If your New Year’s resolution is to take a more creative approach to advertising, then we’ve got some inspiration to get your 2017 started off right.

While many of us were still adjusting to a normal work schedule again after the holidays, these agencies were producing some of January’s most captivating, hilarious, and admirable work.

This month’s roundup includes standout spots from around the globe, including a particularly existential clothing commercial from the Middle East, and an anti-smoking PSA from the Netherlands that takes on big tobacco with a unique spin. We’ve also included the viral, student-produced spec ad that AdWeek called the “most moving work we’ve seen so far in 2017.”

Check out our recap of January’s best ads below, and get inspired to tackle your own big projects in 2017.

10 of the Best Ads from January

1) Meat & Livestock Australia

What brings people together better than … lamb meat? That’s the premise of this extended spot for Meat & Livestock Australia, which assembles an ambitiously diverse cast of lamb-lovers for one epic beach side barbecue.

Produced by Sydney-based agency The Monkeys, the entertaining ad features Indigenous athletes Cathy Freeman and Greg Inglis, transgender comedian Jordan Raskopoulos, and several boatfuls of colonizers from Europe and Asia — all of whom are super into grilled lamb, apparently.

The inclusive tone seems like an attempt to make up for the company’s ill-received Australia Day ad, which was one of Australia’s most complained about ads of 2016 for its perceived lack of sensitivity to Indigenous people and vegetarians. 

2) Film Academy of Baden-Württemberg (Spec Ad for Adidas)

Get the tissues ready for this one. Students at Germany’s Film Academy of Baden-Württemberg created this poignant and visually stunning spec ad for Adidas, and it went viral on YouTube seemingly overnight. The short film follows an elderly protagonist as he attempts to escape his convalescent home for the simple pleasures of an outdoor run. 

Writer/director Eugen Merher, who created the piece as his second-year project at the Film Academy, told AdWeek the inspiration came from a late relative: “An old man with a very young spirit who used to walk two kilometers every day and bring his wife flowers.”

3) Centrepoint

This ad’s answer to existential dread? Looking great.

Impact BBDO Dubai created this ad for Middle Eastern clothing retailer Centerpoint, and it somehow manages to make life’s potentially fatal uncertainties seem oddly quirky.  You can’t control a fiery piano falling towards you, but you can control what you wear while it happens.

4) No7

If anyone knows a thing or two about defying expectations for their age, it’s ballerina Alessandra Ferri, who appears in No7’s latest campaign for an anti-aging serum. The now 53 year-old Italian dancer was the youngest prima ballerina at London’s Royal Ballet when she was 19, and continues to dance professionally today.

In the ad, which was produced by Mother London, Ferri is shown dancing alongside a ghostly vision of her 19 year-old self. It’s a truly mesmerizing concept that’s especially unique for a skincare ad.

5) Expedia

Promoting a message of global fellowship, this ad for Expedia follows a woman through a lifetime of purposeful travel. From the time she looks over her neighbor’s fence as a child to see the world beyond her own backyard, she’s compelled to immerse herself in new cultures and experiences.

Clocking in at just one minute, the 180LA-produced spot packs in a surprising amount of narrative. “We believe that the more each of us travel and peek over our neighbor’s fence, we learn that we have more in common than we have different,” said Vic Walla, senior director of brand marketing at Expedia, to Adweek.

6) Duracell

Wieden+Kennedy developed a new delightfully offbeat campaign for Duracell, focusing on some of the little (potentially unexpected) ways consumers can trust the brand’s batteries on a daily basis.

“We’re taking a lighthearted look at the real issue of trust,” said Ramon Velutini, Duracell’s vp of marketing. “Because while you do need trustworthy power when you’re climbing K2 — the world’s second-highest mountain — you also need it for your game controller and your kids’ toys.”

7) Stivoro

What if employees at a tobacco company party were completely honest about their industry?

Stivoro, the Netherlands’ Foundation for Smoking and Health, teamed up with Wefilm to shed some light on the dangers of smoking (and the hypocrisy of the tobacco industry) in this darkly comic new PSA. 

8) Planet Fitness

Being judged sucks. Being judged by a CPR dummy you’re attempting to give mouth-to-mouth? Well, that really sucks.

In their ongoing campaign to position their gyms as no-judgment zones, Planet Fitness worked with agency Hill Holliday to develop this wonderfully hammy ad for the New Years’ resolution crowd.

9) New York Lottery

It’s a common icebreaker question: What would you do if you won the lottery?

If you’re like the guy in this ad for the New York Lottery, your answer involves dogs. A lot of dogs.

To promote their Cash4Life game, the state-run lottery teamed up with McCann New York to highlight one of the nonmaterial benefits of winning: having more free time to volunteer. It’s a simple spot with an uplifting message — featuring some hilarious slow-motion closeups of running dogs.

10) Angel Soft

I never thought I’d be tearing up at a toilet paper ad, but this one for Angel Soft from Deutsch is surprisingly heartwarming.

The ad chronicles a single dad raising a daughter on his own, and it does a great job capturing some the little, commonly overlooked moments of growing up — all framed in the context of toilet paper, of course.

The creation of mobile devices has made multitasking close to ubiquitous in the modern world. Between social media, live streaming, and digital news, it’s hard to imagine a time of day when we aren’t tempted to look at a screen while we’re doing something else at the same time.

Because of this phenomenon, it should come to no surprise that the average human attention span has fallen to just eight seconds — shorter than that of a goldfish.

What’s more, 59% of people share articles on Twitter without even reading them, and more than half of all pageviews are under a minute in length. It’s clear that people aren’t reading as much as they used to, and content creators need to adapt their strategy to that reality.

In this post, we’ll discuss strategies and resources marketers can use to create content that will generate clicks, shares, and most importantly, more readers.

The Current State of Content Marketing

Back in September, Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs released their annual B2B content marketing survey results, revealing that 70% of respondents plan to produce more content in 2017 than in 2016. However, while content production continues to rise year over year, content engagement saw a 17% drop in 2016, according to TrackMaven.

This dip could be a reflection of decreased content quality, as proper planning and research tend to fall by the wayside when marketers ramp up their output. But it could also be attributed to that attention span shrinkage we mentioned earlier. After all, today’s readers are more likely to skim blogs, long-form written content, and podcasts rather than thoroughly consume them, according to data from HubSpot Research.

What’s a marketer to do? Let’s dive into our strategies for defying the goldfish attention span, without sacrificing the quality of your content.

How to Create Content That Gets Consumed

You already know that content creation is an integral part of the inbound marketing methodology. It attracts visitors to your blog, cultivates brand awareness, and helps you generate leads for your organization. But what about page views? Here are our strategies for making sure you’re not just creating into the void, but are actually producing content that gets consumed and shared.

Write quality content

We know, this one seems like a no brainer. But with 30% of marketers reporting that they don’t have clarity around what content marketing success looks like, it’s an important issue to stress.

It’s estimated that bad writing costs businesses close to $400 billion per year in inefficiency and productivity loss. And it could also be costing your organization if you’re generating content that isn’t driving any results. So before you start putting fingers to keyboard, implement a few processes to make sure you’re writing quality content that’s also useful to your audience.

Here are a few ideas:

• Validate your blog post ideas before writing them by doing industry and persona research and selecting keywords to target.
• Conduct a competitor analysis to see what content drives engagement across a variety of channels.
• Create a style guide and rely on an editorial checklist so each piece of content is held to the same high standard.

One of the easiest ways to create content that your audience will read? Ask your audience what they want to read about. Conduct social media polls and surveys to find out what topics and content types your subscribers are interested in, and brainstorm ideas based on their feedback.

For example, The Muse publishes content for job seekers about career growth, and they ran a poll asking their Twitter followers what would improve their workday.

We’re curious: What would make your workday a whole lot better? #career #poll

— The Muse (@dailymuse)
October 4, 2016

Sure enough, shortly after the poll closed on Twitter, they published this article based on the results:

Clever, right? Experiment with social media polls and ask for engagement from your followers. Encourage your audience to engage with the poll to generate content ideas and more participation on social media, and see what ideas you come up with based on the results.

Invest in thought leadership

When setting your blog editorial calendar for the months ahead, ask yourself: Are there any topics that someone in the organization, such as a founder or executive, is uniquely qualified to write about?

That’s thought leadership — and it’s not as difficult to incorporate into your strategy as you might think it is. In fact, there are a lot of small steps you can take to incorporate more thought leadership into your current editorial.

Here are a few ideas:

• Write a guest post on another organization’s blog. Check out this post for tips on how to become a guest writer on 11 popular sites.
• Publish long-form content that contains original research.
• Speak at conferences in your industry. (Intimidated by public speaking? HubSpot’s CMO Kipp Bodnar suggests starting with improv.)
• Interview an influential industry professional outside of your organization.

At HubSpot, we frequently partner with influential organizations — like Trello — to create content that reflects our combined expertise. By collaborating with the folks behind Trello to put together a comprehensive guide for using the project management tool in your marketing campaigns, we demonstrated our ability to provide credible, helpful tips — straight from the source:

Brainstorm other organizations in your industry and determine a mutually beneficial way you could collaborate. Whether that’s guest posting, cross-promotion, or working together as in the example above, keep bringing new ideas to the table that your audience can’t help but read.

Create visual content

Your audience wants to see more visual content, and it performs better, too: readers spend more time looking at images than words on a web page, and images promote greater memory recall than text alone.

There are a variety of different types of visual content that you can create to draw attention and promote greater readership, and our blog has a number of step-by-step guides to creating eye-catching infographics, videos, and more.

Vox does a great job of providing written and visual content for its readers. On any given day, it might publish a data visualization, a long-form article, and a video featuring different angles on the same topic — in this case, the Women’s March on Washington — to match different people’s content preferences and to keep things fresh for its audience.

Data Visualization

Long-Form Article

Video

The lesson? Don’t automatically default to writing a blog post simply because it’s a medium you’re comfortable with. Experiment with creating visual content to tell data-driven stories your audience will click, and hopefully share, too.

Meet the reader halfway

Follow the Golden Rule: Treat your reader as you’d like to be treated. Most of us are busy people, and busy people on the internet like to skim-read content. Luckily, you can make it easier for readers to consume your content all the way through with different formatting, layout, and coding choices.

Here are a few ideas:

• Use headers and bolded text to break up sections and paragraphs so readers can maintain focus.
• Use bullet points and numbered lists to draw the eye to a new format and pay closer attention. (See what we did there?)
• Include summary and takeaway sections in your written content to help readers remember what they’ve been reading about and maintain their interest.

Even better, help the reader understand how quickly they’ll be able to read a piece before they get started. Check out how Medium does this in an example from ThinkGrowth.org, HubSpot’s Medium publication:

(For more examples of publications that produce easily consumable content, try reading this blog post for inspiration.)

Publish on a variety of channels

Another challenge to getting people to thoroughly consume your content is they just may not have found it yet, and that’s where off-site content can come in handy. Audiences vary across different platforms, and it’s easier for your content to get discovered, and then read, if it’s published in more places than just your blog.

Medium is one example of where you can publish different content to attract a broader audience. You could create original content for a Medium publication, or repurpose old content by turning text into an infographic or video. As HubSpot Vice President of Marketing Meghan Keaney Anderson notes:

On the open web, people are searching, but on Medium, people come to spend time reading. This leads to much higher engagement on Medium and it’s this engagement, not search behavior, that fuels further discovery.”

Social media platforms also offer a variety of features for publishing original content. For example, you can publish live video on Facebook, ephemeral messages on Snapchat, photos on Instagram, and blog posts on LinkedIn. To ensure you’re publishing on these channels at the most optimal time, check out this guide from ClearVoice on when to publish content on social media for different industries.

Getting Started

We know this is a lot of information, but competition is getting stiff, so experimenting with how you create content now will pay off in the future. If you need help getting started, here’s our list of free tools to make awesome content.

What’s your favorite type of content to read? Share with us in the comments below.

I don’t know about you, but as a rule, I communicate better via written word.

It gives me time to think. It lets me use the vocabulary that my SAT tutor hammered into my brain so many years ago. And most of all, it gives me a screen to hide behind when I have to confront an uncomfortable topic — making the situation much less awkward. But there are times when even I, the perpetual wordsmith, have to make an actual phone call.

Speaking to another human being over the phone can be nerve wracking. Maybe it’s because so few of us actually use our mobile devices for that anymore — after all, Pew Research found that text messaging is the most widely-used feature on them. 

But even if it looks like phone calls are fading on the surface, there are times when they’re still essential — especially, it seems, where a sensitive subject is concerned. That means it’s time to stop hiding behind the screen, take a deep breath, and dial. We’ve outlined six of the most important occasions when a phone call is better than an email. Have a look, and start talking.

6 Times a Phone Call Is Better Than an Email

1) When You Want to Apologize

Most of us grow up understanding that, when we do something wrong, we should say, “Sorry” — 96% of parents think it’s important for kids to apologize when they deliberately upset someone, and 88% believe the same is true, even when it’s unintentional. But what constitutes a heartfelt apology?

It’s so hard to admit when we’re wrong. And to actually say it out loud — “I’m sorry” — is even more challenging when we have the option of quickly typing it out in an email or text message. That’s why it can carry so much more weight when someone actually calls us to apologize. Assuming he or she means it, we can hear the person’s remorse.

But if you’re afraid of screwing up an apology when you try to do it off-script, you can still write it down before you make the call. That can help to give you an idea of what it is that you really want to say, and can mitigate the risk of stumbling your way through saying sorry. Just make sure it sounds natural — an apology won’t seem very authentic if it sounds like you’re reading from a script.

2) When You Anticipate a Lot of Questions

My colleague, Leslie Ye, recently had a phone call with someone to discuss a project for the HubSpot Sales Blog. She specifically chose to have a spoken conversation — rather than explain the parameters over email — for a few reasons. Among them, she told me, was that she anticipated the writer would have several questions.

As it turns out, she was right. “Calls that have a lot of questions are typically harder to handle over email, because that’s not a real-time conversation,” Ye explained. “With a phone call you, can go back and forth on one question until it’s clarified, then move on to the next one.”

In other words, it was more efficient for Ye and her counterpart to address all questions in a single phone call, rather than over a string of emails. When you do the latter, you risk losing track of what’s been asked and answered. But there’s a catch — if you don’t take notes during your call, it’s just as easy to forget what you’ve discussed, given our declining attention span and retention of details.

For that reason, there are times when it’s a good idea to combine a phone call with an email. Following up in writing is a helpful way to ensure that both parties are on the same page after a conversation, and gives you a point of reference after the fact.

3) When You Have to Explain Something Complicated

There’s a reason why telephone support still exists. We use it here to help HubSpot customers, and for good reason — 73% of customer service managers say that support inquiries are becoming more complex.

Written instructions are always helpful as a point of reference — see above. But if you’re trying to follow a series of complicated steps, or you’re simply new to what you’re doing, it’s tremendously helpful to have someone walk you through it via spoken word.

As a channel consultant, my colleague Adrianne Ober deals with this phenomenon daily. “Email is great for getting to the point and keeping on task,” she says, but “a conversation is going to naturally provide deeper context.”

But while it’s great to be friendly, it’s also crucial to stay focused — it can be easy for the conversation to go off-track, Ober says, especially when you strike a good rapport with the person you’re speaking with. So remind yourself of the purpose behind the conversation, and stick to it until the issue is resolved.

4) When You’ve Taken Way Too Long to Respond

It’s tough to say how many unread emails exist in the average person’s inbox. When I polled by team, just over 37% of my colleagues responded that they have anywhere between 11 to over 50.

That explains why it’s so easy for emails to be overlooked or forgotten. Admit it — how many times have you opened an email and marked it as “unread” with intention of answering it later? That habit makes it easy for messages to quickly become buried under constant incoming email.

There are two potential solutions to this issue:

1. Organize your inbox with resources like HubSpot Sales, or any number of the email management tools we’ve listed here.
2. If you’ve overlooked something crucial, call the sender.

Remember our advice to call when you need to apologize? Here’s a great example of when that’s particularly helpful. With inbox overload becoming a workplace epidemic, chances are, the person you’re calling will understand a little bit of neglect. Plus, making the effort to actually call the person and address the issue — rather than responding with an overdue email that’s just going to flood his or her inbox, too — speaks volumes. It sends the message that the person is a priority, rather than something at the bottom of endless to-do list.

5) When You Need to Discuss Something Personal

Simply put — life happens, and sometimes, it’s not so awesome. And on occasion, the less-than-awesome things require us to temporarily step away from certain responsibilities, like work.

As we’ve emphasized, using the spoken word in lieu of email can help to make your counterpart feel like a priority, and to understand the significance of what you’re discussing. So when you need to bring up something personal, like a family emergency or medical issue, skip the email and have a real conversation about it instead.

That also helps to instill a sense of empathy. Not too long ago, researchers at the University of Michigan found that there was a 40% decrease in empathy among certain populations, which correlated with an increased use of technology. It’s a symptom of hiding behind a screen — and, therefore, not being able to associate emotion with what’s being said.

That’s why we generally advise using the phone — or an in-person conversation, if possible — when you need to discuss anything important, as we note below.

6) When It’s Really Important

What constitutes “urgent,” these days, has become somewhat fluid. We’re a deadline-oriented culture — in fact, it’s been found that adding a deadline to a task makes us 24% more likely to do even get it done. But sometimes, we can’t pull off those deadlines alone. We need to interview an expert for a quote, or have an official party sign off on something.

But remember — a lot of us have unread emails in the double digits. So when an important request comes in, even when labeled as “urgent,” it’s easy for it to get pushed down by a high rate of incoming emails. What’s urgent to me, might not be a priority for the person I’m trying to reach.

Sure, “most Americans would rather type it than say it,” writes Chicago Tribune’s Corilyn Shropshire. But reaching out by phone not only prevents an email from going unread — and adding to the recipient’s email avalanche — but also, it helps to instill that sense of empathy we mentioned before, and emphasize urgency.

Here’s another instance when following up in writing can help. If you can’t reach the person at his or her desk, for example, email might be received quicker, since 88% of us check it on our smartphones. Try sending a written summary of what you said in your voicemail, but save the meaty details for a phone call, so that they don’t get lost in the email shuffle, as per Ye’s above example. But be respectful of that person’s time, and ask when it would be more convenient to speak by phone — that whole “empathy” thing goes both ways.

Make the Call

To be clear, we’re not trying to knock email. We love email — there are times when it’s an invaluable resource for marketers, and when it’s a perfectly appropriate method of communication.

But we also like to keep a human element to things, which is why — and feel free to call us “sentimental” — sometimes, we like to talk it out. These are six instances in which that’s the way to go, and when it can help you accomplish things more effectively.

When do you opt for phone calls over emails? Let us know in the comments.

Over the past few years, Google has made a lot of changes that can be challenging for modern marketers and SEO experts to keep up with.

Recently, Google started indexing according to mobile search results, cracked down on intrusive pop-up ads, and removed right-side ads. What do all of these changes have in common?

Google has been making changes to its algorithm, search engine results pages, and policies based on user behavior and preference. They’re observing what users are doing and making the search engine work more intuitively for them. This is great for the frequent Google searchers in all of us — Google processes more than 2 trillion searches per year — but it can make it challenging to adapt your strategy and achieve your SEO goals. INBOUND event, Moz Co-founder and former CEO Rand Fishkin unpacked the ways Google is changing and what marketers and SEO pros can do to improve their results in 2017.

4 Ways Marketers Can Strengthen Their SEO Strategy in 2017

1) Diversify your traffic sources to keep earning visits from Google.

Fishkin encourages a distributed content strategy designed to help you earn traffic from a variety of different sources. This approach ensures that your traffic numbers aren’t entirely contingent on people directly searching for your brand name.

Video marketing is an engaging content format that can diversify traffic. For example, Moz videos are published on Wistia first, then on YouTube. This multi-channel strategy allows them to generate traffic from different sources. In the same vein, written content can be published on blogs, LinkedIn Pulse, and Medium publications. However, it’s important to tailor your content to different audiences where they consume content, whether it’s on social media or YouTube or guest posts on other blogs, to keep earning traffic and links from a variety of sources in Google search.

2) Evolve your keyword targeting strategy.

There are many new elements on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) that make it harder to generate clicks. With Google’s Answer Box and Carousel search results, there is less real estate on Google’s search engine results page than ever. Check it out below — if you Google the term “blog,” a large portion of the page is taken up by Google Ads, news stories, and an Answer Box:

Because Google’s real estate is this competitive, it’s harder to get onto page one of the search engine results page, which is proven to have higher clickthrough rates than other results. In fact, did you know that the first position in Google gets 33% of search traffic?

The solution? Changing your keyword targeting strategy so your content is better geared toward the changing ways people are searching on Google. Use keyword research tools such as Google AdWords and HubSpot’s Keywords App to determine the long-tail, conversational keywords your audience is searching for. Then, plan a blog post strategy based around topic clusters so your website is more likely to rank higher in Google search results.

3) Invest in a link building strategy that can scale.

Inbound links pointing toward your website give it massive levels of authority in search engines, so link building is still an integral part of your inbound marketing strategy. Fisher says that, in order for link building to be successful, you need several elements: link goals, a strategic approach to achieving them, tactical initiatives, and metrics to track. Link building takes a long time to show results, so there is usually a significant time gap between when you start experimenting and conducting initiatives and when you see the benefits of your efforts.

For that reason, SEO marketers need to balance their efforts between long-term investments and short-term hacks so you’re constantly generating links while investing in the future health of your site’s inbound link generation. You’ll want to make sure that these approaches are white hat link building tactics that offer a benefit to your site and sites linking to you, and not spammy tactics that can hurt your site.

Long-term investments have high upfront costs and are slower to return on their investment, but they earn links while you sleep and don’t put you at risk of any spammy behaviors. These tactics primarily consist of publishing high-quality content and promoting it in hopes that other sites will link to it. Short-term hacks can show results more quickly, but these strategies can sometimes be viewed as spammy. Such tactics include guest posting and sponsored content.

With a balance of long-term and short-term strategies, you’ll be able to ensure your domain’s authority immediately while you work to build up your blog to the point where it is newsworthy and linked to organically.

4) Increase searcher engagement with your content.

With the introduction of RankBrain, Google’s new machine-learning algorithm that helps determine search engine rankings, how the searcher interacts with Google is now being weighed as one of hundreds of ranking signals. While Google is still figuring out how RankBrain operates themselves, but metrics such as clickthrough rate and time on-page already contribute to how high (or low) your site ranks in Google.

Here are strategies to think about in order to amp up your site if RankBrain starts to play a greater role in SEO:

• Think about all of the questions your audience is searching for answers to, and not just individual keywords.
• Prioritize user experience and consider amplifying or redesigning your website so that it answers multiple search queries and visitors will stay on your site for longer.
• Design your website so that it delivers content quickly and beautifully across multiple devices.
• Remove features like pop-up ads that discourage users from reading or returning to your page.
• Most importantly, invest time and resources in publishing authoritative, comprehensive content that your audience will read and share again and again.

What’s Ahead in Search

Fishkin believes that the name of the SEO game is engagement. “If you deliver dramatically better engagement than your competitors,” he explained, “they will be hard-pressed to catch up with you in SERP.” We already know that Google has changed a lot this year, and will most likely keep changing in the next year, so it’s important to get a plan in motion now for search engine optimization and link building strategies to propel your site’s growth. Watch Fishkin’s INBOUND talk in full below:

 

 

For more ideas on safeguarding your website for search engine optimization, read our blog posts about white hat link building tactics, blog post content ideation, speeding up your blog, and more.

How are you changing your SEO strategy in 2017? Share with us in the comments below.

In today’s technology-driven world, executives and marketers can no longer afford to be satisfied with gut feelings and guessing. You need granular, relevant, enriching data to measure and surface the impact your programs and campaigns have on the business (and impress your boss).

At the same time, anyone who’s ever created a marketing report from scratch knows that it can be … well, tough. From starting with raw numbers to figuring out what information your boss will actually be interested in, extracting the most important insights is no easy task. In fact, you could end up spending weeks in Excel tinkering with your monthly reports and still have missing information.

That’s why the marketing and reporting experts at HubSpot and Looker have joined forces to bring you a brand new free guide, How to Create Marketing Reports Your Boss Actually Cares About. It’s got insights on:

• What you need to measure before your report
• The best tools to help you gather and display your report each month
• How to find the data you need
• Analyzing your data to establish measurable goals
• Tips for visualizing and presenting your metrics and analysis
• How to plan for better results next month

Click here to download How to Create Marketing Reports Your Boss Actually Cares About

No project is an unmitigated success or failure. Even when it seems like a project couldn’t have possibly gone better (or worse), there are always lessons to be learned.

Thus, the project post-mortem.

The project post-mortem shouldn’t be seen as an investigation. It’s an inquiry to uncover all the lessons for the future — not a chance to assign blame or put people on the spot. A productive project post-mortem is a chance to fully unpack a project’s trajectory and dig deeper into why things unfolded the way they did.

It’s the opportunity to ask: What exactly did we accomplish? And even more importantly: what could we do better next time?

To help your agency’s team get the most out of your project post-mortem meetings, we’ve shared some basic guidelines. Check them out below and make your next post-mortem your most productive one yet.

How to Run a Productive Project Post-Mortem

Make post-mortems a standard part of your team’s process.

Post-mortem meetings should be an essential part of your agency’s process — for the big projects, and the smaller ones. Most teams run post-mortem meetings for larger projects with definitive start and end dates, but they can be equally useful for smaller scale or even on-going projects.

Even though “post-mortem” quite literally means after death, your team doesn’t have to wait for the end of a huge, long-term project to get value from a retrospective evaluation. When you’re fleshing out a project’s schedule during the kickoff phase, insert mini post-mortems at key milestones. These pulse-checks will give your team the chance to better understand how a project is progressing — and hopefully identify potential issues before they cause permanent damage.

Once the project has officially wrapped up, don’t wait too long to schedule the final post-mortem, or people will have mentally moved on. In fact, you should schedule the post-mortem when you build out the full project plan, so everyone knows it’s an expected part of the project wrap up.

Send out a post-mortem questionnaire before the actual meeting.

The meeting itself shouldn’t be scheduled for more than an hour. Not everyone will have a chance to speak up, and some smaller (but still important) issues may not get a lot of discussion time. And frankly, not everyone is comfortable speaking up in this kind of forum. Using a pre-meeting questionnaire means everyone on your team has an equal opportunity to share their thoughts, and no stray detail flies under the radar.

The questionnaire also provides an opportunity for people to get themselves organized before the meeting. People can dig into why certain things happened (or didn’t happen), so they can bring causes and potential solutions to the meeting — not just missteps or hastily formulated theories.

For example, if a project required the creatives on your team to work around the clock to get their deliverables done on time, why did this happen? Was the project timeline set up badly? Were inexperienced people assigned to the wrong tasks?

The responses from the questionnaire should inform the post-mortem meeting’s agenda, focusing the discussion on issues that had the biggest impact. Yet the questionnaire also means the “smaller” stuff doesn’t get overlooked in the full post-mortem process.

Select a moderator to keep the meeting on track.

The goal of a project post-mortem is to constructively evaluate what the project’s team accomplished successfully, and what could have been done better. For this discussion to be productive, someone needs to keep the conversation civil, on-point, and moving forward.

This is where the meeting moderator comes in. Establish a moderator prior to the in-person meeting who can stick to the agenda and lead the discussion in case it gets out of hand. The moderator doesn’t have to be the project manager or a member of your leadership team, she just needs to be someone who feels comfortable taking charge.

Set a clear agenda.

With so many details to cover in such a short period of time, it’s easy for post-mortem meetings to veer off track. Help keep the discussion in check by building a clear meeting agenda in advance:

Start with a recap of the project’s core objectives, briefly going over the goals and metrics established at the kickoff. This portion shouldn’t be longer than five minutes, and should act as a quick refresher on what your team set out to do.

Briefly review the results. Once you’ve gone over the primary goals and objectives, take a few minutes to review the project’s final results. This should be a straightforward evaluation of whether or not the project met your team’s metrics for success. Did you hit the targets you set out to meet?

Delve into the why or why not. Now is the time to really dig into why the project ended up the way it did, and how team members are feeling about it. This discussion should take up the bulk of the meeting. We’ve explained how to structure your examination below.

Ask the right questions.

So what exactly should a post-mortem examine? There are a few different cross-sections to frame your inquiry. Basic categories of inquiry are planning, execution, results, and communication.

Within each category, you should ask quantitative, qualitative, and subjective questions:

Quantitative Questions

These are your standard yes or no questions. Were deadlines met or missed? Did we provide all deliverables outlined in the project scope? Were pre-defined success metrics achieved? Were outline workflows and processes followed? Was there a budget overrun?

As you look into the project from this perspective, a key underlying question is always: Was the plan good? Did we follow the plan? Was the plan bad? Why? All the quantitative questions you ask should eventually lead back to this overarching theme.

Qualitative Questions

These open-ended questions should evaluate the project beyond the hard data and planning. Did we deliver work at the high standards we and our client expect? Does the client agree? Did people feel like they had the resources, information, and support they needed to get their own tasks done? Was campaign criteria or task expectations poorly defined or communicated?

In both the quantitative and qualitative inquiries, get specific about what worked well and what didn’t. Did you have delivery date for client to share their personas, but no review time built in? So the client sent them in on time (as per the project plan), but they were inadequate for the project’s needs. Did a lack of oversight by an account manager result in a new PPC campaign manager overspending against the client’s ad budget?

Subjective Questions

Subjective questions help assess how your team members are feeling, and can help leadership identify troubling signs of burnout and fatigue early on. These questions also let leadership know what processes worked best with their team, helping them plan future projects.

What did people enjoy most and least about this project? How was working with the client? What changes would they make to this type of project in the future? How could the work run more smoothly with this client or among certain departments in the future? Do you want to work on a similar type project again? If not, why not?

Make sure to close the loop.

The post-mortem meeting is just one step of the post-mortem process. The end result of the questionnaire and meeting should be a post-mortem document outlining conclusions of the inquiry and actionable takeaways for the future.

And this inquiry isn’t just about what went well or badly, but what’s going to change for the future, and how? What lead to great success here that we can bottle and use on other projects? Circulate the post-mortem roundup document to participants to get their sign-off. Then circulate the agency-wide takeaways for future projects to everyone.

A post-mortem that doesn’t impact future action is a waste of time. Make sure your post-mortems lead to greater results on subsequent projects.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

We’ve all been through it. You know, the moment you’re about to dig into the best darn pile of spaghetti and meatballs you’ve ever seen.

Just as you twist your fork in the pasta, spear a mouth-watering meatball, and go in for the first savory bite … the phone rings. “May I speak to Lindsay Kow-low-witch?” asks the telemarketer on the other end. “This is an important message regarding your oven preferences.”

This frustrating interruption is exactly why we’re here to discuss inbound lead generation. What is inbound lead generation? It’s a solution that can save your business or organization from being that annoying, disruptive cold caller who is ruining spaghetti nights for pasta lovers all over the world.

Let’s start with defining a lead, and then we’ll get into what online lead generation is, why you need lead generation, how you qualify someone as a lead, how you generate leads, and why inbound lead generation is much more effective than simply buying leads.

What is a Lead?

Let’s start with the basics. A lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form.

In other words, instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased your contact information, you’d hear from a business or organization you’ve already opened communication with.

For example, maybe you took an online survey to learn more about how to take care of your car. If you got an email from the auto company that hosted the survey on their website about how they could help you take care of your car, it’d be far less intrusive and irrelevant than if they’d just called you out of the blue with no knowledge of whether you even care about car maintenance … right?

And from a business perspective, the information the auto company collected about you from your survey responses would help them personalize that opening communication to meet the existing needs of the potential client.

What Is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into those leads we just talked about.

Whenever someone outside the marketing world asks me what I do, I can’t simply say, “I create content for lead generation.” It’d be totally lost on them, and I’d get some really confused looks.

So instead, I say, “I work on finding unique ways to attract people to my business. I want to provide them with enough goodies to get them naturally interested in my company so they eventually warm up to the brand enough to want to hear from us!”

That usually resonates better, and that’s exactly what lead generation is: It’s a way of warming up potential customers to your business and getting them on the path to eventually buying.

Why Do You Need Lead Generation?

By showing an organic interest in your business, it’s those strangers and prospects that are initiating the relationship with you — versus you, the business, initiating the relationship with them. This makes it easier and more natural for them to want to buy from you somewhere down the line.

Within the larger inbound marketing methodology, lead generation falls in the second stage. It occurs after you’ve attracted an audience and are ready to actually convert those visitors into leads for your sales team. As you can see in the diagram below, generating leads is a fundamental point in an individual’s journey to becoming a delighted customer of your business.

How to Qualify a Lead

As you now know, a lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. Now, let’s talk about the ways in which someone can actually show that interest.

Essentially, a sale lead is generated through information collection. That information collection could come as the result of a job seeker showing interest in a position by completing an application for the job, a shopper sharing contact information in exchange for a coupon, or a person filling out a form to download an educational piece of content, like an ebook, kit, podcast, tool, trial, or something else.

Below are just a few of the many ways in which you could qualify someone as a lead. Each of these examples also highlights the fact that the amount of information you can collect to qualify someone as a lead, as well as the that person’s level of interest in your company, can vary. Let’s assess each scenario:

• Job Application: Any individual filling out an application form is willing to share a lot of personal information because he/she wants to be considered for the position. Filling out that application shows their true interest in the job, therefore qualifying the person as a lead for the company’s recruiting team.
• Coupon: Unlike the job application, you probably know very little about someone who has stumbled upon one of your online coupons. But if they find the coupon valuable enough, they may be willing to provide their name and email address in exchange for it. Although it’s not a lot of information, it’s enough for a business to know that someone has interest in their company.
• Content: While the download of a coupon shows an individual has a direct interest in your product or service, content (like an educational ebook or webinar) does not. Therefore, in order to truly understand the nature of the person’s interest in your business, you’ll probably need to collect more information — you’ll need enough information for a sales rep to actually understand whether the person is interested in your product or service, and whether they’re a good fit.

These three general examples highlight how lead generation differs from company to company, and from person to person. You’ll need to collect enough information in order to gauge whether someone has a true, valid interest in your product or service, but knowing how much information is enough information will vary depending on your business.

Let’s look at Episerver, for example. They use web content reports for lead generation, collecting six pieces of information from prospective leads:

As you can see, Episerver asks for:

• Full Name: Basic information needed for communication with the to-be lead.
• Email: The email address will allow your business to communicate with the to-be
    lead through your email marketing campaigns.
• Company: This will give you the ability to research what the business does and how the lead might benefit from your product or service. (Mainly for B2B)
• Role: Understanding an individual’s role in the business will help you understand how to communicate with them. Every brand stakeholder will have a different take and perspective on your offering. (Mainly for B2B)
• Country: Location information needed for qualifying the to-be lead and sending it to the correct sales team, if applicable.
• State: Location information needed for qualifying the to-be lead and sending it to the correct sales team, if applicable.

If you’d like to learn more intermediate-level tips on information collection and what you should ask for on your lead gen forms, read our post about it here. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Now, back to the basics …

How to Generate Leads: The Mechanics of Lead Generation

Now that we understand how lead generation fits into the whole inbound marketing methodology, let’s review the actual components of the lead generation process.

Visitor: A visitor has discovered your business through one of your marketing channels, whether that’s your website, blog, or social media page. On any of these channels, you’ll need to have a …

Call-to-Action (CTA): A call-to-action or CTA is an image, button, or message that calls website visitors to take some sort of action. When it comes to lead generation, this action is to navigate to a …

Landing Page: A landing page is a web page a visitor lands on for a distinct purpose. While a landing page can be used for various reasons, one of its most frequent uses is to capture leads through …

Forms: Forms are typically hosted on landing pages, although they can technically be embedded anywhere on your site. They consist of a series of fields (like in our example above) that collect information in exchange for an …

Offer: An offer is the content or something of value that’s being “offered” on the landing page. The offer must have enough value to a visitor to merit providing their personal information in exchange for access to it.

See how everything fits together?

(If you’re looking for a free lead generation tool, take a look at HubSpot Marketing Free, which lets you set up contact and lead capture forms on your website and/or scrape contact info from your existing forms. It’s really easy to set up.)

Once you put all these elements together, you can use your various promotional channels to link and drive traffic to the landing page so you can start generating leads. Here are some example pathways for lead generation:

Hold Up … Why Not Just Buy Leads?

Marketers and salespeople alike want to fill their sales funnel — and they want to fill it quickly. That’s where the temptation to buy leads comes in. Buying sale leads, as opposed to generating them organically, is much easier and takes far less time and effort, despite being more expensive. So why shouldn’t you just buy leads?

First and foremost, any leads you’ve purchased don’t actually know you. Typically, they’ve “opted in” at some other site when signing up for something, and didn’t actually opt in to receiving anything from your company. The messages you send them are therefore unwanted messages, and sending unwanted messages is intrusive, not inviting. (Remember that disruptive call I got when I was trying to eat my spaghetti? That’s how people feel when they receive emails and other messages from people they didn’t ask to hear from.)

If the prospect has never been to your website, indicated an interest in your resources, products, services, or even industry, then you’re interrupting them … plain and simple.

If they never opted in to receive messages from you specifically, then there’s a high likelihood they could flag your messages as spam. This is quite dangerous for you. Not only does this train their inbox to show only emails they want to see, but it indicates to their email provider which emails to filter out. Once enough people click flag your messages as spam, you go on a “blacklist,” which is then shared with other email providers. Once you get on the blacklist, it’s really, really hard to get back off of it. In addition, your email deliverability and IP reputation will likely be harmed.

It’s always, always, always better to generate leads organically rather than buy them. Read this blog post to learn how to grow an opt-in email list instead of buying one.

Lead Generation Trends & Benchmarks

So … you’re getting web traffic and generating leads. But how are you doing compared with other companies in your industry? How many leads should you really be generating?

It’s tough to figure out whether your lead generation strategy is working if you aren’t looking at industry data. That’s why we partnered with Qualtrics to survey more than 900 marketers from all different industries in North America and Europe. Using this data, we created a demand generation report with data on website visitors, leads, opportunities, customers, and revenue.

For example, did you know that 74% of companies that weren’t exceeding revenue goals didn’t know their visitor, lead, MQL, or sales opportunities numbers? How about that over 70% of companies not achieving their revenue goals generate fewer than 100 leads per month, and only 5% generate more than 2,500 leads per month? 

For the in-depth reports, download our Demand Generation Benchmarks Report. Here are some highlights:

Cost per Lead, by Industry

The media and publishing industries report the lowest cost per lead, at $11–25. Software, information technology and services, marketing agencies, and financial services companies all report the highest average cost per lead, at $51-100.

Leads Generated per Month, by Annual Revenue

Unsurprisingly, the more revenue a company has, the more leads they generate. The differences are most drastic at the highest and lowest end of the spectrum: 82% of companies with $250,000 or less in annual revenue report generating less than 100 leads per month, whereas only 8% of companies generating $1 billion in annual revenue report less than 100 leads per month.

Leads per Month

We found that, in general, 58% of companies generated 500 leads per month or fewer and 71% generate 1,000 or fewer. However, as we saw previously, the companies having the most success are also the ones generating the most leads.

Here’s how the data broke down by company size:

Lead Generation Software

We found that the most successful teams use a formal system to organize and store leads: 46% use Google Docs, 41% use marketing automation software, and 37% use CRM software. (HubSpot customers: Google Drive integrates both with HubSpot Marketing and with HubSpot CRM.)

Tips for Lead Generation Campaigns

In a given lead generation campaign, there can be a lot of moving parts. It can be difficult to tell which parts of your campaign are working and which need some fine-tuning. What exactly goes into a best-in-class lead generation engine?  

Use the right lead generation tools.

As you saw in our data, the most successful marketing teams use a formal system to organize and store their leads. That’s where lead generation tools and lead generation software comes in.

How much do you know about the people visiting your website? Do you know their names or their email addresses? How about which pages they visit, how they’re navigating around, and what they do before and after filling out a lead conversion form?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then chances are, you’re having a hard time connecting with the people who are visiting your site. But these are questions you should answer — and you can, too, with the right lead generation tools.

There are a few different tools and templates out there that’ll help you create different lead gen assets you can put on your site:

• CTA Templates: 50+ free, customizable call-to-action (CTA) templates in PowerPoint that you can use to create clickable CTA buttons you can put on your blog, landing pages, and elsewhere on your site
• HubSpot Marketing Free: A free lead generation software tool from HubSpot that includes lead capture and contact insights features, which will scrape any pre-existing forms you have on your website and add those contacts to your existing contact database. It also lets you new pop-ups, hello bars, or slide-ins — called “lead flows” — that’ll help you turn website visitors into leads immediately.

Example of a slide-in lead flow created using HubSpot Marketing Free.

• Hotjar: A great tool to help you understand what users want, care about, and do on your site using heatmaps, visitor recordings, analyses of your forms, feedback forms and surveys, and more.
• A form scraping tool that collects submissions on your website’s existing forms, so you can consolidate all your leads into your contacts database regardless of which form visitors submit on your website. If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can create and embed forms using HubSpot. Non-HubSpot customers can use a form creation tool like Contact Form 7, JetPack, or Google Forms, and then use HubSpot Marketing Free’s Collected Forms feature to automatically capture these form submissions and put them in your contacts database.

Create amazing offers for all different stages of the buying cycle.

Not all of your site visitors are ready to talk to your sales team or see a demo of your product. Someone at the beginning of the buyer’s journey might be interested in an informational piece like an ebook or a guide, whereas someone who’s more familiar with your company and are near the bottom of the cycle might be more interested in a free trial or demo. Make sure you’re creating offers for each phase and offering CTAs for these offers throughout your site.

Yes, it takes time to create valuable content that teaches and nurtures your leads down the funnel, but if you don’t offer anything for visitors who aren’t ready to buy, then they may never come back to your website. From checklists to templates to free tools, here are 23 ideas for lead generation content to get you started.

If you want to take personalization a step further for a higher conversion rate, try using smart CTAs on your webpages and blog posts. Smart CTAs are CTAs that detect where that person is in the buying cycle — whether they’re a new visitor, a lead, or a customer — and change accordingly. Personalized CTAs convert a whopping 42% more visitors than basic calls-to-action.

Link your CTA to a dedicated landing page.

This may seem obvious to some of you, but you’d be surprised how many marketers don’t create dedicated landing pages for their offers. CTAs are meant to send visitors to a dedicated landing page where they receive a specific offer.

Don’t use CTAs to drive people to your homepage, for instance. Even if your CTA is about your brand or product (and perhaps not an offer like a download), you should still be sending them to a targeted landing page that’s relevant to what they are looking for, whether it’s a feature-specific landing page for your product, or something else. If you have the opportunity to use a CTA, send them to a page that will convert them into a lead.

If you want to learn more about how to build and promote high-converting landing pages, then download our ebook on optimizing landing pages for conversions.

Use social media strategically.

While marketers typically think of social media as best for top-of-the-funnel marketing, it can still be a helpful and low-cost source for lead generation. The key is using social media strategically for lead gen.

How do you do that? Start by regularly posting links to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media posts directly to the landing pages of high-performing offers. Make sure you make it clear to visitors that you’re sending them to a landing page, though. That way, you’re setting expectations fairly. Here’s an example from one of our Facebook posts:

You can also do a lead generation analysis of your blog to figure out which posts generate the most leads, and then make a point of regularly linking posts to them, too.

Another way to generate leads from social media? Run a contest. They’re fun and engaging for your followers, and they can also teach you a ton about them. It’s a win-win. Read our step-by-step guide for growing your email list using social media contests here, which covers everything from choosing a platform, to picking a winner, all the way to analyzing your results.

Finally, take advantage of the lead gen opportunities each social media platform already gives you. For example, Facebook has a feature that lets you put a simple call-to-action button at the top of your Facebook Page, helping you send Facebook followers directly to your website. Here’s an example from Canva’s Facebook Page:

Twitter has Twitter Lead Gen Cards, which let you generate leads directly within a tweet — without having to leave Twitter. A user’s name, email address, and Twitter username are automatically pulled into the Card, and all they have to do is click “Submit” to become a lead. (HubSpot users: You can connect Twitter Lead Gen Cards to your HubSpot Forms. Learn how to do that here.)

If you’re looking for more lead generation tips for social media, here are lead gen tips for Facebook and here are lead gen tips for Twitter.

There you have it, folks. Now that you know more about how to generate leads for your business, we recommend you try HubSpot’s free lead generation tool. Use it to add simple conversion assets to your site (or scrape your existing forms), and then learn more about your site visitors and what content prompts them to convert. 

The basics we’ve gone over in this blog post are just the beginning. Keep creating great offers, CTAs, landing pages, and forms — and promote them in multi-channel environments. Be in close touch with your sales team to make sure you’re handing off high-quality leads on a regular basis. Last but not least, never stop testing. The more you tweak and test every step of your inbound lead generation process, the more you’ll improve lead quality and increase revenue.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in July 2013 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.