Finding stylish fonts for your design projects can be a major time sink — especially when you have to wade through seemingly endless pages of typefaces that don’t suit the vision you have in your head.

Finding a free font can be even more of a hassle.

So what’s a budget-strapped designer to do?

We’ve scoured the depths of the internet so you don’t have to, coming up with 20 of the best free scripts, serifs, and sans-serifs to use in your next design project.

Many of the free fonts featured here were developed by designers, for designers, so they understand the need for versatile, polished, free typefaces firsthand. Check out the fonts below and keep them in mind for your next design project.

20 of the Best Free Fonts for Designers

Free Script Fonts

1) Hello Stockholm

What happens when you combine Scandinavian minimalism with classic brushstrokes? You get Hello Stockholm, a casual script that plays well with sans-serif fonts.

2) Wildera Regular

We think this whimsical, light-weight script would look right at home in a fairy tale (or in your next project).

3) Mightype

Subtle hand-drawn details set this script apart from the pack. Mightype is sophisticated without being stuffy.

4) Selima

Selima’s breezy brushstrokes are perfect proof that script typefaces don’t have to look old-fashioned or uptight — they can be casual and modern. 

Free Serif Fonts

5) Oranienbaum Regular

From small print to bold headlines, multi-tasking Oranienbaum is up to the challenge.

6) Butler

A decidedly modern serif typeface, Butler comes in 14 different weights to suit a wide variety of different uses.

7) Arctic

If you’re looking for a slab serif font with a modern edge, give Arctic a try. It’s a great way to give your headlines some character.

8) Bitter ht

We love the versatility of Bitter ht, a contemporary serif typeface that looks stylish at any size or weight. 

9) Agne Regular

With bold lines and contrasting stems, this elegant font is a fresh take on old-fashioned serif typefaces. 

10) Yeseva One Regular

If you’re concerned that serif typefaces come across as too uptight or formal, consider Yeseva, a laid-back option for headlines and subtitles. 

Free Sans-serif Fonts

11) Atami

Atami’s numerous weights and display options make it the Swiss Army Knife of modern sans-serifs — it can really do it all. 

12) Mohave

This all-caps font was designed with bold headlines and big type settings in mind.

13) Alcubierre Regular

Clean, minimal, and geometric, Alcubierre is well-suited to projects that require subtle headlines and a clear focus on the content.

14) Bourbon Grotesque

Inspired by — you guessed it — classic bourbon labels, this sans-serif has a big personality that demands attention. 

15) Frontage Outline

Frontage Outline is reminiscent of handcrafted facade signs, making it a suitable pick for logotypes. 

16) Arciform Sans Regular

Arciform might be simple, but this sleek sans-serif is far from boring. Consider including this easy-to-read typeface in your next web design project. 

17) De La Fuente

This cool typeface is decorative without being over-the-top, making it ideal for headlines, logotypes, and other design projects that focus primarily on the text. 

18) Westfalia

Give your next project an outdoorsy, authentic feel with this hand-painted brush sans. 

19) Moon

Have you exhausted your library of simple sans typefaces? Add Moon to the mix. We love this font’s clean simplicity and round edges. 

20) Anders

Anders just might be the avant-garde font of your dreams. It’s unique geometic lines make it an excellent choice for logotypes. 

Editor’s Note: We hope you find these fonts helpful — but because they are offered by other parties on their sites, we can’t make any guarantees or promises about them (like that they will be available or free to use). Also, we want to mention that the designers who offer these fonts might have rules about how you can or can’t use them, so there might be limitations that are applicable to use of the font. 

Last night, I began to read an excellent novel right before I went to bed. The plot twists! The engaging dialogue! The cliffhangers! It was a great read. But there was a problem. When I finally went to put the book down two hours later, I was completely wired, and nowhere near sleep. Needless to say, I wasn’t too productive the next day.

I always thought it was a good habit to read before bed. Was I wrong?

Kind of. I had failed to take my own advice — to do something mindless before bed — and had instead remained engaged in something that was mentally stimulating, instead of something that helped me wind down. Stress is stress, whether its source is work, or a fictional heroine who won’t leave her unfaithful husband. And that stress is responsible for 33% of adults losing sleep.

But my story shows that external stressors aren’t always to blame. Sometimes, our own routines are getting in the way of our productivity, especially when it comes time to settle in for the evening. It’s not easy, but with a little recognition and behavior modification, your bedtime routine can go from wrecking your work, to enhancing your productivity.

Bottom Line: You’re Not Sleeping Enough

As you may have guessed, we are faced with a sleep deprivation epidemic — 34.8% of U.S. adults sleep less than the recommended minimum of seven hours each night. And it’s getting expensive. In the U.S., the lack of productivity caused by sleep loss costs employers as much as $411 billion a year.

Less than seven hours in one night is what the CDC calls “short sleep,” which we’ll use throughout this post. Among such side effects as high blood pressure and diabetes, short sleep can also lead to “frequent mental distress.” In other words, it can really mess up our work and life in general.

On top of that, short sleep is linked to a higher probability of obesity, probably due to its correlation with poor eating habits. When you’re sleep deprived, you’re more likely to mindlessly eat or make less-than-healthy food choices. But we also eat poorly when we’re stressed, and when we’re stressed, we don’t sleep well. All of these behaviors are linked and, ultimately, are leading to this epidemic of exhaustion.

That network of cause-and-effect does more than illustrate that you’re probably not sleeping enough. It shows the complexity behind why you’re not sleeping enough, which is where your bedtime routine comes in. So let’s explore some of the “why”s. Once you’re aware of them, you can fix them.

6 Reasons Why Your Bedtime Routine Is Wrecking Your Work

1) You’re eating a bunch of crap (and probably too late in the day).

In addition to short sleep causing bad eating habits, the same thing works in reverse — diets high in saturated fat and carbohydrates, for example, have been linked to lower sleep quality. Plus, our tolerance for glucose decreases later in the day, so eating late a night can also throw off our circadian rhythm, the biological sleep-and-wake pattern of humans.

But willpower is hard — and as my colleague Mike Rehahan once wrote, it depletes as the day progresses, so the later it gets, the more tempted we are to indulge in comfort food that we don’t have to cook ourselves. After a long, tired day, it’s a recipe for disaster. You’re not just more likely to indulge. You also risk depriving yourself of quality sleep, creating a vicious cycle of exhaustion.

Here’s where planning ahead can tremendously help. When the weekend rolls around, all we really want to do is watch Netflix and shop online. But setting aside two hours on Sunday afternoon to cook meals for the week can help preserve your willpower on those late nights. But make sure you’re giving yourself the right kind of sustenance — check out my colleague Lindsay Kolowich’s tips on that.

2) Sleep isn’t in your schedule.

When our days are already so overbooked, it seems ridiculous to schedule something like sleeping. But it’s called a routine for a reason — “setting a pattern of going to bed at the same time each night and rising at the same time each morning,” according to the CDC, is key to sleeping well.

Not too long ago, I wrote about how I use a technique called time blocking and create calendar events for everything — getting dressed, working out, and feeding my dog. But when I realized that I was slipping into the bad habit of being liberal with my bedtime, I knew that I would need to schedule time to turn off my electronics, too.

When I asked my team to share the bedtime habits that mess with their productivity, Managing Editor Emma Brudner replied, “Falling into the rabbit hole of the internet for hours.” She’s not alone — I have a bad habit of turning a simple search for a carbonara recipe into an hours-long research session on the culinary arts. And when that happens, my desired bedtime falls to the wayside.

That said, too much screen time before has other impacts on sleep quality that we’ll discuss later. But scheduling a time to unplug can prevent those evening hours from wasting away. Depending on your bedtime, try programming a recurring calendar event to shut down two hours before you actually want to get to sleep for Monday through Wednesday. As it becomes habitual, start adding additional nights.

3) You’re planning your next work day at home.

I’m a big believer in the separation of home and office. Even when I work from my modest apartment, I have a special space set aside to attend to my tasks — every other area is an off-limits, no-work zone.

That accomplishes two things. First, it helps to keep certain distractions out of sight while I’m working. And when I’m not, having a something like a designated “weekend chair” keeps me from checking work email when I should be recharging — as 50% of us are wont to do.

That’s why I also believe that all work-related tasks, including planning for the next day, should be limited to designated work spaces only. Thinking about that seemingly endless schedule can cause some anxiety, which you don’t want to bring into a place that’s designated for personal time — especially at a time of day when you’re supposed to be winding down.

It might mean staying at the office a bit later, but planning your next day at a designated workspace can help maintain your home and sleeping areas as a stress-free sanctuary. Try it tonight — chances are, you’ll be glad you left your work at work.

4) You’re putting off morning stuff until the morning.

We know — when else would you do morning things?

But my colleague, Sophia Bernazzani, stresses the value of getting certain morning tasks done in advance, and she suggests taking “15 minutes to lay out your outfit, pack your lunch, and prep your coffee” the night before.

If you’re not a morning person, she explains, “decision making abilities are limited — so you should save them for work.” So completing these items ahead of time not only gives you the peace of mind of having them done — but also, it frees up a bit of time in the morning to sleep more, work out, or meditate, which is shown to lower stress levels by 31% and increase energy throughout the day by 28%.

5) You’re ignoring your tension.

We have instincts for a reason — we’re built to instinctively seek out the things that will help us survive. Those are represented in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which includes sleep at its baseline.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

When we ignore our instincts, things start to go haywire because we’re essentially fighting biology. And when we ignore our instinct to sleep — by reading “just one more” chapter, or watching “just one more” episode — it can lead to even more tension over the fact that we’re losing sleep.

It’s very meta, but stressing over a loss of sleep will only make you less likely to fall asleep, since — say it with me — stress causes sleep loss.

But when you can’t get that stress off your mind, write them down. It makes sense that journaling before bed has shown to improve sleep quality — it gives your troublesome thoughts somewhere else to “live,” rather than being mentally recycled when you’re trying to quiet your mind.

6) You’re looking at screens.

We’re starting to feel a bit like a bunch of broken records with this one — yes, we harp away about ditching the screens before bed. And yet, nearly half of us continue to use our smartphones before bed.

But if you’re getting as sick of reading about it as we are of nagging about it, here’s a quick rundown, courtesy of Harvard:

• Blue light is the kind emitted from most electronics.
• It’s often cited as the culprit for sleep loss, because it sends a signal to your brain that daylight is present.
• That — like so many of the behaviors we’ve listed here — causes disorder to your circadian rhythm. When your brain thinks there’s daylight, it also thinks it’s time to wake up, not go to bed.

Seriously. Put the screens away before bed.

And if you absolutely must look at your screen close to bedtime, consider investing in an app that will adjust its blue light depending on the time of day, like f.lux or PC Sun Screen.

Give It a Rest

Our cultural sleep deprivation might make things look a bit bleak. It’s causing us to be grossly underproductive, which is causing our collective employers to lose a lot of money. Not only that, but it’s making us sick.

But we hope this post emphasizes that it doesn’t have to be that way, and that our bad bedtime habits can be modified. Don’t try to tackle all of these things at once — start with the one that’s easiest for you to change, and once you master it, slowly work your way through the list.

Consider the fact that people who sleep six hours or less each night lose about six days worth of productivity each year. When you feel tempted to stay up late, ask yourself, “What could I do with six extra days?” Let yourself dream — it’ll be worth it.

What does your bedtime routine look like? Let us know in the comments.

This year will be an important one for ecommerce brands, hinging largely on one specific element — customer experience (CX).

According to Gartner data, 42% of CEOs say that better CX was “the key change that has driven more wins.” Furthermore, for 80% of B2B customers, CX is the biggest influencer in the decision to work with a certain vendor. And, Walker insights indicate that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiators.

That data emphasizes the significance of CX, but what do online retailers really need to know about it? And with 89% of organizations competing on customer experience, what’s the best way to stand out?

In this post, we’ll explore those questions, and look at some examples of brands who already reap the benefits of building a strong online experience.

The Growth of Experience

To better understand why more brands are putting an emphasis on improving their CX, let’s discuss how it’s evolved. We’re already seeing CX come to the forefront in many different formats. For example:

• In 2014, Facebook bought virtual reality company Oculus for $2 billion in order to create new, more engaging experiences for its audience.
• Brands are seeing higher conversion rates by adding a seamless mobile checkout experience.
• Mindfulness is becoming increasingly important within leadership roles on every level, indicating that decisions are being evaluated differently than in the past. In fact, McKinsey cites observation of consumers as a crucial first step in creating better CX.

When we look at experience-related changes that are happening around us, the above examples are merely at the tip of the iceberg. But what we can glean from them is that online CX takes on much more importance than it has in the past — in fact, 76% of consumers say they view this experience as the true test of how much a company values them.

So what changes can be made in the ecommerce world to improve the overall experience? Let’s look at some examples from ecommerce brands who are stepping up their online CX, and find the elements of their successes that we can learn from.

How Brands Can Improve Online Experiences

1) Marucci Sports

The Takeaway: Emphasize the Story

We can take a page from the book of Marucci Sports, the brand that redesigned its site to be both story-centric and mobile-friendly. Using strong visuals and compelling copy — with responsive design — to highlight relationships with players, Marucci was able to increase mobile conversions by 50%.

2) Di Bruno Bros.

The Takeaway: Enable Exploration

We can also learn from food and beverage brand Di Bruno Bros. — and its site redesign — which put an emphasis on a discovery-based CX. With detailed product descriptions and strong visuals, the brand makes it easy for visitors to explore offerings and gather the information they need to make a purchase.

It worked. After these changes were implemented, Di Bruno Bros. more than doubled its average conversion rate and boosted online sales by 6.5%.

3) BOXHILL

The Takeaway: Showcase the Product (and Earn Press)

When BOXHILL revamped its logo, the team looked to implement a new site design that would accomplish two goals:

1. The logo was to appear front and center.
2. The new design needed to showcase the products, pushing more customers to conversion, rather than losing them on what was a confusing journey across the site.

The use of white space, a centered logo, and a more modern site experience increased conversion by 410%. Even better? The publications and vendors BOXHILL was working to secure became more inclined to include the brand in mentions and roundups. With the new site design, BOXHILL earned coveted spots on outlets relevant to its brand, like Goop and HGTV Garden.

4) Andreas Carter Sports

The Takeaway: Remembering to A/B Test

When Andreas Carter Sports relaunched its new site that was replete with a new look and feel, the brand saw nearly immediate results. That made sense — customers would now be able to immediately view products in all available colors, for example.

But the Andreas Carter Sports team knew that additional changes could even further boost success. One of the biggest long-term modifications tested was changing the “Add to Basket” button color from black to blue. It worked — during testing, that one change reduced abandoned carts by 50%, eventually leading to a change of the button color across the site.

5) Baby K’tan

The Takeaway: Learn From the Competition

Good site design isn’t created in a bubble. Online consumers grow used to certain functionalities — things like the “hamburger menu,” which you can read more about here. At first, it was only used on a few sites, but was eventually adopted by many as a mobile best practice.

In some cases, your cometition might provide a certain experience that people have gotten used to — but your site doesn’t provide that experience. In that case, it’s good to do research to figure out what your site might be missing, which is what baby carrier manufacturer Baby K’tan did.

“Our site was inspired by a few favorite websites which helped us decide on a desired layout, and by our brand culture which revolves around family and expressing a cheerful emotional connection,” Tali Zipper, Baby K’tan’s VP of Marketing told BigCommerce. “We wanted something that was colorful, with bright and joyful images as well as a clean and simple layout for easy navigation.”

With these changes, site traffic grew 116%, and the brand saw a 45% growth in revenue.

Prepare for the Rise of Ecommerce Experience

As mobile usage continues to rise — and begins to outpace desktop usage — customer experience will be the focus for many ecommerce retailers. But with the statistics and examples we’ve covered, you can start planning your own customer experience improvements.

Think about which areas or your online presence can be enhanced for your particular audience, and put together an experience strategy that takes it a step further — or better — than competitors.

And remember — observe your customers, imagining yourself in their respective places. What’s missing? What do you wish was there? Answer those questions, and you’ll be on your way to an action plan for CX that excels.

Digital marketing is undergoing a revolution.

Agencies have more granular insight than ever before into how their campaigns are performing. The days of selecting media channels based on broad demographic data and relying on generalized ad impression numbers are over.

Marketers can now target specific audiences across multiple devices and measure engagement on each touch point, building comprehensive roadmaps to conversion. They can confirm the right users are seeing digital ads and even serve websites that are customized to each user with dynamically generated content.

The best part is, every engagement can be mapped to its respective touch point and measured. This empowers agencies to become better strategic advisors in letting clients know exactly what’s working (and what isn’t).

The driving force behind this seismic shift is data — the collection of it, tools to analyze it, and automation algorithms that use it to capture and nurture the best leads.

But how should agencies approach this new flux of data? What should they specifically focus on, and what can they afford to ignore?

Crafting data-driven campaigns doesn’t have to be overly complicated or take months to implement. The foundation of a solid campaign that harnesses the power of data to reach the right audience can be built upon four primary tactics:

4 Data-Driven Ways to Create Better Targeted Ad Campaigns

1) Get Programmatic with Media Buying

The old methods of buying media have been upended. The days of reviewing spreadsheets, endlessly negotiating rates, and committing to inflexible long-term contracts that you are stuck with — even after it becomes obvious that they aren’t working — are over.

Programmatic buying is an automated method of purchasing digital media in real-time that is easily adjustable. That means if budgets change, if you want to test new messaging, or if placements aren’t producing good results, media buys can be changed or scaled instantly.

According to eMarketer, more than two thirds of all digital display advertising in 2016 will be purchased programmatically.

This process gives advertisers a direct avenue to be iterative with campaigns based on data received from first, second, and third party sources.

With access to enhanced data and the ability to implement changes based on what it reveals with no lead time, programmatic buying optimizes media placement quickly and gives advertisers the ability to make changes based on internal changes or external market forces immediately.

2) Verify the Right People are Seeing your Ads

Digital publishers and platforms have their own metrics for who views ads on specific channels, but the market changes quickly and the data they offer is not always accurate. If real prospects aren’t seeing your ads, then the money you spent placing them is a waste. It’s important to verify that the numbers and demographics you’ve been promised match the reality of what is delivered.

The best way to accomplish this is through third party ad verification — but if you aren’t ready to make this investment, you can confirm for yourself that the tools and tactics used by advertising partners are working as promised.

Ensuring users actually see the ads that have been served to them can get tricky. Some platforms still use the legacy “impressions served” model where you pay for each impression the moment the ad loads — but how do you know it was seen?

This can get especially complex when it comes to videos because not only do you have to consider how much of the player is in view, you also need to know how much of the video was seen.

Guidelines from the Media Rating Council count a video ad as viewed when at least 50 percent of the ad is visible for two consecutive seconds.

3) Personalize Websites with Dynamic Content

Your client’s website is made of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of unique visual elements — but there’s no reason they have to be presented the same way to every single visitor. They can, in fact, be customized to individual users based on what you know about them, providing the content that is most likely to be relevant to them first.

You already expect your advertising partners to understand web visitors and only serve your ad to relevant targets. You can use the same logic to create different versions of your site that are displayed for each unique visitor.

Use the data that you have about each user to customize the experience. It can come from browsing history, demographics, and your existing repository of consumer data. Even if you have no data available on a specific user, your website can make intelligent customizations based on navigation behaviors starting with the first click. This personalization ensures that every user has the most engaging experience and sees relevant offers that guide them through the conversion funnel.

4) Use People-Based Measurement to Track Multiple Devices

eMarketer estimates that mobile has already passed desktops as Google’s top device driver of ad revenues, but that doesn’t mean you can concentrate exclusively on mobile.

The modern buying journey is not always linear — consumers enter and exit the funnel at will on different devices. They will interact with brands multiple times on computers, smartphones, and tablets before converting, and they expect a consistent experience the entire way. The only way to provide this is to track relevant data about each consumer — and you can’t entirely accomplish this with device-specific technology like cookies.

Instead, people-based measurement uses unique identifiers that can track engagement across devices. This gives you the ability to measure ROI by channel, obtain accurate reach and frequency measurement, and even tie offline conversions to online interactions.

With so many touch points in today’s sales funnels, attributing conversion to the “last click” is no longer an effective measure to base decisions on. The right messaging at every point is vital to keeping consumers moving on their journeys and you must tie it all to conversion.

Your Campaign Shouldn’t Be a Shot in the Dark

Without the visibility of data-driven tactics, the customer journey is difficult to track, and attributing conversions to the right engagements is nearly impossible.

Using the correct information to advise media buying, messaging placement, website, and touch point mapping elevate all of your marketing campaigns from shots in the dark to highly targeted efforts with the power to right the course on any specific element that misses the mark the first time.

What data-driven tactics will your agency be focusing on in 2017? Let us know in the comments.

Usain Bolt once again dominated his track and field events at the Summer Olympics, putting the perfect finish on his last Olympics in Rio with three gold medals. For eight years, Bolt has been the standard of athleticism, triumph and competition. As the “fastest man in the world,” it seems as if Usain isn’t racing anyone but himself.

But he didn’t get there by taking sprints around the block. Bolt has trained his entire life to reach this pinnacle of athletic success. He says, “Competition is the easy part. Behind the scenes is where the real work is done and everything is done to get to that one race that you need to run.” 

In other words, the hard part comes when he’s training, not when he’s reached the primetime TV slot. Many brands probably know this applies to their methods of marketing as well. The glory of a successful campaign all pulled together, beautifully presented and generating leads, doesn’t come without the struggle, the back and forth and the elbow grease of developing good ideas that come to fruition.

While your brand might be the Usain Bolt of your industry, it’s important to remember that your team is more like the Jamaican relay team when it comes to the hard work behind the scenes. Marketing is the anchor that takes a company’s offering across the finish line ahead of all other competitors, but sales and product teams are the other relay members that bring the baton as far as they can. Bolt recognizes the critical help of his teammates; marketing should do the same.

To win the race, marketers need to constantly eye the competition in the surrounding lanes and put in the work before they reach the track. This takes a careful approach to company-wide teamwork, knowledge of your audience and a dedication to the game as a whole. To become the fastest company in the industry, take some advice from the fastest man in the world. 

Sales Team

One of the first places marketers focus their attention when trying to gain new customers, reach existing ones more effectively and increase company revenue is to partner with the sales team. Companies with closely aligned sales and marketing teams have 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates.

Most companies tie the success of these two departments together. In many cases, sales and marketing acts in tandem rather than independently. A successful company is one that has a clear line of communication between sales and marketing.

With efficient communication between departments, marketing can gain a better sense of their customers. If there is one thing that can deliver a competitive advantage it’s the use of buyer personas.

Companies who map these details and apply them to the buyer journey see 79% higher cross-sell and upsell revenue. Sales teams are often the professionals interacting with customers and hearing feedback about what is important. That information is critical to creating accurate and useful buyer personas.

The sales team is one member of the track relay team racing for the edge out in front. They help put marketing in an advantageous position when it is their turn to run. Together the two members finish the race as they hoped: in first place. Training for that hand-off before the race takes good communication, solid interdepartmental alignment and an understanding of how to work together.

Product Team

Another integral piece of a marketing team’s competitive strategy that is often overlooked because of the main focus on sales is alignment with the product team. Marketing must have an in-depth knowledge of their company’s offering to market it effectively. The best way to learn this information and apply it to any marketing campaign is to work with the product team at every stage of the process.

During innovation, marketing is able to see what the company ideals have been founded on. During development, marketing can see the evolution of an offering. And throughout it all, marketing can highlight the best and most beneficial features of a service or product that appeals to the customer. The best product teams will keep marketing goals in mind as well while doing their job to ease the collaborative process.

This is all the behind scenes work that elevates a company to the stage of competition. Usain Bolt would never have even seen an Olympic stadium without training and applying lessons learned to new strategies to get faster. As a team, the Jamaican runners trained individually, but bring the essentials and fundamentals of running a relay to their performance.

Marketing must do the same with the product team. They can each do what they do best, but at the end of the day, being on the same page will push a company to a higher level of necessity, loyalty and prominence in the customers’ minds.

Winning the Relay

Of course the Jamaican men’s 4×100 relay team couldn’t have won without the surge Usain Bolt provided in the last stretch, but ultimately it was their teamwork that set them up for success. Each individual put in the effort before the race to know how to run each 100 meters to the best of their ability. Marketing should be doing all they can to compete to the best of their ability, including building various relationships across an organization.

However, it’s all relative. After all, Usain Bolt runs 27 miles an hour, which is about 20 miles faster than the average human. But comparatively to other species, humans are quite slow. Considering the everyday house cat can run 30 miles per hour, Bolt has nothing on the animal kingdom. Marketers should remember this as well when looking to outdo their competition.

As a tiny company, your standard doesn’t have to match Coca-Cola or Apple. It should just outpace other tiny companies as you all aspire to grow to the heights and speeds of Olympic champions and Olympic-sized companies.

Whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve been using the same strategies for a while, your content marketing plan needs to be better than ever for 2017.

Why? This year, you’ve got even more competition — according to Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers surveyed say they are creating more content this year than they did in 2016.

The first step to getting a leg up on the competition is to have a solid, smart content marketing plan in place. If you’re having trouble planning for the upcoming year or need some fresh ideas to include in your plan, read on.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into why your business needs a content marketing plan and the exact steps you will need to take to create one.

Why Content Marketing Matters for Businesses

Content marketing helps businesses prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads. Think about it — if you can create just one blog post that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, an embedded link to an ebook or free tool will continue generating leads for you as time goes on. 

The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will give you flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue, such as sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content. Plus, your content will not only help attract leads — it will also help educate your target prospects and generate awareness for your brand. 

Now, let’s dive in to learn the specifics of how to create a content marketing plan.

7 Steps for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

1) Define your goal.

What’s your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan? Know your goals before you begin planning, and you’ll have an easier time determining what’s best for your 2017 strategy. (Want help figuring out the right goals? Download this goal planning template.)

2) Conduct persona research.

To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content’s target audience — also known as your “buyer persona.”

This is especially important for those who are starting out or are new to marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content that they’ll want to read and convert on.

If you’re an experienced marketer, your target may have changed. Do you want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target audience? Revisiting your audience parameters by conducting market research each year is crucial to growing your audience.

3) Run a content audit.

Most people start out with blog posts, but if you want to venture out and try producing other content pieces, consider which ones you want to make. For instance, if you’ve been doing weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an ebook that distills all your blog posts into one ultimate guide would be a one way to offer information in a different format. We’ll go over several different types of content you can use further down on the list.

If you’ve been in business for a while, review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year. Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals to reach. (Pro tip: Now is a great time to align your team’s goals with the rest of your organization’s goals.)

4) Determine a content management system.

Have a system in place where you can manage your content. A few vital parts of content management include content creation, content publication, and content analytics.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can plan, produce, publish, and measure your results all in one place using HubSpot software. Other content management system options include CoSchedule and WordPress (although we can’t speak to the full range of capabilities of these sites).

5) Brainstorm content ideas.

Now, it’s time to start coming up with ideas for your next content project. Here are some tools to get the wheels turning:

• HubSpot’s Website Grader: HubSpot’s Website Grader is a great tool to use when you want to see where you’re at with your marketing. From your blogging efforts to your social media marketing, Website Grader grades vital areas of your marketing and sends you a detailed report to help you optimize and improve each area. With this tool, you can figure out how to make your website more SEO-friendly and discover new content ideas.

• What To Write: Get your mind gears going with What To Write’s unique content idea generator. This tool asks you questions that will help jumpstart your brainstorming. It also generates several blog post ideas for you after you’ve completed the questions, so you can use those ideas in your content marketing plan.

• HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator: Get blog post ideas for an entire year with HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator. All you need to do is enter general topics or terms you’d like to write about, and this content idea generator does all the work for you.

• Feedly: This popular RSS feed is a wonderful way to keep track of trendy topics in your industry and find content ideas at the same time.

• Buzzsumo: Discover popular content and content ideas at Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo uses social media shares to determine if a piece of content is popular and well-liked, so this information will help you see which content ideas will do well.

• Content Forest: Content Forest offers free tools, which include KeywordKiwi and ContentIdeator. These tools will help you find popular content from your competitors, effective keywords to use in your content, and great content ideas all in one spot.
• Blog Post Headline Analyzer: CoSchedule’s tool analyzes headlines and titles and provides feedback on length, word choice, grammar, and keyword search volume. If you have an idea in mind, run a few title options through the Headline Analyzer to see how you could make it stronger, and to move your idea further along in the brainstorm process.

6) Determine which types of content you want to create.

There are a variety of options out there for content you can create. Here are some of the most popular content formats marketers are creating and tools and templates to get you started.

Blog posts

If you haven’t already noticed, you’re currently perusing a blog post. Blog posts live on a website and should be published regularly in order to attract new visitors. Posts should provide valuable content for your audience that makes them inclined to share posts on social media and across other websites. We recommend that blog posts be between 1,000 and 2,000 words in length, but experiment to see if your audience prefers longer or shorter reads.

Read this blog post on how to write a remarkable post (meta, we know), and check out our free templates for writing great how-to, listicle, curation, SlideShare presentation, and newsjacking posts on your own blog.

Ebooks

Ebooks are lead generation tools that potential customers can download after submitting a lead form with their contact information. They’re typically longer, more in-depth, and published less frequently than blog posts, which are written to attract visitors to a website. Ebooks are the next step in the inbound marketing process: After reading a blog post (such as this one), visitors might want more content from an ebook and submit their contact information to learn more valuable information for their business. In turn, the business producing the ebook has a new lead for the sales team to contact.

Check out these 18 templates to get started writing your first ebook.

Templates

Templates are a handy content format to try because they generate leads for you while providing tremendous value to your audience. When you provide your audience with template tools to save them time and help them succeed, they’re more likely to keep engaging with your content in the future.

Infographics

Infographics can organize and visualize data in a more compelling way than words alone. These are great content formats to use if you’re trying to share a lot of data in a way that is clear and easy to understand.

If you need some more convincing, here’s an infographic about why you should publish infographics. If you’re ready to get started, get our templates for creating beautiful infographics in less than an hour.

Videos

Videos are a highly engaging content medium that are shareable across social media platforms and websites alike. Videos require a bigger investment of time and resources than written content, but as visual marketing increases in popularity, it’s a medium worth experimenting with.

We have some tips for making your first marketing video — read them here. You could also try your hand at live streaming videos on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Podcasts

Starting a podcast will help audiences find your brand if they don’t have time or interest in reading content every day. The number of podcast listeners is growing — in 2016, an estimated 57 million people listened to podcasts each month. If you have interesting people to interview or conversations to host, consider podcasting as another content format to experiment with.

Here’s our comprehensive guide to starting a podcast.

External Content

Once you’ve been regularly publishing content on your own site for a while, it might be time to start thinking about distributing your content on other sites. This could entail a few things:

• Publishing website content on social media sites, such as LinkedIn
• Repurposing content into new formats and publishing them on your blog or social media sites
• Creating original content specifically for external sites, such as Medium

Here are some ideas for repurposing published content to generate more traffic. If you’re considering Medium, check out our insights from our first year of publishing original content on ThinkGrowth.org.

When you’re ready for more ideas, there’s a plethora of different content types to diversify your website. Check them out below:

7) Publish and manage your content.

Your marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you’ll create — it should also cover you’ll organize your content. With the help of an editorial calendar, you’ll be on the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website. Then, create a social media content calendar so you can promote and manage your content on other sites.

Many of the ideas you think of will be evergreen — they’re just as relevant months from now as they are today. That being said, you shouldn’t ignore timely topics either. While they may not be the bulk of your editorial calendar, they can help you generate spikes of traffic.

Most people count on incorporating popular holidays such as New Year’s and Thanksgiving in their marketing efforts, but you don’t have to limit yourself to these important marketing dates. If there are niche holidays that might appeal to your audience, it could be worth publishing content on your blog or on social media. Download TrackMaven’s ultimate list of national days to keep an eye on when you’re planning your calendar.

We know this is a lot of information, but the work has just begun. It takes time, organization, and creativity to grow a successful content marketing strategy. From building the foundation of your content marketing plan to adding tools to better manage your content, setting up your strategy for the new year won’t be a hassle if you follow the steps and explore the resources here. For additional guidance, use HubSpot’s Marketing Plan Generator to create a 12-month strategy in just a few minutes.

Happy creating, and here’s to a great year.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2015 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Think about everything you’ve bought in the last six months, specifically the big purchases. When was the last time you didn’t start a shopping trip with a Google search? If your answer is anything close to “I can’t remember,” you’re in good company. Every year, over 2.8 trillion search queries are made on Google alone.

A strong SEO strategy will help your business generate more leads and get found by potential customers, but search engines are constantly switching up and tightening up their criteria for high rankings. If you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of search engines and their algorithms, how will you know what steps to take to help your business found?

OnPage.org and HubSpot have joined forces to bring you the answers you’re “searching” for with the foundational new ebook, What Is SEO? The Introductory Guide to Search Engine Optimization in 2017. It’s got data-backed, expert-recommended perspectives on:

• How search engines work, and what it takes to rank in them
• The keys to gaining inbound links to your site for improved off-page SEO
• Which performance indicators to track when analyzing SEO performance
• How to structure your web pages for maximum on-page SEO
• How to identify the keywords your target audience is searching for
• The keys to developing a successful SEO strategy geared toward ROI

Click here to download What Is SEO? The Introductory Guide to Search Engine Optimization in 2017.

If you work in a creative profession, you’ve likely battled with self-doubt at one point or another.

Perfectionism is the bane of any creative professional’s existence. Constant insecurity about the quality of your own work can cause creative paralysis and make it difficult to stay motivated. And that’s a big problem if being creative is how you make a living.

Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix for developing confidence in your own work, but we’ve shared a few exercises here that will help get you started on the right path. Check them out below to start building creative confidence and a renewed sense of purpose in your work. 

4 Exercises that Boost Creative Confidence

1) Learn a creative skill outside your comfort zone.

If you’re a copywriter, take up photography. If you’re a graphic designer, sign up for a cooking class. If you’re a painter, try poetry.

It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as it falls outside of your usual creative grind. Once you start earning a living in a creative field, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut — you’re getting paid to produce creative work in a single area, so why should you try anything that doesn’t directly relate to it?

Stepping outside of your creative comfort zone and trying a new skill can have a positive impact on your creative confidence. Author Srinivas Rao calls it creative cross-training, and it can help creative professionals embrace new points of view and come up with fresh ideas in their respective fields.

You don’t have to become an expert in the new field, you just have to try it out and commit to experimentation without self-judgment. Rao, a podcast host and writer, tried out realism drawing and found it gave him a new appreciation for everyday objects:

When I read the book Teach Yourself to Draw in 30 Days, I learned so many things about why nothing I drew ever looked real. I learned about the role that light and shadows play. I learned about how to create depth in my drawings. But more than anything, I learned how to see all the things that I had never noticed before when I looked at everyday objects.

Challenge yourself to try a new skill outside of your field for 30 days. Take a class, get a book on the subject, or just search the web for tutorials. It doesn’t matter how you learn it, as long as you commit to it fully and approach it with an open mind.

2) Embrace checklists.

Checklists end up getting a mention in many articles on productivity and creativity because they really work. Setting small, attainable goals and marking them as complete not only helps us keep big projects on track, it also boosts our confidence and gives us more creative freedom.

Worried that checklists are too rigid or confining to be useful in a creative profession? The exact opposite is true, according to psychologist and career coach Marty Nemko. “You won’t feel confined,” Nemko wrote in Psychology Today. “Knowing you’ll remember everything will free-up the brain space to use your creativity … safely.”

When we cross something off our checklist, our brains release dopamine — the chemical that makes us happy. Using checklists to stimulate dopamine levels can help us form productive habits and feel good about accomplishing attainable tasks — which in turn boosts our confidence. Psychologists call this effect self-directed learning.

When we acknowledge successful actions with a small reward (like checking off an item on a checklist), the resulting release of dopamine serves to “lock our attention to the current topic,” which researchers at the University of Colorado say plays a role in “encouraging focused practice on tasks where success is possible but not certain.” In other words, you’re more motivated to complete the next task, because your brain knows it’s going to be rewarded.

3) Start designing a flexible work process, not a rigid one.

Creative work can sometimes feel inherently unstructured (especially if you’re a freelancer or work from home), but designing a process you can continually come back to can make conquering creative projects more methodical, and less of a make-it-up-as-you-go kind of endeavor. Having a proven approach to creative work helps us build confidence, giving us a method we can fallback on if we ever hit a creative block.

Designing a process around your work doesn’t mean you need to immediately create a strict schedule for yourself or put intense expectations on your daily output. Going from no clearly defined process to a super-strict process overnight isn’t realistic, and you risk setting yourself up for disappointment.

When we put unrealistic expectations on ourselves to adhere to structured creative schedules, we usually only end up getting mad at ourselves when we fail to meet those lofty goals right away. This hurts our creative confidence, and makes us feel like we aren’t disciplined/talented/productive enough.

Start documenting your process to see what works best for you, and build a daily creative practice around what you discover. Keep a record of everything you do each day for a week (work-related and non-work-related), and look for patterns on the days you were most productive and motivated.

4) Build keystone habits.

Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, coined the term “keystone habits” to describe positive habits that have a strong correlation with other positive habits — like a ripple effect of positivity. For example, exercising regularly has been proven to increase confidence levels and lead to healthier eating and sleeping habits. When you adopt keystone habits, a lot of other things in your life tend to fall into place.

Building keystone habits around your creative endeavors can help you develop more confidence in your work, and increase your overall productivity on a daily basis. Start by cultivating positive daily rituals you’ll actually hold yourself accountable for, like developing a morning free-writing practice, preparing a meal completely from scratch, or even just making your bed. These seemingly small habits can add structure and intention to your day, resulting in more good habits and confidence down the line.

Building a successful sales team depends as much on the people you hire as it does on nurturing a cohesive and productive relationship between sales and marketing.

Working side by side, the sales and marketing teams represent the growth engine that will propel your business forward.

However, getting both of these entities on the same page is just as big a challenge today as ever. Let’s delve into 4 of the best ways to get marketing and sales to work together.

1) Onboarding Team Culture

It starts with the right people… and hasn’t it always?

Having said this, building a successful team does not develop overnight. While every potential employee carries his or her own unique set of strengths and weaknesses, both sales and marketing teams should consist of members with varying degrees of integrity, loyalty, creativity, ambition, and tenacity.

A foundation of these shared values goes a long way in creating a happy and productive organizational culture.

2) Sharing is Caring

The sharing of resources is critical for both sales and marketing teams to function cohesively. Follow these three principals to prioritize sharing between the two teams.

• All of your company’s relevant marketing communications, such as presentations, brochures, and mailers – which have been carefully written to effectively describe your product, need to be easily accessible by the sales team on a shared drive.

• Every content marketing campaign should be coordinated with the sales team so that all sales members can be adequately knowledgeable on the main talking points and other relevant details of the promotion. This can be accomplished by creating a shared Google calendar that can be edited and easily referenced by both teams.

• The sales team needs to play a role in the content creation process. Given that they are constantly updated on the needs of prospective customers, the sales team is a useful resource for the marketing department, and should regularly give their input during weekly brainstorming sessions— or on a shared Google document.

3) Let’s Get Together

By scheduling regular bi-weekly meetings, sales and marketing teams can build an effective exchange of ideas and cooperation. These meetings will go a long way in terms of getting everyone on the same page. In addition to brainstorming on new ideas, a regular meeting gives both teams the opportunity to share important KPIs related to lead generation, conversion optimization, and market analysis. In addition, attending industry events and conferences together and coordinating fun company outings will also go a long way in developing rapport between the two teams while outside of the office.

4) Listen Up

While strong marketing analytics are imperative to the success of any marketing campaign, the marketing team must also have an intimate understanding of who their audience is.

There is no better way of gaining this understanding than by listening to sales calls. Marketers will gain new ideas for content creation and develop a more personal narrative for their content that is more in touch with the actual needs of prospective clients. Additionally, they will learn which techniques are most effective for the sales team, offering valuable insight into which selling points connect the most with the target audience.

To learn more about what it takes to build a successful sales and marketing team, join us for our upcoming webinar, “What Does it Take to Grow a Predictable Marketing and Sales Organization?”, hosted by Penguin Strategies and featuring VP Global Partner Program & Strategy at HubSpot, David McNeil.

Building a website is, in many ways, an exercise of willpower. It’s tempting to get distracted by the bells and whistles of the design process, and forget all about creating compelling content. But it’s that last part that’s crucial to making inbound marketing work for your business.

So how do you balance your remarkable content creation with your web design needs? It all starts with the “About Us” page.

For a remarkable about page, all you need to do is figure out your company’s unique identity, and then share it with the world. Easy, right? Of course it’s not easy. That said, the “About Us” page is one of the most important pages on your website, and it can’t go neglected. It also happens to be one of the most commonly overlooked pages, which is why you should make it stand out.

But it can be accomplished. In fact, there are some companies out there with remarkable “About Us” pages, and there are elements of them that you can emulate on your own website. By the end of this post, showing off how your company’s greatness won’t seem like such a challenging feat.

10 of the Best About Us Page Examples

1) Yellow Leaf Hammocks

Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It tells us a story.

When you have a great story about how your product or service was built to change lives, share it. The “About Us” page is a great place for it to live, too. Good stories humanize your brand, providing context and meaning for your product. What’s more, good stories are sticky — which means people are more likely to connect with them and pass them on.

Yellow Leaf Hammocks tells users about its product by describing how the hammocks empower artisan weavers and their families. The company breaks down different pieces of the story into sections that combine words and easily digestible graphics, painting a picture instead of big chunks of text. They’re clear about why they’re different: “Not a Charity,” the page reads. And then: “This is the basis for a brighter future, built on a hand up, not a handout.”

Every company has a story to tell, so break out your storytelling skills from that random English class you took years ago and put them to work on your “About Us” page. Using descriptive and emotive copy and gorgeous graphics, an “About Us” page with a story works harder for your business than a generic one.

2) Eight Hour Day

Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s human.

People tend to think that “About Us” pages have to sound formal to gain credibility and trust. But most people find it easier to trust real human beings, rather than a description that sounds like it came from an automaton. Trying to sound too professional on your “About Us” page results in stiff, “safe” copy and design — the perfect way to make sure your company blends in with the masses.

Instead, Eight Hour Day showcases the people behind the company and humanizes its brand. Introducing the founders by name and featuring the photos of them on the “About Us” page drives home the point that Nathan and Katie are — as they so astutely put it — “two individuals with a passion for creativity — creativity makes us happy.”

When you’re designing your “About Us” page, avoid industry jargon and replace it with an authentic voice — yours — to describe your product or service. Sure, it needs to be polished and free of errors, but it should always sound friendly and real. 

3) Apptopia

Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It skips the business babble.

We know — no industry jargon. If you think it makes you sound super smart on your “About Us” page, think again. People want and appreciate straight talk about what your business does. After all, if people can’t figure out what you do, how will they know they need your product or service?

So, skip the industry lingo — that’s what Apptopia does on its “About Us” page. The startup’s simple but polished language effectively communicates the company’s offering while still allowing the Average Joe to understand it.

The moral of the story — again: Try to get rid of jargon on your “About Us” page whenever possible. Use short and punchy sentences to explain complex products and ideas in a way that isn’t patronizing, but rather, is empathetic.

4) Moz

Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s unique and visually interesting.

Instead of following the classic “About Us” script and writing a few paragraphs about the company’s mission and origins, try something different — there are plenty of ways to make it more visually compelling.

Take Moz, for example. A lot has happened since it was founded in 2004 — the company chose to share those milestones using a timeline, using a fun and clean design that incorporates clear headers, concise blurbs, and little graphics to break up the text. We love how humbly they preface the timeline, too, with a thank you to their community: “We owe a huge thanks to our community for joining us on this awesome journey, and we hope that you’ll continue to be a part of our story.”

Visual content continues to be on the rise — people like it for a number of reasons, including its ease to skim and absorb. Think about the ways you can use more visual formats to stand out from the typical “About Us” page style of paragraph text.

Below is the actual “About Us” page, which is a gem once you get there. But it’s great to see a company embrace its own brand of quirk throughout the site.

Even if you have a dedicated “About Us” page, there are plenty of ways to creatively showcase your company’s personality throughout your entire website. And yeah, that’s harder than filling a stock “About Us” template — but it can have a significant payoff for your brand.

6) FortyOneTwenty

Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It lets customers do the talking.

Who would you trust more: A company talking about how awesome it is, or a colleague raving about the company’s work? I’d bet that you prefer the latter — that colleague is more likely to be unbiased and give you a realistic understanding of what the company is like. Including customer testimonials on your “About Us” page can give prospects and leads a more down-to-earth view of your company.

Although FortyOneTwenty’s “About Us” page starts out with a classic but well-designed value proposition, the key part of the page is the testimonial section below the fold. Including that — with pictures, so users can put faces to names — as well as a list of companies that “trust” the company, quickly makes FortyOneTwenty more likable and trustworthy.

Personal testimonials build credibility and trust, making the “About Us” page a good home for them. If you have a customer who has nothing but good things to say about your company, hand them the mic and let them do the talking.

7) Refinery29

Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It lets the employees do the talking.

Here’s another instance where any area of your website — not just the “About Us” page — is an opportunity to break the mold.

Many companies add a “Careers” section to their websites, where there might be a bit of information on the corporate culture. But Refinery29 — like a site after our own hearts — dedicated an entire page to that culture, and it’s a highly engaging one at that.

Like customer testimonials, employee testimonials are a great way to showcase a brand’s value. We love that it opens with an unconventional header — “Party Over Here” and “You Can Sit With Us” — and couples short pieces of texts with pictures from the company’s (non)corporate life. It gives visitors a glimpse into life at Refinery29 in a fun, but not overstated way.

8) Marie Catribs

Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s unexpected.

There’s a reason why these examples are exceptional — “About Us” pages aren’t always the most riveting parts of a company’s website. In fact, they often look like an afterthought. But even if you don’t have budget for juicy graphics, video, or parallax scrolling, there are other ways to make your “About Us” page unexpected with the copy alone.

Marie Catrib’s is a restaurant, so you might think their “About Us” page would be your typical “here’s how we started, here’s what we believe in, and here’s our food” story. Marie Catrib’s “About Us” page does tells us that — but it does so in an unconventional way. Immediately, the user’s eyes are drawn to a header that says, “It’s okay to make a mess, experiments can lead to beautiful things.” Quite philosophical, for a place to have dinner.

But next comes the story about the owner, which starts in an unexpected way — “It’s hard to imagine, but at one time Marie was banned from the family kitchen.” A line like that draws in the audience, because we know it’s not going to be typical.

So, how will you use copy to really draw readers in? It’s amazing what impression you can make on site visitors just by creatively telling your story with words alone.

9) Bulldog Skincare

Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s lovable and memorable.

What’s the difference between “average” marketing and lovable marketing? It’s the difference between creating generic webpages that provide great information, but in a straightforward, black-and-white kind of way — versus creating webpages that provide great information and are infused with color, personality, and stay true to a company’s unique brand voice. When you create lovable marketing, you can start a movement of brand evangelists and advocates who will help you grow.

Where does this fit into a company’s “About Us” page? The folks at Bulldog, a men’s skincare company that was named for the colloquial “man’s best friend” — a dog — could have typed up a few paragraphs about where the brand came from and how they were one of the first in the space to redefine and eliminate stereotypes around men’s grooming. But that text alone would have been a bit, well, average.

Instead, the “About Us” page is pithy, colorful, and leads with the lovable mug of an adorable bulldog — fitting the name and the brand. And it states the purpose of the products — to help customers from becoming “a wrinkly old beast.”

Play on your own words — it’s okay to have fun and pun with your brand, as it helps to inject personality and humor into your “About Us” page. It primes visitors for a story in a way that makes them immediately feel something. That’s how you create memorable, lovable marketing.

10) Doomtree

Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: Its shows, tells, and has a soundtrack.

One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, according to Forrester Research’s Dr. James McQuivey. But what about audio and visual, too, all combined with a really cool story? Well, that’s one way to tell your story in an engaging way — through multimedia.

Doomtree is built on a bit of an innovative concept: That a group of talented artists can each have thriving solo careers, but can still come together on a regular basis to create great music. It’s not a band — it’s a crew. It’s an unconventional concept with an equally interesting backstory that “started as a mess of friends in Minneapolis, fooling around after school, trying to make music without reading the manual.” And as soon as you arrive on Doomtree’s ‘About Us’ page, you’re greeted with big, bold photos of those friends.

As you scroll down, users are treated to even more interaction with the crew’s tracks and music videos. That makes sense, because it gives visitors an instant sample of Doomtree’s product. What’s more, the entire “About Us” page is responsive, including the video. That’s important — not only because it offers site visitors a great mobile experience, but also for Google search ranking — especially now that such mobile usage has surpassed desktop.

How About You?

At this point, we hope that creating an “About Us” page doesn’t seem like a daunting task — rather, we hope you’re ready to have some fun with it. With a good story to tell, creative copy, humility, and digestible visuals, you’re on your way to an eye-catching user experience.

Even better? You’re becoming part of the exception — and standing out from a sea of “About Us” pages. What makes you different? We’re eager to learn more … about you.

Which companies do you think have remarkable “About Us” pages? Share your favorites in the comments

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