All bloggers have a number of websites that they visit every single day. Aside from the obvious ones (like email and Twitter), your favorites might be anything from your blog’s publishing calendar, to your online to-do list, to all your favorite social media button generators.

Wouldn’t it be great if all of those helpful resources were just a click away?

That’s exactly what bookmarks are for. In your web browser, bookmarks are links to specific websites that show up as buttons at the top of your web browser — making it easy to visit your favorite websites.

How to bookmark websites will depend on the browser you’re using. But trust me, it’s easy. Here are links to instructions for how to add a bookmark for four popular web browsers:

• Chrome
• Safari
• Firefox
• Internet Explorer

Now, let’s get bookmarking. What are some of the best websites that all bloggers should add to their bookmark bar? Check out 30 of the HubSpot blogging team’s favorites below. (And be sure to share your own favorites in the comment section.)

30 Websites Every Blogger Should Bookmark

For Keeping Organized

1) Publishing Calendar

Figuring out when you should publish which blog posts is time-consuming enough, right? Bookmark your publishing calendar so it’s only a click away at any given time. You can use it to keep your topics and authors organized, track keyword and call-to-action usage, and make sure all your blog posts are written on time.

• If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can bookmark your HubSpot Calendar App.
• If you’re not a HubSpot customer, then you can create a publishing calendar using Google Calendar and bookmark that.

(Are you also responsible for running your company’s social media accounts? Then you might want to bookmark social media publishing calendar tools as well.)

2) Trello

Trello is a really simple collaboration platform you can use to brainstorm and organize your blog post and project ideas. Bookmark it so you can easily add new blog post ideas as you think of them, manage your own post-writing to-do list, and see what the rest of your team is working on. You can also use it to build an editorial and social media publishing calendar, prioritize different tasks, and organize notes.

3) Evernote

While you can install Evernote as an app on your computer and any device, you may also want to make the website a bookmark on your web browser. Even more specifically, you can make notes within your Evernote into separate bookmarks: one for your to-do list, one where you store useful snippets of HTML, one where you store inspiring articles or ebooks, and so on.

4) Waterfall Graphs

We use waterfall graphs to keep track of daily progress on our traffic and leads goals on the blog. If you’re a HubSpot customer, your marketing software has a built-in waterfall chart template that will generate these graphs for you — so you might want to bookmark that page in HubSpot. If you’re not a HubSpot customer, you can create a waterfall graph yourself in Google Spreadsheets and bookmark that.

For Data Analysis

5) Percent Change Calculator

I can’t even begin to tell you how useful this little calculator is when looking for and analyzing data. Ever want to know the percentage change of two values without having to remember the formula? Simply enter the two values into this calculator, and it’ll spit out the percentage change.

6) Atlas (by Quartz)

Atlas is Quartz’s slickly-designed command center for all its charts. There are all kinds of cool, useful data in there — everything from Prada’s share price over time to the highest CEO-to-worker pay ratios in the U.S. You can download, embed, or grab the data. It’s open source so you can create your own versions, too. One of the best ways to build credibility on your blog is to back up your claims with data and evidence, so bookmark resources like Atlas so you can easily search for and grab the data and charts you’re looking for.

7) Comprehensive List of Marketing Statistics

Whether you’re a blogger who writes about about marketing, or you just need statistics to back up your strategy in a team presentation, it’s tricky to find the original source of data within the rabbit hole of the internet. We’ve put together a massive list of marketing statistics that are up-to-date and categorized for easy reference.

For Blog Ideation

8) Quora

Quora’s question-and-answer platform features questions from real people in your audience — and what better way to appeal to your readers than by answering their questions? Quora also offers an upvoting feature that lets you see how many other users are interested in the answer to a question, which can help you prioritize your response blog posts.

9) Portent’s Content Idea Generator

When you drop a topic into this neat little tool’s search bar, it proposes eye-catching, humorous title and topic ideas for you to test out. It also provides reasoning for the proposed titles, and you can make it spit out a new title idea if you’re unsatisfied. It might not produce the perfect title for your blog post, but it will get your creative juices flowing if you’re wondering what format or style in which to write.

10) HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator

Our handy free tool produces a week’s worth of blog post title ideas when you submit three nouns or keywords you’re trying to write about. The tool is particularly helpful because you can generate ideas about specific angles by entering several search terms at once. I submitted “blogging,” “tools,” and “marketing,” and I got back these five interesting title proposals:

For Writing

11) Style Guide

When you’re blogging, posting on social media, and creating other types of marketing content regularly, it’s important to have a written style guide to ensure your writing style is consistent across different marketing channels. But it can take a long time to learn all the nuances of your brand’s style guide, so have it bookmarked for easy reference while you’re writing and editing. (And if you don’t have a style guide yet, learn how to create one here.)

12) Keyword Tools

Keyword research comes in handy when you’re brainstorming, writing, editing, and creating headlines for your blog posts. That said, keep your favorite keyword tool bookmarked. Here are a few of our favorites:

• HubSpot’s Keyword Tool (30-day trial)
• Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner
• Google Trends

Want to learn more about how to do keyword research for SEO? Check out this blog post.

13) WordCounter

Although there’s no “right answer” for how long a blog post should be, sometimes word count can come in handy. Bookmark WordCounter so you can quickly paste in your content to see how many words you’ve written.

14) Dictation.io

Let’s face it — if you’re a full-time blogger, you might get exhausted by writing sometimes. Don’t worry though, it happens to us too. When you need to take a break, try Dictation.io, a dictation tool that translates talk to text. This is a great way to keep the tone of your blog post conversational and to switch things up if you’re getting writer’s block.

For Editing

15) Pre-Publish Checklist

It can be pretty hard to remember every little thing you should check on a blog post before hitting “Publish.” That’s why we bookmarked this pre-publish checklist, which is a complete list of everything you should do when editing and proofreading your blog content. It covers everything from ensuring all your sources are properly attributed to double checking all your links work.

16) Hemingway App

Have you ever been in the middle of writing a blog post and realized your writing felt a little … convoluted? Bookmark the free Hemingway App for moments like these. All you have to do is paste your content into it, and it’ll assess your writing and identify opportunities to make it simpler. For example, it’ll point out instances of passive voice and hard-to-read sentences.

17) Tone Analyzer

In the same vein as analyzing readability, what about analyzing tone? Sometimes, you might be reading over a blog post and feel like it comes off as a little too negative or a little too excited. Tone Analyzer is a free tool that uses linguistic analysis to detect the tone of a piece — and then offers helpful tips on how to improve and strengthen the tone.

18) HTML Elements

If you edit a lot of blog posts, chances are you’ll be working with HTML on a regular basis. I like to keep this list of HTML elements handy so I can easily make changes to HTML when needed. From there, I can use CTRL + F to jump right to the HTML element I’m looking for.

19) HTML Score

Speaking of HTML, here’s another great HTML resource to bookmark. It’s a long list of special characters that HTML 4.0 processors should support, like the copyright symbol ©, currency symbols € ¥ ¢, and so on.

Image Credit: HTML Score

20) HTML Cleaner

Source codes can sometimes seem to take on a personality of their own and pull in crazy HTML snippets — especially if you’re copying and pasting from an external file, like Google Docs. If you find yourself having that problem regularly, bookmark a tool like HTML Cleaner so you can quickly remove any superfluous code from your content.

21) & 22) Grammarly & Correctica

Before you can officially say you’re done editing a blog post, you should run it through an editing tool like Grammarly or Correctica to triple-check there are no grammatical errors. (Bonus: Grammarly even checks for plagiarism.)

23) Headline Analyzer

You’ve written and edited your blog post. At this point, the only thing standing between your cursor and the “Publish” button is an eye-catching headline. Once you have a few ideas in mind, head to your bookmark bar and open up the Headline Analyzer, a free tool that scores your headline quality and rates its ability to drive social shares, traffic, and SEO value. It also shows you how it will appear in search results.

24) StockSnap.io

Once you’ve written your blog post, a great header image captures reader attention on social media. There are numerous stock photo websites featuring free photo downloads that you’re free to distribute, and we like StockSnap.io’s trending feature that shows you popular photo downloads — so you can steer clear of them to make your blog posts more unique than other web content.

25) Compressor.io

A photo compressor can help speed up the time it takes to load your web page and make your photos smaller for easy social media sharing. Drop your stock photo of choice into Compressor.io, and it will generate a new, compressed image for you to download and use in your blog post.

For Social Media

26) ClickToTweet

Creating a tweetable link is a lot easier than learning custom code. Bookmark ClickToTweet so you can create basic tweetable links to accompany cool quotes in your blog posts at a moment’s notice. (Learn how it works here.)

27) Pinterest’s “Pin It” Button Generator

Ever seen those “Pin it” buttons that let you pin an image to your Pinterest board? We use Pinterest’s “Pin it” button widget builder all the time to create those buttons for images we post on our blog. Bookmark that page so you can create and place these buttons next to images, infographics, and other visual content on your blog. (And scroll to the bottom of this blog post for instructions on how to build your own.)

28) Social Media Button Cheat Sheet

While we recommend bookmarking some of your favorite social media button widget builders (like the “Pin it” button builder above), you may want to go ahead and bookmark this cheat sheet as a handy reference. It has links to all the widget builders for share and follow buttons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. It also includes step-by-step instructions for how to create them and implement them on your website and blog.

29) BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo shares analytics about how many social media shares a URL has received, so when you’re getting ready to publish blog posts on social media, drop links into BuzzSumo to see which types of content perform the best. You can also glean insights about posts from your competitors or previous posts from your blog to see which are most shareable and clickable. Here’s an analysis of one of our blog posts about Facebook ads:

30) Embed Code Generator

Do you create original pieces of visual content (like infographics) and post them on your blog or website? Then you’ll want to provide embed codes alongside them so it’s easy for your readers to share them on their own blogs. (Plus, it’ll help you generate some inbound links because the embedded image will automatically link back to your website.) Bookmark the embed code generator so you can easily create these HTML snippets. (And read this post for instructions on how to use it.)

Here’s an example of what an embed code looks like (taken from this blog post):

Share This Image on Your Site

<p><strong>Please include attribution to Blog.HubSpot.com with this graphic.</strong><br /><br /><a href=’http://ift.tt/1CnPcwG’><img src=’http://ift.tt/1fsQP7g’ alt=’the productivity diet’ width=’540px’ border=’0′ /></a></p>

What are your favorite websites to bookmark that help you be a more efficient blogger? Share them with us in the comments.

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

It is much more cost effective to keep a customer than it is to find a new one. In fact, according to a report by Adobe, returning customers account for up to 40% of a company’s revenue.

Trouble is, a 2016 small business survey revealed that while 72% of small businesses plan to allocate the majority of their marketing budget to customer acquisition, only 28% plan to allocate the majority to customer retention.

To help marketers refocus their retention plans — especially those in the ecommerce industry — I’ve put together six creative ways to keep your loyal customers coming back. Check them out below.

6 Little Ways to Reward Your Customers This Holiday Season

1) Offer a compelling discount.

By a compelling discount, I don’t simply mean “20% off your next order.” Instead, try a discount that will inspire your customer to continue shopping with you.

What does that look like? It depends. And there are a couple things to consider:

• Focus on the value your product or service provides customers, not just the price you discount it by. In other words, position yourself in a way where buying your product is a complete no-brainer.
• Choose your words carefully. According to research from Psychology Today, a “Get $ Off” promotion emphasizes achieving a gain, while the “Save $” wording emphasizes avoiding a loss — and customers recognize that difference.

For example, check out how T-Mobile positioned this holiday deal on the Samsung Gear S2:

2) Get personal.

Great customer service is about more than just solving your customer’s issue. Try going above and beyond by creating something awesome to remind your customers why they love your business.

For example, you might send out a personalized holiday card or thank you note to their home address. Even though we’re in a digital word, it means a lot to receive something handwritten, and capitalizing on the holiday spirit in this way can build a positive brand association.

Not only do the folks at Buffer engage their audience on social, but they also go out of their way to send handwritten cards, stickers, and t-shirts to their clients:

Wearing my @buffer t-shirt with pride. #bufferlove http://pic.twitter.com/bWpjalt2nW

— Jason Thompson (@nosaj_jason)
January 25, 2016

Their strategy works well because with every exchange, they are encouraging customers to become brand ambassadors.

3) Tap into referrals that reward.

Referrals are a great way to get customers to sell your products for you. It’s a simple evolution of word-of-mouth marketing, as customers usually refer friends or colleagues.

For example, when shopping with The Clymb, you are gently reminded to refer a friend in the website header:

Notice how it provides a clear call-to-action along with an incentive — $10 for your loyal customer and $10 for a future one — encouraging visitors to take action even before they start shopping.

4) Use premium packaging.

Anyone that’s spent any amount of time wresting with a roll of wrapping paper and tape dispenser knows the value of a pretty package. In fact, according to a 2015 Dotcom Distribution packaging study, 49% of online shoppers said that branded packaging made them more excited about receiving or opening an item, while 44% admitted that packaging reinforces that a product is worth its cost.

The lesson? First impressions make a huge difference in our fast-paced lives, so by using premium packaging you allow your product to stand out against others. Take Pad & Quill, for example. This tech accessories company packages its iPhone and iPad cases in paper with friendly messages printed on it. It even uses an authentic-looking Roman seal to give a more hand-wrapped feel.

5) Turn the small print into a feature.

Refund and exchange policies are often part of the small print on your website. During the holiday season, you have an opportunity to make them a feature. After all, these policies are in place to increase trust and promote sales, right? Make them known.

When buying gifts, customers prefer a return policy that ensures that if the recipient doesn’t like it, they can easily return it. If you can offer this, you have a better shot at increasing sales, while keeping your customers happy.

Nordstrom does a great job of displaying all of its holiday shopping, shipping, and return perks right on the homepage, giving potential and existing customers peace of mind during one of the more stressful times of the year:

6) Create a holiday-inspired video.

Why does everyone love and anticipate the John Lewis holiday advertisements year after year? Because they tell a story that evokes emotion.

Fortunately, you don’t need a million-dollar TV advertising budget to do this, just an idea for a great story. As video is becoming more and more popular, it’s key that you apply it to all areas of your marketing strategy.

Back in 2014, the Lowell Police Department went viral due to its “Christmas Surprise Traffic Stop” video. In the video, police officers asked the folks they pulled over for traffic violations questions about what they wanted for the holidays. Meanwhile, their behind-the-scenes crew quickly purchased the items and drove them to the scene. Watch the magic unfold below — trust us, it’s worth the four minutes:

The holiday season is a time of giving, so be creative with how you can implement goodwill into your marketing campaign.

Wrapping Up

Offering compelling discounts with creative call-to-actions will inspire your customers to buy, but great customer service is why they return.

Remember to focus on the value that you are bringing your customer, not just how low you can get your prices.

How are you creating the holiday cheer with your marketing this year? Share your ideas with us in the comments below.

Hiring the wrong person costs your agency more than you might think.

According to Jörgen Sundberg, founder of Undercover Recruiter, a bad hire can end up costing your business around $840,000. That’s not a number to take lightly.

Sundberg’s team based their calculations on the cost of a second-level manager who makes $62,000 a year and is terminated after two and a half years. They considered the cost of hiring, onboarding, and retaining the employee, as well as the overall revenue loss associated with mistakes, failures, and missed business opportunities caused during the employee’s doomed tenure.

If you work at a small agency, losing that amount of money over a single bad hire can cause unthinkable damage to your bottom line. There’s simply no room for hiring mistakes.

To ensure your next hiring decision isn’t a major pitfall for your business, we’ve compiled a list of common reasons behind poor hiring choices. Avoid these at all costs to make sure your next new hire succeeds. 

4 Common Mistakes That Lead to Bad Hires

1) You fall victim to “The halo effect.”

Imagine you’re a hiring manager conducting interviews for an account manager position. After a long day of mediocre and disappointing candidates, your next interviewee turns out to be eloquent, positive, and friendly — a welcome combination of traits that impress you immediately. On top of his enjoyable presence, he has a pretty solid resume. You hire him right away.

A few months after he’s been onboarded, you hear word from his manager that his performance has been disappointing so far, and he shows no signs of improvement. So what went wrong? How could the candidate who impressed you so much in the interview turn out to be a total dud?

This is a perfect example of the halo effect: a type of cognitive bias that occurs when we overlook obvious faults when someone impresses us in one particular area. In this case, you were impressed by the candidate’s sociable demeanor, and assumed he’d be equally impressive in other areas. His resume might not have been stellar, but since you were already sold on his sociability, you didn’t even notice you were overlooking potential issues.

Beating the halo effect starts with being aware of its impact, and developing a straightforward hiring system to offset its effect. Melvin Sorcher and James Brant — partners with Sorcher Associates, a management consulting firm — recommend putting an evaluation process in place which requires candidates to be assessed by a group of people from different levels and areas of the company.

“The process enables the group to probe a wide range of leadership criteria and obtain balanced and complete information,” Sorcher and Brant wrote in Harvard Business Review. When a candidate is reviewed by a wide range of people, it exposes them to varying sets of opinions and biases, minimizing the potential impact the halo effect can have on the hiring decision.

2) You don’t know what the position really requires.

Most job requirements come in list format: a neat index of basic skills, recommended experience, and personal traits that somehow combine to describe the ideal person for the job.

Unfortunately, succeeding in most roles requires more than a laundry list of vague qualities — particularly in the fast-paced, ever-evolving agency landscape. Hiring managers seeking candidates for a new position should set aside time before the interviews to dig a little deeper and discover “the pivot” — the elusive set of qualities that tips the scale towards one candidate over another.

“The pivot” is a term coined by Ram Charan, a business advisor and author of Boards That Lead. As Charan describes it, the pivot is “a strand of two or three capabilities that are tightly interwoven and required for the new leader to succeed.” In other words, the pivot is what separates someone who will be an average performer in the role from someone who will truly flourish and exceed your biggest expectations.

For example, when hiring a new business development manager, the pivot might be a background in economics, an adaptive nature, and a unique ability to remain calm and collected in stressful situations.

“Directors who choose the right CEOs do a lot of work before arriving at the pivot,” Charan writes. “They take the time to fully understand the company’s current challenges and how the external context is changing. They read analyst reports, talk to insiders, and consult outside experts to expand their thinking.”

Although Charan uses “the pivot” as a way to help companies hire CEOs and other major leadership positions, it’s useful for all hiring managers to think about what specific abilities really put a candidate over the edge.

3) You focus too heavily on technical skills and not enough on intangibles.

Technical skills are important — don’t get me wrong — but they hardly ever make up for larger issues with an employee’s disposition, attitude, and work ethic. Hiring an employee primarily on the merit of their technical skills could cause you to overlook other major red flags — and might lead to a wasted investment in an unfit employee.

According to a study conducted by Leadership IQ — a leadership training and development company — new employees rarely fail due to issues with their job competence or technical skills. In fact, of the new hires that were terminated within 18 months of being hired, only 11% failed due to technical shortcomings.

So what were the top reasons new hires didn’t succeed in their new roles? Issues taking feedback, inadequate emotional intelligence, and a lack of motivation caused more employees to fail than gaps in technical job competency.

Check out the full breakdown of the survey below:

Image Credit: Leadership IQ

“The typical job interview process fixates on ensuring that new hires are technically competent,” explained Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ, on their company blog. “But coachability, emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament are much more predictive of a new hire’s success or failure. Do technical skills really matter if the employee isn’t open to improving, alienates their coworkers, lacks emotional intelligence and has the wrong personality for the job?”

It’s easy to get blinded by an employee’s impressive technical skill set, but hiring managers need to look beyond the resume and make sure candidates have the right attitude, disposition, and mindset for the role as well.

4) You treat every open position like an emergency hire.

Sometimes it’s necessary to get someone hired and onboarded as quickly as possible for the overall stability of the agency — but most of the time, you can afford to take enough time with the hiring process to find someone who will bring the right energy to the role.

In periods of rapid growth, agencies often feel the need to acquire talent expeditiously, without much thought to the hiring framework or time line. With this attitude, it’s easy for unfit hires to slip through the cracks when they wouldn’t have otherwise been considered.

Linda Brenner, a coauthor of Talent Valuation and the CEO of Talent Growth Advisors, emphasizes the importance of prioritizing hiring for open roles according to long-term business needs.

“Start by identifying which roles are most essential to delivering on future growth commitments — not just to continuing your operations right now,” Brenner writes in Fast Company. “Finding and hiring top talent in those areas is most essential.”

Once you’ve identified which roles to prioritize, develop a hiring time line that allows your team adequate time to select ideal candidates. If you start hiring now for roles that will be essential in the coming months or years, you’ll be able to conduct a more thorough process that yields better candidates.

How does you agency approach hiring top talent? Let us know in the comments.

2016 marks HubSpot’s 10th anniversary. When my co-founder Dharmesh Shah and I first started talking about the concept of inbound marketing, it wasn’t an evolution — it was a revolution. Instead of big brands beating small companies with expensive TV commercials, massive billboards, and other types of outbound campaigns as a foregone conclusion, content and search marketing equalized the playing field. Marketing became much more about the width of your brain than the width of your wallet.

Fast forward to today. While the fundamental tenets of inbound marketing still ring true, many of the specific channels and methods prospects are using to find, evaluate, and purchase products are different than 10 years ago.

Even the supply and demand dynamics have changed. In 2006, prospects had an average of four to five choices for any product or service they were looking to purchase. In 2016, I’ve found that that number has spiked to approximately 14 or 15 different vendors — and this holds among most industries. Choices that once occupied a few inches on a shelf at a retail store now expand endlessly on the infinite shelf of ecommerce sites.

Supply is way up, and demand is relatively flat. The increased competition means understanding how your prospective buyers research and buy is even more critical.

I’ve spent the last year studying the changes in prospect behavior, and I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re looking at another revolution — which heralds the second act of inbound marketing.

Here’s what that means for you, your prospects, your business, and your 2017 marketing plan.

The Second Act of Inbound Marketing

How to Get Found in 2016 (or, Why Google Is Now Ask Jeeves)

Back in 2006, Google helped buyers find the answers to their questions by serving up links to relevant information. Increasingly today, there’s no click needed — Google just gives searchers the answer directly through a rich answer box. The numbers vary on this but research has found that between 20 and 35% of searches performed today result in a quick answer box populated on the SERP itself.

Need an answer fast? Just ask. That’s right, Google has finally fulfilled the original Ask Jeeves promise. In our own research we’ve found that clickthrough rates from these answer boxes are also higher than traditional links. RKG Merkle saw a 516% increase in sessions when a client’s page captured the snippet box.

To adapt, companies should start to create content not just intended to rank in search, but also to be pulled into Google’s quick answer box, and educate your buyer directly on the SERP. Here’s a blog post on how to do this.

Quick answer boxes are not the only way Google is changing. Ten years ago, paid AdWords results took up about 50% of the screen “above the fold.” Today, because of a layout shift Google introduced earlier this year, AdWords ads have moved from the right column to the center and take up nearly 100% of the “above the fold” space on both desktop and mobile.

All of which means: If you have the budget, it’s worth integrating ads into your inbound strategy. But how do you run ads in an “inbound” way? Well, bad ads are still useless. If you have a piece of content, however, that’s taken off organically, that’s a good indication it could be even more useful if amplified by some paid budget. I’d suggest using your ad budget to boost quality content that has already done well on social media.

Speaking of social media, Facebook’s Lead Ads product, which enables buyers to complete a form directly in their newsfeeds, is opening up new opportunities and levels of transparency into an ad campaign’s effectiveness. Whereas once we had PPC, we’re now seeing the early days of PPL: Pay Per Lead.

The ad industry is at a significant precipice. On the one hand we’re seeing a drastic rise in usage of ad-blocking technology; according to the 2016 State of Inbound report, mobile ad blocking has increased 90% year-over-year. On the other, ads are getting more space in search engine results and offering better clarity around their cost per lead ratios. All of this will inevitably influence the way prospective customers find your company.

How to Create Compelling Content in 2016 (or, Why the Silent Movie Is Back)

The way people find answers and discover companies is changing, but so is the format of content itself. Here’s what I’ve noticed about the types of content working well today.

In short: Reading is out, watching is in. Ten years ago, the power content marketing move was search + written content. Now, it’s social media + video content.

And these aren’t the hyper-produced, long-form videos from years past. The marketing teams winning the video game today are mastering live, off-the-cuff video. Additionally, Charlie Chaplin would likely raise an eyebrow to learn we’ve tƒurned away from talkies: A full 85% of videos today are watched without audio.

Increases in mobile usage have fueled much of this growth in video popularity. For content marketers, the takeaway here is simple. While text is still important, you may want to stop looking for that next blogger, and start looking for a video producer. At least 50% or more of your marketing content next year should be in video format, either hosted natively on social or created with social distribution in mind.

The other thing to know about content consumption is much of it is now happening away from the bounds of your website on social media. Social media has evolved from a promotion channel alone to a platform for content. Buyers aren’t just stopping by social media sites during work breaks anymore — they never leave.

Facebook in particular has started to dominate how we spend our free time. Four of the apps consumers use most — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp — are owned by Facebook. Today’s buyers are plugged into Mark Zuckerberg’s universe all day long. If you’re not meeting them there, you risk losing them.

How Buyers Buy in 2016 (or, Why Uber Wrecked Your Website)

Ten years ago, your website augmented your sales rep. Buyers would browse the website to get the basics, and then hop on the phone with a salesperson to get into the nitty gritty.

Today, it’s the opposite: Your sales rep augments your website. Buyers want a self-service experience, making a purchase directly onsite or contacting Sales when they’re ready, not the other way around. Indeed, only 19% of buyers in a HubSpot Research study said they wanted to talk to a salesperson during the “awareness” stage of their purchase process.

And the website of 2006 won’t cut it. Your prospects have been trained in every industry to expect automation, personalization, and self-service. They have been spoiled by Uber to expect a consumer-grade, on-demand buying experience. A website that doesn’t enable viewers to get on-demand information or instantly chat with Sales or Support frustrates your buyers and will send them into the arms of your competition.

Throughout the entire buying process — from your ads, to your website (mobile and desktop), to your live chat service — buyers expect personalization. They expect you to remember them, give them fantastic service, and enable them to serve themselves through automation.

My Advice For Marketers in 2017 and Beyond

Here are the four things I think every marketer should do next year:

1. Invest in video. Diversify your content playbook to include social + video in addition to text + search.
2. Live in social. We’re not B2B or B2C marketers — we’re business to human marketers. Humans live in Snapchat, Instagram, Messenger, and a host of other social apps. Find them there.
3. Accelerate your content. Combine content marketing and paid marketing. Repurpose your most successful content for multiple channels and boost it with budget.
4. Automate your buying process. Buyers expect to be able to buy on their timeline with either minimal or no human contact.

2017 marks the second act of inbound marketing. Are you ready?

Seasonal events and celebrations present different opportunities for different business sectors. For many brands, seasonal opportunities are huge and often the most commercially critical times of the financial year.

But planning an effective seasonal campaign not only takes a lot of organisation, it also takes a considerable amount of time. For this reason, smaller brands tend to let these opportunities come and go without making the most of them.

Rather than miss out on an opportunity to connect with you audience and leverage the ongoing conversation during any given season, we put together some tips designed to help you get your campaign off the ground. Let’s walk through them below.

How to Plan a Seasonal Marketing Campaign: A 5-Step Guide

Step #1: Choose a seasonal opportunity.

When choosing a season to serve as the jumping off point for your campaign, it’s important that you’re being strategic. In simple terms, one of the key routes to success with seasonal campaigns is using an opportunity that engages your audience. If your audience doesn’t engage with the season itself, you can’t expect to see results from a campaign centred around it.

That said, if you have conducted research into your audience, then you’ll likely know their attitudes around these big seasonal events and should be able to pair that with an event that suits your product or service.

Audit Existing Seasonal Campaigns

Once you have decided on a seasonal event to utilise for a campaign, have a look at some of the last few years’ most successful content campaigns for this occasion — Ahrefs and BuzzSumo are great places to start with this. When evaluating existing, successful campaigns, spend some time thinking about how each piece approached content format, distribution, messaging, and emotion.

When validating a campaign, you might find that it’s helpful to ask yourself the following questions:

• How has this piece used multiple content types and distribution platforms?
• Is the messaging clear and if so, what is it?
• What emotion does this campaign evoke in the user?

This type of analysis makes it easier for you to uncover common denominators that may inspire the ideation for your own campaign and contribute to your strategy when planning.

Gather Insights via External Outreach

If you’re looking for an outsider’s opinion, try doing some outreach to journalists or various digital publications that have previously covered some of the campaigns you analyzed above.

By sending out some feelers to see what kind of content they like to post around your chosen season, and when they like to receive press releases for these pieces, is a valuable way to spend a couple of hours or so.

That isn’t to say you must take the feedback you get as gospel, but it is good to bear in mind when you are planning your seasonal campaign.

Step #2: Nail down the messaging.

As with any marketing campaign, your seasonal campaign messaging is so important. To help you get started, you should be thinking the following:

• The customer journey and the story you want to tell
• The emotions you want to evoke in your audience
• A call-to-action or the desired next steps you want to encourage

In 2013, MegaRed — a company that sells a type of krill oil supplement that is good for your heart — launched a noteworthy digital Valentine’s Day campaign.

The basis of the campaign was simple: ‘Whose Heart do you Love?’ consisted of a video piece that urged viewers to give the gift of a healthy heart to someone they love on Valentine’s Day by applying for a free sample of MegaRed via its Facebook Page. To return the love, MegaRed would send the user a free sample, too.

To add an additional tug on the old heart strings, MegaRed also promised that once 100,000 free samples has been claimed, it would donate $100,000 to the National Coalition for Women With Heart Disease.

When it comes to messaging, this campaign hit on all the points mentioned above:

• The customer journey and the story you want to tell: The messaging focused on new customer acquisition, and pushed the universal importance of hearth health.
• The emotions you want to evoke in your audience: In this case, it was love. MegaRed promoted its product by urging those watching to help their loved ones take care of themselves and their heart.
• A call-to-action or the desired next steps you want to encourage: Request a free sample.

Step #3: Establish a schedule.

With seasonal campaigns, timing is of the essence. This means not only scheduling time to plan well in advance of the event, but also planning the execution of each stage of the campaign at the right time.

With today’s journalists, editors, and site owners receiving hundreds of content pitches and press releases each and every day, you can imagine the influx they receive around peak seasonal times. That said, you need to have your content prepared, built, planned and ready to be sent to sites at least two months before the big event — preferably sooner.

When creating a schedule for your campaign, don’t forget about your audience. When is the best time to contact them? When will they be most willing to share the content or engage with the campaign? Plan around that, too.

Step #4: Organise your assets.

You should consider all marketing platforms — email, social, PR, blogging, SEO — when planning your seasonal content campaign, as incorporating different platforms in your campaign allows for an effective content flow, increased reach, and increased engagement.

One of Zazzle’s most successful seasonal campaigns was one done for AO.com, a retailer specialising in household appliances. This simple idea — ‘A Guide to the Ultimate Christmas Dinner’ — manifested into a truly successful campaign that spanned many different content formats and platforms.

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The hero piece was a content hub that sat on the AO.com blog. This interactive piece greeted the user with 12 of the staple ingredients that make up a Christmas dinner that, when clicked on, lead to a simple recipe on how to cook them — including both an ingredients list and a methodology. This recipe could then be downloaded by clicking a ‘download recipe’ CTA.

Outside of the content hub, we created an infographic that detailed step-by-step instructions for cooking a Christmas dinner. This was distributed via our blogger relations team to help AO.com’s campaign gain traction on related websites.

Then it came down to outreach. And with the help of an organized press release and PR push, this campaign was featured in three different articles — including spots on Daily Mail, The Huffington Post, and 50 Connect.

Finally, due to the useful nature of the content, it shared well on social platforms, adding to the overall success and visibility of the campaign.

The lesson? Think big picture when planning your campaign assets. By distributing your campaign’s message across different mediums and placements, it’s easier for folks to find it and share it with their following.

Pro Tip: Having an effective, up-to-date campaign plan document is absolutely essential during this part of the process. It will enable you to better organize the timing and frequency of content release, and keep your messaging consistent by serving as a home for all of your campaign assets and communications. Check out these content marketing planning templates to get started.

Step #5: Report and remain agile.

Something that is imperative when managing and planning a marketing campaign is the ability to be agile. Report and review the campaign’s performance as you go along and adjust your strategy if you feel it’s necessary.

Where is the majority of traffic coming from? Which pages have the best bounce rate? Which ones are converting the best? Use these simple metrics, and other campaign success measurements, to inform your strategy moving forward.

Don’t be afraid to make alterations to the original plans. If the changes you are going to make will ultimately improve the campaign’s success, why wouldn’t you make them? Remember: It doesn’t matter that this plan isn’t what you started with.

Getting Started

With 2017 coming at us full steam ahead, begin to think about which seasonal events your brand could benefit from over the next 12 months. After all, nailing these seasonal campaigns could be the key to your best financial year yet.

What are your best tips for planning a seasonal campaign? Share them below.

If you ask us, infographics aren’t going anywhere.

This year alone, we’ve covered how essential they are to SEO, and the numerous resources available to create beautiful infographics of your own.

And yes — when it comes to infographics, we do like to play favorites.

That’s why we went scoured the web for some of the best infographics of 2016. Their topics are vast and their formats are many, but this year, we truly saw some excellent examples of informative design.

Have a look and let these examples inspire you. Who knows — with all of those resources and a new year around the corner, they might help you create of the best infographics of 2017.

10 of the Best Infographic Examples of 2016

1) Music and Productivity, by WebpageFX

Music is known to enhance many situations. It livens up a party, gets us through a brutal workout, and can make a long commute seem quicker. But did you know that it can also make you more productive? WebpageFX collected these science-backed reasons why music can help you get your work done, and worked them into an infographic that delights us.

This infographic does a nice job of balancing two different color sets — a best practice, according to Marketing Consultant Brian Downard’s infographic design playbook. Downard encourages the use of soft, subtle colors in the background, with pops of color in the foreground to highlight important elements. As you can see below, this approach results in a really clean design.

Beyond the color palette, the folks at WebpageFX did a nice job of following through with the theme, with various musical notes and other symbols that represent a melodic sound. Speaking of symbols, take note of how they used the image of the brain to break down how music stimulates and activates specific sections.

2) “15 Terrifying Statistics On Your Cellphone Addiction” by Trustmypaper

There’s so much information out there about the drawbacks of overusing our mobile devices. They make us lose sleep. They facilitate email addiction. But very rarely, it seems, can we find all of this information in one place — until now.

Trustmypaper created this infographic, which packs 15 eye-opening statistics in a condensed yet engaging format. Plus, the accompanying images help us to process exactly what each number conveys, and reinforces the danger of each fact.

As for the font, it’s more than legible, but isn’t so big that it doesn’t fit in with the overall design scheme. According to a Kissmetrics article from Henneke Duistermaat and Neo Mammalian Studios, poor font choice is one of 19 infographic red flags, and while it may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many brands just don’t get it right.

3) “Vacations Are a Must” Quill

We are definitely preachers of vacation — how to relax when you’re there, how to catch up on email when you’re back, and how many of us feel too guilty to take one. But it’s a must — and this infographic explains why.

From the good, to the bad, to the ugly, Quill makes great use of imagery here. The infographic uses a generally bright color palette, to reflect the lightness of vacation. The “happier” images incorporate the benefits, too. But when it comes to the negative impacts of not taking time off, the pictures don’t hide them — even if it’s a cartoon, we can sense the annoyance of the characters that work or receive a call from the office during their time away.

4) “How to Leave Your Worries Behind,” by Happify

Some of us have a tendency to chronically expect the worst. (Cough — guilty.) But chronically worrying isn’t good for you — from heart disease to memory loss, all of that stress can take a toll on one’s health.

So how do we knock that off? It turns out that there are some fairly simple, science-backed steps to decreasing our anxiety and worry, which Happify has organized into an easy-to-follow infographic. It even has a delightfully helpfully step on figuring out when and how to let go of our negative thoughts, and when they (rarely) deserve merit.

Not to mention, we love the design, especially the combination of bold colors and white space. This infographic manages to work in a vast palette, without seeming to be all over the place with its design scheme — but its brightness reflects the overall theme of happiness.

5) “The 2016 #GivingTuesday Infographic,” by Classy

When it comes to color, sometimes less is more. In fact, according to an analysis of over 200+ infographics on Pinterest, Venngage found that infographics with only two colors earned the highest number of Pins and Likes. While Classy snuck in a few highlights into this infographic on #GivingTuesday, the primary color scheme is a festive red and green combination — which aligns perfectly with the “Home Alone” theme.

Speaking of the “Home Alone” theme, the designer of this infographic did an amazing job incorporating subtle, nostalgia-inducing nods to the classic movie — from the tar-covered staircase to the silly microcopy on the VHS tape. According to Psychology Today, nostalgia memories are social in nature and have the power to inspire social behavior, making this infographic inevitably more sharable.

6) “The Female Entrepreneur: Women Who Run Their World,” by USC Marshall

Female entrepreneurs are taking the world by storm. In fact, among Generation Y entrepreneurs, women are more successful than men. But what makes them so successful? And how are they improving the business landscape as a whole? This infographic from USC Marshall outlines those positive points, from job creation to career growth.

The infographic also includes other fun facts about female entrepreneurship, like the geographic regions where it’s most concentrated, and other tidbits on revenue and valuation. It look a somewhat difficult-to-broach topic around which there’s a lot of conflicting information, and incorporated the facts into a well-designed visual.

It has consistent style and lighting, and we love infographics than can seamlessly incorporate a map. Being able to share geographic statistics in visual way is key — and, it helps people digest a big chunk of data. But our favorite part has to be the use of pictogram charts — where each icon represents a specific value — to make it easier for the viewer to visual the data. Pictogram charts can help you achieve a more representational view of your data, and even overcome differences in language, culture, or education, according to The Data Visualization Catalogue.

7) “How to Avoid a Hangover” by Fix

As you might be aware, there’s a new year around the corner. With that comes New Year’s Eve, which brings a lot of partying. In other words, January 1st might be known as the most hungover day of the year.

Knowing that, Fix provided yet another helpful infographic that breaks down all things hangover. We’re delighted by the design of this visual. It incorporates a ton of helpful information, ranging from what a hangover really is, to how to prevent them, to how to cure them the next day. And the images? We don’t know about you, but we’re craving a full English breakfast.

What we really like about this infographic is the ability to condense important details that, were they in the format of a full article, may not have been as easy to process. We’ll drink to that.

8) “Typography And Font Deconstruction” by The Logo Company

When it comes to design and text, there are two things we know to be certain:

1. Comic Sans is bad.
2. We have to be able to read it.

As for the rest, it seems like learning typography is like learning a second language for many marketers. It has to be on brand, it has to be legible, and what the heck is a ligature?

The Logo Company took some fundamental pieces of the typography vocabulary and compiled it into this well-designed infographic. Following its own advice, the text is perfect. It’s readable, but considering there aren’t a ton of pictures in there, it doesn’t leave us feeling overwhelmed by text. At the same time, each vocabulary word has a clever visual representation next to the written definition, which helps to keep the image from looking too text-heavy.

9) “Why a Website Redesign Doesn’t Always Work,” by VWO

Sometimes, a website redesign is necessary. User preferences change, as do brands themselves — that should be reflected in your public-facing content. But are you going about it the right way?

According to this infographic from VWO, many marketers aren’t. And while we don’t love the errors of website redesign outlined in this visual, we do like the way they’re represented. It’s thematic — there’s a recurring use of contrasting red and green, for example, to symbolize the necessary A/B testing that, evidently, 57% of website redesign projects lack. Plus, we enjoy how literal the imagery is, without going over the top. A burger represents “food for thought,” and a brain accompanies the statistic on psychological factors in design.

10) “12 Classic Sauces and How To Make Them” by Quid Corner

When the holidays roll around, one of our favorite parts is the food. And what enhances any dish — besides wine? An accompanying sauce, of course.

So when Quid Corner combined two of our greatest loves — food and infographics — we were thrilled. It’s not often that actual photos appear on infographics, but when they do, it can be tricky to pull off. The lighting has to be just right, and the coloring has to match the overall design scheme of the infographic at large. This infographic manages to pull that off, by using a backdrop that’s ample in white space, and a specific color theme according to each recipe — red for tomato and green for parsley, for example. Is anyone else feeling hungry?

Let’s Get Visual

Okay, so maybe we have a thing for infographics. But it’s easy to see why — they’re such a concise, comprehensive device for conveying detailed statistics and facts in a visual way that makes them easy to follow.

So as you plan your marketing for 2017, don’t leave out the visuals — and certainly don’t leave the infographics behind. Need some help creating your own? Be sure to check out these free, pre-made Infographic templates.

What were some of your favorite infographics of 2016? Let us know in the comments.

Social media is no longer the new kid on the block when it comes to marketing channels. Today’s most successful B2B and B2C companies have recognized and harnessed its potential as a scalable lead generation tool. It’s also a great growth engine, driving conversions throughout the funnel.

Although the importance of social media seems obvious to modern brands, many are still struggling to make it work. In fact, in certain contexts, social media is the hardest strategy for 38% of SMBs to execute.  At the same time, a sound social media strategy has never been more critical to the health of a growing business’s inbound funnel.

Most of the challenges working against these brands come from poor social media team structure and organization. Whether you’ve got a team of one or a bevy of interns working on social, now’s the time to reassess how you build and incentivize your team for ROI and scalability.

That’s where HubSpot and Sprout Social’s new guide, How to Build and Manage a Social Media Team, comes in. Inside, you’ll find tips on:

• Structuring your team for social media ROI
• Looking for the right skills in a social media hire to complement your team
• Shortening the onboarding process by setting up new hires for success
• Measuring individual success to ensure your employees have a trajectory of career growth
• Preventing burnout with leadership and team-building activities

Click here to download How to Build and Manage a Social Media Team.

You can’t “hack” motivation. There’s not a quick trick in existence that’s going to motivate you to do something if you just don’t want to do it.

But you can make an effort to understand the psychology behind motivation, and use this to your advantage.

The things that keep us on track towards our goals might surprise you. In this article, we’ll discuss four perspective changes that can help keep you motivated — even when you feel like giving up.

4 Surprising Things That Keep Us Motivated

1) Overcoming a setback.

Despite being one of the seven deadly sins, pride is actually an important factor in staying motivated towards long-term goals. Pride comes in two different forms: There’s hubristic pride (the kind that inflates your ego and gets you into trouble) and authentic pride, which describes those warm, rewarding feelings you get from making progress on meaningful work or accomplishing a hard-won goal.

Jessica Tracy, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and author of Take Pride: Why The Deadliest Sin Holds The Secret To Human Success, has extensively studied the effects of authentic pride (i.e., feelings of accomplishment and fulfillment) on human motivation.

In a recent study, Tracy and her colleagues examined the effects of authentic pride on students’ test taking abilities. When students reported feeling a low sense of authentic pride after receiving a poor test score, they were more likely to change their study approach and work to improve their results for next time. Students who did not report feeling a low sense of authentic pride after receiving a poor test score were much less motivated to improve.

In other words, having your ego bruised a little bit will actually motivate you to work harder in the long run. So if you’ve recently suffered from a setback or disappointment at work, channel that energy into changing up your approach and improving your results, rather than pushing those feelings away and ignoring them.

But be wary of taking it too far. Tracy warns that there’s an important distinction between using the absence of pride productively and suffering from a problematic lack of confidence — i.e., shame.

Shame, Tracy explained, is characterized by feelings of uselessness, and thoughts of “I’m not going to try to work hard because it’s just going to end up in failure.” In contrast, feelings of low authentic pride push you to restore feelings of fulfillment and achievement by working harder and more efficiently.

2) Being at peace with distractions.

Embracing distractions instead of fighting through them certainly goes against conventional wisdom about motivation — a quick Google search for “motivation and distraction” reveals a list of articles about “killing” or “eliminating” distractions as a strategy to stay motivated. But resisting all distraction can actually make it more difficult for our brains to stay focused.

Oliver Burkeman, the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, believes the typical way of approaching distractions as the enemy of productivity is misguided, and could counterintuitively be causing us to become even more distracted.

Although it’s easy to blame external factors like your chatty coworker or the addictive allure of social media, Burkeman said the real cause of our chronic distraction is an internal urge to fight anything that compromises our autonomy.

In other words, we like to feel in charge, and when we’re told we have to focus on something specific, the idea of fixating on anything but the task at hand becomes irresistibly magnetic.

For example, I recently set aside a block of time on my calendar to get a project I’d been putting off completed once and for all. When the time finally rolled around, all I really wanted to do was mindlessly look at pictures of dogs on Instagram. This was my brain’s way of rebelling against the task at hand, and assuming autonomy by drifting towards a more appealing activity.

“The good news is that when you see distraction for what it really is, you’re much better equipped to fight it,” Burkeman wrote in 99u. “Remember, too, that you don’t need to ‘feel motivated’ in order to do important work. Instead, let yourself feel like you’d rather be doing something else, and at the same time, do the work: Open the laptop, make the phone call, type another sentence.”

3) Strengthening your tolerance for discomfort.

We’ve all been here before: you’re just about to jump into a big project, and the thought of taking those first steps is almost physically painful. All you can focus on is the hardship to come: the effort you’ll have to expend, the hours you’ll have to put in, and how taxing the project will be from start to finish.

Carson Tate, a productivity coach and business consultant, calls this phenomenon intellectual discomfort, and pretty much everyone has experienced it at one time or another. It’s a gut-level aversion to doing any work that requires us to come off autopilot and challenges us on a deeper level.

And to get any meaningful work done, you have to learn to fight through it.

It will be unpleasant at first, but it is possible to train yourself to become more comfortable with the discomfort of intellectually demanding work. Think of it like preparing for a marathon: If you make a training schedule and put in the effort to stick to it, eventually the running gets easier every day. That first day, running a mile might seem tortuous, but in six months, it’ll be a breeze.

To start increasing your tolerance for work that requires your full attention, consider using a structured framework to manage your working hours. One of the most commonly used (and widely discussed) methods is the Pomodoro Technique, which relies on a intervals of work and rest to keep your mind on track without burning out. 

When used consistently, structured methods like this can help increase your endurance for intellectually taxing work — and make it easier to prevent those pangs of dread and premature fatigue before the project even kicks off.

4) Stop obsessing about being unmotivated.

The overarching theme in the previous three methods seems to be this: stop beating yourself up about not feeling motivated, and just start working. It sounds counterintuitive — how can you work when you don’t feel like it? — but constantly fixating on how motivated you wish you felt only amplifies your lack of motivation.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner famously demonstrated that attempts to forcibly coerce your own thoughts or emotions overwhelmingly backfires. If you force yourself to get super motivated to start your next big project — but in reality, you’re really not feeling it — you could actually end up feeling more unmotivated than before.

All you accomplished was making yourself feel bad that you weren’t experiencing what you perceived to be the ideal emotional responses: excitement and motivation.

The takeaway? Don’t judge yourself so harshly for feeling unmotivated. It’s perfectly okay, and you can still get things done without being extremely excited about them. So go ahead, give yourself that Twitter break. And then get down to business.

How do you stay motivated when things get tough? Let us know in the comments.

Marketers work hard, amirite? But there are still some people in our lives — ahem, Mom — who seem to think that we just write stories and draw pictures on the internet all day.

I mean, we don’t do that every day. We work hard, and we have a great appreciation for things that are creative and clever. It makes sense, then, that we also like our season’s greetings to share those traits. And when it comes to holiday cards, just make us laugh.

But if you’ve been described as “impossible to please,” or having an “abnormal appreciation for puns,” have faith — you’re not alone. That’s why we put together this guide of great holiday cards for marketers.

From punny to downright clever, these cards certainly have us in stitches — We hope you’ll enjoy them, too.

11 Hilarious Holiday Cards for Marketers

1) Thoughtful Tweets, by Someecards

Leave it to Someecards to capture the holiday snark that lives in all of us, at least a little bit.

Holidays are a busy time for marketers. We have to plan content for the season — which is remarkably easier with a social media content calendar — and make sure it continues to thrive, even if we’re elsewhere, donning ugly sweaters and drinking eggnog.

Naturally, this fitting sentiment made us laugh.

Someecards makes it super easy to send these greetings, too. Just visit the link, click on the picture, and choose when you want it to be delivered.

2) CapterraGrams, by Capterra

In a past holiday season, Capterra compiled a list of 10 B2B holiday greetings that were so clever, we’re kind of jealous that we didn’t come up with them.

It’s hard to pick just one, but here are a few of our favorites — like this one, which puts a marketing spin on the classic carol “Up on the Housetop.”

Or this one, which turns social sharing buttons into dreidels.

Of course, we couldn’t leave out a good CTA color pun, either.

3) The Forgetful Marketer, by SadShop

We love all of SadShop’s holiday cards for their deadpan greetings, like “You are not bad” for Valentine’s Day, and “You are too old to say yolo” for birthdays.

So when it came time to find the perfect holiday sentiment for the marketers in our lives, we knew that SadShop would have something fitting. And if you’re the type of marketer who works so hard before the holidays that perhaps you never quite make it to the “cards” line on your December to-do list, this one might be for you.

4) Holiday Zen, by ThePaperArtShoppe

Then, there are the marketers who do manage to get it all together — work, cards, and maybe even a box of homemade cookies — but you wish he or she would take a minute to breathe. (Or maybe, you know, that describes you. We can relate.)

There’s nothing like some holiday yoga to keep calm and market on during this season. A little bit of laughter wouldn’t hurt, either — What better way to get a chuckle than with a tree-posing reindeer?

5) Appy New Year, by nocturnalpaper

As marketers, we really love our apps, especially if they help us relax or become more productive. So when it comes to wishing us a happy holiday, it’s quite fitting to make it more of an “appy” holiday.

This adorable card puts that pun to work by taking four app icons — weather, mail, messages, and music — and attaching tiny arms and legs to them. However, depending on who you ask, those arms might look like little reindeer antlers. Festivity is in the eye of the (appy) beholder. 

6) For the Good-Humored Boss, by FINCHandHARE

If you’re as lucky as we are, your boss has a great sense of humor. In that case, he or she might appreciate this greeting — which is actually meant to be a birthday card, but still works as a holiday one — which simply reads, “You are terrifying.”

Once the card is opened, the humor continues with, “You are a terrific boss. I am really enjoying the comfortable work environment you foster.” Be sure to add your own warm, hand-written greeting, though, to make sure it’s all in good fun. We suggest, “For one of the best marketers I know. Happy holidays,” or, “I mean it. Thanks for such a great year, and happy holidays.”

7) Holiday Buzzwords, by Someecards

Someecards strikes again with this great greeting that calls out marketers on, well, the language we might throw around during the holidays.

But hey, don’t fault us — we really do wish you hope, peace, joy, and successful marketing.

8) #FFFFFF, by NerdyWordsGifts

Where there’s marketing, there’s often branding. And where there’s branding, there’s a style guide. That usually comes equipped with official rules about which colors should be used in marketing collateral. Those colors usually have their own html codes that lead with the # symbol.

As you probably guessed, #FFFFFF is the html color code for white. This card puts a branding and design spin on the famous carol lyrics, “May all your Christmases be white,” replacing the word “white” with the digital symbol. In that case, we hope your holidays are anything but #0468E0. 

9) Holiday QR Code, by kissandpunch

QR codes are hardly a new marketing concept, but when used correctly, they can still be effective. Case in point: this card with a QR code letterpress.

But the greeting doesn’t end there. Once the code is scanned, the recipient is taken to this adorable video of a yorkie’s holiday adventures — and who doesn’t love marketing with a healthy dose of dogs?

Warning: The video is a bit corny, but we can’t think of a better time than the holidays for some cheesy cheer.

10) #Presents, by NewtonAndTheApple

No matter how you feel about a personal use of hashtags, there’s no denying their importance in marketing.

The makers of this card leveraged that idea to capture a hightlight of the holidays: #presents.

But if the marketers in your life are feeling a bit grinchy this season, fear not — there’s another version made just for them.

There are also editions available for #lights, #Rudolph, and #tree. Might we submit a request for #cookies and #wine?

11) Beyoncé Jingles, by NostalgiaCollect

Consider this one our gift to you. I mean, Beyoncé and a pun? Nothing says “happy holidays” to our favorite marketers like a play on popular song lyrics.

Happy Holidays From Our Marketers to Yours

Between all of the chaos and planning, it seems like there’s one big thing we forget to do during the holidays — laugh. That’s what the season’s greetings are for, after all. And if that festivity and joy happens to come with a good dose of marketing humor, we hope that makes you all the merrier.

Have you come across some great holiday cards for marketers? Let us know in the comments.

Whether you’re a Baby Boomer or a young member of Gen Z, there’s a good chance you use some form of social media. In fact, there are over 2 billion social media users worldwide.

When it comes to marketing, segmenting social media content for your audience is key. And one way to target your social media marketing efforts is by age group.

Although billions of people log onto social media platforms every day, generational groups each have different habits and preferences when it comes to their favorite platforms and ways they engage with content.

In this infographic from WebPage FX, you can see just how large the generational gaps can be on social media. For example, did you know that Generation Xers between the ages of 36 and 49 make up 36% of Pinterest users, 93% of whom have shopped online in the past six months? 

There are huge segments of social media users who want to hear from brands. Check out the infographic below to learn more about how they’re using social networks and how you can target them more effectively.