Most people have a love-hate relationship with their email inbox. On the one hand, email can be exciting — whether you’re making progress with a client, replacing a meeting with a (much more efficient) email thread, or receiving an invitation to a fun social gathering.

On the other hand, though, email can be overwhelming — especially if you lose control.

And boy is it easy to lose control. After all, email is one of the top ways we communicate with a lot of the people in our lives, from our best friends to people we’ve never spoken with before. Many of us get bombarded by new emails on a regular basis, and it’s stressful to know that we might be missing out on the truly important stuff amid the flood of less pertinent stuff.

Luckily, there are a lot of tools out there that can help us get more organized. In this post, we’ll go through 14 of our favorite tools for organizing your inbox. Try ’em out, and help pave your own way to a more productive and less stressful email experience.

14 Time-Saving Tools for Organizing Email

1) Unroll.me

Price: Free

The first step to relieving your inbox from all that email is to unsubscribe from all the newsletters you’ve subscribed to over the years. But unsubscribing manually from tens, maybe hundreds of newsletters would take forever.

Enter Unroll.me, a free tool that lets you mass unsubscribe from all the newsletters you don’t read. You can either wipe the slate clean and unsubscribe from everything at once, or you can pick and choose. Read this blog post to learn more about how it works.

2) FollowUpThen

Price: Free; Paid Versions Available

Here’s another simple but useful tool, this time for reminding you — and even your clients, if you want — to follow up on specific emails.

Here’s how it works: Compose an email, and then include [any time]@followupthen.com in the “Bcc,” “Cc,” or “To” fields of your email. The “any time” wording here is pretty flexible: It can be “tomorrow@followupthen.com,” “nextwednesday@followupthen.com,” “3hours@followupthen.com,” “everyday@followupthen.com,” “every3rdwednesday@followupthen.com,” and so on.

What happens to that email when you click “send” depends where you put that @followupthen.com email address:

• Bcc: You’ll get a follow-up regarding the email (without bothering the original recipient).
• Cc: The tool will schedule a reminder for you and the recipient.
• To: The tool will send an email to your future self.

Here’s a video that explains the tool in more detail:

It works for every email client, and it’s free for up to 50 follow-ups per month. You can increase the number of follow-ups and add features like calendar integration for between $2–$9 per month.

3) HubSpot Sales Free

Price: Free; Paid Versions Available

Ever wanted to know who opens your emails and when, how many times, and from where? When you download the HubSpot Sales Free Chrome extension, you can opt in to get live notifications whenever someone opens or clicks on the links in your email. It integrates with both Gmail and Outlook.

Another cool feature is the contact information sidebar that pops up when you open an email thread. It includes all the relevant information about the person you’re emailing, including past contact history (kind of like LinkedIn’s “relationship tab” function), social media content, mutual connections, and so on. Soon, the extension will let you schedule emails to send later.

The free version gets email open notifications — as well as the ability to schedule emails to be sent later, and a few other functionalities you can learn about here. For unlimited open and click notifications (and a slew of other upgraded functions), you can upgrade to Pro for $50 per month.

4) IFTTT

Price: Free

IFTTT, short for “If This Then That,” is an amazing productivity tool that helps you connect the apps and devices you use every day with “if this, then that” statements — which they call “recipes.” (Seriously, you can do anything. Including using Liam Neeson’s badass quote from Taken to scare someone into returning your phone. You’re welcome.)

When it comes to inbox productivity, IFTTT can do wonders for automating some of the more tedious, manual tasks. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Get a text message when a specific person emails you.
• Send email attachments to Dropbox.
• Save starred emails to Evernote.
• Schedule reminders tomorrow for the emails you star in your inbox today.
• Add “receipt” or “order” emails to a Google spreadsheet.
• Track your work hours by adding an entry into a Google spreadsheet every time you arrive at or leave your office.
• Turn emails into Trello cards.

5) Google Inbox

Price: Free

Google learned a lot about how people use email from Gmail. Instead of revamping Gmail with these new learnings, they decided to start fresh and create an entirely new inbox system: Inbox.

To understand how Inbox work, it’s best to think of it less as a classic email tool that simply pools all your new messages into one place, and more as a task-focused message management tool. Every time an email comes in, you can process each one as a task. If you’re not ready to respond to an email, you can select “snooze” and tell the app when to display the email again. Or, if the email is something you need to do at a specific location, you can ask Inbox to remind you about that message when you’re at a specific location.

Image Credit: Tech Republic

Another thing that makes it different from other email apps? It’s mobile-friendly. To use it, you’ll have to first install the mobile app on iOS or Android. Only then can you access Inbox from your desktop browser at http://inbox.google.com.

6) Gmail “Special Stars”

Price: Free

I couldn’t write a blog post about inbox organization without including my go-to strategy for getting to — and maintaining — inbox zero. This tool isn’t an add-on; it’s a methodology developed by Andreas Klinger. It uses two, built-in features in Gmail: “special stars” (a slightly fancier labeling system than Gmail labels) and multiple inboxes. Since writing that post last year, many people have told me it’s changed the way they use email and has made their lives a lot easier. I highly recommend it.

Read this blog post to for step-by-step instructions for enabling special stars and using the methodology to get to inbox zero in a few hours.

There’s just one, notable caveat: No special stars other than the yellow star are supported by Gmail’s mobile app, so you won’t be able to see your lists on mobile. If you frequently use mobile devices to sort your emails, try Sortd, which is next on the list.

7) Sortd

Price: Free For Now (Private Beta; Access by Invite Only)

Sortd is basically a cleaner version of the Gmail Special Stars methodology I described above, in that you don’t need to star, label, or mark your emails in any way. But it does work right in Gmail: It’s what their team calls a “Smart Skin for Gmail,” meaning that it lives right inside your Gmail inbox so you don’t have to leave the app at all.

What it does do is fix the problem of important emails getting lost below the fold — most importantly, by expanding your inbox into a flexible set of lists, organized cleanly into columns. This allows your emails, to-do lists, and priorities to live together in one place, and lets you easily drag-and-drop emails from column to column.

HubSpot’s VP of Marketing Meghan Keaney Anderson is a big fan of Sortd. “I think of my inbox as a conveyer belt of sorts — bringing me a rapid succession of requests, resources, and to-dos,” she told me. “Email triage means keeping up with that influx without letting anything slip through the cracks. Before I found Sortd, I was marking any email that needed further action as ‘unread’ in the hopes of returning back to it to complete the review or follow up. It worked about as poorly as you’d expect.”

This is what Anderson’s inbox looks like now that she uses Sortd:

“Sortd merges your inbox with a drag-and-drop to do list, so I can quickly evaluate the urgency of an email and then decide what to do with it,” says Anderson. “I drag it to the appropriate category of response and rename it to a quick summary of the action needed. Then, I can get a birds eye view of my work for the week.”

“What’s especially nice is Sortd allows me to add tasks that haven’t come in through email, for example a request someone asked of me over chat or in person,” she adds. “So my inbox really becomes my central command.  I have a column for immediate action items, tasks for the week, a backlog for next week, and resources that I want to have at my fingertips quickly.”

Another advantage to Sortd over special stars? You can use it on mobile if you download the Sortd Mobile Companion App on iOS or Android. (Remember, all special stars but one aren’t supported by the Gmail mobile app — so this is your best option if you like to sort your email on mobile.)

8) SaneBox

Price: Monthly ($7-35), Yearly ($59-299), and Bi-Yearly ($99-499) plans available.

If you’re looking to automate prioritizing each email as it comes in, you may want to give SaneBox a try. There’s nothing to install here: Basically, it works with any email client to create new folders like SaneLater and SaneNews. When a new email comes in to your inbox, SaneBox quickly analyzes it to determine how important it is. This analysis is based on your past interaction with your inbox. If SaneBox finds the new email important, it’ll keep it in your inbox. If not, it’ll send it to one of those folders.

Later, you’ll get a digest of the emails that were sent to those three folders so you can decide whether any of them need your attention when you have the time. Over time, you “train” SaneBox to filter certain types of emails into each of these folders.

Image Credit: SaneBox

SaneBlackHole is a fourth folder that’ll help you delete emails and unsubscribe from them in one fell swoop. When you manually drag an email into your SaneBlackHole folder, it’ll delete the email and unsubscribe from the source automatically.

There are other cool features in here too, like the “attachments” feature that automatically sends all email attachments into a Dropbox folder.

9) The Email Game

Price: Free

If you’re overwhelmed by the amount of email in your inbox but dread the thought of clearing it out, and you’re a competitive person, The Email Game might be right up your alley. This free tool for Gmail and Google apps gamifies the act of clearing out your inbox.

All you have to do is enter your email address, and the game will begin. It gives you five seconds per email to decide what to do with it: reply, “boomerang” (i.e., archive now and resurface in your inbox at a later, specified time), archive, delete, or skip. You get a certain number of points for each action and you’re penalized if you go over time. If you click “reply,” then you’re given three minutes by default to respond. You can always add time if you really need to, but speed is in your best interest here.

10) Checker Plus 

Price: Free

Checker Plus is a Chrome extension for Gmail that helps you manage multiple Gmail accounts at once so you don’t have to flip through multiple inboxes. One of the main features is instant email notifications even when Gmail isn’t open. So if you’re a fan of notifications, then you’ll like this one.

Without opening Gmail in your browser, Checker Plus will give you desktop notifications when you get a new email, along with the option to read, listen to, or delete emails.

I’m a big fan of the extension’s voice notification feature. If I get an email while I’m busy cooking dinner or something, I can choose to have the extension read the email out loud to me, even if Gmail isn’t open. (Just remember to shut this off when you head into the office.)

It’s worth noting, by the way, that Checker Plus has pretty extensive online support and documentation. If you’re having an issue with the extension, it’s not hard to find a solution.

Image Credit: PC World

11) Hiver 

Price: Free; Paid Versions Available

If your team (or heck, even your family) uses Gmail as their main email client, then this could be a useful app for collaboration. Hiver lets you share Gmail labels with other users to streamline collaboration. That way, you can share emails with other people — even if they weren’t an original recipient — by adding a shared Gmail label to that email. A great way to use these labels is by assigning tasks, delegating emails, and tracking their status.

Hiver also lets you create and share email templates with your team, as well as share notes on emails that help you summarize or explain what’s going on in an email thread. This can be helpful for anyone working on proposals, tasks, or support tickets.

Hiver’s free version lets you share labels, notes, and so on with three other users, and lets you share three labels and ten email templates. For added features and functionality, check out one of the paid plans. 

Image Credit: Hiver

12) Boomerang 

Price: Free for Basic; Paid Versions Available

Boomerang is a powerful tool I’ve been using for years to manage my Gmail inbox. This Chrome extension for Gmail users does two things really well:

1. It lets you schedule emails to be sent later.
2. It lets you archive emails that will reemerge in your inbox later as an unread message.

The second concept here is similar to that of FollowUpThen, except you have a lot more control over tracking and changing the times at which emails reemerge in your inbox. It’s free (for Basic) and works on desktop and mobile, including Android.

13) Mailbird

Price: Free; Paid Versions Available

There are other email clients out there, like Mailbox, Boxer, and CloudMagic, but Mailbird manages to stand out.

While it only works for Windows users, this email client unifies your inbox with your apps by rolling your email and all your calendar, task, and messaging apps into an all-in-one interface. And it’s a simple user interface, which you can customize in different colors and layouts.

Here’s an example of what one layout looks like with email and WhatsApp integration:

Image Credit: IT World

Other popular choices for app integration include Google Calendar and a video conferencing app called Veeting rooms.

Mailbird works for Windows users on desktop and mobile. The Lite version is free, but if you want other, more advanced functionalities — like the ability to “snooze” your email — then you’ll have to get the paid version for $1/month or $45 for a lifetime subscription. 

14) SimplyFile 

Price: Single User License for $49.95

While Outlook doesn’t have nearly as many organization tools as other email clients, here’s one for Outlook users only that’ll help you spend less time filing your email. The tool adds a toolbar (or “ribbon tab”) to your inbox, with different, customizable files, which is easily accessible so you can file new emails quickly.

When an email comes in, simply drag it into the appropriate folder. You can organize both messages you’re receiving in your inbox, as well as messages you’re sending — which you can file as you send them.

Image Credit: SimplyFile

Which tools do you use to organize your inbox? Share them with us in the comments.

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

With 1.13 billion daily active users engaging on the platform, Facebook has become an obvious option for marketers looking to explore the benefits of targeted ad creation.

And while Facebook’s targeting options make it easier for you to get your ads in front of the people you really care about, it’s ultimately up to you to do the convincing. To do that, you’ll need to pay close attention to the details.

If you look at AdEspresso’s anatomy of a Facebook Ad diagram, the headline may seem like a tiny piece of the puzzle, but that couldn’t be further from the truth: A users’ decision to take action on your Facebook Ad will undoubtedly be influenced by the strength of your headline. After all, it sets the tone and expectation for everything to come.

That said, you want it to be memorable, eye-catching, and above all, clear. To help you put together a Facebook Ad headline that accomplishes all of the above, we compiled some criteria and tips to guide your efforts. (For more on the science of successful Facebook Ads, check out this free guide.)

The Basis of a Clickable Facebook Ad Headline: 3 Principles to Follow

1) Customized

If you want to make your Ad more personal and engaging, customize the headline.

Situated just below your featured image, the headline can often be the last thing Facebook users read in order to understand exactly what you’re offering. In other words, a lack of headline contributes to an overall lack of clarity (which we’ll discuss next).

Here’s an example from The New Yorker to help illustrate what we mean here:

The Ad headline is customized, but it fails to offer a compelling reason or highlight a specific benefit for subscribing. For example, a more interesting headline might read, “Subscribe for $1 a Week” or “Award-Winning Reading for Only $1 a Week.”

2) Clear

With Facebook users publishing over 3 million posts every minute, you must strive for a level of headline clarity that isn’t easily glossed over.

For example, check out the following headline from Blue Apron, which makes the “what” (Blue Apron) and “why” ($40 discount) crystal clear:

And here’s another headline example from Ceros that clearly defines what users are being asked to sign up for:

If you need help narrowing your focus, check out these suggestions for writing with greater clarity.

3) Concise

To echo the previous guideline, you should aim to keep your Facebook Ad headline short, sweet, and to the point. Facebook recommends that Ad headlines fall between 25-40 characters in length to maximize engagement, so your focus should be on creating something that is easily understood and value-oriented.

This short headline from Maven is a great example of “less is more”:

In this example, they’ve made the offer very clear to ensure that Facebook users fully understand that they will have access to nutritionists if they click on the Ad.

This example from Frontier also highlights the power of short and sweet Facebook Ad headlines:

More specifically, this particular example demonstrates how to get to the point in the headline, while leveraging the image to do the rest of the talking.

Need help writing more concise content? Practice writing in short-form — haikus, tweets, six-word memoirs, and so on — to get in the zone before writing your headline.

How to Write Better Headlines for Your Facebook Ads: 5 Formulas to Try

1) Ask a question.

A headline in the form of a question is a great way to grab a Facebook user’s attention and draw them in to get the answer.

In fact, research from Social Influence about declarative-statement headlines found that headlines in the form of questions received 150% more clicks than statement headlines. Not to mention, these questioning headlines received 175% more clicks if the question included the word “you.”

Moral of the story? If you know what questions your target audience is asking, use those questions to encourage engagement with your Facebook Ads. For example, Brilliant Earth asked a question — “Dreaming of the perfect ring?” — that makes their target audience (future brides and grooms) want to know more:

The short copy quickly makes it crystal clear why Facebook users should shop with them: They sell the “perfect” ring. They also used the positive superlative “perfect,” which CoSchedule suggest using as a way to drive urgency in your headline messaging.

Here’s another example from Harper’s Bazaar:

In this ad, they used a question and a superlative to tease their photo gallery of movie stars and pique the interest of users. As an added bonus, the question also takes advantage of a concept known as nostalgia marketing. By positioning the question around the year in which the reader was born, they’re effectively triggering nostalgic memories — which tend to be happy ones.

2) Give a command.

University of Texas Visual Communications lecturer Frances Ylana suggests employing commands in headlines when you have a strong verb to use to inspire interest.

When crafting an effective Facebook Ad headline, start by communicating the command or action you want people to take upfront. Then, rely on additional Ad elements — image, descriptions, and so on — to paint the rest of the picture. This will help you keep things clear, concise, and actionable, while still being compelling.

Here’s an example from ModCloth that demonstrates this idea:

You’ll notice that the headline commands action — “Visit ModCloth IRL in CO” — while the other elements of the Ad support that pitch: lovers of “fierce fashion” should follow instructions and take advantage of their limited-time offer.

Here’s another example of a clear and concise headline in the form of a command:

Casper did a great job of keeping this headline short and sweet, while also using a direct ask and positive superlative to make this Ad highly clickable.

3) List a benefit.

Another strong technique for Facebook Ad headlines is showing users how the offer benefits them.

If you’ve been reading our blog for some time now, you know that the “always be closing” sales era has given way to “always be helping.” In other words, people don’t want to be sold to aggressively anymore, and according to Entrepreneur, a headline that clearly states how your offer will benefit the audience is a better way to drive clicks and conversions than listing the features.

Galvanize’s Ad headline does a great job of listing the benefit of working with them:

If the headline were “Take Our Coding Class,” it would get a similar message across, but in a less helpful tone.

Slack’s Facebook Ad is another great example of showcasing benefits over features:

Slack is an instant-messaging product, but instead of mentioning any specifics about the technology, the Ad headline focuses on how Slack can help the user.

4) Inspire curiosity.

Social media platforms and print newspapers alike are full of headlines that make you want to learn more, and these headlines take advantage of the curiosity gap.

What’s that? According to George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University, this concept refers to the gap between “what we know and what we don’t know.”

His theory is that when we are exposed to a gap in our knowledge, we feel the urge to fill in that gap with new information. Another experiment testing his theory found that curiosity activates the reward-seeking parts of our brain, making it an effective strategy to apply to Facebook Ad headlines. Why? Because it’s almost painful for us to learn that there’s something we don’t know until we resolve it by learning new information.

The lesson? Choose an Ad headline that teases the content you’re linking to on your website. This approach can help you inspire curiosity and earn your campaign clicks. For example, BuzzFeed’s headline does a great job of generating interest in a topic that many in their audience are probably interested in without reading like “clickbait”:

And here’s an example of how my team at HubSpot used curiosity to promote a new product with a Facebook Ad:

By teasing users with information about how to transform selling without giving it away in the headline itself, users are more likely to click to learn more.

Note: While inspiring curiosity is a great strategy to apply to your Ad headlines, don’t overdo it. Clickbait headlines suck, and relying on them could hinder your efforts: Earlier this month, Facebook announced their continued efforts to reduce clickbait in the News Feed in the form of an algorithm update.

“With this update, people will see fewer clickbait stories and more of the stories they want to see higher up in their feeds,” explains Facebook’s Alex Peysakhovich and Kristin Hendrix. (Check out the full announcement here for more information.)

5) Leverage lists.

People love lists. According to Maria Konnikova, the listicle has exploded into such a popular content medium due to the way our brains work: when we see information, our brains immediately try to process it, and numbers help break up the masses of written content we see on social media every day.

According to one study, numbered lists make it easier for us to categorize and draw on differences between data, which ultimately helps us process it more quickly.

Here’s an example of a list in action from the folks at Lost Waldo:

The listicle headline does a fantastic job of teasing a highly useful piece of content for anyone planning travel, while also using a positive superlative to drive interest (as we mentioned earlier).

Now, if you’ve read my bio, this next example might seem a little biased (spoiler alert: I love Harry Potter) … but that’s not the only reason why it’s being featured …

The listicle headline shows users that the names highlighted are distinct from other names because they’re magical, and the headline word choice is “spellbinding.” If that’s not clickable, I don’t know what is.

Ready to craft your own headlines?

John Caples, the Mad Men-era copywriter made famous by his direct-mail taglines, once said: “If you use a poor headline, it does not matter how hard you labor over your copy because your copy will not be read.”

I love this quote because in any type of advertising you pursue — whether it’s a news article or a Facebook Ad — headlines will play a huge part in getting people to read your content.

Once you feel like you’ve mastered the art of the headline, check out this ebook to learn how to choose the right description, caption, and image to make your Facebook Ad successful.

What’s your secret for the perfect Facebook Ad headline? Share it with us in the comments below.

I wrote this post by the pool. Not by my pool — I don’t have one — but by a pool. It was 104 degrees. Since I recently left behind big New York agency life to focus exclusively on writing and consulting, I’m able to do that — work by pools. I can work when I want, how I want. And I’ve noticed I get more done, better.

It got me thinking about the nature of remote working, yes, but not in a trendy way.

We’ve all seen the stats. We know cloudworking is a growing phenomenon, and it’s here to stay. Last year, 37% of workers telecommuted some of the time. That’s quadruple the number that did so a decade ago. Right now, research suggests around 63 million members of the U.S. workforce work remotely. That’s 43%.

It got me thinking not about the productivity part — a robust body of research clearly shows that flexibility is a boon to productivity.

It got me thinking about the creativity part.

Is a virtual work environment simply more conducive to creativity? Is the distributed agency, therefore, an innately more creative business model?

I didn’t want to rely on data to answer this question. Data is persuasive, but it doesn’t always convince. Stories convince. And I wanted to hear about the relationship between telework and creativity first-hand.

So I reached out to some top distributed business leaders to get their take on it.

Now I know what you’re thinking: These people run distributed companies. They’re biased. And full disclosure, I once ran a 100% distributed Manhattan agency. But I don’t do that anymore. And if you want directions, you ask the people that have been there.

This is what I learned: Remote workers are up to 20% more creative, and there are probably three primary reasons why.

You’re Only as Good as the People You Work With

Creativity begets creativity. To reach creative potential, one must surround one’s self with creative people. And virtual agencies have the edge when it comes to recruiting and retaining top creative talent.

Jason Fried, CEO and co-founder of Basecamp, has employees in more than 32 cities globally. “I keep hearing about the ‘talent wars, and how no one can find great people,” Fried said.

The talent war, or rather, the war for talent, is a term created by Steven Hankin in 1997. A Harvard Business Press book immortalized it in 2001. But more recently, the war for talent has become a lot more aggressive.

“The reason no one can find great people is that they’re all looking in their own backyards,” Fried said. “We find the best people in the world, not our own zip code.”

“There’s always someone better suited for the job whom you can’t bring on board because they live elsewhere,” says Abdullahi Muhammed, CEO of the content marketing agency, Oxygenmat. “Being fully distributed means … city and time zone become mere data to know about your team, not selection criteria.”

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the creator of WordPress, sums it up well: “Our company can recruit from a global talent pool that is greater in aggregate than any geographic subset, even Silicon Valley.”

The ability to fish in a bigger pond — heck, a sea! — is worthless, however, if the fish aren’t biting. But they are.

Highly-flexible work practices are a potent recruitment tool. Employees wouldn’t be taking advantage of them in such exploding numbers if it were otherwise. Telework is particularly attractive to millennials: 68% of them say the ability to cloudwork vastly increases their interest in an employer.

Teams With a Singular Perspective Get Stuck

Creativity feeds on diversity. One study on the subject illuminates five primary reasons this is true. Greater diversity:

1. Opens access to novel ideas.
2. Offers the opportunity to think opposably.
3. Encourages workers to re-evaluate their creative habits and look at their processes differently.
4. Opens doors to normally inaccessible information.
5. Promotes a willingness to leverage ideas from unfamiliar sources and places.

Diversity’s impact on creativity was well known to all the leaders I interviewed.

Fried captured the dynamic nicely: “Flexible work practices help you create a team with a broader perspective. If you’re only hiring people from your own ‘echo-chamber,’ they’re all going to think relatively the same. When you have people that think the same, that stifles creativity. When you hire people from all over the place, you have a shot at a team of different perspectives, and that’s invaluable for creativity.”

Quality of Life Influences Creative Output

Despite the romanticized trope of the super-artistic malcontent, research indicates happiness enhances creativity. And people who work remotely are happier.

One study scored workers on a scale of 1 to 10. Teleworkers scored an average of 8.10, while traditional workers averaged only 7.42.

Buffer formalizes the notion of encouraging happiness to encourage creativity in its culture. “One of our core Buffer values is ‘Live Smarter, Not Harder,'” says Hailley Griffis, who does communications for the maker of social media management tools. “And with that, we say, ‘You choose to be at the single place on earth where you are the happiest.'”

“It’s about eliminating things that are soul-sucking,” Fried said. “Our employees can see their kids grow up. They don’t have to spend three hours a day commuting. The ability to work remotely improves the overall quality of life … and I can’t quantify it, but I’m sure that improves creativity, too.”

The data is there, but so are the boots-on-the-ground stories. And that’s something agencies can’t afford to ignore. Working remotely does appear to enhance creativity.

And I hope I’ve convinced you working by a pool does, too.

Sometimes, when I tell people that I blog for a living, they roll their eyes. “That’s so easy,” they say. “You get a paycheck for sitting on the internet all day and writing. A monkey could do your job!”

That’s when I roll my eyes. See, people are quick to deem blogging as a no-brainer job. But when they actually sit down to write their first couple of posts, it hits them: This is way harder than I thought. Like any person starting a new job, they mess things up.

That’s okay — it happens to pretty much every new blogger. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to avoid these roadblocks if you know they’re coming.

So for all of you beginner bloggers out there who are looking to get up-to-speed quickly, keep on reading. Below are 12 common mistakes most beginners make and some tips on how to avoid them.

How to Avoid the 12 Most Common Beginner Business Blogging Mistakes 

Mistake 1: You think of ideas in a vacuum. 

When you start blogging, ideas will come to you at random times — in the shower, on a run, while on the phone with your mom. While the ideas may come at random moments, the ideas themselves should never be random. Just because it’s a good idea in general doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for your company. 

Solution: Your blog posts should all serve larger company goals.

The reason you’re blogging is to grow your business, so all of your blog post ideas should help serve those growth goals. They should have natural tie-ins to issues in your industry and address specific questions and concerns your prospects have. 

Need help figuring out what those goals are and how to address them? Chat with your manager about the larger company goals, and then schedule a meeting with someone on the sales team to hear what questions they get asked most often. After both meetings, you should know which goals you need to achieve and have some ideas on how to achieve them. 

Mistake 2: Your writing’s too stiff. 

Writing a blog post is much different than writing a term paper. But when bloggers first start out, they usually only have experience with the latter. The problem? The style of writing from a term paper is not the style of writing people enjoy reading.

Let’s be honest: Most of the people who see your post aren’t going to read the whole thing. If you want to keep them interested, you have to compel them to keep reading by writing in a style that’s effortless to read.

Solution: Write like you talk.

It’s okay to be more conversational in your writing — in fact, we encourage it. The more approachable your writing is, the more people will enjoy reading it. People want to feel like they’re doing business with real people, not robots.

So loosen up your writing. Throw in contractions. Get rid of the jargon. Make a pun or two. That’s how real people talk — and that’s what real people like to read. 

Mistake 3: You think people care about you as a writer.

It sounds harsh, but it’s the truth: When people first start out blogging, they think that their audience will be inherently interested in their stories and their interests … but that’s not the case. It’s no knock against them as a person — it’s just that when you’re new, no one is interested in you and your experiences. People care way more about what you can teach them. 

Solution: Show your personality; don’t tell it. 

Even though people don’t really care that it’s you that’s writing the post, you can infuse parts of your personality in your writing to make them feel more comfortable with you. How you do that is entirely up to you. Some people like to crack jokes, some like to make pop culture references, and others have a way with vivid descriptions.

HubSpot’s Director of Content Corey Wainwright is particularly good at this. Here’s an example from the introduction of one of her posts:

To infuse personality into your own writing, try looking for ways to relate to your readers on the topic you’re writing about — then write in the first person as if you’re hanging out with them and chatting about it. Make your tone personal, approachable, and engaging, just like you would in a face-to-face conversation.

Mistake 4: Your topics are too broad.

When people start blogging, they generally want to write on really big topics like:

• “How to Do Social Media Marketing” 
• “Business Best Practices”
• “How to Make Money on the Internet”

Topics like these are far too broad. Because there are so many details and nuances in these topics, it’s really hard to do a good job answering them. Plus, more specific topics tend to attract smaller, more targeted audiences, which tend to be higher quality and more likely to convert into leads and customers.

So, to get the most short-term and long-term benefits of blogging, you’ll need to get way more specific.

Solution: Create very specific working titles.

Nailing really specific topics is crucial to knocking your first few posts out of the park. My colleague Corey wrote another fabulous post on how to do that. Go read it now. Seriously. She’ll tell you how to pick a topic that works for business blogs, and walk you through the process of narrowing it into a working title.

The working title isn’t final — it’s just a concrete angle you can use to keep your writing on track. Once you nail those two things, it’s much easier to write blog posts.

Mistake 5: Your writing is a brain dump. 

Sometimes when I get a great idea I’m excited about, it’s really tempting to just sit down and let it flow out of me. But what I get is usually a sub-par blog post.

Why? The stream-of-consciousness style of writing isn’t really a good style for blog posts. Most people are going to scan your blog posts, not read them, so it needs to be organized really well for that to happen. 

Solution: Use a specific post type, create an outline, and use headers.

The first thing you should do is choose what type of blog post you’re going to write. Is it a how-to post? A list-based post? A curated collection post? A SlideShare presentation? For help on this, download our free templates for creating five different types of blog posts. Once you have a template down, it’ll be easier to write your outline.

Writing an outline makes a big difference. If you put in the time up front to organize your thoughts and create a logical flow in your post, the rest becomes easy — you’re basically just filling in the blanks.

To write a blog post outline, first come up with a list of the top takeaways you want your readers to get from your post. Then, break up those takeaways into larger section headers. When you put in a section header every few paragraphs, your blog post becomes easier and more enjoyable to read. (And plus, header text with keywords is good for SEO.) When you finally get to writing, all you’ll have to do is fill in those sections.

Mistake 6: You don’t use data as evidence.

Let’s say I’m writing a blog post about why businesses should consider using Instagram for marketing. When I’m making that argument, which is more convincing?

1. “It seems like more people are using Instagram nowadays.”
2. “Instagram’s user base is growing far faster than social network usage in general in the U.S. Instagram will grow 15.1% this year, compared to just 3.1% growth for the social network sector as a whole.”

The second, of course. Arguments and claims are much more compelling when rooted in data and research. As marketers, we don’t just have to convince people to be on our side about an issue — we need to convince them to take action. Data-driven content catches people’s attention in a way that fluffy arguments do not.

Solution: Use data and research to back up the claims you make in your posts.

In any good story, you’ll offer a main argument, establish proof, and then end with a takeaway for the audience. You can use data in blog posts to introduce your main argument and show why it’s relevant to your readers, or as proof of it throughout the body of the post. 

Some great places to find compelling data include:

• HubSpot Research
• Pew Research Center
• MarketingSherpa
• HubSpot’s State of Inbound report 

Mistake 7: Your content borders on plagiarism.

Plagiarism didn’t work in school, and it certainly doesn’t work on your company’s blog. But for some reason, many beginner bloggers think they can get away with the old copy-and-paste technique. 

You can’t. Editors and readers can usually tell when something’s been copied from somewhere else. Your voice suddenly doesn’t sound like you, or maybe there are a few words in there that are incorrectly used. It just sounds … off. 

Plus, if you get caught stealing other people’s content, you could get your site penalized by Google — which could be a big blow to your company blog’s organic growth.

Solution: Learn how to cite others.

Instead, take a few minutes to understand how to cite other people’s content in your blog posts. It’s not super complicated, but it’s an essential thing to learn when you’re first starting out. 

Mistake 8: You think you’re done once the writing’s done. 

Most people make the mistake of not editing their writing. It sounded so fluid in their head when they were writing that it must be great to read … right?

Nope — it still needs editing. And maybe a lot of it.

Solution: Take 30 minutes to edit your piece.

Everyone needs to edit their writing — even the most experienced writers. Most times, our first drafts aren’t all that great.  So take the time you need to shape up your post. Fix typos, run-on sentences, and accidental its/it’s mistakes. Make sure your story flows just as well as it did in your outline. 

To help you remember all the little things to check before publishing, check out our checklist for editing and proofreading a blog post. 

Mistake 9: You try to make every post perfect. 

I hate to break it to you, but your blog post is never going to be perfect. Ever. 

There will always be more things you can do to make your posts better. More images. Better phrasing. Wittier jokes. The best writers I know, know when to stop obsessing and just hit “publish.”

Solution: At a certain point, just ship the post.

There’s a point at which there are diminishing returns for getting closer to “perfect” — and you’re really never going to reach “perfect” anyway. So while you don’t want to publish a post filled with factual inaccuracies and grammatical errors, it’s not the end of the world if a typo slips through. It most likely won’t affect how many views and leads it brings in.

Plus, if you (or your readers) find the mistake, all of you have to do is update the post. No biggie. So give yourself a break once and a while — perfect is the enemy of done.

Mistake 10: You don’t blog consistently.

By now, you’ve probably heard that the more often you blog, the more traffic you’ll get to your website — and the more subscribers and leads you’ll generate from your posts. But as important as volume is, it’s actually more important that you’re blogging consistently when you’re just getting started. If you publish five posts in one week and then only one or two in the next few weeks, it’ll be hard to form a consistent habit. And inconsistency could really confuse your subscribers.

Instead, it’s the companies that make a commitment to regularly publishing quality content to their blogs that tend to reap the biggest rewards in terms of website traffic and leads — and those results continue to pay out over time.

To help establish consistency, you’ll need a more concrete planning strategy.

Solution: Use an editorial calendar.

Use it to get into the habit of planning your blog post topics ahead of time, publishing consistently, and even scheduling posts in advance if you’re finding yourself having a particularly productive week.

Here at HubSpot, we typically use good ol’ Google Calendar as our blog editorial calendar, which you can learn how to set up step-by-step here. Or, you can click here to download our free editorial calendar templates for Excel, Google Sheets, and Google Calendar, along with instructions on how to set them up.

Mistake 11: You concentrate your analytics on immediate traffic. 

Both beginner bloggers and advanced bloggers are guilty of this blogging mistake. If you concentrate your analysis on immediate traffic (traffic from email subscribers, RSS feeds, and social shares), then it’s going to be hard to prove the enduring value of your blog. After all, the half-life for those sources is very brief — usually a day or two.

When marketers who are just starting their business blogs see that their blog posts aren’t generating any new traffic after a few days, many of them get frustrated. They think their blog is failing, and they end up abandoning it prematurely.

Solution: Focus on the cumulative potential of organic traffic.

Instead of focusing on the sudden decay of short-term traffic, focus instead on the cumulative potential of organic traffic. Over time, given enough time, the traffic from day three and beyond of a single blog post will eclipse that big spike on days one and two thanks to being found on search engine results pages through organic search. You just have to give it a while.

To help drive this long-term traffic, make sure you’re writing blog posts that have durable relevance on a consistent basis. These posts are called “evergreen” blog posts: They’re relevant year after year with little or no upkeep, valuable, and high quality.

Over time, as you write more evergreen content and build search authority, those posts will end up being responsible for a large percentage of your blog traffic. It all starts with a slight shift in perspective from daily traffic to cumulative traffic so you can reframe the way you view your blog and its ROI entirely.

Mistake 12: You aren’t growing subscribers.

Once you start blogging, it’s easy to forget that blogging isn’t just about getting new visitors to your blog. One of the biggest benefits of blogging is that it helps you steadily grow an email list of subscribers you can share your new content with. Each time you publish a new blog post, your subscribers will give you that initial surge of traffic — which, in turn, will propel those posts’ long-term success.

The key to getting significant business results (traffic, leads, and eventually customers) all starts with growing subscribers. use HubSpot’s email tool to easily set up these regular email sends, as well as set up a welcome email for new subscribers.)

Next, add subscription CTAs to your blog (and elsewhere, like the footer of your website) to make it easy for people to opt in. These CTAs should be simple, one-field email opt-in forms near the top of your blog, above the fold. As for where to put these CTAs, we typically place our blog CTAs at the bottom of our blog posts or add a slide-in, which you can learn how to do using a free tool called Leadin here.

You can also create a dedicated landing page for subscribers that you can direct people to via other channels such as social media, other pages on your website, PPC, or email. (For a list of more simple ways to attract subscribers, read this blog post; for more advanced ideas, read this one.)

Don’t worry if you read through this list and are now thinking to yourself, Well this is awkward … I’ve made literally every single one of these mistakes. Remember: I used the word “common” to describe these mistakes for a reason. The more you blog, the better you’ll get at it — and you’ll reap the benefits in terms of traffic and leads in the process.

We hope you’ll use this list of mistakes as fuel for the fire to step up your blogging game. After all, the benefits of keeping up a healthy business blog will be well worth the time and effort.

What mistakes are we missing? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in July 2014 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Who are you marketing to?

It’s a question that’s all-at-once simple, yet hard to answer in short and with confidence.  For many nonprofits, this question is a vital one. 

With limited marketing budgets, and stretched resources nonprofits of all shapes and sizes cannot afford to waste their efforts on marketing that is not tailored to the right audiences. 

That’s where personas come in. Persona’s can be defined as fictional, generalized representations of your ideal audience. They help you understand your constituents (and prospective constituents) better, and make it easier for you to tailor content and campaigns to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

We’ve built a PowerPoint presentation that provides an overview of what personas are, and how they work—followed by examples and fill-in-the blank templates that you can use to build your own personas by answering questions about: 

• Who you’re targeting
• What their goals and challenges are
• Why they should care about your organization
• How you can engage with them

Ready to give it a shot for your organization? You can download the Nonprofit Persona Templates here, or by clicking on the button below. 

Despite its impressive reach — over 300 million daily active users and counting — it took some time for marketers to realize the business potential of Instagram. 

Not only is including Instagram in your social media marketing strategy helpful in terms of achieving high levels of engagement and brand awareness, but it can also make it easier for you to attract new leads and customers.

Why should your business be on Instagram? Check out the infographic below from Buzzoid to learn why Instagram deserves a place in your marketing strategy, along with some tips for how to make the most of your Instagram content. Then, check out our ebook How to Use Instagram for Business to master Instagram marketing so you get the most ROI out of the platform that you can.

It’s every marketer’s dream: send an email out to hot prospects and get a flood of positive responses. This dream isn’t necessarily a pipe dream. Because even though technology has dramatically changed the way people buy, the human brain hasn’t changed. What it responds to is the same today as it was thousands of years ago. Which is fortunate for marketers, because this means we can take advantage of what the field of persuasion psychology has to teach us about how to influence people’s buying decisions.

But this article isn’t going to overview theories. (Although if you’re interested in the field, I highly recommend checking out the work of David Straker and Robert Cialdini.) This article is going to apply principles of persuasion psychology specifically to marketing email, giving you five ways to generate more conversions from your email marketing.

1) Send from a consistent “from” name and a personal email address.

You’ve probably read dozens of articles on how to improve your subject lines, and you likely regularly A/B test your subject lines. But just as important is that little piece of information that appears next to your subject line: the “from” name.

The “from” name offers a valuable opportunity to build trust with your recipients. If you consistently send highly-relevant emails with the same “from” name, your recipients will start to associate your “from” name with good things. And because they’ll want to receive those relevant emails, they’ll be looking for your “from” name and be less likely to overlook your emails in their overly-full inboxes.

So what “from” name should you use? Your company name or the name of a specific team member? I recommend using both. You can build trust in your brand while creating a more personal feeling by using both simultaneously. You might try “[Team Member First Name] @ [Company Name]” or “[Company Name] — [Team Member Name].” It’s worth running a few tests to see what exact combination works best for you.

Of similar importance is the email address your emails are sent from. In short, it needs to be personal. At the end of 2014, HubSpot ran an article reporting on the trend of human-to-human marketing. This trend has only increased in importance as more and more of life has become automated while the basic need for human connection hasn’t lessened.

Sending from a “no reply” email address is convenient (and who really wants to sort through all those out-of-office notifications?), but it discourages engagement, can come off as arrogant, and can also increase the chances that your email will be sent to the spam folder. Sending from an “info@” email address or other similarly non-personal address is better than a “no reply,” but if your goal is engagement, you’ll get better results if you send from a personal email address.

2) Personalize more than the recipient’s first name and company name.

Most buyers are tech savvy these days. They know you can use personalization tokens easily and know that it doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily taken the time to learn about them or their preferences. What does have an impact on buyers is personalized content. When you segment your lists to deliver highly-relevant content to each segment, your recipients will feel that you understand them and are inviting them to connect.

Research by Dr. Hugh Mackay shows that one of the basic human desires is to be seen as a unique individual. When you’re able to demonstrate to your recipients that you understand them and you acknowledge them to be unique, they’ll pay attention to what you have to say.

But how are you going to get that kind of detailed understanding of your recipients without using forms that have so many fields that your visitors hit the “back” button? Smart fields and progressive profiling. This is one of my favorite things about HubSpot — that we have the ability to keep forms short while gradually learning more about subscribers.

Over time, you can deliver a more customized experience to each of your subscribers as you learn more about them. Match your content to what you know about each subscriber, and continually be gathering more detailed knowledge to enable you to further customize your content for relevance. I guarantee your engagement will increase.

3) Offer relevant content that’s not locked behind a form.

This strategy may be controversial, but I truly believe that not all your premium content should be locked behind forms — especially the content you share with people who are already subscribers. I just talked about the importance of learning more about your subscribers through forms and customizing your content accordingly, so let me explain why I think you should occasionally offer and link to premium content that’s not walled off behind a form.

Sharing no-strings-attached resources demonstrates generosity. Generosity is a powerful persuader because it hits on two of Dr. Robert Cialdini’s principles of influence: likeability and reciprocity. We are inclined to go along with someone’s suggestion if we like that person and if that person has done something nice for us. When you generously share content without asking for anything in return (including personal information through a form), people are more likely to do what you suggest.

This is not at all to say that forms are bad or that you shouldn’t use forms — you have to, in order to deliver relevant content! But occasionally offering content that’s not locked behind a form can generate the goodwill that will result in people eventually taking the action you want them to.

4) Bring in subject matter experts.

We defer to people who we perceive to be superior. If we believe someone knows more than we do about a particular subject, we tend to accept what that person says as truth. Marketers have been taking advantage of this fact for decades. Commercials feature recognized experts. Ads quote recognized experts. Marketers have spent a lot of money trying to convey credibility through the use of experts.  

But we sometimes forget that credibility is just as important in our content as it is in our paid ads.  A recent study by Relevance in partnership with Nielsen revealed that 85% of consumers regularly or occasionally seek out trusted expert content in the buying process. No one is going to believe what you have to say just because you say so.  

But you, as a content producer, don’t have to be a nationally-known expert with highly-impressive credentials. You can bring these experts in and benefit from the credibility they lend to your content. Whatever you’re writing about, include research. Quote experts in the field. Reference studies and reports. Interview experts and include their comments in your content.

5) Include social influence.

Experts aren’t the only ones people believe, however. Your email recipients can also be convinced by social influence, or social proof. Humans are wired for conformity. We take cues from our peers. If others we identify with are doing something, we’re drawn to do whatever it is. This is why we see mob mentality prevail in social situations — people engaging in behavior they would not have engaged in if they were by themselves.

Social influence can be a force for good, however, and you can use it to persuade subscribers to take action. Testimonials, case studies, and reviews are all powerful forms of social proof that you can include in your emails.

So enough dreaming of email responses dancing down your computer screen. . . . Put these principles into practice, and start making that email marketing dream a reality!

Here’s the truth: Excel struggles are real.

As marketers, it’s likely that you know these tiny conflicts all too well. From accidental deletes to misplaced numbers, one click can throw your spreadsheet all out of whack. And putting it back together once you’ve done the damage can be seriously frustrating — not to mention, time-consuming.  

But you’re not alone: Even the most advanced Excel users experience these errors from time to time. So for that reason, we’ve put together some tips designed to save you a few minutes (or hours) when solving frustrating Excel errors. Check ’em out below. 

Best Practices That’ll Help You Reduce Excel Errors

Before we go over the errors and tips, we wanted to share a few helpful tricks we’ve learned from our own Excel experts. These precautionary lessons are designed to help you avoid errors all together, making life a whole lot easier:

• Begin every formula with an equal sign.
• Use the * symbol to multiply numbers, not an X.
• Match all opening and closing parentheses so that they are in pairs.
• Use quotation marks around text in formulas.

7 Excel Error Messages You’re Sick of Seeing (And How to Fix Them)

We’ve all fallen victim to the little green arrow in upper-left hand corner of a cell before. You know, that pesky little thing that Excel uses to indicate something has gone wrong?

In many cases, clicking on that arrow will pull up enough information for you to remedy the problem at hand. Take a look:

But in other cases, you still can’t seem to figure out what’s gone wrong. For those instances, we’ve provided the following list of common errors, explanations, and tips for overcoming them. Dig in for the context you need to right your wrongs and get back on the Excel saddle.

1) #VALUE!

Excel displays the #VALUE! error when it finds spaces, characters, or text in a formula where it is expecting a number.

Excel requires formulas to contain numbers only and won’t respond to formulas associated with numbers, so it will show you an error is if you’ve included anything else.

How to Resolve This Error:

An easy solution to this error is to double check your formula to make sure that you only used numbers. If you’re still seeing an error, check for blank cells, missing formulas linking to cells or any special characters you may be using.

In the example above, the “Sum” column is referring to empty cells. Excel can’t calculate the sum of empty columns, so it gives us an error.

2) #####

When you see ##### displayed in your cell, it can look a little scary. The good news is that this simply means the column isn’t wide enough to display the value you’ve inputted. And that’s any easy fix!

How to Resolve This Error:

Click on the right border of the column header and increase the column width.

Pro Tip: You can double-click the right border of the header to automatically fit the widest cell in that column. 

3) #DIV/0!

When you see #DIV/0!, you are asking Excel to divide a formula by zero or an empty cell. In the same way that this task wouldn’t work if you were doing division by hand, or on a calculator, it won’t work in Excel either.

How to Resolve This Error:

This error is pretty easy to resolve. Simply change the value of the cell to a value that is not equal to 0 or add in a value if your cell was blank. Here’s an example:

↓

In some cases, you might find that you’re simply waiting for input in a particular cell. Rather than including a “0” as a placeholder, and subsequently turning up a #DIV/0! error, you can add a custom display message. Learn more about your alternative options here. 

4) #REF!

This one can sometimes be a little tricky to figure out, however Excel usually displays #REF! when a formula references a cell that is not valid.

What does that really mean?

That means that you may have accidentally deleted or pasted over a cell that was used in your formula. For example, let’s say that the “Outcome” column references the formula: =SUM(A2,B2,C2).  

If we were to accidentally delete the “Number 2” column, we’d see this error:

How to Resolve This Error:

Before you paste over a set of cells make sure that there are no formulas that will be affected. Also, when deleting cells it’s important to double check what formulas are being referred in those cells.

Pro Tip: If you accidentally delete a few cells, you can click the Undo button on the Quick Access Toolbar (or press CTRL+Z for PC / Command + Z for Mac ) to restore them.

5) #NULL!

#NULL! errors occur when you specify an intersection of two areas that don’t actually intersect, or when an incorrect range operator is used.

To give you some additional context, here’s how Excel reference operators work:

• Range operator (semi colon): Defines a references to a range of cells.
• Union operator (comma): Combines two references into a single reference.
• Intersection operator (space): Returns a reference to the intersection of two ranges.

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How to Resolve This Error:

First things first, check to make sure that you are using the correct syntax in your formula.

• You should be using a colon to separate the first cell from the last cell when you refer to a continuous range of cells in a formula.
• On the other hand, you should be using a comma should when you refer to two cells that don’t intersect. 

6) #N/A

When you see #N/A, this typically means that the numbers you are referring to in your formula cannot be found.

You may have accidentally deleted a number or row that’s being used in your formula, or are referring to a sheet that was deleted or not saved.

For advanced users, one of the most common causes of the #N/A error is when a cell can’t be found from a formula referenced in a VLOOKUP. (Check out this post for more on VLOOKUPs.)

How to Resolve This Error:

Triple check all your formulas and be sure to look closely at which sheets or rows may have been deleted or incorrectly referenced. If you have a few formulas linked together, check to see that everything in every formula has a value.

For advanced users using VLOOKUP functions, reference this guide.

7) #NUM!

If your formula contains numeric values that aren’t valid, you’ll see an #NUM! error appear in Excel. Often times this happens when you enter a numeric value that’s different than the other arguments used in your formula.

For example, when you’re entering an Excel formula, make sure you don’t include values like $1,000 in currency format. Instead, enter 1000 and then format the cell with currency and commas after the formula is calculated.

How to Resolve This Error:

Check to see if you have entered any formatted currency, dates, or special symbols. Then, make sure to remove those characters from the formula, only keeping the numbers themselves. 

Here’s how you can format numbers after removing the commas and currency from your formula:

(To adjust the currency, select the small triangle to the right of the icon to select an option from the dropdown menu.)

What pesky errors did we miss? Let us know in the comments section below.

The education industry is going through a major disruption, facing pressures in demand, supply, and delivery.

Enrollment rates continue to decline, especially for four-year for-profit and two-year schools. Four-year universities see flat enrollment rates. As the pool of potential students gets smaller, the options they have for school are increasing. New programs like Promise and EQUIP offer financial incentives for students to attend community colleges and alternative educational institutions.  The rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other digital education services are forcing brick-and-mortar schools to expand student options and improve flexibility as to where and how students attend class.

All this is going on as attitudes of students and parents change as to how they research and select what sort of school to attend, and then which school to attend. Increasing costs, especially at four-year schools, which now take six years for most students to complete, has put many people’s focus squarely on gauging what sort of return they’ll get for the money they spend on school. What’s the most cost effective way to earn credits? What skills will they have? What will their job prospects be? 

And like every other purchase made today, consumer or B2B, students and parents are conducting most of their school research well before they ever make direct contact with a school.

The Empowered Consumer Student

You know well that the days of guidance counselors and school brochures controlling the selection process are long gone. 

Students and parents have a remarkable array of information and resources to access when researching schools. Let’s forget (only for a minute) about the content put out by the schools themselves.

There are also the review sites both for schools and individual teachers, and websites and blogs dedicated to guiding people through the selection process. Prospects have access, through social media, to the everyday conversations other students, parents, and prospects are having about the schools they attend or are thinking about attending.

There’s no topic a prospect can’t find online information to educate themself about whatever her educational priorities and motivations are. This newly empowered, self-directed prospect means educational marketing strategies need to evolve to meet them.

Leaning into the Digital Disruption

Traditional outbound tactics, like print ads and cold direct mailing, aren’t where the prospects are. To meet enrollment goals, both in number and quality, schools have to be right in the digital mix addressing the issues prospects are already researching online. 

Inbound marketing answers this call.

Inbound marketing uses digital capabilities to execute a strategy of targeted personalization by delivering online content that attracts and delights your prospects. This more personal approach is necessary to attract quality leads to your institution. You don’t just need eyeballs. You need the right eyeballs.

Getting found by your best prospects online requires serving up the information they want, in the formats and places they prefer.

In order to do that, you need to a clear picture of who your target prospects are. These are your personas, fictional profiles that describe the motivations, challenges and demographics of who you’re trying to reach. You can find free templates to use for your school here. Your personas probably aren’t just different student types, but others who participate in their school decision. This means parents, teachers, and counselors.

Once you know who you’re trying to reach, follow the inbound methodology to get quality leads into your database and nurture them through to application and enrollment. The inbound methodology for schools has four main steps: attracting web traffic, converting that traffic into leads, nurturing those leads into making inquiries to your school, and then closing them by getting the application. You can learn more about creating personas the moving them through each step in The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing for Schools.

Where the Prospects Are

Google documented back in 2012 that 90% of students research higher learning institutions online. So we’ve learned a lot about how students do their education research. They’re eager for information about areas of study, scholarship information, and campus life. They consult campus ratings as well. Everyone gets reviewed today.

Social media is another active source of information, so YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, and messaging apps are probably valuable distribution mediums for your content. Of course, your school’s own website is their single largest resource about your school, and curious prospects will visit often – if you’re serving up engaging, informative content they can’t resist.

Use your social media and school blogs to answer the questions your prospects have, using the search language they use. This is the starting point for inbound. When you publish content with the right keywords and answering key prospect questions, your school’s website and blog will start showing up in student searches. That’s how schools are getting found by the right prospects in today’s education market.

That’s where all education searches start today – online. If your school wants to be pro-active about enrolling full classes of your ideal students, then it’s time to get counter-intuitive and stop chasing them with brute force, outbound tactics.

Being pro-active in today’s market means making them come to you by being a trusted, authoritative resource throughout their entire research process.  They’re not interested in being talked to. They want you to respond to their needs, and then they want you to anticipate their needs. That’s inbound marketing.

Whether we realise it or not, our brains are wired to pay more attention to a select handful of voices in a crowd. It might be a celebrity setting a new fashion trend, a business leader announcing a new viewpoint on company culture, or a brand unveiling new innovative product designs.

If it’s an area we’re interested in, we automatically listen to some voices more than others.

These individuals and brands are known as influencers. But while it’s great to be a follower, you might want to be the one others look up to. The question is, how do you do that?

What is an Industry Influencer?

Influencers are individuals or brands that are considered leaders and trendsetters in their particular niche. People follow them because they have expertise, authority, and a proven track record of being ahead of the curve.

Some influencers are globally well-known and associated strongly with a particular area, such as Apple for design innovation, Jack Ma for business, Nike for forward-thinking advertising, Kate Middleton for style, and Warren Buffet for financial advice.

Yet there are even more influencers that, while not universally recogniseable, have huge followings in certain niches. In marketing, for example, you’ve most likely heard of Seth Godin and Ariana Huffington, who are pioneers of internet marketing and publishing. If you’re big into SEO, you probably follow Rand Fishkin and Dan Petrovic. If you’re focused on landing page conversions, Oli Gardner may be at the top of your list of people to watch.

How Can You Become an Influencer?

Being an influencer gives you a larger platform for your message, which means more brand awareness, recognition, and respect. But how do you become an influencer?

Learn how to build your influencer strategy with the help of our brand new ebook How to Become an Influencer in Your Industry, co-authored by HubSpot and LinkedIn with a foreword from well-known industry influencer Jeff Bullas. After reading it, you’ll understand:

• The psychology of influence. What characteristics and traits are necessary to become an influencer?
• The components of influencer strategy. Learn how to identify your audience and establish your brand through content and promotion.
• How to grow your brand. Get actionable tips on how to increase your reach through networking, online thought-leadership and events

If you’re serious about growing your brand and increasing your following, you don’t want to miss out on this step-by-step guide to becoming an influencer in your industry! Click here to download your free copy.