the organization. 

5) It seems obvious, but you need good WiFi.

I saved the best, and arguably most important, for last. Ensuring you have the proper technology to do your job and stay in touch with colleagues is absolutely essential. It can be frustrating for everyone involved if all of a sudden your computer freezes, or your internet crashes and your call is disconnected. And you know that always happens when its least convenient. 

Before you plan to work remotely (even if it’s just for a day), test out the locations you plan to call in from. If you are working from home, make sure that you have a strong WiFi connection. Test it out with a friend or colleague ahead of time to make sure you’ll be able to get your job done effectively and stay in touch with the necessary people.

If you think you might want to journey to an alternative location during your remote work week, test that out as well. I encourage my team to test out new coffee shops they want to work from during lower-stakes meetings — like 1:1s with their manager — instead of waiting until a larger team meeting. This reduces the danger of your technical difficulties impacting more people.

As you’re getting your remote setup ready, figure out if you need other tech besides WiFi. Having a second monitor at home for example can help increase your efficiency. Having a standing desk is another way to make sure you get to move around during the day.

Taking Remote Week Back to the Office

Remote Week was a fantastic experience for the team. It gave us a unique opportunity to put ourselves in our teammates’ shoes and truly understand the pros and cons of remote work.

Since this experience, we’ve learned to be more collaborative with our remote counterparts, make sure everyone has a voice in team meetings, and be more flexible when hoping on a quick video chat with a remote colleague. The next time you interact with a remote colleague, remember these lessons to ensure you build a productive and collaborative environment for your team and co-workers, no matter where they work. 

Gone are the days of the CMO who isn’t fluent in metrics, analytics, and spreadsheets. The internet has made marketing far more measurable (and therefore more accountable to the CEO) than ever before.

But CMOs struggle to find the right metrics that will get them credibility, and show how marketing contributes to the bottom line — especially when 80% of CEOs don’t trust the efforts of their marketing teams.

Some of the best marketing metrics look at the total cost of marketing — including program spend, salaries of the team, and overhead — and relate those costs to the results you care about: revenue and customer acquisition.

Other metrics, like cost per lead, cost per follower, or cost per page view can be useful to look at within a marketing team, because they can help you make decisions about where to focus, and what parts of your marketing process are broken.

But most CEOs care more about the cost and the net results than the interim steps. This list of metrics is meant to focus on the most critical measures of marketing that your CEO will likely want to discuss with you.

Here are some metrics the HubSpot marketing team has found most useful over the years while growing our company and working with other members of senior leadership and our board.

The 6 Marketing Metrics Your CEO Cares About Most

1) Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

This is your total Sales and Marketing cost: Add up all the program or advertising spend, plus salaries, plus commissions and bonuses, plus overhead within a given time period. Then, divide it by the number of new customers in that same time period.

For instance, if you spent $300,000 on Sales and Marketing in a month and added 30 customers that month, then your CAC is $10,000.

2) Marketing Percentage of Customer Acquisition Cost (M%-CAC)

We compute the marketing portion of CAC and call it M-CAC, and then compute that as a percentage of the overall CAC. The M%-CAC is interesting to watch over time, and any change signals that something has changed in either your strategy or your effectiveness.

For instance, an increase either means that 1) you are spending too much on marketing, 2) sales costs are lower because they missed quota, or 3) you are trying to raise sales productivity by spending more on marketing, and providing more and higher-quality leads to Sales.

For a company that does mostly outside sales with a long and complicated sales cycle, M%-CAC might be only 10-20%. For companies that have an inside sales team and a less complicated sales process, M%-CAC might be more like 20-50%. And for companies that have a low cost and simpler sales cycle where sales are somewhat humanless, the M%-CAC might be more like 60-90%.

3) Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC (LTV:CAC)

For companies that have a recurring revenue stream from their customers — or even any way for customers to make a repeat purchase — you need to estimate the current value of a customer and compare that to what you spent to acquire that new customer.

To compute the LTV, you need to take the revenue the customer pays you in a period, subtract out the gross margin, and then divide by the estimated churn percentage (cancellation rate) for that customer. So, for a type of customer who pays you $100,000 per year where your gross margin on the revenue is 70%, and that customer type is predicted to cancel at a rate of 16% per year, then the LTV is $437,500.

Now, once you have the LTV and the CAC, you compute the ratio of the two. If it cost you $100,000 to acquire this customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1. For growing SaaS companies, most investors and board members want this ratio to be greater than 3X — because a higher ratio means your sales and marketing teams have a higher ROI.

Higher is not always better, though. When the ratio is too high, you might want to spend more on Sales and Marketing to grow faster, because you are restraining your growth by under-spending, and making life easy for your competition.

4) Time to Payback CAC

This is the number of months it takes you to earn back the CAC you spent to get a new customer. You take the CAC and divide by margin-adjusted revenue per month for the average new customer you just signed up, and the resulting number is the number of months to payback.

In industries where customers pay one time up-front, this metric is less relevant, because the upfront payment should be greater than the CAC — otherwise, you’re losing money on every customer. On the other hand, in industries where customers pay a monthly or annual fee (as is the case for many SaaS companies like HubSpot), you usually want the payback time to be under 12 months, meaning that you become “profitable” on a new customer in under a year, and after that, you start making money.

5) Marketing-Originated Customer Percentage

This ratio shows what percentage of your new business is driven by marketing efforts. To compute it, take all of the new customers you signed up in a period, and look at what percentage of them started with a lead that the marketing team generated. This is much, much easier to do when you have a closed-loop marketing analytics system, but you can do it manually — just know it will be time-consuming.

What we like about this metric is that it directly shows what portion of the overall customer acquisition originated in Marketing, and it is often higher than what you might think. In our experience, this number varies widely from company to company. For companies with an outside sales team supported by an inside sales team with cold callers, this percentage might be pretty small, perhaps 20-40%. But for a company with an inside sales team that is supported by a lot of lead generation from Marketing, it might be as high as 40-80%.

Note: You can also compute this percentage using revenue instead customers, depending on how you prefer to look at your business.

6) Marketing Influenced Customer Percentage

This number is similar to the Marketing Originated Customer Percentage, but it adds in all the new customers in cases where Marketing touched and nurtured the lead at any point during the sales process, not only by originating the lead.

For instance, if a salesperson found a lead, but then the lead attended a marketing event and then later closed, that new customer was influenced by Marketing. This number is obviously higher than the “Originated” percentage, and for most companies, we think this number should be between 50% and 99%.

Marketing Metrics Cheat Sheet

You can’t go anywhere these days without hearing about the elusive, purportedly mystical powers of influencer marketing.

But is this buzzword-laden tactic actually worth your time and energy?

According to a recent study comprised of marketers from a variety of industries, 94% said influencer marketing was an effective campaign strategy. That’s great news for marketers — right?

Not so fast. Even though a majority of marketers believe influencer marketing is a viable tactic, it’s still incredibly challenging to report accurately on influencer campaign ROI. In fact, 78% of marketers said that determining the success of influencer marketing campaigns would be a top challenge this year.

So even though the tangible benefits of influencer marketing — follower engagement, driving traffic, and creating more authentic content — seem clear-cut, there’s still a lot of progress to be made in making this form of campaign measurable for agencies and marketers.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Let’s back up for a minute. What exactly is influencer marketing, and how does it differ from the traditional celebrity spokesperson advertising model?

Influencer marketing is designed to tap into an existing community of engaged followers. Influencers — or influential people — are specialists in their particular niches, and have established a high level of trust and two-way communication with their follower bases. As a result, these individuals have influence over an audience you might be trying to reach, and can be helpful marketing to those buyers.

There is some overlap between celebrity endorsements and influencer marketing campaigns, but fans of influencers trust that their endorsement of a product or brand comes from a well-researched, more holistic place, rather than something as simple as a signed contract. And while there is often a formal agreement in place between brands and influencers, influencers tend to be more selective about their affiliations, choosing to partner with brands that reflect their unique personal brands and won’t alienate their followers.

Celebrity product endorsements are less about engagement and more about attaching a person’s fame and name recognition to a particular brand. For brands, celebrity-driven campaigns are much more about grabbing the attention of a wide audience than tapping into a very specific niche.

10 Influencer Marketing Examples

To give you an idea of how brands — both big and small — are leveraging the power of influencers in their marketing efforts, we’ve put together a list of ten influencer-driven campaigns. Check them out below, and decide for yourself: Is influencer marketing worth the hype?

1) Old Navy

The affordable clothing chain tapped social media influencer Meghan Rienks to appear in a series of promotional posts on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. In the videos, Rienks shows fans how to style outfits for different occasions (e.g., a holiday party, and big date night) using pieces from Old Navy.

Rienks, known for her comedy sketches and lifestyle content, has a formidable following on social media, with over 1.3 million Instagram followers and 2 million subscribers on her YouTube channel.

2) Naked Juice

This bottled smoothie brand is edging its way into the beauty, fashion, and health scene on Instagram with help from key influencers in the space. Lifestyle bloggers like Kate La Vie (below) share sponsored posts featuring snapshots of their daily outfits and beauty essentials — including a strategically placed Naked Juice in the mix.

3) Glossier

This Manhattan-based beauty startup (which was recently named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2017) owes much of their seemingly overnight cult status to their ever-expanding network of super fans and micro-influencers.

Instead of paying a few big names to promote their minimal skincare and cosmetics, the brand relies on “regular women” to spread the word.

“What’s very motivating to us is this idea of every single woman being an influencer,” Glossier CEO Emily Weiss told Quartz. Glossier recently introduced a referral program to enable its more influential followers to offer product discounts and other incentives to their unique networks.

4) Sperry

Towards the end of 2016, the boat shoe brand began working with over 100 micro-influencers on Instagram to create engaging content for its followers. Sperry identified fans of the brand on Instagram who were already sharing high-quality photos of its products, and started inviting these users to develop visual content for its official Instagram account.

5) My Tales of Whisky

Diageo, the parent company of Scottish whiskey brands Lagavulin and Oban, was awarded a Shorty Award for Best Influencer Marketing Campaign for this yule log video starring Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman.

The 44-minute minute video shows Offerman sitting by a crackling fireplace, staring broodingly into the camera, and occasionally savoring a sip of his drink. Thanks to the simple seasonal premise and Offerman’s unique brand, the video was a viral hit.

6) GAP

GAP’s successful Styld.by campaign featured a number of influential social media personalities showing how they incorporate GAP clothing into their personal wardrobes. Users viewing the influencers’ posts on social media were given options to “Shop this Look” conveniently in the caption of photos.

Thanks to the involvement of multiple influencers from different niches, GAP’s campaign had enormous reach.

7) Stride Gum

If anyone has figured out how to gain a loyal following on Snapchat, it’s hip-hop artist and producer DJ Khaled. Once a minor figure in the music world, Khaled has enjoyed an unprecedented level of success on the ephemeral photo-sharing app, with each of his snaps garnering over 3 million views on average.

“DJ Khaled has completely cracked the platform,” said Emmanuel Seuge, senior vice president for content at Coca-Cola, one of Snapchat’s major advertisers. “He’s the king of Snapchat.”

His “King of Snapchat” status means Khaled is in high-demand for influencer campaigns with brands. He regularly takes part in “Snapchat takeovers,” where a brand hands over the reigns of their corporate Snapchat to Khaled for a brief period of largely unfiltered antics.

Working with W+K London, Stride Gum launched a Snapchat takeover campaign with Khaled last year to promote its “Mad Intense Gum” campaign. The brand called the takeover “an unpredictable, fun day for all his followers.”

Source:
W+K London

8) Skype

One promising way to work with influencers is to create a competition for them — one that invites them to create content on behalf of your brand for an opportunity to win something, like exclusive features on your social media channels or be named on a “best of” list, for example.

Skype executed influencer marketing in this way with its “Your City, Your Passion” competition. Influencers from every corner of the globe were invited to create content explaining why they’re proud of their home cities, for a chance to win a one-on-one Skype session with a famed expert within their given field, including Epic Mealtime creator Darren Morenstein.

9) Hallmark

To promote its 2016 holiday collection of keepsake ornaments, Hallmark partnered with a number of family-friendly Instagram influencers to share personal, tender moments from their families’ holiday season.

Using the hashtag #KeepsakeIt, the influencers offered their followers candid glimpses into their family holiday traditions, along with a link for users to purchase one of their own keepsake ornaments.

10) Loeffler Randall

High-end accessory and footwear brand Loeffler Randall has become a favorite among artists, bloggers, and fashion insiders, thanks in big part to the company’s commitment to involving social media influencers in its marketing campaigns.

The brand’s “LR Ambassadors” include a diverse group of writers, painters, florists and other creative businesswomen “leading dynamic lives.” In the brand’s own words, their LR Ambassadors are “cool girls doing cool things.”

In addition to profiling its LR Ambassadors on the company blog, Loeffler Randall shares pictures of its ambassadors wearing LR shoes and accessories on Instagram, using the hashtag #LRambassador.

 

Have you ever noticed that some URLs start with “http://” while others start with “https://”? Perhaps you noticed that extra “s” when you were browsing websites that require giving over sensitive information, like when you were paying bills online.

But where’d that extra “s” come from, and what does it mean?

To put it simply, the extra “s” means your connection to that website is secure and encrypted any data you enter is safely shared with that website. The technology that powers that little “s” is called SSL, which stands for Secure Sockets Layer.

In this post, I’m going to break down what SSL is, an updated version of Google Chrome that will soon flag websites which are not secure, and how you can evaluate and get SSL.

What is SSL?

First, let’s start with a definition from SSL.com:

SSL is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browser remain private.”

Let’s break that down.

When you land on a website page that has a form, after that form is filled-in and you hit ‘submit’, the information you just entered can be intercepted by a hacker on an unsecure website. 

This information could be anything from details on a bank transaction, to high-level information you enter to register for an offer. In hacker lingo, this “interception” is often referred to as a “man-in-the-middle attack.” The actual attack can happen in a number of ways, but one of the most common is this: A hacker places a small, undetected listening program on the server hosting a website. That program waits in the background until a visitor starts typing information on the website, and it will activate to start capturing the information and then send it back to the hacker. Scary stuff that is no longer just is sci-fi movies.

But when you visit a website that’s encrypted with SSL, your browser will form a connection with the webserver, look at the SSL certificate, and then bind together your browser and the server. This binding connection is secure so that no one besides you and the website you’re submitting the information to can see or access what you type into your browser.

This connection happens instantly, and in fact many suggest is now faster than connecting to an unsecure website. You simply have to visit a website with SSL, and voila: Your connection will automatically be secured.

Everything You Need to Know About Chrome 62 and SSL

Google is getting ready to release a new version of their popular Chrome browser, version 62, which will begin to indicate that a page is not secure if it contains a form, but does not have SSL-enabled. Chrome has approximately 47% browser market share, so when this update is rolled-out a significant number of websites will be affected almost immediately.

According to recent HubSpot Research, up to 85% of people will not continue browsing if a site is not secure. In January 2017, Google rolled out a similar update that only applied to sites collecting sensitive information such as passwords or credit card numbers. With that in mind, users are now familiar with seeing this “not secure” warning, and per the research below will often leave a site because of it.

If you utilize incognito mode in your browser, Chrome will always indicate a page is not secure if it does not have a valid-SSL certificate installed. If you use Chrome outside of incognito mode then this “not secure” warning will only display when starting to enter information into a form.

Image credit: 9to5Google

This means that wherever you host content that contains a form, even if it’s just asking for an email address, you should enable SSL. Keep in mind that if you have content hosted in different platforms, it will be important to talk to each of them and ensure SSL is setup before this Google Chrome update is live. In reality, if it’s not cost prohibitive for you, it’s best to enable SSL across your entire website regardless if a form exists on the page because it can have SEO benefits that we’ll cover in the next section.

Is SSL good for SEO?

Yes. While the primary purpose of SSL is securing information between the visitor and your website, there are benefits for SEO as well. According to Google Webmaster Trends Analysts Zineb Ait Bahajji, SSL is now part of Google’s search ranking algorithm:

Over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.”

In addition, Google has publicly stated that two websites which are otherwise equal in search results, if one has SSL enabled it may receive a slightly rank boost to outweigh the other. As a result, there is a clear SEO benefit to enabling-SSL on your website, and across all your content.

How can I tell if my website has SSL?

When you visit a website with SSL, there are a few distinct differences that display within the browser.

Check your site for SSL with our free tool.

1) The URL says “https://” and not “http://”. 

It looks like this:

2) You’ll see a little padlock icon in the URL bar.

It’ll show up either on the left- or right-hand side of the URL bar, depending on your browser. You can click on the padlock to read more information about the website and the company that provided the certificate.

3) The certificate is valid.

Even if a website has the “https://” and a padlock, the certificate could still be expired — meaning your connection wouldn’t be secure. In most cases, a site that displays as https will be secure, but if you encounter a site that asks for a lot of personal information it may be worth double-checking to be sure the certificate is valid.

To find out whether the certificate is valid in Chrome, go to view > Developer Tools. From there you will need to navigate to the security tab and you can see if the SSL certificate is valid, or expired. If you click the “View certificate” button you will be able to see more information about the SSL certificate and the specific date it’s valid through.

How can I get an SSL certificate for my website?

The first step is to determine what type of certificate you need. For example, if host content in multiple platforms (on separate domains/subdomains) it may mean that you need different SSL certificates.

For most, a standard SSL certificate will cover your content, but for companies in a regulated industry — such as finance, and insurance — it may be worth talking with I.T. because there are specific requirements within your industry that specify the type of SSL certificate you need.

The cost of SSL certificates vary, but you can get a free certificate or pay a few hundred dollars per month to obtain a custom certificate. On the free side — Let’s Encrypt offers certificates at no cost but I would strongly recommend that you have someone knowledgable about the DNS and technical setup of your website to help with this. These certificates will also expire every 90-days, so you’ll need to make sure they stay up to date. 

Many other domain providers will sell SSL certificates that generally range from $50 to obtain a certificate for one domain, up to a few hundred dollars for multiple-domains. This process will be easier than using Let’s Encrypt, but does have a cost associated with the certificate.

(HubSpot customers: If you’re hosting content on HubSpot, SSL is available for free within this promotion. To find out more, contact your Customer Success Manager, or visit our SSL page.)

One of the other key considerations is the validity period of a certification. Most standard SSL certificates that you purchase are available for one to two years by default, but if you’re looking for longer-term options, then look into more advanced certificates that offer longer time periods.

WordPress Plugins To Help Install SSL

If you utilize WordPress to host your content and website, depending on your domain provider, you may need to obtain an SSL certificate and then install it. Here are a few plugins that can help you:

1. Really Simple SSL. Purchasing your SSL certificate is just the first step. This plugin helps you install it across your all your WordPress content. There are premium versions available to help you install it across sites, and verify there are no warnings on your website. Premium versions run from $20 up to $145 for a full-service configuration and optimization of SSL.
2. Insecure Content Fixer. Once you have an SSL certificate and it’s installed, your not quite done yet. If your website is built with any hard-coded references to “http”, such as an image file, then it will show a warning when trying to load that securely. This plugin can help you find and fix anything coded that way so your site displays properly, and securely for visitors.
3. WP Force SSL. Ok, now that you’re done obtaining SSL, installing it, and fixing any errors, it’s time to make sure all your traffic sees the secure version of your site. This plugin will force all traffic to HTTPS so it only loads securely. I strongly recommend that you check for insecure content (also known as mixed content) before enabling this. Without checking for mixed content first your site may appear with warnings because of those insecure files. 

(HubSpot customers: All files hosted within HubSpot File Manager are automatically encrypted with SSL, and in one-checkbox you can force all visitors to utilize the secure version of your site, no plugins required. To find out more, contact your Customer Success Manager, or visit our SSL page.)