You’ve heard this common theme repeated by your parents, your teachers, your managers … even your significant others: It’s up to you to take ahold of the opportunities presented and make something of them.

The problem is that opportunities usually equal choosing the hard thing. It’s much easier to stay constant on the current path, walking with the wind rather than against it. 

But as Winston Churchill said, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” 

And when it comes to your business, there are a lot of difficulties that equal big opportunities. However, when you’re in the middle of it, it’s not easy to recognize or focus on what actually matters — it’s that whole “can’t see the forest for the trees” conundrum. 

We pulled a few stats from our Agency Pricing & Financials Report that detail how agencies price their services, manage their firms, sell, and service their clients to highlight a few issues that, if improved, could equal significant opportunities for agencies as they work toward growth, stability, or higher profitability. 

Download the full report here or view a few of the interesting charts below.

4 Revealing Charts on Agency Business Practices

1) 57% of agencies win less than 50% of proposals sent.

Depending on how in-depth your agency’s proposals are — the length, the amount of research you do, how much you give away (i.e., the strategy), and design — creating a proposal can be a time-consuming and arduous process. It might take you two hours, eight hour, or upwards of 40, depending on the requests of the prospect. 

And all of that time is arguably wasted if you don’t win. 

That’s why it’s so concerning to see that a majority of agencies don’t win even half of the proposals they create. 

Increasing the conversion rates of your proposals by improving your sales process should be a priority. And this all starts with understanding what types of clients actually want to buy your services — what makes a prospect a good fit. By having the right qualifying questions, you can increase the time you spend with prospects who would benefit and see the value of your services and spend less time writing proposals that are ignored or irrelevant.  

2) 44% of agencies don’t use a CRM, and 42% haven’t defined their ideal client. 

That many agencies don’t use a CRM and have yet to identify which clients are a good fit for their agency and services further supports the low conversion rate on proposals. In the survey, we also asked how satisfied respondents were with their sales process: Only 28% were satisfied or very satisfied, while 41% were not satisfied or very dissatisfied. Even more confusing is the 31% who responded as “neutral,” signaling a lack of concern or worry about growth.

I’m not saying that every agency needs to be highly focused on gaining more and more and more new clients. In fact, the opposite is often recommended. You can grow by building a roster of 10 or 20 highly profitable client accounts that provides your team with the opportunity to do highly rewarding work.

But without a sales process — and an understanding of who these future profitable clients are, how they think about marketing, what they value, etc. — then you’re simply chasing one account after another.

And without a tool or system for tracking prospects, you could be losing out on valuable business you’ve already invested hundreds of hours in. If you’re marketing your agency right, the clients you really want should already know about you. And even if they’re not ready to switch shops today, they should think of you when they do begin to look around. A CRM can help you to stay in touch with these people — something that old Excel file can’t yet handle. 

3) Agencies fail to track future-looking metrics.

Without tracking the right financial metrics, agencies can’t truly understand the health of their business. And while it’s necessary to track revenue and profit numbers, these only tell the story of how well the company is doing today, not tomorrow or next week or three months from now.

Metrics such as leads generated and client satisfaction provide more forward-looking information. By tracking average client tenure, you can spot clients at-risk of leaving before you get that dreaded phone call or request for an urgent in-person meeting. 

It also doesn’t reveal the opportunities for greater efficiencies. Do you know how much your agency is losing due to overservicing? Do you understand which client accounts are profitable? And which ones are costing you money? 

If the utilization rate for your agency is too low, then maybe your firm has become top heavy, with too many non-billable employees in management. If you’re employee satisfaction score is low and turnover is high, what’s causing this? 

As I hope the above shows, these metrics are only the starting points for more in-depth conversation and analysis, but they will help guide you to new information and possibly a solution. Otherwise, you’re simply running in the dark toward revenue and profit numbers.  

4) Agencies are too reliant on referrals and word of mouth.

It’s no surprise that referrals are listed as the best source of new leads for agency new business. And referrals are valuable — we know that referrals convert at a higher rate and have a higher lifetime value. 

However, by relying on referrals too heavily, agencies are essentially putting their new business development in the hands of their clients — some who are happy and some who are not. And referrals don’t scale as well as many other methods, such as focusing on lead generation through blogging, social media, PR, and events. 

In addition, referrals are influenced by things such as public speaking, publishing educational content, the professionalism of your web presence, etc., so it’s important to create a sustainable plan for marketing your agency and driving both referrals and new connections with clients outside your current sphere of influence.

What are the biggest opportunities for improvement in your agency? Let us know in the comments below!

It’s difficult to communicate emotion through just text — and as a digital marketer, you’re always looking for ways to make more meaningful connections with your audience.

Images make it easier for you to bring your stories to life, as well as overcome linguistic and cultural barriers between you and your audience. If you’re not using graphics to your advantage, you’re missing out on a huge chance to make a personal connection with your audience and increase engagement with your content as a result.

How can you use images strategically on social media channels, on your website, and within your content? What kinds of photos will draw your audience in and enhance the experience your brand delivers?

We worked with iStock, one of the leading photography providers for content creators around the world, to bring you this handy guide to effective imagery.

In this ebook, you’ll find tips on:

• Improving brand sentiment with images that are perfectly curated and optimised for your audience.
• Optimising your images to drive traffic from organic search, social media, and paid social posts.
• Using images and color schemes strategically to increase conversion rates.
• A/B testing your images.
• Optimising your photos for Google search.

Ready to leave ugly, uncoordinated, and random photos behind?

Download your completely free copy of The Digital Marketer’s Guide to Effective Imagery now to learn how to select images that not only look beautiful, but also resonate with your audience.

Growing traffic can be a bittersweet experience when you’re first starting out in content marketing. On one hand, you’re thrilled to see your posts gaining traction as incoming traffic and engagement climbs. On the other hand, your growing audience demands frequent content updates and they expect you to deliver good material.

You might be able to manage the content by yourself initially, or with the help of an in-house employee or freelancer. At some point though, that increase in traffic means your team and your content strategy are going to have to “grow up.”

Fail to grow your content team and you could find yourself among the 57% of marketers who are struggling to consistently produce content. A lack of resources and slow output can limit the top of the funnel content and make it a lot more difficult to properly nurture leads — let alone attract them. 

Is your team experiencing growing pain? Do you think it might be time to add another set of hands … or maybe even a few? Check out the 10 warning signs below to determine if it’s time to make a change, as well as actionable tips to alleviate strain on your team if you do decide you’re not quite ready.

10 Signs It’s Time to Grow Your Content Team

1) Deadlines are looming (or rushing by).

An editorial calendar is supposed to make it easier for you to track everything going through the pipeline. It helps you stay on top of topic areas and ensure that content is published on a regular basis.

But if you find yourself faced with constantly looming deadlines, or worse, missed deadlines, then you might have a problem on your hands.

While some people work well under pressure, feeling it constantly can create a need to just get things done as soon as possible — leaving little time for polishing. And drop in content quality is not going to do you any favors.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Prioritize your writing by adjusting your deadlines for less time-sensitive projects. This will give your more room to breathe.
• Repurpose older content to give your production schedule a break.
• Hire additional writers on contract. (Check out this post for tips on hiring freelancers.)

2) Editing is eating up all of your time.

The magical combination of a great writer and an experienced editor is content marketing gold. Quality posts can be written quickly with minimal editing and a good editor can glance through and add the finishing touches to a well-written piece in a fairly short timespan.

But if content is written in a hurry with little to no in-depth research and hordes of grammatical and spelling errors, then editing can turn into a lengthy process that steals you away from other important business matters you need to focus on. This is especially true when you hire one or more new writers: there’s always an adjustment period as they learn your specific style guide and find their groove.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Improve your onboarding process so new writers have clear direction on your writing expectations, style, and formatting preferences
• Hire an experienced editor on contract to handle a majority of the proofreading duties.
• Gather advice from a former HubSpot Editor here or tips on how to quickly improve any piece of writing here. 

3) Research leaves little room for production.

To build credibility, a lot of your content will require you to collect authoritative data, conduct quality research, and provide proper citations. There are no shortcuts here: It can sometimes take hours just to research and produce a single post.

If the time you spend researching starts cutting into other projects and little time is left for actually writing the content, then you have to take action right away. When this happens, some marketers scale back production or let time slip by without getting content published, but don’t fall into that trap.

When you start skimping on research, you start skimping on quality, so don’t take this one lightly.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Diversify your content to fill schedule gaps. A quick video might be easier for you to publish than a 2,000 word blog post (just don’t skimp on value).
• Expand your pool of writers to more than just one. Hire enough writers to maintain consistency and quality in your editorial calendar.

4) Quality is slipping.

I mentioned this in the above warning sign, and I’ll mention it again: Quality is key. If you have a team of one or more writers and the quality of their content is starting to slip, then you need to evaluate your production process.

Are your writers getting enough down time? Are projects being managed well? Are projects being assigned to the right team member based on their expertise and skills?

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Acquire a project management system to streamline the production process.
• Stagger project schedules for your writers to give them more downtime and promote better work/life balance.
• Change topic assignments if possible to give writers more variety.
• Hire a project manager skilled in content marketing to better handle and manage projects.

5) You’re falling short on engagement.

Content marketing involves so much more than just publishing content. In most cases, your audience wants to engage in the comments, or on social, or via email, too. 

If you’re not responding, then your engagement levels might take a hit — readers often want to see that you’re actually paying attention to them.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Schedule at least 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the afternoon/evening to respond to comments.
• Hire a social/community manager to handle your engagement across the channels you use for promotion and branding. 
• Issue a survey that asks your audience for their feedback directly to prove that you do value their opinion. 

6) You have a poor promotion plan.

One critical aspect of your content marketing strategy is the promotion of your content across a variety of channels. Although there are many useful tools to help you distribute content online, content promotion is still a time-consuming effort for each piece of content you publish.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Use social publishing tools (like HubSpot) to streamline promotional efforts.
• Use a process management tool such as inMotion, TallyFy or Process Street.
• Use these free social media image templates to create more engaging post promotions on the fly.
• Hire a virtual assistant to handle content promotion for you.
• Delegate content promotion to a dedicated project/content manager.

7) You’re constantly dealing with inconsistent posts and missed opportunities.

If you suffer from irregular posting habits, regularly miss out on great content ideas, or leave trending topics out of your content marketing strategy, then it’s time to reevaluate your approach. Perhaps you don’t have the time to dedicate to strategy and planning right now, or your current strategy is stagnating and you don’t know where to go from here.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Create a documented content marketing strategy so your needs and expectations will be clearly outlined for each day, week, month.
• Allot time each day, even if it’s just 10-15 minutes, to check for changes and trends happening in your industry. (Try these 35 IFTTT hacks to save even more time here.)
• Use sites like AllTop to simplify your content curation efforts.

8) You’re lacking content diversity.

If you limit the types of content you produce, then you also limit your potential engagement. Your audience may have different preferences when it comes to consuming content: Some prefer to read articles while others might prefer visuals, video, or audio.

Diversity is important in content marketing, and you should reanalyze your audience research to figure out what other types of content might work best for your audience.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Hire a contract designer or video specialist to test out custom images and video.
• Use an online tool like Canva to easily add more engaging images to your content. 
• Check out HubSpot’s 386+ free content creation templates to simplify your process.
• Hire a freelance designer to repurpose older content into new material, like an infographic or SlideShare. 

9) You’re missing out on conversions.

Poor conversion rates are caused by a variety of factors, from minor design flaws to poorly worded or missing calls-to-action. A lack of steady conversions can also be a result of content that isn’t mapped appropriately to your sales funnel or the buyer’s journey. Rather than guessing how you can improve conversions, you may want to consider expanding your team by adding an expert on conversion rate optimization (CRO).

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Don’t just create content for the top of the funnel (acquisition). Adding lead nurturing content to the mix to provide vitiors with a next step can make all the difference.
• Hire a CRO specialist to help you map content to buyer intent and your sales funnel.
• A/B test content offers to see what your audience prefers.
• Leverage heatmap software like Hotjar to get a better read on your website visitors’ behavior.

Are You Ready to Expand?

When you’re ramping up your content marketing efforts, it’s important to continually reassess the function and performance of your team as often as you monitor and evaluate your metrics. Set benchmarks or triggers that let you know early on where bottlenecks might form in your content creation and promotion.

Be proactive in the expansion of your content team to stay on top of your workload and avoid problems that might arise if you wait too long to hire experienced writers and editors to help you.

Have you run into any of these problems as you expanded your content marketing efforts? How did you address them? Share your tips with me in the comments below.

Back-to-school season is here, and it’s bigger than ever. In the U.S., 17.2% of the entire year’s retail sales happen during back-to-school shopping. That’s a cool $828 billion dollars annually.

But, there’s a big way that the back-to-school season differs from the holidays – discounts. 46% of shoppers said that price is one of their main deciding factors for purchasing, and almost 10% of shoppers said their purchases were 100% influenced by deals.

With such price sensitive shoppers, you need to focus on customer lifetime value, instead of the value of this first purchase. Develop a strategy to continue to build your relationship with these shoppers (and at the same time, get them to come back and purchase from you again). With that foresight, you’ll be able to benefit from these customers through the holiday season.

Check out the infographic below from The Shelf for more data, tips, and tricks to get back-to-school ready.

Did you know that the top 20% of your current customers contribute 70% of your total sales? How about that keeping a customer costs 3–10X less than acquiring a new one?

There’s a lot to love about customer loyalty programs, from higher retention rates to the likelihood they’ll spread the word about your business with their friends. The key to a successful loyalty program is offering actual value to your customers.

If that sounds like a program you want to build for your customers, get started by reading through the infographic below from Antavo. It’ll lead you through the process of building a successful program, from giving it a catchy name all the way to creating touchpoints for customer enrollment.

The result? Happy customers that’ll buy from you again and again. (For more ideas, check out this post on seven different types of customer loyalty programs that actually add value.)

When every new knick-knack on the block is labeled “disruptive” within an hour of its launch, how do we know if something actually breaks new ground?

The fitness industry is a perfect case study for real innovation. Estimated to be the next trillion dollar market, it‘s proof that people are more than willing to shell out for pricey equipment, clothing, apps, and tech to improve their workouts and health. But even among constant giants such as Nike and Weight Watchers, people are always looking for the next big thing to emerge.

These six little-known fitness brands are each redefining the fitness space with their business models and advertising tactics. Their ability to carve out lucrative niches in a crowded market is impressive, and any business looking to re-vamp their image should take note.

6 Innovative Fitness Brands

1) Peloton

Using tech to revitalize studio fitness.

This tech-driven cycling startup offers fitness aficionados and amateurs alike an at-home alternative to SoulCycle’s studio classes. Cycling workouts are streamed live from the company’s New York studio, and anyone with Peloton’s touch screen-equipped stationary bike can tune into the action.

While the adrenaline rush is surely a powerful lure for riders to keep on peddling through multiple classes, the brand wants to make the social element addictive. Currently, users can follow each other’s remote workout activity streams and share their progress on Facebook. But they want to take it a step further. The company’s Vice President of Community Jayvee Nava has been working to cultivate a sustainable community on Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube to get Peloton’s 12,000 riders more socially invested. “The group fitness experience needs people to feel that community part,” Nava explained to Fast Company.

It seems to be working so far. Peloton has developed an undeniable cult following, and its new CMO Lori Marcus thinks the biggest challenge for the company has been clearly communicating to the public what they actually do. To remedy this, Peloton recently enlisted the help of agency Partners & Spade to spin up a “comprehensive brand refresh” in the form of print and TV ads aimed at educating consumers.

2) Outdoor Voices

Changing the fitness narrative.

This indie fitness apparel brand is poised to dethrone long-reigning powerhouse Lululemon as the dominant force in the $100 billion athleisure space. Founded by a 27-year old graduate of Parsons The New School for Design, Outdoor Voices sets itself apart in a crowded market by focusing on accessibility above all else. While other fitness brands preach a credo of high-performance workouts and no excuses, Outdoor Voices stands behind a much more attainable motto: “Doing things is better than not doing things.”

The casual, authentic approach to working out shines through in its advertising. The brand’s first campaign was a simple Instagram hashtag — #DoingThings — that invited users to highlight the ways that physical activity is naturally woven into their day-to-day routines. The campaign’s approachable sentiment resonated with young consumers and led ultimately to the inaugural Doing Things Day, a fundraiser to fight childhood obesity.

The brand’s blog also manages to champion the accessible side of fitness, featuring posts about light and social exercise ideas, such as how to play frisbee and stretches you can do at the office.

Image Credit: Outdoor Voices

3) Bandier

Making brick-and-mortar worth the trip.

A three-story, 10,000-square-foot space might seem a bit ambitious for a startup fitness apparel boutique, but there’s a catch: Bandier only uses one floor to actually sell its high-end merchandise. The rest of the multi-use space is devoted to lounges, music, events, and food. The top floor even hosts a fitness studio, offering a wide selection of playfully named classes — like “New York Pilates” and “Yoga for Bad People.” 

Converting traditional brick-and-mortar spaces into multi-purpose venues for social events and other activities is a growing trend among retailers. When people have the option to shop online, it takes considerably more effort to get them off the couch and through the doors of a flagship store.

But Bandier’s expansion into a hybrid retail and event space is unique for its industry. The athletic apparel space might be a booming market, but the vast majority of brands are adhering to a digital-first ecommerce business model, avoiding permanent storefronts altogether. “We don’t have competition in the format that we are in,” said Neil Boyarsky, one of the stores‘s founding partners. “Other companies sell activewear online, but they don’t have brick and mortar.”

The risky business model has paid off. Bandier already has multiple locations in the U.S. and is looking to expand into Europe. 

Image Credit: Racked NY

4) Kit and Ace

Redefining fitness apparel for luxury consumers.

Founded by the former head designer of Lululemon and her son, Kit and Ace has carved out a uncommon niche for itself as the athleisure brand for the luxury market. While other fitness brands are immediately recognizable for their flashy patterns and neon color schemes, Kit and Ace has positioned itself as the grown-up antidote. Its subdued palette and classic tailoring is more reminiscent of Banana Republic than Nike, enabling the brand to comfortably straddle the line between fashion week and yoga class.

So what actually makes its clothing athletic apparel? It’s all in the materials. Namely, its signature “technical cashmere”: a stretchy fabric made from synthetic materials and a hint of real cashmere sourced from mountain goats.

More important than the fabric itself — which is flying off the shelves — is the way they market it. Cashmere isn’t the main component of “technical cashmere”, but adding it to the name certainly screams high-end. And its not stopping at that; the brand is perfecting a stretchy athletic silk-based material as well: “technical silk”.

By giving an athletic update to traditional luxury fabrics, Kit and Ace has been able to break into the upper echelons of the fashion universe — a place no athleisure brand has been before.

Image Credit: Christopher Deagle

5) EVEN Hotels

Adapting to a powerful demographic.

IGH hotel group saw a gap in the travel market for health and fitness-centric hotels, and it  decided to fill it. EVEN Hotels presents travelers with an appealing alternative to the typical gluttonous breakfast buffets and crowded leisure pools of most hotel chains. Health-conscious travelers can expect world-class fitness centers, standing work stations, high-end spas, and a carefully curated menu of healthy food options — complete with small dessert portions (because even health nuts enjoy some balance).

As part of its marketing plan to make a big impression on the wellness industry, the brand launched Wellwellwell by EVEN Hotels, a hub for articles on how to remain healthy while traveling. The initiative has allowed EVEN Hotels to capture thought leadership real estate in the coveted health junkie space. Articles such as The Best Restaurants for Vegan Travelers and Secrets to Staying Fit During Wedding Season deeply resonate with its target demographic.

EVEN Hotels is a perfect example of how the fitness craze doesn’t stop at the gym or even with gym clothes. The wellness industry commands significant consumer power, and other industries can benefit from catering to the health-conscious.

Image Credit: EVEN Hotels

6) Lark

Developing an accessible and personal approach to wellness.

What if you could carry a health coach around in your pocket? Lark is just that: an app designed to monitor your movement, ask about your meals, and help you be healthier through friendly, natural conversations. For example, if you tell Lark that you ate “bacon and eggs” for breakfast, the bot will kindly remind you, “That’s the third time this week you’ve had bacon,” and offer up some better alternatives. It’s all about changing behavior patterns. “The interface of empathetic coaching and chatting, having a conversation with people, is a big part of that,” explained CEO and co-founder Julia Hu.

The App Store has no shortage of fitness apps, so what really sets Lark apart? It takes a more holistic approach to health, forgoing the tedious calorie and mile trackers of other fitness apps in favor of personalized recommendations and positive reinforcement. Lark knows when you’ve been stationary for too long and encourages you to get up and go for a quick walk. It monitors your sleep patterns and knows when you might need to clock in a few more hours. Most impressively, it acknowledges when you make progress, cheering you on for the extra mile or when you reach for an apple instead of chips.

Lark’s human touch comes from real health coaches. “We basically cloned tens of thousands of conversations and interventions that these health experts knew would be effective in helping people get more active and eat healthier and sleep better,” Hu said.

Image Credit: Lark

Featured image credit: Outdoor Voices

It’s ironic, but despite knowing how to sell products and services, so many marketers have a hard time selling themselves. It can often be difficult to turn the spotlight inward, but creating a standout resume is a skill all marketers need to perfect if they want to grow their career.

If you’re a marketer whose resume could use a little polish, don’t worry. With just a few resources and some actionable tips from hiring managers themselves, we’ll help you create a truly impressive marketing resume that’s sure to stand out to recruiters.

These free resume templates feature sample copy for 10 of the most popular marketing positions. Take a look at them, and then use the advice below to customize your resume and make it rise above the rest in the stack.

How to Write a Standout Marketing Resume

Know Your Target

You never start a marketing campaign without knowing who you want to reach. That’s because once you know your target audience, it’s easier for the other decisions to fall into place.

The same logic applies to your resume. If you know who will read it and what’s important to them, you can shape your message accordingly. To do this, you need to think about the type of job and company you’re hoping to work for.

Ask yourself questions like: Is the job purely in inbound marketing, or will it require both traditional and digital work? Will you be a specialist or a generalist? Who is the employer — an agency with a buzzing digital marketing team in place already, or a small company looking to leverage the power of social media to grow their sales? Or maybe it’s a marketing department within a large and established corporation?

Once you’ve outlined what’s most important to the company and job you’re applying for, you can carefully target your resume to them. You’ll know what skills or traits to highlight, what keywords to use, and which parts of your background will be most interesting to the hiring manager. (For clues about which skills different marketing roles typically require, read this blog post on marketing job descriptions. You can borrow phrasing from those for your own resume.)

Define Your Unique Value Proposition

You have a unique blend of skills, characteristics, and experiences that make you different from every marketer. To create a truly effective resume, you need to define exactly what this unique blend is — we’ll call this your value proposition.

To develop your own value proposition, think about what separates you from other marketers. Is it your in-depth knowledge of marketing analytics? Your ability to write irresistible headlines? Perhaps it’s your talent for creating compelling videos? Or maybe you have an impressive record of using social media to drive sales growth? Whatever it is, you can use it to set your resume apart from the crowd.

To a large extent, your value proposition depends on the type of positions and companies you’re targeting. Large and small companies often look for completely different skill sets, as do companies in different industries. So as you think about what makes you uniquely valuable, and how that aligns with the jobs you’re applying to.

Determine Your Messaging Strategy

It’s crucial to determine your messaging strategy — before you write a single word of your resume. That’s what you do when you’re running a marketing campaign, isn’t it? Here are some of the things to think about:

• What is the best structure for your resume in order to highlight your value proposition?
• Which keywords will your ideal employer be looking for?
• How can you give real world examples of your value proposition in action? (Think about campaigns you’ve run, social media successes, ideas you developed, etc.)
• What is the best layout and design to reinforce your message?

All these decisions should be made before you start writing, and they should all be made with your target audience in mind. That way you can be sure that when potential employers read your resume, it will immediately strike a chord.

If you want an example of great messaging in a resume, check out the digital marketing executive resume sample among our free downloadable resume templates. Look at the progression of roles and key accomplishments in those roles — it tells his career story while also making him look exceptionally qualified.

Make Sure Your Resume Gets Seen

If you don’t already have a connection at the company you’re applying to, you’ll most likely need to apply through a computer system. This process is what makes it so critical to upload it in a format that allows all recipients to read it as intended, like a PDF. That way, none of the original formatting or spacing is lost in translation, making it really yucky to read from a recruiter’s perspective. Although they’ll still have access to your resume, confusing formatting might distract them from the content.

Many common applications have similar save or export options that let you ultimately save as a PDF. The most common are Microsoft Word and iWork Pages:

• Microsoft Word: Choose File > Save as Adobe PDF
• iWork Pages: Choose File > Export to > PDF

Once you send in your resume, the computer service will do is scan it for relevant keywords that have been programmed in advance by the recruiter. Then, the system will either “pass” or “fail” you, depending on how many keywords and phrases are included in your resume that match what the recruiter’s looking for.

Don’t worry: Even if you “fail,” it doesn’t mean your resume won’t ever get seen by a real human. But it doesn’t look great, either — so try to foresee which keywords the recruiter will be looking for by making a note of all of the skills you have that are relevant to the job description.

Keywords to include might be the names of the social media sites you use, analytics or CRM systems you know, and software programs or SAAS systems you’re familiar with. Make sure you’ve included these terms as seamlessly as possible throughout your resume (where relevant), and add any outliers at the very bottom under a “Technical Skills” or “Digital Marketing Skills” section.

9 Things Hiring Managers Are Looking For in Your Marketing Resume

Sure, computers may be used in the initial screening process, but it’s humans — with real feelings, pet peeves, hobbies, relationships, experiences, and backgrounds — who are ultimately reading and evaluating our resumes.

They’re also the ones who get annoyed when we don’t put our employment record in chronological order; who just don’t feel like reading paragraph-long job descriptions; and who get excited when you went to the same college as them. So to get a sense of what really matters on a marketing resume, I asked some hiring experts what they actually care about when they scan resumes, and here’s the inside scoop on the tips they shared with me. (By the way, don’t miss out on what they said about cover letters at the end.)

• Length
• Formatting
• Writing Quality
• Location
• College/Graduate School and Major/Concentration
• Companies and Titles
• Top Few Bullet Points in Each Section
• Dates of Employment
• Interests and Hobbies

1) Length

Limit your resumes to one page if you can. It takes hiring managers six seconds to decide whether they like your resume or not. If they do, they’ll keep reading. If they don’t … well, it’s on to the next. So, chances are, they won’t even get to page two.

In some cases, bleeding onto another page is OK, especially if you have a lot of really relevant experience. But if you have to do that, just don’t exceed two pages. Remember, recruiters can always look at your LinkedIn profile for the full story. (Because you’ve completed your business profile on LinkedIn, right?)

2) Formatting

Formatting speaks to the way candidates collect their thoughts and organize their ideas. As HubSpot’s VP of Training and Development Andrew Quinn explains it, “A candidate’s resume is their ad to me. How are they structuring this ad so I get a clear picture of what they’re capable of?”

There’s a fine line, though, warns HubSpot Senior Marketing Recruiter Emily MacIntyre. “If you stray too far from normal formatting, it’s hard to read and understand your resume. Don’t get so creative that your resume becomes difficult to digest.”

Below is a snippet from a 2-page resume with great formatting that’s easy to read. If you like the format and want to use it as your own, you can find it among our free downloadable resume templates here under “Digital Marketing Strategist.”

Here’s another one, this time a one-page resume from a student seeking an internship. If you like the format and want to use it as your own, you can find it among our free downloadable resume templates here under “Inbound Marketing Intern.”

To explore other resume formats, download our free resume templates.

The creatives among you might be asking, “What about infographic resumes?” Here’s the general consensus: Don’t make an infographic resume. Every hiring manager I spoke with advised sticking to the classic resume form instead of infographics or other formats.

“Infographic resumes are impossible to understand,” says MacIntyre. “We appreciate creativity, except when it’s overkill and hard to follow. Keep it simple. Everyone appreciates a simple resume. If you’re a designer, showcase your creativity with a cool portfolio website in addition to your simple resume.”

Below is an example of a creative format that’s still easy to read and understand. It was made using the Apple desktop app iWork Pages, which can be exported as a PDF so none of that beautiful formatting gets messed up in translation.

3) Writing Quality

Hiring managers throw away resumes with spelling errors — but writing quality goes beyond just simple spelling mistakes. Writing and presenting data in meaningful ways is a critical skill for any position, from blogging to engineering.

Are the details you want hiring managers to know about you easy to consume? Do you use concise sentences to convey your performance and accomplishments? Are your verb tenses consistent (except for current positions)? Is your language overflowing with buzzwords, or does it sound natural? Are you making sure to use first-person without using “I” or “my”? (See #11 in this blog post to understand why that’s not okay.)

“Formatting, spelling, syntax, and structure are all evidence of attention to detail,” Quinn told me. “This is important for any job, but especially if you’re applying to a job where attention to detail matters.” If you’re applying for a writing position, this is even more important.

4) Location

Hiring managers want to know if you’ll need to relocate. If you already live near the company’s office, great! If you would need to relocate, then it gets a little more complicated. Technically, hiring managers can’t legally ask you directly where you live — but omitting location will raise eyebrows. Even P.O. boxes are a little iffy.

If you do need to relocate, you should still include your current, out-of-town address on your resume, but be prepared to answer relocation status questions in an interview. If the company doesn’t offer relocation packages, will you be able to afford taking the job and moving anyway? If not, you may be wasting time.

5) College/Graduate School and Major/Concentration

Which is more important: Where you went to school, or what you studied?

It depends on the job you’re applying for. In most cases, your degree should make sense for the role. Hiring managers are looking for the tie-in; what’s relevant about what a candidate’s done in school. That doesn’t mean only marketing majors can apply to marketing jobs — marketing teams might hire someone who came out of creative studies like liberal arts, graphic design, or writing. An engineering team, on the other hand, probably won’t hire someone without a computer science degree.

It also depends on how successful you were at the school you attended. While there are some hiring managers who only give interviews to graduates of top-tier schools, most say it helps to go to a top-tier school, but it’s certainly not a deal-breaker if you went to a lower-tier school or community college. A community college graduate with a 4.0 GPA could be more attractive than an Ivy League graduate with a 2.0.

Speaking of GPA — when to take it off your resume is subjective. If your GPA was below a 3.0, consider removing it altogether. If it’s higher than that, the Andrew says, “The benchmark is five to seven years after graduation, which is when candidates tend have a solid track record of employment. If you did well in school but had lackluster job prospects following graduation because of, say, a bad economy, you could definitely leave it on longer.”

It goes both ways, he explained: If you had great jobs and accomplishments following graduation but didn’t have a good GPA, consider removing your GPA earlier.

Three to five years after college or graduate school graduation, you can move your “Education” section to the bottom of your resume — unless you connected with someone through an alumni network or if you know an executive there also went to your school.

Want to take your marketing education to the next level and make your resume even more appealing to potential employers? Become a certified inbound marketing professional with HubSpot’s free marketing certification. Get started here.

6) Companies and Titles

Hiring managers will look at where you’ve worked before (do they recognize the company names or know anyone who works there?) and your titles at those companies.

“If you’re applying for a sales position at a software company like HubSpot, we’re looking for experience selling software,” David Fernandez, Recruiting Team Lead at HubSpot, told me. “If you’re applying for a services position, we’re looking for customer-facing experience.”

Yes, people tweak their titles at previous companies to more closely match the positions they’re applying for. If you do this, your “new” title should be close enough to what you really did that if someone were to call and check a reference, they wouldn’t be dumbfounded. Maybe “Clerk to the Surgical Waiting Room” becomes “Customer Service Clerk.” Also, make sure to change your titles on LinkedIn, too — hiring managers will check for consistency on LinkedIn, Fernandez said.

7) Top Few Bullet Points in Each Section

Each position you’ve had should be accompanied by no more than five to six bullet points. Remember, these hiring managers are scanning your resumes really quickly, so you want to make it easy for them to find and digest the relevant information by consolidating the most important points and putting them first. Paragraphs are a big no-no.

Luckily, you work in a profession where everything can be measured and analyzed, which means it’s relatively easy to tell an impressive story of success. Think about all the ways your work can be quantified through hard data and then fill your resume with action-packed bullet points that convey the value you’ve added.

Focus on accomplishments first before responsibilities and duties. If you had a senior management role, include the number of people you managed.

Also, include goals and metrics that hiring managers can use to compare you against other candidates, and make sure those metrics make sense so you don’t confuse the hiring manager. Run the metrics by your mom. I’m serious. If they make sense to her, then they’re all set. If not, then you weren’t clear enough and you need to tweak the language.

Examples might be increasing social media engagement, improving SEO ROI, driving increased web traffic, reducing bounce rates, boosting landing page conversions, etc. Once you have a list of your results, choose the best four or five and turn these into bullet points like these:

• Drove 37% improvement in newsletter clickthrough rates by rewriting sales copy.
• Grew ecommerce sales 23% in just 6 months by redesigning and A/B testing all landing pages.

Here’s a more detailed example:

If you want more examples of actionable data points, download these free resume templates.

8) Dates of Employment

Hiring managers look for job hopping and large gaps in employment, which are both red flags. Job hopping is a sign of failure to commit, a quality no one wants at their company. A word of advice: You should try to stay at every job for at least a year, preferably two or more years. Otherwise, it’s a red flag.

And if you took longer than six months off of work, MacIntyre suggests you explain the gap on your resume. If it’s something like teaching or the Peace Corps that you can describe like a job, then you can insert it into your resume just as you would any other position:

If it’s something like traveling abroad or taking time off for family or personal reasons, you can simply add it in italics of parenthesis. “Travelled abroad.” “Took time off for family.” “Took time off for personal reasons.” Hiring managers just want to see a rational explanation — that you were doing something productive with your time.

9) Interests and Hobbies

Whether you include interests and hobbies on your resume depends on the company and the job. If you’re applying for a creative role, hobbies like photography and painting could be interesting to an employer. If you’re hiring for an accounting role, then a hobby like skydiving wouldn’t be good to include — hiring managers might categorize you as a risk-taker, and do they really want a risk-taker managing their money?

“Think about the conclusions someone could draw from your hobbies relative to the role you’re hiring for,” Quinn advises. “Do they enhance or detract from the image you’re trying to convey? If you know the culture embraces unique individuals that have a broad background and set of interests, then it could be useful information. But conservative organizations probably don’t care what you do in your free time — in fact, they could interpret outside hobbies as distractions.”

Companies with cultures like HubSpot’s want their employees to have some personality and invest in outside interests. So if you’re applying to join that kind of culture, an “Interests” or “Hobbies” section could benefit you. “They’re great conversation starters,” says MacIntyre. “‘You’re a skier? Me too! Which mountain do you go to?’ It creates common ground for conversation and helps us assess culture fit.”

Before including or omitting this section on your resume, gain some intelligence about the company’s environment and culture. (And check out HubSpot’s culture code if you haven’t already.)

Spend Less Time on These …

Personal Statements/Objectives

In fact, we recommend skipping these altogether. Frankly, they’re irrelevant — not to mention way too easy to screw up. I’ve spoken with HubSpot recruiters about numerous times where candidates put the name of another local company on there — huge mistake.

Instead, replace it with a “Skills” or “Key Skills” section at the top of your resume, in column format, that highlights the top six to nine skills applicable to the role you’re applying for. Be sure to change these skills for each job and use the job description as a guideline.

Don’t plagiarize the job description by any means, but you can pull out key phrases. For example, in the example below, one of the listed skills is “Deep understanding of the consumer lifecycle.” That’s because the job description asked for exactly that: a deep understanding of the consumer lifecycle and customer journey.

Pro Tip: Although you should leave this section off your resume, you should have something in the ‘Summary’ section of your LinkedIn profile. Focus this section on specific skills and achievements. It’s a good place to put a link to your portfolio, blog, SlideShare presentations, or examples of work you’ve created like open-source code.

Use that space to talk about specific achievements from previous roles, awards you’ve won, or projects you’ve worked on. The information and skills on here should be applicable to where you’re headed in your career, not irrelevant past skills. (When I first heard this tip, I immediately took “emergency medicine” off of mine.)

Cover Letters

Cover letters vary in importance, depending on industry, and even on individual company. Here at HubSpot, we phased out requiring one — and instead ask candidates thoughtful questions during our application and interview process. Many companies that require you to write a cover letter will read it, but they’ll focus mostly on your resume.

With this in mind, include important details on your resume, like gaps in employment, rather than relying on your cover letter — which may never get read — to explain it. And reallocate those hours you plan to spend writing and perfecting your cover letter to writing and rewriting your resume. Your resume is the most important tool in the first stage of the application process, so spend a lot of time on it and ask multiple people to critique it.

It’s Just Like Marketing

As a marketer, you have a talent for communication and a solid understanding of what makes people buy. The good news is that by applying this knowledge to your own resume, you can easily stand out from the crowd.

Need to revamp your resume? Get started by downloading and customizing these free marketing resume templates.

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

What if you could make your marketing more relevant, more remarkable, and more relatable to your potential customers? Well, user-generated content can help you do all that. By facilitating interactions between your current and future customers, you can increase the authenticity of your marketing. Amplifying your customers’ experiences, beyond helping you retain your current customers, can also help you acquire more customers, too.

With that in mind, we’ve partnered with Yotpo to bring you The Guide to User-Generated Content: A Playbook for Ecommerce Marketers.

You’ll learn:

• How user-generated content powers your inbound strategy
• How to get started with user-generated content in ecommerce
• Great user-generated content examples from ecommerce sites
• User-generated content mistakes to avoid

Download The Guide to User-Generated Content: A Playbook for Ecommerce Marketers to get started with user-generated content in your marketing strategy.

Have you ever seen something in the window of a shop that you just had to have — and then bought it immediately?

In most cases, that’s not how purchases are made. (And thank goodness, otherwise many of us marketers would be out of a job.)

Most of the time, before becoming a customer, a person will first go through what’s called the sales funnel. The sales funnel consists of the different stages a customer goes through leading up to their purchase — from looking at your website for the first time, to subscribing to your email list and reading your emails over a period of time, to talking to a sales associate and figuring out whether to buy from you.

Although it’s called a “sales” funnel, it’s been at the heart of marketing for ages. That’s because at any given time, your prospective customers are all at different points in their journeys toward a purchase. It’s a marketer’s job to give them the fuel to move them along the funnel toward a purchase.

The internet has made it easier for marketers (and salespeople) to engage customers at the various stages of their journey using content marketing. That’s one of the main reasons that 88% of B2B marketers are using custom content marketing (up 86% from 2015), and 76% of marketers plan to produce more content this year.

Despite that increase, 65% of marketers are still challenged when it comes to understanding which types of content are effective and which types aren’t. Much of that challenge can be traced back to marketers who struggle with creating the right content, for the right people, at the right time.

When you don’t have a complete understanding your audience, a disconnect is created between your business and your potential customers. For content marketers, this usually means you’re putting out content that your readers don’t really relate with, which can cause you to lose them.

As is the case in all marketing disciplines, it’s important to understand your audience: how they think, the answers they seek, and the path they tend to take to find a solution. From that research, you can begin crafting a documented content strategy that maps your content to the various stages of the buyer’s journey.

In this post, I’ll begin by defining the buyer’s journey as it aligns with the sales funnel, by its three main parts: the top of the funnel (awareness), the middle of the funnel (evaluation), and the bottom of the funnel (purchase). Then, I’ll offer ideas up for effective types of content to create for folks in each stage, including examples from real companies.

Defining the Buyer’s Journey

In most cases, you can base your strategy around a three-stage funnel:

• Top of the Funnel: The “awareness” stage, where people looking for answers, resources, education, research data, opinions, and insight.
• Middle of the Funnel:T he “evaluation” stage, where people are doing heavy research on whether or not your product or service is a good fit for them.
• Bottom of the Funnel:T he “purchase” stage, where people are figuring out exactly what it would take to become a customer.

Keep in mind your funnel may look very different depending on factors like your industry, business model, product, pricing, and audience. Some B2C customers, for example, spend very little time in the middle of the funnel compared to B2B customers that require far more nurturing, engagement, and relationship development before a purchase is made. A $50 pair of sneakers, for instance, requires a lot less handholding when it comes to making purchase decisions than a $10,000 business software investment.

On the other hand, a B2C customer making a substantial purchase equating to thousands or tens-of-thousands of dollars — like a new car or a big vacation — may spend a lot more time in the middle of the funnel before making a decision as they research and develop trust with potential brands.

Price isn’t the only factor though. I guarantee I’d spend significantly more time looking into, engaging with, and comparing $5-per-month SaaS brands for a business service to a $5-per-month investment in something like Pandora or Slacker internet radio.

Because audiences can vary so widely based on industry and intent, persona research is of the utmost importance. Only by understanding their unique process for awareness and evaluation will you be able to create a truly effective content marketing strategy, packed with custom content that best supports their journey toward making a purchase.

Let’s look at a standard funnel and what you could expect at each phase:

Top of the Funnel: Awareness

At this point, a buyer is trying to solve problems, get an answer, or meet a need. They’re looking for top-level educational content to help direct them to a solution, like blog posts, social content, and ebooks. Their value as a lead is low because there’s no guarantee that they’ll buy from you. But those who find your content helpful and interesting may journey on to the middle of the funnel.

Middle of the Funnel: Evaluation

When someone moves into the middle of your funnel, it means you’ve captured their attention. They know they have a problem that has to be solved, and now they’re trying to discover the best solution. The need for a future purchase commitment creeps up as they’re evaluation their options.

While the top of the funnel is designed to educate a prospect, this is the stage where you want to show why your solutions in particular are the best fit. (You also want to help people determine if they’re not a good fit, which will be very important later for healthy customer retention. If you convince customers to buy who aren’t a good fit for your business in the long run, you could be shooting yourself in the foot in the form of high churn rate later.)

The middle of the funnel is typically a point of extended engagement where you’re nurturing a lead, building a relationship, and establishing trust between the audience and your brand.

Bottom of the Funnel: Purchase

The bottom of the funnel is where someone is making the actual purchase decision. They’re ready to buy, but that still doesn’t guarantee that they’re going to buy from you. That’s the last choice they have to make: Where do they get the solution they’re seeking?

In most cases, leads at the bottom of your funnel just need that final nudge and that compelling call-to-action to get them to make a purchase decision. The right offer and content at this stage can have a dramatic impact on lifting your conversions.

Content Ideas for Each Stage in the Funnel

Content Ideas for the Awareness Stage

According to Adweek, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making a purchase. There’s a good chance that a majority of your audience falls into that category. Remember, these people are looking for information and answers relating to a problem that points back to a product/service need.

One of the most powerful ways to capture their attention is through optimized, high-value written content like blog posts, ebooks and white papers, and reports with original research. Don’t feel limited to written content though; amazing top-of-funnel content can also include videos, social media content, courses and certifications, and other forms of educational content

Examples

Farmers Insurance, for example, launched its 15 Seconds of Smart campaign: short, 15-second videos educating their audience on insurance opportunities — while being wildly entertaining. These snackable bits of content were delightful, shareable, and educational all at once.

Another example comes from MindBody, a company that targets small business owners in the health, spa, and beauty industry. The “Inspiration” section of their blog is filled with user-generated content (content submitted by their customers) that taps into the power of emotional storytelling while increasing engagement with people who already love their products and leveraging the power of word-of-mount marketing. (Read this post for more inspirational user-generated content campaigns.)

ConversionXL is a website that specializes in educating marketers and business owners on conversion optimization. As such, much of the content they share is meant to drive high-value leads to their conversion optimization service, like gated offers.

However, in addition to these offers, they also launched a ConversionXL Institute, which offers training for those who either don’t have the budget or traffic for a premium optimization service. Their top-of-the-funnel content appeals to both audiences, using ebook offers to gain opt-ins and deliver value to their segmented audiences.

Content Ideas for the Evaluation Stage

Blogs are a great way to attract attention to your website, but they lack the personal engagement side of marketing that helps businesses qualify prospects and nurture relationships. This kind of engagement is necessary, especially for people in the middle of the funnel.

Evaluation is arguably the most critical point in the buyer’s journey because this is where prospective customers start eliminating solutions that aren’t a good fit.

Unfortunately, a surprising 68% of B2B organizations haven’t even defined the stages in their sales funnels. Without defining the stages in their funnel, they can’t possibly nurture leads effectively — meaning they’re making little to no concerted effort to move customers to the purchase stage.

Companies with refined middle-of-the-funnel engagement and lead management strategy see a 4–10 times higher response rate compared to generic email blasts and outreach. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% lift in sales opportunities. That’s not something good marketers take lightly.

People in the middle of your sales funnel are likely to be looking to you for content showing that you’re the experts in your industry. That’s why the most effective types of content in the evaluation stage are things like expert guides, webinars, live interactions, and whitepapers that compare your features and benefits with that of your competitors, like this one comparing HubSpot to WordPress.

Examples

Zendesk puts out a wealth of in-depth educational content, like the gated ebook offer on how to build and manage a virtual team below. This piece of content targets people who manage remote teams, and it goes a step further than a typical, top-of-the-funnel blog post by diving much deeper into the subject. Middle-of-funnel content like this helps point their audience to a specific solution, while simultaneously building a relationship between business and consumer.

Image Credit: The Kapost Blog 

DocuSign does a terrific job with their email marketing content by delivering timely and targeted expert content to an audience – building engagement leading up to a final CTA that spurs an audience to take action at the bottom of the funnel. (Here are more great examples of email marketing campaigns you can browse for more ideas.)

Image Credit: The Kapost Blog 

EYStudios, an ecommerce web design and development studio, regularly holds live webinars that include interactive commentary, user-submitted questions, and episodes that often feature expert contributors. Their interactive content targets those already tuned into the brand who are likely looking to make a change with their ecommerce site, or who may be gearing up for a launch.

Content Ideas for the Purchase Stage

The more time you spend online, the more you’ll see bottom-of-the-funnel content all over the internet. Websites are full of calls-to-action for trial offers, demos, downloads, and estimate request buttons — despite the fact that the majority of their audience isn’t ready to buy initially.

In fact, Google and CEB’s The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing report shows that people get up to 60% of the way through a buying process before they’re ready to talk to anyone about making a purchase. 

By itself, a bottom-of-the-funnel offer isn’t likely to close a lot of leads into customers. However, when you have it mapped appropriately to the buyer journey, you’re combining the compelling nature of that final offer with all the engagement you’ve created leading up to that point. You’re far more likely to nail the close and see that lift in conversions.

The most effective types of content in the purchase stage tend to be case studies, trial offers, demos, and product literature.

Examples

Kissmetrics is a star at using customer stories and data in an educational and entertaining way. Whereas many companies will list out their product features in a text-heavy format, Kissmetrics uses infographics and other attractive visual content to help close the deal. This is the kind of compelling digital product literature that’ll help sway a person’s decision.

Zapier has taken the demo route to the extreme, offering a “Free Forever” pricing plan to help onboard their audience. With the packed but slightly limited features, it’s a clever way to warm people up to the paid services. Once you sign up for the free option, Zapier cycles you back to the middle of the funnel and continues to strategically build the relationship by reinforcing the effectiveness of their platform and steering free or “demo” subscribers to their premium plans.

Amazon also knows the power of a free trial — and that a great way to get the people who sign up for one to purchase in the end is to give them the moon during that free trial. Their bottom-of-the-funnel offer is a completely open trial of the Prime service, including everything from live streaming to free digital book downloads and free Prime shipping. Once the trial is over, it’s hard for subscribers to let go.

Image Credit: International Business Times

The last example comes from HubSpot. HubSpot uses case studies as one of their main bottom-of-the-funnel content offers. And they don’t just offer a few, either; HubSpot offers hundreds of these case studies, showing through text and video exactly how their services have impacted real-world businesses. (Read this post to learn how to create your own compelling case studies.) 

Create a More Engaging Buyer’s Journey

Every business has a unique sales funnel, sculpted and designed around their buyer’s unique journey. It’s a recipe that can’t necessarily be replicated from one business to another. When creating your own buyer’s journey, there are a number of factors specific to your business to take into consideration.

That said, the general approach remains the same: Understand your audience, develop your funnel around your industry and audience intent, and create a documented content marketing strategy that maps custom content specifically to each phase of their journey through the funnel.

Do it well, and this process will have the greatest possible impact on your customer relationships, as well as the greatest possible lift in your overall conversions.

What other great TOFU, MOFU or BOFU content examples can you add to this list? Do you have a tip or two to share for how you’ve mapped your own company’s content journey to these stages? Leave me a note in the comments below.

Not too long ago, my alma mater asked me to give a talk about “what comes next” after business school. I was to address a group of MBA candidates about the discomfort of figuring out what to do with this fabulous new degree, and how to embrace the path to leadership. And in the process of preparing for it, I came across some pretty dismal statistics about the workplace.

Among other fun facts, I learned:

• Less than half of employees actually trust their senior managers.
• Only 32% of employees actually feel engaged with their work.
• 49% of employees would actually recommend working for their employer.

“Jeez,” I thought. “I’m not about to paint the best picture of the future, am I?”

But I kept looking. Instead of searching for more data on dissatisfied employees, I turned my attention to the ones who reported being engaged, happy, and confident at work. I wanted my audience to know that this positive reality existed, and I wanted to find out which factors contributed to it. And more often than not, it seemed, an employee’s satisfaction — high or low — could be traced back to his or her leaders.

So what makes those numbers strong? What creates trust, engagement, and confidence within the workplace? We asked a few people — ranging from record executives to business school professors — who have learned a thing or two about leadership, and came up with a list of ways that new leaders can build credibility. (To learn more, check out our free guide to leadership.)

7 Ways to Build Credibility When You’re a New Leader

1) Actively listen.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not surprised to learn that we only remember 25% to 50% of what we hear. I mean, I can only listen to my mother’s story about the deer eating her hydrangeas so many times, right?

But at work, tuning people out can be dangerous, especially when you’re managing them. You might miss important feedback, directions, or updates. Even worse? If your team thinks you’re not hearing them, they won’t confide in you. That can diminish the chances that they’ll turn to you when they have questions or need help, which in turn prevents them from producing their best work. That’s a top management faux pas: Not helping your team succeed.

That’s why it’s so important to learn how to actively listen, especially in the early stages of building credibility and earning trust as a leader. It’s not an easy task at first — especially when we’re constantly overloaded with information and stimuli — but it can be learned with a few good habits. (HubSpot’s VP of Sales, Pete Caputa, writes more about that here.)

When colleagues are speaking to you, keep distractions minimized or at bay; try moving the conversation away from anything that might cause your attention to stray, like your computer or mobile devices. And don’t be afraid to do whatever’s necessary to make sure you heard the person correctly, even if it means repeating back to them what you think you heard.

2) Get to the point.

Not only do we only retain about half of what we hear, but now, studies say that humans have a shorter attention span than goldfish. So when you speak to your team, cut to the chase — you want them to remember the important parts.

The Brandon Hall Group listed what I like to call the “CSS” of verbal communication:

• Clearly
• Simply
• Succinctly

The first, “clearly,” is particularly important — according to a recent Wrike work management survey, 37% of employees blamed “unclear priorities” for decreased productivity. So don’t water down your message with a lot of big words or details to prove your competence; not only does that detract from your confidence as a leader, which we’ll get to later, but it’ll undercut focus from your main takeaways.

But while you’re keeping things brief, make sure your team knows that you’re also receptive to questions and feedback. Only 20% of employees say that their managers take action when concerns are voiced, so when you invite input, you’re setting yourself apart as a leader.

3) Be consistent.

When I asked my friend Dessa — rapper extraordinaire and President of Doomtree Records — what her career has taught her about leadership, she said something that really resonated with me.

“Do what you say you’ll do.”

It seems simple in theory, right? But imagine this scenario: Being goal-oriented, you’ve taught yourself to eradicate the word “no” from your vocabulary. So you start off by saying “yes” to everything — more than any one person can actually take on — until you realize you’ve completely over-committed and can’t deliver on everything you agreed to. Been there? I have.

If you go from always saying “yes” to being so overwhelmed with commitments that you snap at new requests, it creates a major inconsistency in your leadership style. It makes your temperament look unpredictable, which can really stress out your team and make people less inclined to approach you. In fact, a recent study showed that employees actually prefer a manager who’s consistently mean over one with erratic behavior.

“One of the most important things for leaders to think about is consistency,” James Harder, Director of Communications at Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries, told me. “If your messaging is consistent, it gives you more credibility. That is true with any phase of marketing, or for that matter, communication.”

So before you make a promise, be sure to ask yourself, “Is this a priority? Can I really take this on right now?” Knowing when to say “no” will create a balanced sense of priority among your team, and on your own to-do list.

4) Get to know as many people as possible.

When I asked Harvard Business School Leadership professor Ethan Bernstein for his thoughts on leadership credibility, he summed it up with one line: It’s “built by doing, enabling, and recognizing great work.”

So while you’re likely in a position of leadership because of your own achievements, it’s important to acknowledge that people around you do good work, too.

Why is that?

Well, to start, employee recognition goes a long way — 70% of employees in North America say that receiving recognition is “effective,” for example, when it comes to their engagement.

But by going beyond the parameters of your own team, you’re better able to recognize the far-reaching talent throughout your organization. That creates an opportunity to “design mutually beneficial partnerships” — another leadership lesson that Dessa says she’s picked up — which can accomplish a few things.

Reaching out to more people within your organization sends the message that you’re open to different perspectives. Since that kind of behavior shows that you’re looking beyond your own self-interest, it can build credibility. At HubSpot, for example, we follow the philosophy of solving for the customer first. So when our leaders are able to seek out multiple perspectives and talents within the company, it ultimately leads to more people improving and creating new solutions.

No wonder McKinsey identifies “seeking different perspectives” as a leadership best practice. It can lead to the beneficial partnerships that Dessa was talking about: The ones that reach across different departments to work toward a common goal.

5) Seek out speaking opportunities.

Remember all those lessons on the best ways to speak with your team? For those who don’t love addressing groups to begin with (and don’t worry — you’re in good company), effective communication might require a little extra effort.

That’s why my colleague, Lindsay Kolowich, suggests that leaders go out of their way to find speaking opportunities. “Not only will it get your name out there,” which is always a good way to build credibility, she says, but “it’ll give you good practice. The more advanced you become in your career, the more you will be expected to speak.”

So how do you go about finding these opportunities? First, check out our CMO’s guide to becoming a better speaker. Then — once again — start with the people around you.

“I got my first few speaking gigs by emailing someone on my PR team,” Kolowich says. “I asked how I might be able to find events that could be a good fit.” As a result, she ended up being booked for several talks.

If you do reach out to your company’s PR department, just make sure to be specific. Identify your area of expertise, the geographical location(s) where you’d like to speak, and the types of events that interest you the most: Workshops, conferences, etc. And even if your organization doesn’t have a PR rep, these are the details you’ll need when looking for opportunities on your own.

6) Trust the training.

Corporate training gets such a bad rap, doesn’t it? When we think of it, many of us have visions of things like trust falls and kitschy name-games. But look beyond the stereotypes. Training has changed, and it can be highly valuable.

Most companies — 83% of them, in fact — have said how important it is for all leaders to receive some sort of training. But only 5% of employers actually have it. So while it might be easy to roll your eyes at the idea of training, think of it this way: Your company is part of the small percentage employers who actually care enough to invest in leadership development. (You are valued!)

That’s true no matter where you are in your career. Even if you’ve been with your company for years, writes HubSpot Principal Marketing Strategist Sam Mallikarjunan, “it’s probably been a while since you went through new hire training.” And because many of the people reporting to you have gone through this process recently, you might want to experience it, too.

When you have something like that in common with your team, it can heighten your ability to relate and empathize, which helps to improve credibility — leaders with empathy show a 40% higher overall performance than those without.

7) Have trust in yourself.

When I first started at HubSpot and felt a little nervous about my new role, someone suggested that I try Googling “new job anxiety.” I immediately felt better, if for no other reason than my fears seemed to be more common than I thought.

For a lot of us, a big part of this stress can be traced to something called “imposter syndrome”: The sense that, no matter how much we’ve achieved, we don’t belong in a leadership position or deserve the success of having gotten there. A whopping 70% of us — especially particularly ambitious folks — will endure that feeling at some point in our careers.

But if we don’t even lend ourselves any credibility, how can we expect to build it within our teams? Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy has discussed this phenomenon quite a bit. In her TED Talk, she even referenced the “fake-it-till-you-make-it” approach.

By “faking it,” Cuddy isn’t suggesting that you lie about your credentials. Instead, she’s encouraging the idea of doing what scares you the most — like public speaking, as we discussed above — and internally reciting whatever mantra you need to in order to make it happen (for example, “I am a rock star”). When you repeatedly face these fears, she says, you’ll get to a point where you realize — and believe — that you do, in fact, belong in this position of leadership.

When you think about it, confidence = credibility. Merriam Webster defines the former as “the feeling of being certain that something will happen or that something is true,” and the latter as “the quality of being believed or accepted as true, real, or honest.” So believe in your team, believe in the training, and believe in yourself — the sooner you can, the sooner you’ll be on your way to building credibility as a leader.