Society has sensationalized the idea that our children need to be gifted athletes with superstar careers in order to be truly successful. As a marketer with an affinity for analytics, I have a different hope. I hope my kid becomes an analytics superstar. And thanks to recent social trends, that’s actually a cool thing to be now.

Pursuing a career in analytics has never been more accessible. Traditional data tools are becoming easier to use, which allows non-programmer types to perform even complex analyses quickly. This allows agencies to build analytics departments with varying levels of technical expertise. With today’s tools, you don’t have to be in the analytics department to analyze data.

Within agencies, the move to fully staffed analytics departments is gaining momentum. According to the 4A’s “Survey on Analytics in Agencies” in May 2015, 93% of agencies reported having staff members who perform analytics functions. And half of agencies with more than 50 employees reported having a separate analytics department. As agencies look to increase their capabilities, the competition for talent to lead these new departments will grow.

The need for data analytics talent has been a big discussion in recent years. A 2015 survey by MIT Sloan Management Review found that 43% of companies struggle with finding the analytics talent they need. And with all the competition out there for a limited pool, agencies may discover that the talent is not only hard to find, but also hard to retain.

Marketers need some analytics background to succeed 

Universities are responding to this new staffing demand. As a sitting board member of the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management, Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program, I’ve noticed that more and more universities are offering graduate programs designed to produce skilled analytics professionals with business acumen.

Undergraduate programs for analytics are also starting to take shape. These programs will likely range from concentration clusters to complete minors that can be easily added to a student’s business, marketing, or advertising curriculum. Students are starting to realize that even basic analytics skills will make them more employable.

This year, I was not only impressed by the number applications we received for our marketing analytics internship program, but also with why the students applied. They fully recognized that analytics would be an important part of their marketing career — even if they didn’t want analytics to be their full-time job.

Agencies need to seek candidates with a base of analytics knowledge — especially in the account management department

Analytics courses and graduate programs are providing agencies with a unique opportunity: What if your account department was filled with talented people who were predisposed to testing, optimizing, and using predictive behavioral algorithms?

Candidates with a background in analytics are perfect for account management roles, since they can easily translate a client’s business needs into behavioral data questions.

Such talent brings another benefit: Many clients have been strengthening their own analytics capabilities. An agency that has a solid analytics department — one that can support or augment a client’s analytics staff — will be a true business partner. In the future, agencies with strong analytics cultures will be a client requirement, not a request.

Senior staff needs to adapt to support this new wave of analytics talent

The rise in young analytics-minded talent will be the disruption that pushes senior staff to seek out resources to upgrade their own knowledge base.

Progressive and successful agencies need to offer internal programs that demystify analytics for agency leaders as part of formal training programs. This will help senior staff better understand what analytics can and can’t do. Basic knowledge makes — and will continue to make — a big difference when it comes time to sponsoring analytics initiatives and designing an appropriate organizational structure to support analytics activities.

It also helps executives ask the right questions when dealing with prospective analytics vendors. One way to provide this basic knowledge is through partnerships with local universities and industry organizations. Such collaboration will aid this process by allowing on-site classes, which should maximize attendance.

Analytic thinking will improve creative executions

With more agency staff thinking about how to test, learn, and optimize based on customer behavior, the integration of analytics with the creative staff will be a major factor in agency success.

The reality is that integration is simple. The new analytics mindset will improve creative evolution over time because it’s rooted in customer behavior. This ability to evolve a campaign quickly will help ensure an unfair advantage for any client. To do this quickly and effectively, the analytics team has to be well integrated into the creative culture of the agency.

The fact is that analytics isn’t just about dashboards, crazy math, or predictive algorithms. It’s about using data to understand human behavior.

The creative product is then commissioned to alter these human behaviors. An agency that has demystified and embraced analytics for its staff will have a natural flow of conceptual evolution on core creative ideas — one based on a feedback loop of customer behavior to the creative.

Agencies need to start planning today

Integrated analytics thinking will soon be the expectation in business, not the exception. Attracting and retaining the top talent will require an environment that fosters the skills of newly minted talent entering the workplace.

This analytics talent will thrive in agencies that have an interdepartmental group of analytics-minded individuals — especially in the account department — who can help communicate complex analytics in simple ways.

Start planning today how to improve your agency’s analytics practice, as well as your own personal knowledge. You’ll be glad you did.

How is your agency taking part in the analytics revolution?

Over the past few years, we’ve observed innovations in technology that have drastically changed the digital experience for people all over the world. More people are using mobile to access the internet than ever before, newsfeeds are packed with content, and bots are redefining what it looks like to complete the most common of online tasks.

And as technology changes, the inbound marketing methodology must evolve with it.

And while we still have great benchmark data on how marketers and salespeople do their job today, we also have included new datapoints on how technology is changing consumer habits and where marketing and sales is headed in the future.

How many companies are investing in video content, social selling, and preparing for new disruptors that enter the market? Check out our biggest and most data-packed edition of the State of Inbound to find out.

In addition to our new report, we’re excited to host five online events every day this week that break down the key themes in this year’s report. Tune in to hear predictions and insights from industry leaders like:

• Joanna Lord of ClassPass
• Larry Kim of WordStream
• Rob Go of NextView Ventures

They’ll join HubSpot’s Brian Halligan (CEO), Kipp Bodnar (CMO), Meghan Keaney Anderson (VP Marketing), and Kieran Flanagan (VP Marketing) throughout the week to talk about the current and future state of marketing, sales, and business. Join us to learn:

• Expert predictions on the next year’s biggest disruptors
• How to improve collaboration between Marketing and Sales to increase ROI
• What types of content consumers want to see more of in the future
• How new technologies will affect how businesses get found
• How to advertise in a way that aligns with inbound marketing
• What skills marketers and salespeople should prioritize for the future of inbound

• Monday, September 12 | State of Marketing | Facebook Live at 1 p.m. EDT
• Tuesday, September 13 | Future of Marketing | YouTube Live at 11 a.m. EDT
• Wednesday, September 14 | State of Sales | Tune in live for #InboundSalesDay
• Thursday, September 15 | Future of Sales | YouTube at 11 a.m. EDT
• Friday, September 16 | Future of Business | Facebook Live at 1 p.m. EDT

Video has been on the rise for a while, offering marketers a proven way to grab strangers’ attention and keep their target audience engaged.

Live video streaming in particular has become increasingly popular as a tool for companies and groups to connect directly with their users, to gain greater product awareness, and to brand themselves creatively. In fact, just recently, the Content Marketing Institute predicted video — specifically real-time platforms — will be critical to brand growth in 2016.

To learn more about how to take advantage of the live streaming boom, here are 11 creative ways to use products like Snapchat, Google Hangouts, Facebook Live, and Periscope to successfully market your business or group.

11 Creative Ways to Use Live Streaming on Snapchat, Facebook Live & More

Snapchat

1) Raise awareness for a cause.

The World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) paired with Snapchat to create the #LastSelfie campaign with the goal of raising awareness about endangered species. Using the slogan “Don’t let this be my #LastSelfie,” the non-profit suggested that just as images on Snapchat disappear within a short 10 seconds, these animals are vanishing from our Earth all too quickly.

Users were then asked to share the snap, “adopt” an animal, and donate to the WWF through SMS. Within one week, the #LastSelfie campaign received 40,000 tweets, and was seen by roughly 50% of all active Twitter users.

2) Recruit interns and new hires.

GrubHub saw potential in Snapchat early on as a way to get more interactive with a younger demographic. Rather than post an intern application on a standard career search site, or on less targeted channels like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, GrubHub asked its Snapchat followers to apply using the app itself.

The doodle request was an easy way for the company to assess creativity and confidence, while also tapping into their ideal intern pool.

3) Coordinate with a popular event.

Taco Bell managed to become one of the most followed brands on Snapchat by uploading a six-minute Snap Story “movie” in increments of 10 seconds. The short film focused on the launch of their product, the Doritos Locos Taco, but the company also took things a step further. Taco Bell coordinated their campaign to align with the MTV Movie Awards, making it relevant to the event and, therefore, gaining greater reach and brand awareness.

Google Hangouts On Air

Note: As of today (September 12th) Hangouts On Air will move from Google+ to YouTube Live. You can learn more about how to set up Hangout On Air with YouTube Live here.

4) Show off the job.

NASA is big on Google Hangouts, hosting live videos as a way for space-interested audience members to learn more about the organization and its recent discoveries — they’ve even held Hangouts from outer space. Recently, they teamed up with Verge Magazine to show off some perks and pitfalls of the astronaut job.

Hangout participants used the hashtag #askAstro on their Twitter or Google+ to ask the NASA crew about life — both personal and professional — while aboard the craft, which were then answered in real time. The Hangout provided fascinating content, but also provided valuable information to those interested in that career path.

5) Get a bigger audience.

In an effort to reach a larger audience, Manchester United used Google Hangouts to get a few more people on the “front row” during a match against Liverpool. Fans were asked to use the hashtag #MUFrontRow on their Google+ Page with a photo that showed off their team spirit.

Of the entries, the best 22 were selected, and those fans were then projected onto the stadium’s digital advertising board alongside the field. The campaign created more interest in the event, and seriously delighted some die-hard fans.

6) Interview industry experts.

Every month, IMPACT Branding & Design hosts a “Website Throwdown” featuring top marketing and design professionals. Participants are invited to submit their own website URLs to be broadcast during the Hangout and constructively critiqued by that month’s guest speaker.

People can also tune in to watch, or help out by asking questions and posting comments on Twitter using the hashtag #WebsiteThrowdown during the live stream. The Website Throwdown is an awesome way to create brand awareness and authority by offering participants a chance to learn and improve.

Facebook Live

7) Show off some skills.

Tastemade does pretty much everything food, from recipe ideas to vlog tutorials — they even hosts its own food show series. Part of what sets Tastemade apart from other food-focused publications, though, is the brand’s really great content targeted to the everyday foodie. And, recently, Tastemade started exploring Facebook Live as a raw way to gain social traffic while also engaging with fans.

During a live latte art video, Tastemade asked viewers to submit requests as part of their #FoodArtFridays series. The interactive video received over 90,000 comments and nearly 5,000 shares.

8) Get fans and followers to laugh.

Who doesn’t love a good laugh? BuzzFeed decided to try out Facebook Live with a video purely for fans’ entertainment. Two BuzzFeeders explored how many rubber bands it takes to explode a watermelon, which lasted about 45 minutes. According to Facebook, at the time, more people tuned in to watch the stream than any other live video on Facebook — reaching over 800,000 viewers at its peak. Now, the video has over 10 million views, creating a ton of social and site traffic, just for doing something fun.

9) Announce new products.

CES is an annual event hosted by the Consumer Technology Association to showcase innovation technologies and products from across the world. During the 2016 event, Chevrolet debuted its newest car model, the 2017 Bolt EV.

But rather than limit its audience to only those able to attend CES 2016, Chevrolet live streamed the announcement from its Facebook Page, giving all of the company’s fans a chance to tune in and learn more about the product. Chevrolet also responded to Facebook comments in real time to keep its audience engaged with the video and answer any relevant questions.

Periscope

10) Bring the audience along.

Last summer, Nestle partnered with online influencers to host live Periscope sessions of ways they were celebrating the first day of summer — while eating Drumstick ice cream cones, of course. The company then promoted each activity on Drumstick’s Twitter using the hashtag #FirstDayOfSummer for followers to tune in.

Activities ranged from jumping on a ferris wheel, to biking on the beach, to eating ice cream by a fire pit. Nestle’s campaign provided an opportunity for user engagement, helped associated Drumsticks with enjoying summer, and branded the company as lively and fun.

11) Go behind the scenes.

General Electric used Periscope to launch a five-day live streaming campaign called #DRONEWEEK. GE enabled Periscope on a group of drones to give their audience a real-time, bird’s eye view of their facilities, featuring not only some of their industrial machinery, but also interviews with GE scientists and tech experts. Fast Company called it the “Shark Week for science and social video nerds.”

GE managed to showcase five different facilities across the country, and even created a Twitter @GEDronePilot to provide extra commentary and interact with viewers.

Ready to Try It?

These are not the only live streaming platforms out there. Tons of applications and websites exist, and are used by millions of people every day. There’s so much potential for brands and groups to use these outlets creatively to gain recognition, authority, and interest.

How do you plan to use live streaming in your marketing? Share your ideas in the comments below.

Remember when “surfing the net” meant traversing a minefield of unwelcome pop-up ads? When “digital advertising” referred almost exclusively to obnoxious flashing banners and random sidebar ads?

Online ads have matured a lot since those days, but it’s still important to look back at the flashy, gaudy, sometimes messy origins of internet advertising to better understand where we’re headed — and where there’s still room for improvement.  

Check out a condensed history of online advertising below.

The History of Online Advertising

1994: The first banner ads appear

Image credit: Wired

On October 27, 1994, the world of advertising was forever transformed by a small graphic bearing the presumptive words, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will,” in a kitschy rainbow font. The age of banner ads had officially begun.

You can thank (or blame?) Wired magazine’s former online off-shoot HotWired for introducing the world to the enduringly ubiquitous banner ad. HotWired was a digital publication, and it needed a way to generate revenue to pay its writers.

The publication devised a plan to set aside portions of its website to sell space to advertisers, similar to how ad space is sold in a print magazine. They called the ad spaces “banner ads,” and charged advertisers an upfront cost to occupy the real estate for a set time period — very different from today’s pay-per-click model. 

AT&T paid HotWired $30,000 to place the banner ad above on their site for three months. The ad enjoyed a click-through-rate of 44% — a number that would make most marketers balk in disbelief today. To put that in perspective, the average clickthrough rate on display ads today — 22 years later — is closer to 0.06%. 

Users enticed to click the mysterious banner were transported to a very early landing page for AT&T. Visitors could click links to view information about landmarks and museums around the world to highlight the internet’s ability to transport you to different locations virtually.

Craig Kanarick, one of the digital consultants hired to work on the campaign, remembers the team’s goal was to make an ad that didn’t feel like an ad, and actually offered valuable content to users. “Let’s not sell somebody something,” he recalled thinking, “Let’s reward them for clicking on this thing brought to you by AT&T.” 

The banner ad concept blew up as a way for websites to keep their content ungated and free for users, and it wasn’t long before other companies — such as Time Inc. and CMP’s Tech web — were seeking out advertisers to lease banner space as a sustainable way to scale their sites. 

1995: Display ads become increasingly targeted 

As banner ads continued to gain popularity, advertisers became increasingly interested in targeting specific consumer demographics, rather than just placing their ads wherever space was offered and hoping the right people would see it. This led to the beginning of targeted ad placement.

WebConnect, an ad agency that specialized in online ads, began helping their clients identify websites their ideal consumers visited. Now, companies could place ads where their target demographics were more likely to see them.

This was nothing short of revolutionary in the digital advertising space. Not only were companies reaching more relevant audiences, but websites hosting the ads were also able to display banners that were more applicable to their visitors.

WebConnect also introduced the CustomView tool, which capped the number of times a particular user was shown a single banner ad. If a user had already seen an ad a certain number of times, they would be shown another ad instead.

Users tend to stop noticing a banner ad after they’ve seen it before, so capping the number of times a user sees an ad helped early online advertisers prevent “banner fatigue.” Ad frequency capping is still a common display ad tactic advertisers use today. 

1996: ROI tracking tools begin to improve 

In 1996, banner ads plastered the internet, but advertisers still didn’t have a good process to determine if these ads were actually driving tangible results for their businesses. Marketers needed a way to more efficiently manage their display ad campaigns across multiple websites and report on how users were interacting with their ads.

Doubleclick emerged on the scene as one of the first ROI tools for banner ad campaigns. They offered advertisers a new service called D.A.R.T. (Dynamic Advertising Reporting & Targeting), which enabled companies to track how many times an ad was viewed and clicked across multiple websites.

The most impressive feature of D.A.R.T. was the fact that advertisers now had the ability to track how their ads were performing and make changes to a live campaign. Previously, advertisers needed to wait until a campaign was completed before they could analyze the results and optimize their next banner for better performance. If an ad was performing poorly, they were forced to wait it out.

With Doubleclick, advertisers could see if an ad’s performance was suffering midway through a campaign, and they had the option to make changes. For example, if a marketer noticed their ad was underperforming on one website, they could remove the ad and devote those resources to another website where the ad was performing better.

Doubleclick’s success also gave rise to a new pricing model for online advertising: Cost per impression (CPM). Previously, websites were paid a flat fee to host banner ads for a predetermined time period. With improved ad tracking, banner pricing transitioned towards an ROI-based model.

1997: Pop-up ads quickly rise and fall 

It would be an understatement to say that pop-up ads suffer from a poor image problem. They’ve been called internet’s original sin and the most hated advertising technique, and one of the original developers has even apologized for creating the underlying code that unleashed them upon unsuspecting web surfers. Even so, these much-maligned ads hold an undeniable place in the history of online advertising.

So who created the very first pop-up? Before you get your pitchforks and torches out, you should know their intentions were good. Ethan Zuckerman, then a developer for Tripod.com, is widely credited with creating the code that enables pop-up ads to open up a new browser window.

“It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content,” Zuckerman wrote in the Atlantic.

Amidst dwindling banner ad clickthrough rates in the late 1990s, pop-up ads first seemed like a way to save online advertising and capture the attention of increasingly ad-blind users. And while pop-ups did force users to pay attention, they didn’t actually translate to real ROI. By the early 2000s, it was standard for web browsers to come with pop-up blocking features.

1999 – 2002: Advertisers turn to paid search and pay-per-click

By this time, the web was expanding rapidly and users needed a better way to navigate the terrain. With search engines steadily gaining popularity, advertisers looking to create ads that were more targeted and less loathsome turned to sponsored search as the next digital advertising frontier.

In 1999, GoTo.com — an emerging search engine company that would later be acquired by Yahoo — introduced the first pay-for-placement search engine service. Advertisers were given the opportunity to bid for top search engine results on particular keywords. Despite some initial outcries that paid search would lead to corrupt results, GoTo.com was able to monetize their search engine through the model.

Pay-for-placement eventually evolved into pay-per-click. Companies bid on search result placement on a per-click basis: e.g., I’ll pay GoTo.com $1 per click if you put my company as the top search result. This led to search results that were largely determined by how much a company was willing to pay. The highest bidders were usually listed first, even above more relevant content, and it was unclear to users which results were paid and which were organic content.

The user experience of paid search was suffering, and one up-and-coming search engine thought they could fix it. Google introduced AdWords in 2000, originally under a pay-for-placement ad model. Google wanted to create a sponsored search experience that generated revenue without compromising the quality and relevancy of search results.

While previous paid search models like GoTo.com relied on bids from advertisers to determine search rankings, AdWords introduced a Quality Score model, which took into account an ad’s clickthrough rate when determining its placement on the search results page. Even if an ad had a lower bid, it would still appear above other, less relevant paid ads in search results thanks to its high clickthrough rate. The Quality Score model is still used today.

2006: Digital ads become hyper-targeted

As social media platforms picked up steam in the mid 2000s, advertisers sought a way to integrate ad content in a way that was both effective and non-intrusive. Marketers wanted a plan of action to reach younger internet users who were increasingly unswayed by banner ads and spending most of their internet time on social networks.

After previously resisting ads on its site, Facebook started working with advertisers in 2006 as a way to increase the young company’s profitability. They started with small display ads and sponsored links, and eventually moved onto ads targeted to a user’s demographics and interests. Despite some controversies along the way, Facebook has proven itself to be a targeted ad pioneer, changing the way that companies reach their desired audiences online.

“Our strategy is much less [about] increasing the volume of ads and much more about increasing the quality of the content and the quality of the targeting to get the right content to the right people,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in 2014.

Targeting consumers with relevant ads — rather than bombarding them with a large volume of ad content — has become a standard practice for online advertisers, particularly on social media. Beyond Facebook’s targeting efforts, other social networks such as Twitter, YouTube, and Google+ focus on providing an advertising experience for users that doesn’t feel aggressive or impersonal.

2010 – present: Marketers find value in native ads

Around this time, a new group of media companies began to emerge. Websites like BuzzFeed and Mashable presented advertisers with new opportunities to connect with their audiences through sponsored content and native advertising. 

Advertisers pay to produce articles, videos, and other types of content for news and media sites. The nature of the content itself is promotional, but the format looks less like an ad and more like a regular piece of content on the host’s website.  

Instead of relying on ads that disrupt their target audience’s online experience, native advertising allows marketers to create promotional content that supplements a user’s online experience. “Marketers interested in targeting ads to specific consumers in an unobtrusive fashion should seriously consider spending some time on native,” Mimi An concluded in a HubSpot Research study on native advertising.

Websites that traditionally generated revenue from display ads began to realize that they could create a better user experience by relying primarily on native ads — rather than traditional display ads — without compromising on ad revenue. 

The Future of Advertising

That’s a look back at the history of online advertising — but what about the future?

According to recent data from HubSpot Research, 91% of respondents say ads are more intrusive today compared to just two to three years ago. It’s clear that the future of digital advertising pivots on developing a targeted ad experience that offers consumers relevant content without feeling nosy or invasive.

To get the full scoop on the current state of digital advertising and how your company can keep its ad strategy relevant, download HubSpot’s just-released State of Inbound 2016 report here or by clicking below:

Do you know how your content marketing efforts stack up compared to other companies in Asia, Australia and New Zealand?

To make content marketing work for your company, it’s useful to have some idea of how other businesses are succeeding.

It helps you find and fix gaps in your own approach to content strategy, content creation and content promotion, and helps you to develop a realistic view of how you should budget and plan.

To help out fellow marketers in Asia Pacific, our Australian and Singaporean teams dove into some data on the state of content marketing in APAC. Alongside SurveyMonkey, we surveyed over 700 marketers across Asia, Australia and New Zealand to see where they’ve been focusing their efforts, where they’re struggling, and what their plans are for the remainder of 2016 and beyond.

To learn about these findings in more detail and get access to insights and tips from local content marketing experts, download the full Asia Pacific Content Marketing Report 2016 here.

21 Revealing Statistics About Content Marketing in Asia Pacific in 2016

1) Key Statistics Revealing the State of Content Marketing in Asia Pacific in 2016

Marketers in Asia Pacific believe in the power of content marketing to generate ROI.

• Marketers in APAC believe content marketing to have the most commercial impact on their business.  Tweet this stat 

• 49% of businesses in APAC intend to increase their content marketing resources during the rest of 2016. Tweet this stat 

Businesses in Asia Pacific are doing content marketing, but haven’t quite cracked it yet.

• 70% of APAC businesses feel their content marketing efforts are limited, basic, or inconsistent. Tweet this stat 

• 62% of APAC businesses are creating more content in 2016 than they did in 2015. Tweet this stat 

• 50% of businesses in APAC are doing content marketing, but have no strategy. Tweet this stat 

The key issues with managing content marketing in this region are the creation of quality content and developing a strategy.

• 57% of APAC marketers say producing quality content is an obstacle to their success. Tweet this stat 

• 56% of marketers in Asia Pacific struggle with content strategy. Tweet this stat 

• 53% of marketers in APAC struggle to produce enough content. Tweet this stat 

APAC marketers are finding success with blogging and paid promotion on Facebook.

• 47% of marketers in APAC have the most success with blog posts and articles. Tweet this stat 

• 35% of APAC marketers rate e-newsletters or online magazines as effective forms of content marketing. Tweet this stat 

• 37% of marketers in APAC find Facebook advertising to be the most effective form of paid promotion. Tweet this stat 

Asia Pacific marketers are focused mainly on top-of-funnel when it comes to measuring the success of their content marketing.

• 69% of APAC businesses use website traffic to measure of content marketing success. Tweet this stat 

• 62% of APAC marketers measure their content success using social shares. Tweet this stat 

2) Key Statistics on the State of Content Marketing in Australia & New Zealand 2016

• 52% of businesses in ANZ are convinced of the value of content marketing & can measure its ROI. Tweet this stat 

• 71% of businesses in ANZ said they are producing more content in 2016 than in 2015. Tweet this stat 

• Almost a quarter of marketers in ANZ are planning to increase resources to assist with content marketing. Tweet this stat 

• 68% of marketers in ANZ plan to increase investment in promoting their content via earned media (PR & social sharing).Tweet this stat 

3) Key Statistics on the State of Content Marketing in Asia 2016

• Only 40% of businesses in Asia are convinced of the value of content marketing & can measure its ROI. Tweet this stat 

• 62% of businesses in Asia struggle to create sufficient volumes of quality content. Tweet this stat 

• 51% of marketers in Asia plan to increase investment in promoting their content via earned media (PR & social sharing). Tweet this stat 

• 58% of marketers in Asia struggle to define the best content & influencers to build reach and support conversion. Tweet this stat 

Want to see more data on the state of content marketing in Asia Pacific alongside commentary from some of the region’s best content marketers? Check out the full report here: The Asia Pacific Content Marketing Report 2016.

You know that you’re a true email marketer if every single one of your emails includes a call-to-action. And I’m not talking about email marketing blasts here. What I have in mind are the individual, personal email messages you send on an everyday basis.

Yes, your personal email signature can provide a serious marketing opportunity.

You are most likely already using your own email signature to provide information about who you are and where you work. But you can take this practice to the next level by updating your signature to reflect the marketing campaigns you are running today.

Are you missing out on another opportunity to spread brand awareness or nurture prospective customers? Wondering what exactly you can promote through your email signature? Here are twelve awesome suggestions.

12 Professional Email Signature Ideas to Support Your Marketing Campaigns

1) Your Homepage

The least you should promote in your email signature is your company’s website. But in order for this tactic to be efficient, you have to make sure your homepage acts like a landing page.

In other words, it directs the visitor’s attention to the activity you want them to take. For instance, HubSpot’s homepage suggests that you receive a free product demo. Including your website’s homepage in an email signature also helps to expand awareness of your brand. Here’s an example (with help from our friend, Harry Potter):

2) Social Media

When it comes to the usage of social media in email signatures, you have two options. You can either include a link to your personal accounts on sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, etc., or you can include links to your company’s accounts. Both are good options. Check out how HubSpot’s Principal Marketing Manager Pam Vaughan promotes her social channels in the example below:

3) Your Blog

Your blog is one of the smartest things you can include in your email signature because it provides value to the community and gets updated on a regular basis. The fresh content on your blog is more engaging than a static homepage and will most likely retain the attention of the visitor for longer.

If you do shine light on your blog, don’t forget to include calls-to-action throughout your posts to encourage readers to take the next step and become a lead. Using our email signature tool, you can create a dynamic email signature that includes an RSS feed, which shows the title of your most recent blog article and automatically updates as new articles get published. Check out my editor, Carly Stec‘s:

4) Book

Have you written a book? Has your manager or CEO written one? Don’t be shy about it. Share a link to the book in your email signature. That will help you build authority and credibility among the people you communicate with. Here’s our own Aja Frost promoting her ebook:

5) Conferences & Events

Is there a company trade show coming up soon? Or maybe you are speaking at a conference? Change your email signature to reflect that. While your email signature might not necessarily help you generate more registrants, it will surely spread the word about the event and gain some awareness among your target audience. Here’s an event promotion signature from my colleague, Elijah Clark Ginsberg:

(P.S. – Are you registered to hear from Alec Baldwin, Serena Williams, and other marketing and sales professionals at INBOUND 2016 yet?)

6) New Marketing Offer

Have an offer that’s doing a great job of converting traffic into leads? (You can tell by looking at their corresponding landing pages’ visitor-to-submission rates in your marketing analytics). Identify your best performing offers, and then expose them to more traffic. Use your email signature to share a link to a popular ebook or a webinar. Or if you’re currently featuring a new campaign that highlights a particular offer, use that in your signature instead. Here’s an example of my own signature promoting this ebook:

7) Industry Research

Speaking of data, don’t underestimate the impact that facts and figures can have in a marketing context. People on the web are overwhelmed with information, which encourages them to look for specifics. If you publish an industry report based on proprietary research, as Mimi An does over at HubSpot Research, consider including a link to it in your email signature:

8) Case Studies

Salespeople love this one. If you’re talking to potential customers, what’s better than sharing stories of successful ones?

For instance, you can mention how your product or service increased the ROI of customer XYZ, or quote a customer in your email signature to boost your company’s credibility.

9) Free Tool

If your company happens to have a free tool, such as an ROI calculator, educational game, or blog topic generator, give it some marketing love. Free online tools have the power to engage readers and get them further interested in your product or service. Check out Eric Peters‘ signature promoting HubSpot’s free email signature generator (meta, we know):

10) Demonstration of Your Product / Free Consultation

When you are having a tough sales month, consider using an email signature that promotes a free consultation with your team or even a demonstration of your product. In that way, you’ll increase traffic to these middle-of-the-funnel marketing offers and show your sales organization that you’re taking advantage of every possible opportunity to help them out. 

11) News about Your Company

If your team or company has received recognition for exceptional work, highlight the news article or press release in your email signature. News that your company is doing exceptional work will drive traffic to your blog and promote greater brand awareness for your organization. Here’s an example from HubSpot Senior Recruiter Emily MacIntyre:

12) Promotional Videos

Has your company ever produced a promotional video? (Here’s an awesome video about HubSpot’s culture, for example.) Add a link to your company’s video so recipients can learn more about you without navigating away from the email message. You can promote a campaign, an event, or an offer in a more engaging way than a hyperlink alone. Here’s an example from our own Angela O’Dowd promoting HubSpot’s Agency Partner Program:

Ready to rework your email signature? Simplify the process using this free email signature generator.  

Have any other ideas for what your email signature can promote? Share them in the comments section below!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2012 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

 

You’ve heard it again and again – more than 68% of shopping carts are abandoned before purchase. That’s four trillion dollars left behind in abandoned shopping carts in 2015 alone. What’s a storeowner to do?

Before you can start recovering those purchases, you need to understand the reasons behind shopping cart abandonment. Once you understand the triggers for abandonment, you’ll be able to identify what’s causing your own shoppers to leave their carts behind.

We’ve put together a guide to help you do just that – identify the common reasons for shopping cart abandonment, and then learn how to fix them on your own site.

We’ll cover common reasons for abandonment, including:

• Limited shipping options
• No social proof
• Lack of payment options
• Prices aren’t competitive

Download How to Avoid the 15 Most Common Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment to start plugging the holes in your conversion funnel and generating more revenue.

You’ve read up about inbound marketing and have identified it as the best way to start attracting, converting, and closing more customers online, but what’s next?

Getting your inbound marketing strategy off-the-ground can feel like a mammoth task, but it doesn’t need to be. That’s why we’ve created the Getting Started With Inbound Marketing Kit, complete with all the templates you need to simplify and speed up the process of kick-starting your inbound strategy at the top-of-the-funnel.

We also worked with Robert Coorey, #1 best-selling author, to include a free copy of his book How to Feed a Starving Crowd. It’s filled with inspiration for your campaigns and features case studies from those who’ve already succeeded with inbound marketing.

In the Getting Started With Inbound Marketing Kit, you’ll find:

• A free copy of How to Feed a Starving Crowd by best-selling author, Robert Coorey
• SMART marketing goals template
• Buyer persona templates
• Content mapping template
• Blog editorial calendar
• A “teach your team inbound marketing” presentation

Ready to kick-off your inbound marketing plan and leave dated, outbound strategies behind?

Download your free Getting Started With Inbound Marketing Kit and get all the templates and inspiration you need to help you build out your strategy.

So, apparently, there’s a show on Disney Channel called Dog With a Blog. 

Yes, you read right.

When I discovered this, two thoughts quickly entered my mind — one, “what the heck ever happened to good old shows like The Mickey Mouse Club?,” and two, “literally everyone has a blog now, don’t they?”

With so many people (and apparently pets) blogging today, general consumers are far more familiar with most blog conversion practices and, unfortunately for marketers, how to avoid them.

Despite this newfound hurdle, there are still several simple, data-backed features and tactics to help you attract more leads with a high-converting blog design.

Think your blog is missing something? To paraphrase another Disney classic, just look for these blog necessities; these simple blog necessities.

1) A Dedicated Blog Subscription Page

This is an old “hack” that many brands seem to forget these days — having a landing page dedicated specifically to subscribing to your blog.

Part of the reason many subscriber lists don’t grow is because people don’t understand why they should be subscribed in the first place.

Why should they volunteer to hear from you? Why should they grant you access to their personal inbox? What value does your blog offer?

A dedicated blog subscription landing page allows you make your case in more detail than most pop-ups or sidebar forms allow.

On your dedicated landing page, you can incorporate social proof, share examples, and fully sell the value of your blog to your audience, in turn, making it more inclined to convert.

Doing this also creates a page that you can directly link to from your blog and one that can be optimized and indexed by search engines to get your brand found. After all, the more new people finding your blog, the more opportunities to gain new subscribers.

Below is a great example from Social Media Examiner. Notice how they incorporate a lead magnet; this is something we’ll talk about in #7. 

 2) Crisp, Beautiful Visuals

If the rise of photo filters has taught me anything as a marketer, it’s that we live in a superficial world.

It’s not enough to tell people what they need to know anymore, you need to show them — and the view better be good.  

Studies show that on average, the #1 search result on Google has 9 images and if those images are high-quality, they are likely to get 121% more shares. Knowing this, make an effort enhance your written content with relevant graphics, photos, or charts.

A high-converting blog design is fully-optimized to showcase high-quality images like these and offer the best viewing experience possible.

Contently has done a commendable job with this; making striking, colorful imagery the focal point of its article right-off-the-bat.

3) A Fast Load Time

Now, where there are beautiful images, unfortunately, there are also often speed and loading issues.

According to a study by Akamai, about half of web users expect a site to load in two seconds or less. That means if your blog design is image-heavy or not optimized to handle high-resolution files, you may be losing a large number of potential leads while these visuals load.

To avoid this, compress image files and optimize your blog design to load quickly while you still have your audience’s attention.

Not sure how quick it needs to be? Use Google Analytics to find your average user’s on-screen time. If the time is low (and your bounce rate is high), you may be losing people to a slow site speed. Find your blog’s exact site speed here then talk to your developer about ways to improve this number if need be.

Even a few seconds too many could lead to an uptick in your bounce rate and a huge drop in your number of conversions.

4) Mobile Responsive Design

If your business is anything like ours, your blog is one of the most popular pages amongst mobile users. Make sure that its browsing and reading experiences are the best possible by optimizing the page through responsive design.

Responsive design is arguably the most efficient approach to mobile optimization, as it automatically adjusts fonts, images, and layouts to the specifications of the device at hand, without the need for a separate, dedicated design.  

Offering a positive, consistent user experience both on desktop and mobile, makes it easier for people to convert on your blog when and where the mood strikes them.

5) Cross-Browser Optimization

Similar to mobile optimization, you want to make sure that your blog design is uniform and beautiful across different web browsers.

Cross-browser testing and optimization help ensure a consistent, high-quality experience to all of your users. The last thing you want is to lose a loyal reader because they’ve switched to a Mac and your blog design was only optimized for Android.

6) Prominent Social Share Links

Word-of-mouth is a powerful marketing tool and it’s only getting stronger with the aid of social media and inbound marketing. One of the easiest ways to harness it to increase your conversion rates is by including prominent share links in your blog design, like we do at IMPACT (both on the main page and within articles):

As sad as it may be, Upworthy found that readers who only consume about 25% of an article are, more likely to share than those who actually complete a piece, so use this to your advantage. Place easy-to-identify and click social share buttons on each of your articles and your blog homepage.

Making it as easy as possible for people to share your content with their audience makes it that much more likely they will do so; and again, the more new eyes on your blog, the more chances of gaining new leads.                                                           

7) A Subscription Lead Magnet

As great as your blog may be on its own, sometimes people need a little extra push to commit with an email subscription. That’s where your lead magnet comes into play.

A lead magnet is a premium offer of irresistible value. It’s a piece of content that visitors can’t help but want to exchange their email address for, and in this context, it is an incentive to subscribe to your blog.

Adding a high-quality piece of content that people can only get by subscribing (i.e. a video or guide like IMPACT does above) is like adding a free gift to an in-store purchase. It “sweetens the deal.” It delivers a more immediate value (instant gratification, if you will) to the act of subscribing and creates a sense of exclusivity.

Highlighting this added value in your blog design can help entice new subscribers and boost conversions.

8) An Exit-Intent Popup

For those of you not familiar with them, exit-intent popups are framed messages that only display when you’re about to close the window or attempt to navigate away from the site.

As consumers, we all hate them, but as marketers, frankly, they work.

WP Beginner, for example, increased its subscriber numbers by about 600% by implementing an exit-intent popup on its blog and results like that are quite common.

Though a bit in-your-face (even Google is cracking down on them on mobile), exit-intent popups give users one last chance to convert before leaving your site.

Instead of simply bouncing away, these additions give you an opportunity to make your final case and possibly win back a lead that was ready to give up on you. So, test it out!

Consider integrating an exit-intent popup into your blog design that highlights its value or even promotes your subscription lead magnet.

Neil Patel took a bold approach with his here:

So, How Does Your Blog Stack Up?

Download our full 10-point blog design optimization checklist here to see what else your blog may be missing.

If you’d like some help implementing or even fine-tuning one or more of these tactics, talk to IMPACT. Our all-new blog optimization services will help you incorporate the 8 necessities mentioned above and many more, to start generating more leads from your business blog!

In an ever-changing digital landscape, success in business can often depend on what you do (or don’t do) in terms of marketing your company online.

From SEO to content marketing and analytics, it can be overwhelming figuring out where to start — and, more importantly, what’s going to have the biggest impact on your business. To be effective at digital marketing, you’ll need a strategy.

What is Digital Strategy?

The term ‘strategy’ might seem intimidating, but building an effective digital strategy doesn’t need to be difficult. In simple terms, a strategy is just a plan of action to achieve a desired goal, or multiple goals. For example, your overarching goal might be to generate 25% more leads this year than you drove last year.

In short: Your digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that are going to help you achieve that goal using online marketing.

Now depending on the scale of your business, your digital marketing strategy might involve multiple goals and a lot of moving parts, but coming back to this simple way of thinking about strategy can help you stay focused on meeting those objectives.

Despite our simplification of the term ‘strategy’, there’s no doubt it can be difficult to get started actually building one. So, we’ve put together a series of seven building blocks to help you create an effective digital marketing strategy and set your business up for online success.

What is a Digital Marketing Campaign?

It’s easy to confuse your digital strategy with your digital marketing campaigns, but here’s how to distinguish the two.

As we’ve already outlined, your digital strategy is the series of actions you take to help you achieve your overarching marketing goal. Your digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that move you towards meeting that goal.

For example, you might decide to run a campaign sharing some of your best performing gated content on Twitter to generate more leads through that channel. That campaign is part of your strategy to generate more leads.

It’s important to note that even if a campaign runs over the course of a couple of years, it doesn’t make it a strategy — it’s still a tactic that sits alongside other campaigns to form your strategy.

Now we’ve got to grips with the basics of digital strategy and digital marketing campaigns, let’s dig into how to build your strategy.

How to Build a Comprehensive Digital Strategy

1) Build your buyer personas.

For any marketing strategy — offline or online — you need to know who you’re marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first step is to create them. (Need help? Start here with our free buyer persona kit.)

Buyer personas represent your ideal customer(s) and can be created by researching, surveying, and interviewing your business’s target audience. It’s important to note that this information should be based upon real data wherever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing strategy to take the wrong direction.

To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool should include a mixture of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who align with your target audience.

But what kind of information should you gather for your own buyer persona(s) to inform your digital marketing strategy? That depends on your businesses, and is likely to vary depending on whether you’re B2B or B2C, or whether your product is high cost or low cost. Here are some starting points, but you’ll want to switch them up depending on your particular business.

Quantitative (or Demographic) Information

• Location. You can use web analytics tools like Google Analytics to easily identify what location your website traffic is coming from.
• Age. Depending on your business, this may or may not be relevant. It’s best to gather this data by identifying trends in your existing prospect and customer database.
• Income. It’s best to gather sensitive information like personal income in persona research interviews, as people might be unwilling to share it via online forms.
• Job Title. This is something you can get a rough idea of from your existing customer base, and is most relevant for B2B companies.

Qualitative (or Psychographic) Information

• Goals. Depending on the need your product or service was created to serve, you might already have a good idea of what goals your persona is looking to achieve. However, it’s best to cement your assumptions by speaking to customers, salespeople and customer service representatives.
• Challenges. Again, speak to customers, salespeople and customer service representatives to get an idea of the common problems your audience faces.
• Hobbies and interests. Speak to customers and people who align with your target audience. If you’re a fashion brand, for example, it’s helpful to know if large segments of your audience are also into fitness and wellbeing, as that can help inform your future content creation and partnerships.
• Priorities. Speak to customers and people who align with your target audience to find out what’s most important to them in relation to your business. For example, if you’re a B2B software company, knowing that your audience values customer support over a competitive price point is very valuable information.

Take this information and create one or more rounded personas like HubSpot’s Marketing Mary, and ensure they’re at the core of your digital marketing strategy. If you need more detail, check out this comprehensive buyer persona guide with templates.

2) Identify your goals & the digital marketing tools you’ll need.

As a marketer, your goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of the business. For example, if your business’s goal is to increase online revenue by 20%, your goal as a marketer might be to generate 50% more leads via the website than you did last year to contribute towards that success.

Whatever your overarching goal is, you need to know how to measure it, and more importantly, actually be able to measure it (i.e., have the right digital marketing tools in place to do so). How you measure the effectiveness of your digital strategy will be different for each business and dependent on your goal(s), but it’s vital to ensure you’re able to do so, as it’s these metrics which will help you adjust your strategy in the future.

(HubSpot Customers: Reporting in HubSpot brings all of your marketing and sales data into one place so you can quickly determine what works and what doesn’t. Learn more here.)

3) Evaluate your existing digital marketing channels and assets.

When considering your available digital marketing channels or assets to incorporate into your strategy, it’s helpful to first consider the bigger picture to avoid getting overwhelmed. The owned, earned and paid media framework helps to categorize the digital ‘vehicles’, assets or channels that you’re already using.

Owned Media

This refers to the digital assets literally owned by you. Whether that’s your website, social media profiles, blog content, or imagery, owned channels are the things your business has complete control over.

Earned Media

Quite simply, earned media refers to the exposure you’ve earned through word-of-mouth. Whether that’s content you’ve distributed on other websites (e.g., guest posts), PR work you’ve been doing, or the customer experience you’ve delivered, earned media is the recognition you receive as a result. You can earn media by getting press mentions, positive reviews, and by other people sharing your content on social media, etc.

Paid Media

Paid media is very self-explanatory and refers to any vehicle or channel that you spend money on to catch the attention of your buyer personas. This includes things like Google AdWords, paid social media posts, native advertising (like sponsored posts on other websites), and any other vehicle which you directly pay for in exchange for visibility.

Gather what you have, and categorize each vehicle or asset in a spreadsheet so you have a clear picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.

Your digital marketing strategy might incorporate elements of all three channels, all working together to help you reach your goal. For example, you might have an owned piece of content on a landing page on your website that’s been created to help you generate leads. To amplify the amount of leads that content generates, you might have made a real effort to make it shareable, meaning others are distributing it via their personal social media profiles, increasing traffic to the landing page. This is the earned media component. To support the content’s success, you might have posted about the content to your Facebook page and have paid to have it seen by more people in your target audience.

That’s exactly how the three can work together to help you meet your goal. Of course, it’s not compulsory to use all three. If your owned and earned media is very successful, you might not need to invest in paid. It’s all about evaluating the best solution to meet your goal, and then incorporating the channels that work best for your business into your digital marketing strategy.

Now you know what’s already being used, you can start to think about what to keep and what to cut.

4) Audit and plan your owned media.

At the heart of digital marketing is your owned media, which pretty much always takes the form of content. Everything your brand says is your content, whether that’s your ‘About Us’ page, your product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, social media posts — it’s all considered content. Content helps convert your website visitors into leads and customers, and helps to raise your brand’s profile online. Whatever your goal, you’re going to need to use owned content to form your digital marketing strategy.

To build your digital marketing strategy, you need to decide what content is going to help you reach your goals. If your goal is to generate 50% more leads via the website than you did last year, it’s unlikely that your ‘About Us’ page is going to be included in your strategy (unless that page has been a lead generation machine in the past!)

In fact, it’s much more likely than an ebook that’s hidden behind a form on your website drives far more leads, and as a result is probably something you want to do more of.

Here’s a brief process to follow to work out what owned content you need to meet your digital marketing goals:

Audit your existing content

Make a list of your existing owned content and rank each item according to what has previously performed best in relation to your current goals. If your goal is lead generation, rank them according to which generated the most leads in the last year. That might be a particular blog post, an ebook, or even a specific page on your website that’s converting well.

The idea here is to figure out what’s currently working, and what’s not, so that you can set yourself up for future success.

Identify gaps in your existing content

Based on your buyer personas, identify any gaps in the content you have. If you’re a math tutoring company and have discovered in your audience research that one of your persona’s biggest challenges is finding interesting ways to study, but you don’t have any content that speaks to that concern, then you might look to create some.

By looking at your content audit, you might discover that ebooks hosted on a certain type of landing page convert really well for you (much better than webinars, for example). In the case of this math tutoring company, you might make the decision to add an ebook about ‘how to make studying more interesting’ to your content creation plans.

Create a content creation plan

Based on your findings and the gaps you’ve identified, make a content creation plan outlining the content that’s needed to help you hit your goals. This should include:

• Title
• Format
• Goal
• Promotional channels
• Why you’re creating it (e.g., ‘Marketing Mary struggles to find time to plan her blog content, so we’re creating a template editorial calendar’)
• Priority level (to help you decide what’s going to give you the most ‘bang’ for your buck)

This can be a simple spreadsheet, and should also include budget information if you’re planning to outsource the content creation, or a time estimate if you’re producing it yourself.

5) Audit and plan your earned media.

Evaluating your previous earned media against your current goals can help you get an idea of where to focus your time. Look at where your traffic and leads are coming from (if that’s your goal) and rank each earned media source from most effective to least effective.

You can get this information from tools like Google Analytics, or in HubSpot’s Sources Reports if you’re a customer.

You might find that a particular article you contributed to the industry press drove a lot of qualified traffic to your website, which in turn converted really well. Or you might discover that LinkedIn is where you see most people sharing your content, which in turn drives a lot of traffic. The idea here is to build up a picture of what earned media will help you reach your goals, and what won’t, based on historic data. However, if there’s something new you want to try, don’t rule that out just because it’s not yet tried and tested.

6) Audit and plan your paid media.

This process involves much of the same process: You need to evaluate your existing paid media across each platform (e.g., Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to figure out what’s likely to help you meet your current goals.

If you’ve been spending a lot of money on AdWords and haven’t seen the results you’d hoped for, maybe it’s time to refine your approach, or scrap it altogether and focus on another platform that seems to be yielding better results. (Check out this free AdWords guide for more on how to leverage it for business.)

By the end of the process, you should have a clear idea of which paid media platforms you want to continue using, and which (if any) you’d like to scrap.

7) Bring it all together.

You’ve done the planning and the research, and you now have a solid vision of the elements that are going to make up your digital marketing strategy. Here’s what you should have so far:

1. Clear profile of your buyer persona(s)
2. One or more marketing-specific goals
3. A spreadsheet of your existing owned, earned and paid media
4. An audit of your existing owned, earned and paid media
5. An owned content creation plan or wish list

Now, it’s time to bring all of this together to form a solid strategy document. Let’s revisit what ‘digital strategy’ means — ‘the series of actions that are going to help you achieve your goal(s) using online marketing’.

By that definition, your strategy document should map out the series of actions you’re going to take to achieve your goals based on your research to this point. An Excel sheet is probably the best format. For the sake of consistency, you’ll probably find it easiest to map out according to the owned, earned and paid media framework we’ve used so far.

You’ll also need to map out your strategy for an extended period of time (usually 12 months or longer, depending on how your business is set up) so it’s helpful to overlay when you’ll be executing each action. For example:

• In January, you might start a blog which will be continually updated once a week for the entire year.
• In March, you might launch a new ebook accompanied by paid promotion.
• In July, you might be preparing for your biggest business month.
• In September, you might plan to focus on earned media in the form of PR to drive additional traffic during the run-up.

By taking this approach, you’re also creating a structured timeline for your activity which will help communicate your plans to your colleagues — and help keep you sane!

Your strategy document will be very individual to your business, which is why it’s almost impossible for us to create a one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy template. Remember that the purpose of your strategy document is to map out the actions you’re going to take to achieve your goal over a period of time — as long as it communicates that, then you’ve nailed the basics of creating a digital strategy.

If you’re eager to learn more about digital marketing and how you can build a truly effective digital marketing strategy for your business, check out The Simple Guide to Digital Strategy in 2016.

What other questions do you have? Share them with us in the comments below.

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