Popular culture makes entrepreneurship seem very appealing. Between “Shark Tank,” “Joy,” and “The Social Network,” it can be hard to deduce what the experience of founding and running your own business is truly like.

The hard truth of the startup world: 90% of all startups fail, and the most common reason for failure is a lack of market need for the product or service. Even though 68% of entrepreneurs believe that their business idea is better, a lack of market research can often prove that to be false.

If you think you want to start your own business, DealSunny.com has created this infographic to provide a thorough overview of the state of entrepreneurship around the world. One in 18 people worldwide own their own business, but they aren’t always in the countries or industries you might assume. Read the post to learn more about what makes startups successful and what entrepreneurs around the world have in common.

Every year, HubSpot publishes the State of Inbound report, providing benchmarks for the tactics, challenges, and priorities of marketers and salespeople around the world. 

HubSpot has been tracking trends in inbound marketing for eight years, and we’ve recently seen serious disruptions rock the market. In 2016, we began asking marketers more forward thinking questions — and saw a real shift in focus to visual content, like video.

Has your marketing team integrated Snapchat into its marketing strategy? Are you finding yourself more focused on video and less on written content? Or do you think this is all a blip? 

We can’t run this study without the help of marketers like you. Tell us how your envisioning marketing in 2017 by taking our 10-minute survey — it’s completely anonymous so you can be honest. Click here to get started.

We publish the results every year, free of charge. Best of all, as a thank you for participating in our study, you’ll get the report before it’s released to the general public.

When I first got into digital marketing as a career change a few years back (I had previously worked as a financial advisor and had a brief stint starting a study-abroad program for a Chinese government contracted company) I thought the term ‘growth driven design’ was a bit haughty.

It reminded me of an interview I once read with a favorite musician of mine, who was labeled in the music press as an IDM artist, the acronym standing for ‘intelligent dance music’.

The artist’s response, and of course I need to paraphrase here, was: “Intelligent dance music? It makes it sound like other types of dance music aren’t as intelligent as this kind. A bit nasty, innit?” (He was English, and “innit” was the only part I didn’t need to paraphrase, as it’s humorous to read it online when one is a guy born and raised in the US.)

I agreed with his perspective, and felt the same way when ‘growth driven design’ and ‘GDD’ first began exploding on marketing blogs left and right, bandied about like free candy. Does the term imply that other web design methodologies were somehow not aimed at growing the organization? That these companies NOT using GDD were suckers, and we select few were privy to a pot of marketing gold? Should I feel guilty for knowing how to do this?

Well, yes. I should feel guilty, but only if I refuse to share this knowledge with others. Hence – here we are now.

Before we get into how GDD impacts your sales process, we should clear the air beforehand, and this is not something that every marketing professional will let you know from the get-go…but I will because I’m still a rebel at heart.

Growth driven design is not practical for every organization.

If you are Nike or Coca-Cola, you probably don’t need to be a GDD devotee to the degree that the rest of us do. Until my company attains the market salience and multi-billion revenue of a Bloomberg or Macy’s, I am a convert one hundred percent to the value of GDD.

Also, if you run an organization in certain industries (i.e. legal services, construction work) where your online presence needs to be as consistent and predictable as your personal communications, delivery of services, what-have-you, then GDD might not the best way to approach your web design efforts.

Yet, emphasis on might…

However, if you run a dynamic company, breaking ground with your products or services, trying to edge out the competition as one of the new guys, or any other situation where online customer conversions via your website are vital for your sustainability – welcome, friends. Time to dive in.

So, why doesn’t Mercedes-Benz need GDD?

Once your company has been globally recognized as an industry leader for about 100 years, well, you gained market salience during the entire time that many of your customers were birthed and passed on, all before the internet existed.

Yes, admittedly this is a bit grim, but it’s a fact. Rolex doesn’t need GDD for their web presence. Not to say it can’t be a bit of fun to try it out for those guys, but it could very well plainly be a waste of time and (ahem, negligible degree) of resources. 

So, why does your company need GDD?

Because traditional web design approaches are robbing you of potential customers for a crazy number of reasons. I don’t use the word ‘crazy’ as an adjective often, so here’s why it’s warranted:

• You started to grow your company after the dawn of the internet which, for practical purposes, demands that your web presence is your primary line of contact with customers or
• You work in an industry for which a web presence is impossibly valuable for your sales
• The traditional approach of design – a complete overhaul of your website every two years – alienates customers who have not yet had the opportunity to develop brand loyalty to your company

Before I get into the stats (they’re going to happen eventually – this is a blog post about marketing after all), here’s another quick story that illustrates the impact of GDD:

When I was 23 I was department manager at a major domestic chain store outside of NYC. I had retail experience for the preceding five years at four other retail outlets. The one I’m talking about now confused the hell out of me – our merchandisers and designers were spending every single day going over fresh plans from corporate to redesign the entire store bit by bit, and here’s the kicker, during retail hours.

I found the idea ludicrous. Who would want to shop at a store that is always a work in progress? But…it worked. The target audience were Millennials and Generation X’rs, and this redesign perpetuity brought us in measurably greater foot traffic (and thus sales) than any other competing stores in each and every American college town we had property in.

Yes, we did the analytics.

What this retailer was doing was the physical equivalent of web GDD. It didn’t make sense to me as a kid, but it makes tremendous marketing sense to me now as an adult – give the customers what they want deep down from your by testing it out on them while they’re already in your store.

I swear I’ll get into the numbers soon, but here’s the thing – the core audience didn’t mind the sawdust or awkward positioning of fixtures while things were shuffled around; the value of the product was already established. However, the customers kind of on the fence, that walk in once or twice to survey what the brand feels like, are much more enticed to walk in again a few days or weeks later just to see how the store had changed.

And this was all analyzed by corporate…

Color choices for seasons were not simply chosen at random – they had be tested over several years. In tandem, trends were analyzed and incorporated into the store’s design along with what had learned to be the company’s target audience preferences.

Ladies and gentlemen – this was growth driven design in actual physical practice.

The numbers you’ve been waiting for…

You are probably making your own assumptions for why when it comes to web design GDD is a godsend for countless organizations, why it works, and how crucial it is to grow sales. To reference my earlier point, ‘growth driven’ isn’t implying that GDD is what simply grows a company’s sales, but instead that it drives sales when sales need to be driven through your website experience.

If you’re like my agency and in charge of turning SMEs and enterprise-level technology companies into industry dominators through digital marketing, or are one yourself, this is why you need to incorporate GDD or suffer miserable profit margins:

• Across the board, human attention spans have shrunk down to 8 seconds. Yes, shorter than a goldfish’s, not a whimsical exaggeration
• Consumers (almost 40%) are exceedingly likely to leave your company’s website if the load time is longer than they are used to, which is now no more than two seconds
• Tablet use for web browsing has increased 30% from 2013-2015
• Smartphone use for web browsing increased 78% during the same period of time
• Mobile devices now account for two out of three minutes that the internet is accessed

What does this mean for your web design? It means that your potential customers are expecting to know how your product or service is going to solve their pain points, but with less text and prettier pictures.

Remember, your core audience will still be loyal to your brand, because the content that worked in the first place is still there. However, the traffic that is walking through your doors is going to need to know why your brand is the right choice for them.

This is where GDD gives you greater opportunity to convert them than traditional web design. The sales and marketing teams work in conjunction with your designers in testing out what works for the customer, instead of what your brand assumes works for the customer.

In this sense, GDD allows you the freedom to optimize your site to cater only to the customer’s expectations and desires. Through continually redesigning your site, while analyzing what changes are providing the greatest ROI, you are building a site design that speaks exactly to both your core customer base and to those unfamiliar with your brand yet. 

How does this impact your sales process?

When continuously optimizing your website for your target audience, your sales risks are substantially mitigated against consumer preferences and trends. This means that not only are you saving money on an extremely costly overhaul of your site, in at least the tens of thousands, but you are delivering a site that is based not on assumptions, but actual customer behavior regarding their preferences and expectations.

This means that your sales team can now communicate with customers that are already prepped to be closed. Sales staff are kept in the loop month after month of what is working to convert visitors to leads. Your team may already know of your product and its value, but know they are also aware of how informed the leads are via your design; the content and visuals that have spoken to the buyer at that moment in time.

For example, buyer preferences change over time, such as what color car is in fashion and which have fallen out. With an informed sales team, one which knows exactly what pain points are relevant to customers at a given moment in time and how preferences have shifted from one month to the next, well, think of the possibilities.

When you’re new to marketing, especially on a small team, you might have to do a lot of things at a moment’s notice. And when it comes to things like blogging and social media, sure, you’ve got this. But soon enough, you’re being pulled onto design projects. One day you’re mocking up an infographic; the next, you’re designing an ebook. You feel woefully unprepared — and that design vocabulary? It can feel like a foreign language.

Sound familiar? 

We’ve been there — and we know we’re not the only marketers who have, at some point, needed to become fluent in this vocabulary. So we decided to share a larger glossary, to help us all step up our game a bit. By no means is this the be-all-end-all of design terminology, so feel free to add your definitions in the comments as well. Here’s what we have, organized alphabetically.

The Ultimate Web Design Terms Glossary

A /
B /
C /
D /
E /
F /
G /
H /
J /
K /
L /
M /
N /
O /
P /
R /
S /
T /
V /
W /
X /
Z

A

1) Alignment

The positioning of the elements in your design (e.g. text, images, etc.). These elements can be aligned to both the page and to each other. For example, this paragraph of text is aligned to the left margin, whereas the lines depicted in the image below are aligned to the right.

Source: Pixabay

2) Analogous Colors

Colors that appear adjacent to each other on a color wheel.

Source: nopira

3) Ascender

A linear extension of a letter that appears above the midline — also see baseline, cap height, descender, and extender.

Source: Max Naylor

B

4) Baseline

The even, invisible line on which all letters of a typeface sit — also see ascender, cap height, descender, extender, and midline.

Source: Max Naylor

C

5) Cap Height

The distance between the baseline and the top of uppercase letters — also see ascender, descender, extender, and midline.

Source: Max Naylor

6) CMYK Color Model

Stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. This set of colors is used in print design because of the way paper absorbs light.

Source: Capsoul

7) Color Wheel

A circle of colors that shows relationships between primary, secondary, and tertiary colors.

Source: nopira

8) Color Schemes

The combination of two or more colors from the color wheel — also known as color harmonies.

9) Complementary Colors

Colors that are directly opposite of each other on the color wheel.

Source: nopira

10) Compression

Reducing a file size by eliminating excess data. Particularly helpful when emailing or saving large image files. See more on lossy and lossless compression.

11) Contrast

The accentuation of differences between colors, shapes, spacing, or any other design element.

Source: Pixabay

12) Crop

When outer parts of an image are removed to reframe the subject matter, or to resize the image’s aspect ratio.

13) CSS

A piece of code that is used to designate the look and feel of a website, separate from the actual content of a web page.

D

14) Descender

An extender on a letter, appearing below the baseline — also see ascender, cap height, and midline.

Source: Max Naylor

15) Dots per Inch (DPI)

Similar to the pixel for the web, dots are the smallest unit of measurement when printing digital images. The number of DPIs refer to the resolution of a printed digital object — the higher the DPI, the higher the resolution.

16) Drop Shadow

A visual effect that displays a graphic as if it had a shadow behind it.

Source: Tizio

E

17) EPS

A file format used for vector images that contain both text and graphics.

18) Extender

The part of a letter that extends above the x-height or below the baseline — also see ascender, cap height, descender, and midline.

F

19) Feathering

A design technique used to smooth out edges of a feature.

20) Font

A typeface in one specific style and size. An example would include Times New Roman Semi Bold in size 14.

G

21) GIF

An image file format that’s best used for small image files with few colors and designs, or animated images. Below is an example of an animated GIF image:

Source: Manuel Almagro Rivas

22) Gradient

A design technique in which one color or portion of an image appears to fade into another.

Source: Public Domain Pictures

23) Grid

A purely hypothetical map of vertical and horizontal lines that helps align images and text within a document.

H

24) HEX Code

A code used in HTML and CSS to designate a specific color, often appearing after the pound sign (#). Below is a chart of HEX color codes:

Source: bmdavll

25) HTML

The computer language used to display content like text, images, and links on the web.

26) Hue

What most people think of as “color” — red, orange, yellow, etc.

J

27) JPEG

An image file type that uses lossy or lossless compression, with little perception in a loss of quality. This type of file is best used for photographs and realistic paintings where there are smooth transitions between colors.

K

28) Kerning

The space between individual letters.

Source: Sherbyte

L

29) Leading

The space between lines of type.

30) Lossy

A form of data compression where detail is deleted as the file size is decreased. A usual lossy compression method is JPEG.

31) Lossless

As opposed to lossy compression, this format allows the image’s detail to be restored.

M

32) Midline

The distance from the baseline to the top of most lowercase letters, including “e,” “g,” and the curve of “h.” Also know as the “median,” as depicted below. See ascender, cap height, and descender.

Source: Max Naylor

N

33) Negative Space

The empty space surrounding a design, whether a webpage or single image — also see white space.

Source: Public Domain Pictures

O

34) Open Type Fonts

The current standard in font formats. It contains both the screen and printer versions in a single file, and is compatible for both Windows and Mac. The file extension is .otf.

35) Orphan

An opening line in a paragraph that appears alone at the bottom of a page. An orphan can also be a word or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph.

Source: Maat

P

36) Pantone

A color-matching system developed by the Pantone company. Largely used in print design, and used to match printed colors to those that appear on the screen during the digital phase of design.

Source: Pixabay

37) PDF

A file format best used to represent documents and presentations.

38) Pixel

The smallest element of an image on a computer.

39) Pixels per Inch (PPI)

Another measure of image resolution, according to how many pixels are present within a given section of the image.

40) PNG

An image file format that’s best used when the image has large areas of uniform color, or a transparent background (unlike JPEG).

R

41) Rectangular (or Tetradic) Colors

Four colors that are two pairs of complementary colors.

Source: nopira

42) Resolution

A way of measuring the sharpness and level of detail in an image. A higher resolution usually indicates a larger file size, representing the amount of data — like pixels or dots — within the image.

43) RGB Color Model

An acronym standing for the colors red, green, and blue. The RGB color model is used for web design, because monitors transmit light in these colors.

Source: Mike Horvath

S

44) Saturation

How bright or intense a color is.

Source: SharkD

45) Serif

A small line attached to the end of a stroke in some fonts. “Sans serif” refers to fonts that don’t have this line.

Source: GJo

46) Shade

How much black is mixed in with the hue.

47) Split-Complementary Colors

Colors that consist of a base color, plus the two colors that lie next to its complementary color.

Source: nopira

48) Square Colors

On the color wheel, four colors are spaced evenly from each other.

Source: nopira

49) Stem

The primary vertical stroke in a letter. It’s used in the letter “B” and the diagonal line of “V.”

50) Strokes

The lines that make up a letter in a typeface.

T

51) Tail

The descending stroke in a letter that’s often decorative — for example, in the letter “Q.”

52) Terminal

The end of a stroke that doesn’t include a serif.

53) Tint

How much white is mixed in with the hue.

54) Triadic Colors

Color scheme in which three colors located at 120 degrees from each other on the color wheel are combined. It’s often considered the best color scheme.

Source: nopira

55) Typeface

A design collection of characters, including letters, numbers, and punctuations. Examples include Times New Roman, Helvetica, and Arial.

V

56) Vector Image

Instead of using pixels to represent images, vectors use lines and shapes. Because they do not rely on pixels, enlarged vector images still maintain image clarity and quality.

57) Visual Hierarchy

A design principle that visually orders and emphasizes different parts of your content’s message by using colors, sizes, and layouts.

W

58) Watermark

An easy-to-see marker placed over the top of photos on the web and in print. It is used to identify the owner of an image and prevent visual content theft.

59) Weight

In typefaces, the thickness of the stroke’s width. Some examples include demibold, light, and bold.

60) White Space

The blank space surrounding an object in design — also see negative space.

Source: Pexels

61) Widow

The section of text at the end of a paragraph that spills over into the following column or page.

Source: Maat

X

62) X-height

In a letter, the distance between the midline and baseline — also see ascender, cap height, descender, and extender.

Source: Max Naylor

Z

63) ZIP file

A file format that compresses several files and combines them into a single folder. Compressed files do not lose any data to become smaller, and are easily restored by unzipping the ZIP file.

What other web design terms would you add to the list? Let us know in the comments. 

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

Growth Hacking is a popular marketing buzzword, but does anyone really know what it means? Neil Patel does a pretty good job explaining the concept and talking about its origin, saying that a growth marketer is someone who uses “analytics, inexpensive, creative and innovative ways to exponentially grow their company’s customer base.” But how can one pull off that kind of growth — especially with a limited budget and resources?

Growth hackers or marketers are inherently what we call “scrappy” — fast-moving and super creative. They experiment and experiment until they find something that multiplies growth by 10, 20, or 40x, instead of doing large projects that increase conversions in small increments.

On the surface, it might look a little intimidating. But with a little bit of light shed on how growth hacking works — and how marketers have successfully experimented with it before — you’ll be on your way to producing your own significant results.

A Bit About Growth Hacking

At its core, there are five major pillars to growth hacking:

1. Evaluate current marketing initiatives. Do a full audit that determines your best sources of leads, traffic, and page views. Figure out which channels are working for you.
2. Set achievable goals. Determine where you’d like to improve these numbers, and start to think about how you can do so.
3. Plan experiments to test your hypotheses. Come up with two, three, four, or twelve ways of testing your theories, and how you can reach your goals.
4. Let it run. Experiment until your results are statistically significant. You can also continue optimizing until you reach your goals.
5. Document your winning results, and share them with your team. Growth hacking is all about improving what you already have. If you come up with a game-changing tactic, spread the word.

For traditional marketers, this level of experimentation can look overwhelming, or maybe even foreign. But if you’re already testing certain marketing variables and learning from the outcomes, you’re executing “growth hacking” without the label.

Think about it — have you ever A/B tested a subject line in an email? That’s an experiment. Have you ever noticed that a certain landing page converts much high than another? It’s an opportunity to duplicate that page for other campaigns and optimize for conversion. That conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a major component of growth hacking. It takes your existing content and updates it to increase conversion rate, making things like your landing pages and blog posts perform better, without having to create new content.

To give you an idea of how to start growth hacking your marketing plan, we talked to four growth marketers from some of the top tech companies in Boston. We asked them to give an example of an experiment that they ran with significant results — here’s what we found.

4 of the Best Growth Hacking Experiments From Real Growth Marketers

1) Andrew Capland, Growth Team Lead, Wistia

For video hosting platform Wistia, getting a video into a new user’s account is the first important step in the onboarding flow. Once users upload a video, they can begin to explore all of the core Wistia features, like customizing player colors according to the brand, and adding lead generation tools or clickable links. After experimenting, Andrew’s team was able to produce a 15% lift in onboarding metrics. Here, he explains how:

Objective/Hypothesis

Capland’s team zoomed into the data and noticed that many users who borrowed a video from Wistia just to complete that onboarding step actually viewed it — which presented an opportunity.

“We realized there could be an opportunity to use that video for additional product education,” said Capland. “We believed that we could increase our active users by making our ‘loaner’ video more educational and product focused.” Wistia decided to test this hypothesis by creating a new video that gave a tour of the media page and taught users how to use the Wistia tools.

Here’s the old video:

Experiment Plan

Wistia created a new video — which we’ve shared below — for their users to borrow, and showed it to 50% of visitors.

Results

The new variation produced a 15% lift in one of Wistia’s main onboarding metrics – and led to more account activations and sales.

2) Jessica Webb, Growth/Content Marketer, Trello

The team at Trello needed to find the best way to position the product on its homepage, to make the best impression on new site visitors. To test out different messaging options, the team ran an experiment that ultimately increased homepage conversions by 2%. Here’s how:

Objective/Hypothesis

The homepage serves as Trello’s most important real estate for new users to learn about the product and sign up. The team was looking to determine the best messaging to accomplish that, and came up with the idea that experimenting with different themes would be a good way to see what resonated most with visitors.

“We didn’t know if productivity, collaborating, project management, or something else would be the best way to position our product,” Webb reported, “so we decided to let the data speak for itself.”

Experiment Plan

Webb’s team tested 11 different messaging headlines on the Trello homepage — English-speaking only, on both web and mobile. The experiment ran until a statistical significance was determined, which, in the end, only took about two weeks,

To give you an idea of what that might look like, the test variants were labeled with internal language and included the following:

1. default
2. collabToolPerspective
3. projectPerspective
4. platformPerspective
5. visualTool
6. organizedTool
7. collabTool
8. teamPerspective
9. youPerspective
10. sharedPerspective
11. platformSharedPerspective

Results

The experiment resulted in a 2% increase in sign-ups with the “collabtool” variant. That makes sense, since Trello is a collaborative project tracking tool.

And it didn’t end there. “We also used the winning messaging to inform other pages,” Webb said, “and make them more collaboration-focused as well.”

3) Lindsy Lettre, Marketing Operations, InsightSquared

InsightSquared is a company all about data. So when Lettre’s team began to evaluate how to increase conversion across its website, they realized that their long forms might be stopping people from completing them. After an experiment that removed an optional field, the team was able to create a new form that converted 112% better than the old form.

Objective/Hypothesis

Historically, the previously long form — which had to be required in order for visitors to download any piece of content — had some required fields, and others that were optional, like “Phone Number.”

“We had a hypothesis that if we presented a short form to our audience, we would see increased conversions,” Lettre said, “as the form would look less daunting.”

Experiment Plan

First, the team looked into what percentage of people provided a phone number when they filled out a form, which was only 15%. The next step was to run an A/B test on an eBook landing page for 30 days, to see if the field removal made any difference.

Results

Once the experiment was under way, Lettre’s team saw that the form without the optional field converted 112% better than the old form. That was a statistically significant result — and all other content forms were subsequently updated in the same way.

4) Eric Peters, Growth Marketer, HubSpot Academy

Throughout 2016, Peters’ team released five new HubSpot Academy certification courses. It became necessary to find a simple way to introduce those courses to existing students, without knowing which skills that section of the audience was interested in developing. But the team had an idea — add a status bar to emails that indicated how far along the student was on various certifications. That increased the number of certifications per user by 18%.

Objective/Hypothesis

The purpose of this experiment was to increase the number of HubSpot Academy certifications held by each student. “Our goal was to reach 1.5 certifications per user by the end of 2016,” Peters said. He hypothesized that by showing users the status of their certifications, it would provide functional value that also introduced them to other courses.

Experiment Plan

Peters and his team began by implementing a module that displayed all of the certification badges one could acquire, in grayscale, within Academy emails. If the user had achieved that certification, it was orange, but once it expired, it would revert to grayscale. The badges were hyperlinked to a central page listing all courses.

“We built this module directly into one of our main email nurturing templates, so it immediately went live in dozens of nurture tracks and hundreds of emails,” Peters explains, “depending on which stage a user is in for each of our 12 certification courses.”

Results

Initially, there were a few bugs that made some student statuses reflect incorrectly — for example, certifications that they held weren’t orange, or they didn’t realize that the certification expired. As it turns out, the experiment proved to be a great way to remind the community that certifications do expire.

After a few days, these little status icons were receiving a remarkably high number of clicks — specifically, the orange ones that showed a user held an active certification. After speaking to some users, Peters and his team learned that they were proud of their orange badges, and wanted to get more of them.

“We are still not at 1.5 certifications per user, so we did not reach that overall goal,” Peters said. “But we have increased the number of certifications per user from 1.1 to 1.3 — up 18% — thanks in part to this experiment.”

Time to Put on Your Lab Coat

Experimentation doesn’t have to be a massive project that requires developers, expensive software, or complicated charts. It just needs to be a way for you and your team to test out hypotheses, and learn from the data rather than by guessing. From these four examples alone, we learned that the results can improve other areas of your business, that sometimes “less is more,” that teaching opportunities might already exist where you least expect them, and that data you already have can inspire your users to do more.

Growth hacking is as simple as improving and optimizing your existing marketing efforts through experimentation. Get out there, and get experimenting. And to help you get started, check out HubSpot’s Marketing Experiments Calendar to get some new ideas on the board — your team/boss/department will thank you.

Have you conducted any growth hacking experiments? Let us know in the comments.

If you work in a creative profession, you’ve probably been approached at one point or another by someone who wants you to work for free.

They might offer some form of intangible benefit in return, like exposure or new contacts, but do these potential perks actually outweigh the negative aspects of not getting paid for your hard work?

We asked 10 agency leaders, consultants, and experienced freelancers to weigh in on this age-old debate.

Drawing from their own personal experience on the subject, they share their best advice on working for free below. See what they have to say and decide for yourself: Is working for free ever really worth it?

Is it Ever OK to Work for Free?

If you decide to work for free, put a smart process in place to make sure you benefit.

‘Strategically free’ is OK — where you explicitly choose to do free work because you benefit from it — but ‘secretly free’ is not. Here are my top tips as you’re starting out:

– Be smart. Make it clear to clients that they’re getting a special deal, and that you’re working for free because you benefit, too.

– Limit the scope of any ‘strategically free’ work — don’t write clients a blank check. For instance, you’ll do a specific deliverable, or you’ll work four hours a week for no more than one month.

– Get the terms in writing, with the client agreeing to do something in lieu of paying cash — for instance, confirming you can name their brand as a client, approving your using the work in your portfolio, serving as a reference, and/or providing in-kind services to you.

– Send ‘strategically free’ clients an invoice — for the total, discounted to zero. Even if they paid nothing, this helps reinforce that they received something of value.

– Karl Sakas, Agency Consultant at Sakas and Company

There’s a difference between working for free and demonstrating your ability free of charge.

It’s never okay to work for free. It sets the expectation your work is not worth paying for. However, it’s very useful to demonstrate your ability free of charge. Early off in any freelancing/agency career, you’ll be required to demonstrate some ability — and if you have no portfolio, this can be a challenge.

I would recommend putting together a collection of passion projects that demonstrate ability. Or, if you’re in a position to land a client, make a deck with examples of how you’d market the company, accompanied by relevant examples of your work in a nice short PDF. If the prospect likes it, they’ll seek out your services.

– Jordan Scheltgen, Founder and Managing Partner at Cave Social

If you work for free, you miss out on developing necessary business skills.

The fees marketers and freelancers charge should be in line with their experience, portfolio, and the marketplace’s demand for the service. If you’re early in your career and you don’t have a portfolio yet, charge a student or apprentice rate to clients.

When you don’t charge anything, your work isn’t valued. Part of being a freelancer is learning how to charge people and get paid. It’s just as important as the work you do, so get used to being a business person and charge for your work.

– Marilyn Heywood Paige, Vice President of Marketing at Fig Advertising

Free work can pay off in other ways besides monetary gains.

A few years ago as a young freelancer, I had two choices: do a few jobs that I was passionate about for free, or, not work at all.

A freelancer must ask him or herself: What does free really mean? Does building a site for a somewhat well known client who took a leap of faith working with you for free mean you aren’t getting anything out of it? Absolutely not. I’ve done a handful of free projects (I definitely don’t do them anymore), but each one benefited my business in some way.

– Chris Johnson, Co-founder at The Collective

If you’re seeking a permanent gig at an agency, working for free can give you a head start. 

Working for free in the early stages of your career, particularly through college or university, shows a real work ethic to agency leaders, as well as a genuine drive and passion for what you do.

Agency work is an incredibly competitive job market, and a lot of the time it comes down to who you know. If an agency promises you industry exposure, access, and the opportunity to start building up a portfolio of work, the benefits to your career far outweigh the negatives of not getting paid.

My Content Specialist began as a freelance journalist, and also worked as an unpaid intern for a regional newspaper. It was his large portfolio of work that landed him his first job as a Marketing Copywriter.

– Steve Pritchard, Managing Director of It Works

Pick free projects for passion, not the promise of exposure.

There are situations where it is okay to work for free, but generally exposure is not one of them. The main reason here is that if a brand is not able to pay you, they likely won’t be able to actually get you a lot of exposure.

When is it okay to work for free? Passion projects. To me, that’s the only acceptable time to work for free. If you’re really passionate about a brand, a cause, or an event, by all means work for free if you must. A lot of these jobs will turn into paying jobs down the line as well. If they don’t turn into paying jobs, that’s why they call them passion projects! You followed your passion, and are hopefully a little better off for doing so at the end of the day.

– Tim Akers, Owner of Akers Digital

Instead of working for free, start your career by working for cheap.

It’s not okay to work for free 98% of the time, but saying never would be wrong. Usually the ‘exposure’ or experience or whatever is offered is not worth much — if this offer is even followed through on — and the offer is often coming from someone who doesn’t really value creatives or the work they do (and wouldn’t know good work if it hit them in the face).

I suggest working for cheap instead. If you are early in your career, charge a low rate that’s appropriate to someone with your overall experience and skill level. Build your portfolio and reputation, and raise your rate incrementally from there.

– Julie T. Ewald, CEO and Creative Director of Impressa Solutions

Free projects can help you build connections, as long as you remain wary of scope creep.

Early in your career, when you do not have a lot of connections and are looking to build a portfolio of work, it’s a good time to work for free. This enables you to showcase your capabilities and hopefully — at the same time — meet key board members at non-profits and/or others who could hire you.

But be careful to what you commit to. What they want you to do at the outset can change quickly over time. Instead of writing a press release, you could suddenly find yourself running an event, training an executive for a media interview, or even doing a full blown campaign.

If you have the time early in your career, you may not mind handling a lot of the responsibilities. New professionals and freelancers can certainly benefit from working for free. The trick is to not over-commit yourself, and set limitations before your involvement gets out-of-hand.

– Steve Turner, Managing Principal at Solomon/Turner Multimedia PR

Early in your career, use free work to develop case studies and new skills.

Early on in your creative/freelance career, I do think that in limited circumstances it is ok to work for free to 1) get experience and 2) if the client will let you use them as a public case study so that you can sign other work.

There is a very strong limit to free work though, and in my opinion should only be done for the above two reasons. Also, what I have seen work well for some consultants is to have one area that they do well and are being paid for (e.g., SEO consulting) and then to offer clients an additional free service in an area they aren’t yet an expert in to gain some experience.

– John Doherty, Founder of Credo

Free work is a necessity to get your creative career off the ground.

When you get started as a freelancer, you will almost certainly have to work for free at some point. Most clients and companies won’t trust a new freelancer with no reputation, or give them work until they prove themselves.

Once you have projects and references, you won’t have to take on these types of tasks anymore. Also, some opportunities for free work may arise that can be very beneficial to your portfolio, or might simply make you feel good for being involved.

If you are willing to do some of the work for free, it gives you exposure to a new client and also adds a project to your portfolio (one you might not have otherwise had the chance to work on).

– Mark Tuchscherer, President of Geeks Chicago

What do you think? Is it ever OK to work for free? Let us know in the comments.

As the Chinese New Year rolls around again, the grown ups start filling up red envelopes with token amounts of cash as gifts to younger ones in the family. Much like any other holiday season (ahem, Christmas), the Lunar New Year is a season of gifting and showing appreciation. Besides the lovely “ang paos” (red packets) that we receive, it is also about showing you care and wishing others well. We’ve talked about CSR in the past and explained how it helps with brand management. This new year, we’ll talk about how it ties in with your overall 2017 marketing strategy.

As a business, giving back is always one of those things that are pretty difficult to do. Too much of it and you get called out for putting up a show. Too little and you get criticized for not doing enough. In the spirit of Chinese New Year, here are a few tips to integrate your CSR into the overall marketing plan.

 

1. Align your CSR with company goals

A good CSR strategy should tie in with the overall business goals and branding. For example, at HubSpot, we place heavy focus on customer education and spreading the good word of Inbound Marketing. While it might bring in a decent amount of revenue if we put a price on our certification courses or webinar sessions, providing these resources for free aligns with our goal of wanting to bring Inbound knowledge to a wider audience. When the alignment is made, not only are you able to bring greater contribution (since you’re leveraging on existing competencies), you’re also boosting brand identity.

Besides that, it is also important to see how you can plan your CSR initiatives such that it brings positive impact to the bottomline. Simply said, how can CSR help bring in additional profit for the business? The easiest way to frame this is that the brand will be positively associated with being compassionate and socially constructive in the minds of consumers. Research has shown that 67% of consumers are more likely to purchase products and services from a company that supports a cause, making your company a more ideal candidate. Plus, 80% of customers would tell their family and friends about a company’s CSR efforts, thus making them advocates for your business.

2. Which part of the customer journey does your CSR fit in?

There’s no reason you can’t do good and pay attention to your funnel goals at the same time. Just put aside some time to think about how your CSR initiative can be applicable to a customer at various stages of their journey with your business.

If you’re looking to attract new customers, share about an interesting CSR initiative like inviting less fortunate children into the office for an old school retro gaming challenge. Pay attention to the various channels and content types that would appeal to someone further up in the funnel. Social media, blog posts and interesting/out of the box event ideas are some of the best channels and content you can use to attract a customer with CSR.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to delight existing customers, consider getting them involved. Get them to join a sharing seminar that helps youths with shaping their career goals. Otherwise, organize a networking session for fresh graduates looking to enter the industry and invite your prospects to share their experiences and mingle. This way, not only do you get to do CSR, you also help your customers do good too!

Some activities, like a cash donation or a company charity run doesn’t in itself, fit into the funnel, but the promotional efforts for it can. This brings us to the next point, which is to…

3. Make your efforts known

A lot of companies keep their CSR efforts hush-hush. We’re not sure if it’s because they’re trying to be humble when doing good deeds, but we can’t say that we wholeheartedly agree with it. You don’t have to toot your own horn, but marketing your CSR efforts is almost as important as having one in the first place. Whether it is posting a quick Snapchat or posing for a Boomerang, your CSR becomes useful content.

Research involving companies like Procter & Gamble , General Mills and Timberland has shown that many of their stakeholders did not know about their CSR initiatives or did not find them personally relevant. However, a shift in strategy that updates consumers about their efforts has seen tangible results in terms of increased customer loyalty.

Putting your initiatives up on various marketing channels is also a good way to catch the eye of potential customers who are looking for socially responsible companies to fulfil their business needs. In fact, 90% of consumers would switch brands to one that is associated with a good cause, given similar price or quality, making this a great way to differentiate your business from competitors.

4. Listen to your stakeholders

Here’s where marketing can help too. By listening to your stakeholders and carrying out market research on what they think is the best way your company can contribute to society, you are giving them a chance to become involved in what traditionally is a business decision.

Further, taking your stakeholder opinions into consideration gives them ownership over the initiative and encourages them to become more involved with the business. The Body Shop is one good example. By listening to their customers and pursuing and ethical, no animal testing approach to their production process, they’ve won over the hearts of many existing and new consumers. They’re even going further and ensuring that their products are not only cruelty-free, but environmentally sustainable as well.

5. Track your performance

Like with almost every other campaign, you should aim to track the performance of your CSR initiatives to understand how it can be improved. Understand the reach and business goals you met. But at the same time, find out how many lives you’ve touched and how much difference you’ve made. It might take awhile to obtain concrete data, but reporting on such metrics provides a level of transparency for your business.

Performance tracking also allows you to identify areas for improvement and replicate success. By understanding which initiatives are the most effective, you’ll be able to expand initiatives in that particular direction to bring even greater impact to your brand identity and goals.

New years often signify new beginnings and it’s always great to start a brand new year off on a good note. That’s why this Chinese New Year, the HubSpot team wants to help your business grow.

You can download the 2017 Marketing Strategy Templates & Guides for free and start achieving your new year resolution of having a kickass marketing strategy.

 

Any fan of 90s pop culture will remember the show “Clarissa Explains It All,” a series about a precocious adolescent whose adventures most of us could only dream about. In one episode, Clarissa was required to write a poem for school, but lacked the skills or motivation to carry it out. But she was in luck — her computer wrote the poem for her, and it was a hit.

Today, I realize that her computer was an early form of a bot. It was the first pop culture reference to AI I ever saw.

But AI and bots both existed long before the days of Clarissa. In fact, some even claim that the idea of them is rooted in ancient Greek mythology. For the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on when machines really began interacting with humans, beginning around 1950.

Fictional references aside, let’s explore what exactly constitutes a bot, and how we arrived at an era in which — whether you want to admit it or not — bots have become essential to some of our most routine tasks.

What Are Bots?

A bot is a type of automated technology that’s programmed to execute certain tasks without human intervention. That is, it might be prompted by a human to perform an action, but it can carry it out on its own.

Bots are one form of artificial intelligence (AI), which my colleague Mimi An explains brilliantly — it’s “technology that can do things humans can uniquely do, whether it’s talk, see, learn, socialize, and reason.” So many of the bots with which we’re most familiar today, like Siri and Google Assistant, are artificially intelligent enough to answer questions like a human being would. Have a look at the latter:

 

Most of us use bots regularly — 55% of us use voice assistant technology, for example, on a daily or weekly basis. They’ve become common solutions for a number of needs, like customer service, or you might have seen one used as a promotion that you didn’t even realize was a bot. How does it work? We’ll get to that. First, let’s see where this all began.

A Brief History of Where Bots Come From

The 1950s

The Turing Test

In 1950, computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing developed the Turing Test, also known as the Imitation Game. Its most primitive format required three players — A, B, and C.

• Player A was a machine and player B was a human.
• Player C, also a human, was the interrogator, and would enter questions into a computer.
• Player C received responses from both Players A and B.
• The trick was, Player C had to determine which one was human.

But there was a problem. At the time, databases were highly limited, and could therefore only store a certain amount of human phrases. That meant that the computer would eventually run out of answers to give Player C, eliminating the challenge and prematurely ending the test.

The Test Is Still Around — and Cause for Controversy

In 2014, the University of Reading hosted Turing Test 2014, in which an entire panel of 30 judges filled the position of Player C. If all of the judges were convinced that the machine’s answers were actually from a human over 30% of the time, the machine would be considered to have “beaten” the test — which is exactly what happened. An AI program named Eugene Goostman, developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy in Ukraine, had 33% of the judges convinced that he was human.

According to the university, it was the first occasion on which any AI technology was said to have passed the Turing Test. But those results were met with praise and criticism alike — the contention was even a topic on NPR’s popular “All Things Considered”. Many were skeptical of Eugene Gootsman’s capabilities and asking if they were really any more advanced than the most primitive forms of AI technology.

Regardless, Turing is rightfully considered a pioneer in this space, as he may have set into motion a series of events that led to AI as we know it today. Only five years later, the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was run by mathematics professor John McCarthy — who is said to have invented the term “artificial intelligence” — which led to AI becoming a research discipline at the university.

In 1958, while at MIT, McCarthy went on to develop LISP — a programming language that became the one most preferred for AI and, for some, remains so today. Many major players in this space, including computer scientist Alan Kay, credit LISP as the “greatest single programming language ever designed.”

The 1960s

ELIZA

One of the most significant AI developments of the 1960s was the development of ELIZA — a bot, named in part for the Pygmalion character, whose purpose was to simulate a psychotherapist. Created in 1966 by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum, the technology was limited, to say the least, as was ELIZA’s vocabulary. That much was hilariously evidenced when I took it for a spin — which you can do, too, thanks to the CSU Fullerton Department of Psychology.

But Weizenbaum knew that there was room for growth, and even likened ELIZA himself to someone “with only a limited knowledge of English but a very good ear”.

“What was made clear from these early inventions was that humans have a desire to communicate with technology in the same manner that we communicate with each other,” Nicolas Bayerque elaborated in VentureBeat, “but we simply lacked the technological knowledge for it to become a reality at that time.”

That wasn’t helped by the 1966 ALPAC report, which was rife with skepticism about machine learning and pushed for a virtual end to all government funding to AI research. Many blame this report for the loss of years’ worth of progress, with very few significant developments taking place in the bot realm until the 1970s — though the late 1960s did see a few, such as the Stanford Research Institute’s invention of Shakey, a somewhat self-directed robot with “limited language capability”.

The inaugural International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization was also held in 1969 — which still takes place annually — though any noticeably revitalized interest or attention paid to AI would be slow to follow.

The 1970s – 1980s

Freddy

In the early 1970s, there was much talk around Freddy, a non-verbal robot developed by researchers at the University of Edinburgh that, while incapable of communicating with humans, was able to assemble simple objects without intervention. The most revolutionary element of Freddy was its ability to use vision to carry out tasks — a camera allowed it to “see” and recognize the assembly parts. However, Freddy wasn’t built for speed, and it took 16 hours to complete these tasks.

Bots in Medicine

The 1970s also saw the earliest integrations of bots in medicine. MYCIN came about in 1972 at Stanford Medical School, using what was called an expert system — asking the same types of questions a doctor would to gather diagnostic information and referring to a knowledge base compiled by experts for answers — to help identify infectious disease in patients.

That was followed by the creation of the similar INTERNIST-1 in the mid-1970s at the University of Pittsburgh — which, it’s worth noting, relied on McCarthy’s LISP — which then evolved into Quick Medical Reference, a “decision support system” that could make multiple diagnoses. This technology has since been discontinued.

Larger Conversations Around Bots

The early 1980s saw a continuation of larger meetings on AI, with the first annual Conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence taking place at the start of the decade. That decade also saw the debut of AARON, a bot that could create original both abstract and representational artwork, which was exhibited — among other venues — at the Tate Gallery, Stedelijk Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Despite all of the very recent talk of self-driving cars, the technology behind them actually dates back to the 1980s, as well. In 1989, Carnegie Mellon professor Dean Pomerleau created ALVINN — “Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network” — a military-funded vehicle that was powered to limitedly self-operate with computer control.

The 1990s – early 2000s

Consumer-Facing Bots

The following decade saw a major shift in bots in becoming increasingly consumer-facing. Some of the earliest computer games are often thought of as primitive consumer-facing bots, especially those in which players had to type in commands to progress — though no one can really seem to remember what any of them were called.

But one additional example was the 1996 Tamagotchi. Though not specifically labeled as a bot, the interaction was similar — it was a handheld, computerized “pet” that required digitized versions of care that a real dependent might require, like feeding, playtime, and bathroom breaks.

If nothing else, robots were becoming smarter and more capable in the 90s, to the extent that they were even able to independently compete in athletic matches — one of the most notable instances was the 1997 first official RoboCup games and conference, in which 40 teams comprised exclusively of robots competed in tabletop soccer matches.

SmarterChild and More

The year 2000 was somewhat pivotal in the realm of humans speaking to bots. That’s the year SmarterChild — “a robot that lived in the buddy list of millions of American Online Instant Messenger (AIM) users,” writes Ashwin Rodrigues for Motherboard — was released. It was pre-programmed with a backlog of responses to any number of queries, but on some level, was really a primitive version of voice search tools like Siri. 

“Google had already been out and Yahoo! was strong, but it still took a few minutes to get the kind of information you wanted to get to,” Peter Levitan, co-founder and CEO of ActiveBuddy — the company behind SmarterChild — told Motherboard. “You said, ‘what was the Yankee’s score last night,’ and as soon as you hit enter, the result popped up.” It was technology that he says, at the time, “blew people’s minds.”

Source: Lukas Thoms

And while the technology was, at first, enough for Microsoft to acquire ActiveBuddy, it wasn’t long before it also discontinued to the technology.  

The early 2000s also saw further progress in the development of self-driving cars, when Stanley, a vehicular bot invented at Stanford, was the first to complete the DARPA challenge — a 142-mile-long course in the Mojave desert that had to be traversed in under 10 hours.

Bayerque, for his part, sees the 2000s as the real catalyst for major bot progression in the increasing popularity of smartphone use. It began, he claims, when developers had the “obstacle of truncating their websites to fit onto a much smaller screen,” which ultimately led to a conversation about usability and responsiveness. “Could we find a better interface?” he subsequently asked. As it turns out, we could — one with which we ultimately began interacting as if it were another person.

Enter voice search.

2011 and Beyond

With regard to Bayerque’s credit to smartphone use, it can be conjectured that voice search gave rise to the rapid growth of bots among consumers due to their introduction of AI personal assistance. Prior to that, one of the few household names in AI was iRobot, which actually began as a defense contractor and eventually evolved into the manufacturing of what the Washington Post calls a “household robot” — namely, the Roomba.

But people couldn’t communicate with Roomba on a verbal level. Sure, it could clean the floors, but it couldn’t really help with anything else. So when Siri was introduced in 2011 and could answer questions — on demand, right from your phone, and without having to visit a search engine — the game changed. There was new technology to improve upon and, therefore, a newly eager market for assistive voice technology.

Today, we have four major pillars of voice search:

It didn’t take long for manufacturers to combine voice search with the Internet of Things — in which things like home appliances, lighting, and security systems can be controlled remotely. Amazon released its Echo only three years after Siri debuted, using a bot named Alexa to not only answer your questions about the weather and measurement conversions, but also to handle home automation.

Google, of course, had to enter the space, and did so with its 2015 release of Google Home. (And if you’re curious to know more about how it differs from the Echo, check out our breakdown here.)

The key theme here has really become service. At this point, bots aren’t just being used for voice search and other forms of personal assistance — brands have also started implementing them for customer service. In April 2016, Facebook announced that its Messenger platform could be integrated with bots — which would “provide anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages all by interacting directly with the people who want to get them.” Here’s an example of how two major brands — Louis Vuitton and Everlane — use the platform for customer service:

Source: Digiday

We’re even seeing a revamping of technology that was pioneered by MYCIN and INTERNIST-1 with bots like Healthtap, which uses — you guessed it — a database of medical information to automatically answer user questions about symptoms.

But even all of the developments listed here merely comprise the tip of the iceberg. Just look at this additional research on bots from An — there are currently so many uses for bots, that it’s virtually (if you’ll excuse the pun) impossible to list them all in one place.

…And It’s Not Over Yet

Just this month, an announcement was made about yet another personal assistant bot, Olly. As Engadget described it, it shares most of the same capabilities as the Echo and Google Home, but it has a better personality — yours.

Yes, that’s correct — we’re now working with bots that are trained to observe your behavioral patterns and can listen to the way you speak, and begin to imitate it. Whether it’s the food you order, the books you read, the jargon you use, Olly can figure it out and take it on. Cool, or creepy?

This latest development just goes to show that what used to be limited to science fiction is very quickly becoming reality. And no matter how you feel about it — scared, excited, or both — nobody can accuse it of being dull. We’ll be keeping an eye on the growth of bots, and look forward to sharing further developments.

What are your favorite facts about the evolution of bots? Let us know in the comments.

What was your most embarrassing office etiquette moment? For me, it was when I started to watch a hilarious video of a sheep screaming like a human and quickly realized my headphones weren’t plugged in. I frantically scrambled for the mute button on my keyboard while my distracted coworkers laughed at my mishap.

Sound familiar? Since then, I don’t watch videos at work unless they don’t require sound.

Video content is in high demand from your audience, and many viewers prefer watching videos that don’t require sound. In fact, 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without sound. Videos on Facebook autoplay without sound until users click to turn up volume, and Instagram videos only autoplay with sound if the phone’s ringer is turned on. 

Users are telling platforms their video streaming preferences, and they’re responding with features that make it easier to consume silently. Now, it’s up to content marketers to crack the code for making compelling videos that their audience will click and share, even without sound.

We’ve rounded up some of the best videos from around the internet that you don’t need volume to consume, along with reasons why they’re so great that you can use in your own video content strategy — no headphones required.

Creating Content for the Silent Screen 

Social media platforms have constraints that force marketers to get creative in order to attract attention. Think about it: Twitter has a 140-character limit, which makes you think very strategically about how to tell a story. Snapchat limits recordings to 10 seconds, forcing you to get to the point, and quickly.

What does all of this mean for marketers? It’s time to get creative to get noticed on social media. Due to the volume constraints popular social platforms set on what you’re posting, creating a video that doesn’t require sound is a smart strategy to drive video views and engagement. By making videos “volume-agnostic,” anyone can watch and understand them, whether they’re on a desktop computer or browsing their social feeds on their commute. These videos might feature background instrumental music, but the bulk of the information is presented with graphics and captions so your audience can effectively “read” a video when it’s muted.

Because nearly 80% of social media time is spent on mobile devices, making videos that are consumable with or without headphones is a great strategy to drive engagement on social media. We found several brands that are doing this well, so keep reading for tips for creating your own soundless video

11 Videos You Can Watch Without Volume

1) Tasty on BuzzFeed

Tasty on BuzzFeed shares recipe videos that don’t require volume — or a lot of time — to enjoy. Tasty videos reach 500 million people per month, and in December 2016, Tasty generated 1.4 billion video views — 1.2 billion of which came from Facebook. Tasty’s social media virality has something to do with the fact that the videos can be watched without sound, and a few key things make them so successful. 

They’re filmed in hyperlapse-style, which is immediately eye-catching and makes viewers want to stick around to learn how to make the rest of the recipe. What’s more, Tasty videos solve problems for the viewer. In the example above, Tasty demonstrates how to make spaghetti in four different ways in a video that earned more than 76 million views.

Its “Four Ways to Make Anything” series is among its most popular, with each of the videos accumulating tens of millions (and sometimes, hundreds of millions) of views. Tasty’s Producer, Alvin Zhou, told Adweek that recipe popularity and searches inform the videos they film — for example, vegetable swaps for starches and vegetarian options drive views, so they make new videos in response to its audience’s preferences.

If you’re thinking about making a soundless video for your brand, think about Tasty’s approach. Conduct buyer persona research to determine what challenges your audience is trying to solve — in Tasty’s case, it’s finding easy recipes — and adapting the story to a soundless social media landscape.

Tasty uses bold captions when needed, but the cooking demonstration is the video’s star to quickly deliver viewers the information they need to go home and make the recipe. Once you have your story, determine if graphics, animations, captions, or demonstrations (or a combination) are the best way to get the information across to your viewers quickly and silently.

2) Mode

Mode shares lifestyle videos on Facebook and YouTube, and their most popular videos are their “100 Years of” retrospectives that look at a century of changes to a popular trend. And while the decade-specific background music in this video is fun, you can press mute and still learn about the history of women’s workout wear.

Mode shared this video in early 2016, a time of year when millions of people resolve to start exercising more as part of their New Year’s resolution. This soundless video drove engagement on Facebook and YouTube because it was timely. Lots of people were reading and watching content about exercise at the beginning of 2016, but the unique and timely angle of this video made social media scrollers stop and click to learn more. Additionally, it features one star who draws focus and makes the story crystal-clear, even without sound. It also has a simple backdrop, which Wistia recommends in order to maintain focus on the video subject.

If you have a great idea for a soundless video, it doesn’t need to look extremely high-tech or busy. Stick to a clear and focused subject so the story is easy to understand without sound. Then, try to time its publication for a holiday or event when lots of people will be searching for information on the subject on social media and search engines.

3) Refinery29

Refinery29 publishes creative lifestyle inspiration videos, such as the hairstyle demonstration video here that garnered over 1 million views on Facebook. It uses bold and bright colors to attract attention. More than half of pageviews are less than 15 seconds long. Bright colors help this video pop out to viewers against the lighter-colored Facebook News Feed, YouTube homepage, and Twitter feed without sound to rely on.

It also shares pro tips to make a process easier, which cultivates a positive feeling among Refinery29’s audience that the brand is sharing insider knowledge to help them learn how to do something. Finally, the celebrity social proof makes people familiar with Ariana Grande understand what the video is about without need for sound so they’ll continue watching the video.

If you’re sharing a soundless video that’s as short and sweet as this one, make it visually eye-catching with color, and use social proof to compel people to keep watching, if you can. And if you can, amp up your topic’s social proof in the video’s title by mentioning a prominent figure like Ariana Grande, a short stat, or superlative words like “popular,” “best,” and “worst” to draw attention that way.

4) NowThis

NowThis News, a social media outlet, only produces video content — a neat way to get the news, if you ask me. NowThis publishes video news segments that work with or without sound, and the captions and video content work together to show and tell viewers what the story is all about.

In this example, NowThis uses shock factor to draw in viewers. Tylenol is one of the most popular painkillers in the U.S. alone, and the shock factor of learning your headache cure could impact your relationships makes viewers want to watch to learn more. Without sound, dramatic titles and headlines to draw viewers’ attention are necessary. Additionally, the video features a negative headline, which Outbrain get more clicks than positive headlines.

When making a soundless video, make sure to choose a compelling angle to play up in the headline, captioning, and the video itself on social media. Whether it’s humor, anger, or disgust, find a unique way to relate a subject to your audience’s story to get them to click.

5) Business Insider

Business Insider publishes video content about industry news on Facebook, and this video is one of their most popular at almost 3 million views. The video employs the curiosity gap, a psychological concept that awareness of information we don’t know yet makes us eager to learn it. Words like “hidden messages” trigger that curiosity and make viewers want to click to learn more and supplement the lack of sound. 

The topic is also highly visual. If you’re telling a story without sound, make sure the subject matter can be easily visualized so you don’t rely on captions too heavily. Instead, rely on numerical data, animations, and images to tell the story for you.

6) BuzzFeed Video

BuzzFeed publishes videos on a variety of different topics. This one is popular at nearly 2 million views for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it’s funny. Emotion is a useful tool in advertising, and content that incites positive reactions, such as laughter, drives engagement. In order to communicate humor without sound, the content has to be highly visual, which Snapchat photos and videos already are.

Then, by using the word “best” in the video’s title, BuzzFeed has told viewers without using sound that the video will invoke a great reaction, like laughing or being inspired. It’s also a simple concept — a slideshow of funny Snapchat captions — which makes it work as a soundless video because it doesn’t require much additional context to understand.

7) The Dodo

The Dodo publishes stories about animals, which involved lots of videos of them being cute. Their soundless videos work because they mostly feature animal stars. It’s not an exact science, but animals are a great marketing tool. It’s probably because they’re cute and make us feel positive emotions when we see them. When making a soundless video, try choosing a topic or subject that incites strong positive or negative emotions to drive engagement.

Another perk of this video is that it’s unexpected. When you think about pigs, do you typically imagine them wearing jackets or enjoying belly rubs? Me either, and that made me want to click on it just by seeing it, without having to hear anything about it with sound on. 

If you’re filming a video that can be viewed without sound, think about the star of the content. Whether it’s a brilliant animation or an adorable piglet, try to elicit an emotional response and surprise viewers with something provocative to make them keep watching.

8) Tech Insider

Tech Insider is Business Insider’s technology news division, and they publish unique science and tech explainer videos that don’t require sound. This one uses cool visuals to break down a complicated concept. The animations used in this video draw attention in busy social media feeds and work with the captions illustrate the story, step-by-step.

It also answers a common question. Who else remembers spending the summer covered in mosquito bites? The title of this video made me instantly curious. If your organization has a product or expert who can inform on a common query, that could be a great subject for a soundless video.

9) 5-Minute Crafts

The name of their Facebook Page is self-explanatory: 5-Minute Crafts publishes easy craft explainer videos that use household items. Their soundless videos work well because they focus on ease. The name of the page already tells viewers that they’re going to learn how to do something quickly and easily. Then, the video’s title tells viewers that they’ll be able to repurpose things they already have to turn them into toys. This focus on time and money-saving immediately draws people in to watch the rest of the video. 

If you’re thinking about doing a soundless demonstration or DIY video, consider leveraging the fast-action filming style used in this video — as well as the Tasty videos — as it tends to stand out in busy news feeds where you’re fighting for attention.

10) Vox 

Vox publishes a ton of video content on social media channels where they do in-depth explainers of complicated topics in the news. This soundless video explains Deflategate, the pro football scandal that dominated the news for more than a year, in less than two minutes.

It’s a complicated story, but Vox communicates it succinctly and clearly in this video with the help of bold captions, animations, and humor. The captions visually tell the more complicated parts of the story, while the video relies on photographs and animated graphics to set the scene of the story: who was involved, where it happened, and why it matters.

The emojis and interactive highlighting and texting add humor to the story to provoke a response and, hopefully, get viewers to share the video.

11) HubSpot

Not to toot our own horn, but here’s our video review of how social media changed in 2016. The video uses captions and animations to build suspense, and promises to take viewers through a retrospective, which draws them in to watch until the end.

It’s also very meta: A video on social media, about social media is a unique story within a story. There’s a lot of variety among the videos included, but all of these videos have a few things in common:

• They’re under five minutes in length
• They use captions
• The stories are simple

Whether you work for a B2B software company or a news organization, you can use video to tell your brand’s story in a more engaging way. If your video doesn’t require sound, so much the better for sharing it on social media. When you’re ready to make your own, here are our tips for making a killer marketing video.

What are some of your favorite “soundless” videos? Share with us in the comments below.

Facebook Ads are going to drive more leads for your business in 2017 than any other paid channel. You’ll need to have the right strategy and execute with agility and precision, but right now there is a massive Facebook opportunity for inbound marketers. An opportunity that if you take advantage of now, will pay off for years.

Technology changes fast but that doesn’t stop us from missing big shifts. This is because they never happen all at once, but every once in awhile you can catch a glimpse of change in motion. Right now, this is the case with Facebook.

Facebook’s growth has been tremendous — and I don’t just mean the number of people who have a Facebook profile. Its most exciting growth has come from its network:

• Facebook (desktop/mobile): 1.18 billion daily active users, as of September 2016.
• Instagram: 600 million users, as of December 2016 — with 50% of all users following a business.
• Facebook Messenger: Over one billion monthly active users, as of July 2016.While those are a big numbers, it’s just the visible part of the iceberg. What’s fascinating is the amount of time people spend with this network. In May of 2016, Zuckerberg announced that globally users spend 50 minutes a day on average with Facebook properties. That is head and shoulders above any other tech property — and almost as much time as people spend eating and drinking each day.

But Facebook has always had reach. You know it can provide that. What’s new is a subtle shift towards solutions that benefit B2B, midmarket companies.

Why You Should Invest in Facebook Ads

Mobile Marketing Silver Bullet

According to research from Google B2B buyers have increased the amount of mobile research they do by 91% year over year throughout the B2B purchase path. Facebook has cracked the code on mobile marketing.

This is important because as consumers have shifted to mobile over desktop so have B2B buyers. They now do more research, reading, and work on their phones — and spend time on the Facebook app/Instagram/Messenger.

With Facebook you can now reach these people with slick ad units like Lead Ads that promote your event or white paper and allow users to sign up with just a few clicks.

Facebook’s Lead Ads eliminate the need for users to fill out a form by using pre-populated data and cut out the landing page step, both of which skyrocket conversion rates and actually make the mobile ads effective for B2B marketers.

The news and information site theSkimm used Facebook Lead Ads to attract new subscribers for its daily newsletter, seeing a 22% increase in lead quality at a cost per acquisition of just $1-2.

If you have a longer sales cycle, you need to influence decision makers wherever and whenever they do research. That means you need a strong mobile strategy. Right now that strategy can simply be Facebook paid and organic.

The Best Ad Technology Available

Facebook offers some of the most powerful, innovative and advanced ad units and targeting. But they present it in a way that makes it easy for marketers to execute. Ads are built around your goals, which makes getting started simple for inbound marketers. Let’s dive into some of their best tech for B2B.

Targeting: Facebook puts heavy duty technology to work to help you reach and connect with the most valuable people for your business. Most marketers start by targeting Friends of your existing users, visitors of your website, or people in your CRM lists. These options can be very powerful but what may be most effective is Facebook’s audience expansion tool Lookalike Audiences.

Lookalike Audiences uses machine learning to help find you valuable potential customers who are similar to those who visit your site or are already in your CRM. So you can upload a list of your most valued customers from your CRM and have Facebook hunt down similar users based on their rich data.

Ad Units: Facebook is also rolling out better B2B ads, like Lead Ads and Canvas. I mentioned them earlier but Lead Ads are worth a look from any B2B or lead focused marketers.

Canvas ads can also be great for B2B and are a storyteller’s dream. They expand into beautiful pieces of creative that allow you to deliver a great marketing via mobile. If you’ve got a more complex product or one that really shines through video consider Canvas.

Instagram Ads: Similar to Canvas the Instagram Ad format is a big, beautiful ad unit. These ads lend themselves to powerful ad creative with strong CTAs. While Instagram may feel more B2C, B2B brands are already having success on the platform.

In the big picture, Facebook is focusing more on solutions that help smaller, B2B companies. This is great news for inbound marketers.

(HubSpot customers: Facebook Ads now integrate with HubSpot, providing you automatic and precise ROI reporting on all your Facebook and Instagram Ads.)

The Future of Facebook Ads

Facebook ad solutions will help you grow today. But investing in Facebook now also sets you up to succeed in the future. By all measures, Facebook has been extremely successful over the last few years but don’t expect it to rest on its laurels. When people all over the world go online today, they go to social, and spend the majority of their time with a Facebook property, but that’s just the start.

Video Ads: Facebook is also investing heavily in video, looking to steal time and attention away from TV and movies. It’s easy to imagine a future where Facebook is the most watched video channel, larger than cable, YouTube, or Netflix.

It already has some powerful video solutions but expect Facebook to grow video ads and get more creative. If video and video ads aren’t yet a part of your B2B marketing strategy now is a good time to consider it.

Source: HubSpot

Messaging Ads: Globally, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) dominate the mobile messaging app space. Messaging is an area that is growing like wildfire and quickly replacing email, text and voice calls for millions of people every day.

As this trend continues, Facebook (Messenger/WhatsApp) could become the main way we all chat with our friends and family on our phones. This is larger an untapped resource for Facebook in terms of ads. It’s a little further out but paying to have your Facebook Messenger B2B bot placed prominently as an option for your target audience could happen.

Virtual Reality Ads: In 2014, the company bought Oculus Rift — the leader in virtual reality technology. This along with its play into video puts Facebook in a better position than any other tech company to lead this format if it becomes the default way to watch movies or play video games. It also opens up a new ad powered revenue stream.

Source: ABC News

Ads Powered by Artificial Intelligence: In the last few years ad targeting, bidding and buying has become much more automated and machine powered.

Programmatic ad buying companies are growing fast and Google, Facebook and others are putting more and more machine learning into the targeting and bidding process. This trend should continue and it is something most marketers should take advantage of. When it works, this automation means less work for you with better results.

Facebook already does this and will look to get more sophisticated with the application of AI for ads. It’s hard to say exactly how ads will fit into all of these bigger best for Facebook but it’s been a very successful model for them. And while it all may feel a little foreign or uncomfortable, the rules of inbound will still hold up as Facebook changes the landscape of marketing.

This is true for ads. Ads haven’t always been part of the inbound playbook, but due to the innovation from Facebook and other ads can be very help and not interruptive. We also know the combination of ads and inbound works.

Source: HubSpot State of Inbound 2016

Have you seen success with Facebook Ads? Are you planning to invest in this area in 2017? Share your thoughts in the comments below.