Think of the most successful salespeople you know. They’re equal parts artist and scientist, skilled at building trust, telling their products’ stories in a persuasive way, answering and overcoming objections and, finally, closing the deal.

If you’re an ecommerce company, your website is your salesperson. And like a good salesperson, your site should bring your brand’s personality to the forefront while leveraging a few fundamental tactics of artful online dealmaking:

1) Build Trust by Highlighting Your Brand Promise on Your Homepage

Strong salespeople never begin in the middle of the story. They start by presenting who they are and what makes their company different—in other words, their brand. Homepages are a great place to show off your brand message, best products, and any timely promotions you might have.

Do you offer an at-home trial or free returns? Are your products eco-friendly? The homepage is the place to establish what sets your company apart, typically using bold photography and punchy statements that can link to interior pages for more info. Making your return policy clear and easily accessible can also help build trust, as can having a clear value proposition.

2) Create a Complete Shopping Experience

Product pages are the meat of your sales pitch and should overcome customers’ concerns and objections for purchasing the product. Having beautiful product photography is one of the quickest ways to increase sales. Not only does it help your brand build trust, it makes it easier for customers to make purchasing decisions as they can more clearly study the product. On product pages, use photos of the front, back, top, sides and bottom of your products to mimic the experience of looking at a product in person. If applicable, show the product in various stages of being open or closed with accompanying products or accessories. In addition, it’s a good idea to show the product in use so that customers can get a sense of size and scale.

Do your products group naturally into “looks” or collections? Just as a brick-and-mortar shop owner might dress a mannequin or arrange a grouping of products in the window, ecommerce providers are increasingly upselling by adding the ability to shop entire looks or groups, rather than one product at a time.

Social proof—customer reviews—are also an essential part of the sales process and are particularly important for ecommerce, since the customer is purchasing the product without seeing it in person. One way to go beyond typical product details and general customer reviews is to enable customers to rate and review individual features of the product. For example, a clothing store might offer customers the ability to rate each item’s width and length, fit, material and color. That way prospective buyers can decide whether someone else’s three-star product might be a five-star product for them, or vice versa.

3) Seal the Deal With a Super-Easy Checkout

The checkout process is the most crucial element of an ecommerce site. If poorly implemented, none of the previous elements will matter. There are many factors that contribute to a great checkout experience, including speed, having a guest checkout option, easy form filling, progress indicators and a persistent cart summary. If you can offer free shipping or other features that reduce the objections to buying, conversions will go up even more.

Just like salespeople need to understand their customers’ buying process, your checkout experience should depend on your customers’ typical purchases. If they typically buy in large quantities, say a minimum of 10 products each, it’s important to make sure it’s easy for them to get items into the cart with varying quantities. In this situation, you might include quantity selectors inside the product tiles to save customers from having to click into another page to make quantity edits. These kinds of “minor” features often seem invisible, but combine to make a high-converting checkout process.

Of course, just as salespeople must be responsive to their prospects’ questions and requests, your site must load quickly and your on-site search functionality must work properly.

And with all of these elements, you should A/B or multivariate test your ecommerce design elements and iterate –– every business is different, and it’s possible you will stumble upon new best practices during your testing. This is a cost-efficient and effective way to truly know what makes your customers pull the trigger on a purchase.

Like any good sales pitch, an ecommerce site should be constantly evolving, with each design element purposefully chosen, tested and refined or replaced, all with the goal of driving conversions. When in doubt about a design choice, be sure you’ve answered these three questions: What does it make the customer feel about the brand and its products? Does it provide information the customer needs to make a purchasing decision? Does it make it easier to complete that purchase? Let the sales process be your guide, and you’ll have the tools you need to craft a design that converts.

1) PlayBuzz

The original PlayBuzz site is for the average Internet user interested in which Hogwarts house she belongs to or wants to test her knowledge about 1990s TV shows, but PlayBuzz’s business site is tailored to empowering companies to generate an interactive feature, embed it in their marketing content and watch user engagement rise and their network grow.

With PlayBuzz you can create free countdowns, polls, personality quizzes, flip cards, trivia, rankable lists, general lists, gallery quizzes and a swipe voting feature made popular by dating apps. Each element has an appealing quality that catches readers’ attention and can communicate information quickly in a visual manner. It also keeps visitors on your page longer and is designed for social sharing.

When choosing from so many options, remember highly interactive features like quizzes and swiping are good for social platforms and visually driven posts, while flip cards and polls are good for text-heavy content.

When you are designing these embeddable features, keep in mind your company’s brand and voice, this will ensure consistency while adding that added bonus customers appreciate. The best way to track the success of PlayBuzz content is to monitor its social performance in shares, engagement and views.

PlayBuzz is so user-friendly, you will forget you are marketing while playing with the design tools and fun features. Check out these flip cards we made with it.

2) SlideShare

Slide presentations are something nearly every professional has seen or used, whether it’s from business trainings, college lectures or group projects. Putting information in a condensed, easily-digestible format is one of the most popular marketing, sales and proposal tactics because of its familiarity and logic.

SlideShare can be embedded into any blog post and breaks down a topic for readers in a much more visual and attractive manner than static paragraphs of text. Try it with an existing post that needs more visits but provides valuable content.

Take text from the blog, simplify it for each slide, keeping word count at a minimum, include a CTA on the last slide, and embed the feature somewhere in the post. If you put the slides near the top, you can include a friendly disclaimer such as, “Don’t have time to read the rest? We summed it up for you here.”

Readers appreciate options for taking in information and really appreciate when you understand their limits. SlideShare transforms already written content into powerful snippets of data.

Don’t think of SlideShare as a place to put all the information in bullet points; think of it as a place to present an idea in a visual and condensed manner. It might be a good challenge to fit a hefty amount of information into a slide show. This exercise will help you write succinctly and think about content in an out-of-the-box way.

Give the most important points priority instead of cramming an entire blog post into a slide show. Graphs, statistics and quick thoughts are especially effective on SlideShare.

3) Make a GIF

Regardless of how you pronounce it (“JIF” or “GIF”), these little graphics excel at entertaining and inserting some fun into your digital content. It shows you have a sense of humor and don’t take yourself too seriously. That said, make sure to use GIFs sparingly and only for appropriate topics.

Many websites have tools for creating your own animated GIF or have a domain of popular ones for every emotion and situation. This imagery also warrants the use of BuzzFeed-worthy titles and descriptions to accompany your chosen GIFs.

This type of interactive content performs excellently on social platforms because of the flashy element and viral qualities. These qualities lend themselves well to tracking social success easily by monitoring shares, likes and engagement.

When choosing or creating a GIF, make sure it is a reference your audience will understand. You wouldn’t want to use a GIF from a popular TV show if it’s not likely your customers are familiar with it. However, if pop culture references are common in your content, feel free to use GIFs as freely as you’d like. 

Websites such as GIPHY make the art of finding the right GIF quick and entertaining, while at the same time providing you with everythin you need to share with your audience. Take the GIF below – I typed “content marketing’ into the search box, found this gem from Mad Men, and simply copied the embed code into the blog. Easy!

via GIPHY

4) Qzzr

If the products or services you are marketing lend well to quizzing your prospects, Qzzr is the right tool for engaging them further. This free quiz-making platform allows you to create a quiz in minutes, embed it into any post and track the results. It also comes with a WordPress plugin for easy integration.

Customers love to test their knowledge, if only to prove how much they know. They also love to reveal pieces of their personality and discover new sides of themselves. Giving your customers these opportunities through quizzes is the perfect gateway for interaction and connection.

Keep quizzes as short as possible so as not to fatigue your readers. Make sure the answers are pointed and don’t allow quiz takers to avoid questions. There is nothing worse than a vague answer and worthless results. And there is nothing better than seeing interactions with customers and the fruitful rewards of getting specific.

You might use a quiz if you are trying to target specific products or services to your customers as they begin their buying journey. The fashion-delivery company Stitch Fix requires all first-time users to take a fashion quiz to determine which products will please them most.

You can emulate this model or use a quiz for testing your customer’s knowledge about your industry, current events or other relevant topics. Readers especially love quizzes that tell them which [car, building, time period, scientist, politician, 1980s pop star, etc. they are most like.

The great thing about Qzzr is the ability to integrate with CRM systems. This feature allows you to track the success of each quiz, pull data from the results and target customers more accurately and personally.

5) Podcasts

Podcasts aren’t just for Serial fans or listeners of public radio. The audio format is a gold mine for the busy professional. It gives multi-taskers a chance to consume your content on their terms. There might not be enough time in the day to read all the content circulating within certain industries or interact with specific companies.

But if marketers give professionals a way to gain all the benefits of static content during their daily commute without burying their faces in a screen, they might see a rise in interest and customer conversation. It’s also great for audio learners and is a much more casual and open environment for bringing guests and commentators to foster a fruitful discussion.

Before creating a podcast, study up. Listen to all different kinds of podcasts to figure out what works. It’s also good to pay attention to which length is appropriate. If you are getting more downloads and listens for shorter episodes, your customers might want quick conversation. But if you see a demand for longer form podcasts, your customers probably appreciate deep dives into certain topics.

Bring in guests for fresh perspective. Try implementing different segments to break up the monotony of a single episode. But make sure to get into the groove of podcasting before you give up or count your early success.

As you develop your podcast and find what works, you will find you can adjust and evolve episode to episode based on listener feedback or performance statistics. The key is keeping your eyes and ears open. Podcasting is just as much about listening as it is about talking.

Wrapping it up

Interactive content rules the marketing landscape for now and the foreseeable future. There’s no denying customers want more than some block text on a page. They want to dive in, learn more, give feedback and get to know the company. Just ensure you are balancing the message within the format and you will see immediate success. Trying any of these methods should result in an increase of engagement and possibly even leads without the headache of a complicated tool and it won’t cost you a cent.

Writer’s block. Lack of focus. Laziness. The feeling can come in many different flavors, but they’re all tied to the same, underlying issue of simply being uninspired.

Think of inspiration as the emotional equivalent of incentive. As an employee or a freelancer, you have an incentive (i.e. your paycheck) to do great work. It’s a very tangible, measurable thing that can motivate you.

Inspiration, on the other hand, is considerably more abstract. It’s a feeling, or an influence, that not only motivates you, but also makes you feel good about the work that you’re doing. And that’s exactly why those moments of inspiration often come from the most unlikely of places.

The Psychology of Inspiration

While inspiration was originally thought to be a spiritual or even supernatural phenomenon, research now shows that it’s rooted in three key, psychological components:

1. Evocation: when a thought or memory is spontaneously triggered in your mind
2. Transcendence: when you see something in a new way, or are able to move beyond a “usual” way of thinking
3. Motivation: when you’re compelled to express or actualize an idea

Knowing the underlying components of inspiration makes it easy to see why it’s such a powerful force. When you’re inspired, you’re not just motivated; you’re thinking in a new way, which can lead you to those big, breakthrough, “a-ha” moments. (Of course, knowledge is power when it comes to sparking these moments.)

Unfortunately, we can’t feel like that all the time. And yet, in the workplace, we’re always expected to meet — and ideally, exceed — expectations … our inspiration levels notwithstanding.

There are some well-known solutions to this inspiration problem, of course. For example, you could try going for a walk in nature, or meditating, or listening to inspirational music. (Might I suggest Survivor’s 1982 masterpiece, “Eye of the Tiger,” which pairs nicely with a can of Red Bull.)

As someone who has to write and create on a daily basis, I’ve identified (with the help of science … thanks, science!) some less obvious strategies for upping your inspiration levels.

How to Draw Inspiration From the Most Unlikely Places

1) Embrace Your Daydreams

You might think of daydreaming as an enemy of inspiration. After all, if you’re trying to come up with an innovative approach to solving a problem or completing a project, intense focus seems like it would be pretty critical.

But alas, that’s not how inspiration works.

In a daydream, you don’t have to be hindered by the stresses of pesky old reality. Instead, your mind is free to float between past and future; between real-life and fantasy. Your daydream might start with you revisiting that vacation you took last year … but before you know it, you’re envisioning what a vacation on Mars might be like. (Note to self: Remember to pack a spacesuit.)

The inherent randomness of daydreaming makes it a perfect activity for triggering inspiration, as it can help you find connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. As psychologist Malia Fox Mason once told once told Psychology Today, “By allowing your mind the freedom to roam, the chances that you’re going to have an insight are much higher. It’s likely that you are going to recombine pieces of information in a novel way.”

2) Pull an All-Nighter

If you’re searching for inspiration, pulling an all-nighter could help you get in the right frame of mind. (Unless you’re a night owl, in which case you might want to try waking up early.) Here’s why.

When you’re faced with an analytic problem (i.e. a problem that you can solve by systematically employing a known strategy), the research tells us that you should attack the problem during an optimal time of day. What that optimal time is will vary from person to person, but think of it as the time of day when you’re most alert and most able to tune out distractions.

However, when you’re faced with an insight problem (i.e. a problem that can’t be solved through grinding, but requires a revelation or “a-ha” moment), that same research tells us that you’re better off attacking it during a non-optimal time of day.

The underlying explanation here is tied closely to the daydreaming/inspiration phenomenon: When you’re feeling overtired, or otherwise “out of it,” you’re more susceptible to the influence of other ideas.

“If you need to open your mind to alternative approaches and consider diverse options, it may be wise to do so when your filter is not so functional,” writes Cindi May for Scientific American. “You just may be able to see what you’ve been missing.”

3) Get Outside of Your Bubble

Go to the same bar or restaurant every Friday with the same group of friends? Watch the same show every Sunday night? Read the same publication every Monday morning?

This, my friends, is your bubble. The same places, the same people, the same viewpoints … over and over and over.  If you’re looking to get inspired, you need to get outside of this bubble — from time to time, at least. Go to a different restaurant. Hang out with different friends. Watch a new show. Read a new publication.

There isn’t a specific course of action you really need to follow here. The point is this: In order to prep your mind for inspiration, you need to take what you usually do, and change it. As was the case with daydreaming, this will help open you up to new ideas and help your mind make novel connections.

In psychology, this is tied to the concept of “openness to experience.” Folks with a high level of openness to experience are more intellectually curious and prefer engaging in a variety of activities as opposed to sticking to a routine.

Research suggests that there’s a correlation between openness to experience and how frequently people feel inspired. So if you’re serious about finding inspiration, give your schedule a shuffle and expose yourself to some different perspectives.

4) Write Down Your Crappy Ideas

All of them.

How many times have you stared at a blank screen, the cursor blinking, and you’re just waiting for inspiration to strike? Inside your brain, the wheels are turning; but every idea you come up with you immediately dismiss for one reason or another. Not practical. Too expensive. Would require renting a llama.

Don’t let these ideas slip away. Instead, write them down. Every single one of them.

Ultimately, having a hundred bad ideas in front of you is better than having no ideas in front of you. Despite their crappiness, these ideas can still help you feel inspired — and help you lead you to the good ideas. 

In fact, researchers have found that the more variance you have in the quality of your ideas (i.e., some are terrible, some are “meh,” and some are alright), the more likely you’ll be to arrive at truly great idea.

5) Forget the Coffee; Grab a Beer

To be clear, beer is not a magical inspiration potion. That being said, beer and other alcoholic beverages (if consumed in reasonable quantities) can potentially help prime your brain for inspiration.

Here’s a simplified look at how this works: When you drink a beer, the alcohol interferes with the neurons in your brain, causing a slowdown in how fast you’re able to process information (similar to what happens when you’re over-tired). The end result? You can’t focus on stuff very well. But, as we’ve already established, not focusing is actually key to feeling inspired.

Bearing that in mind, coffee is probably the last thing you want to drink if you’re searching for inspiration. Unlike alcohol, caffeine (at least initially) helps you focus. And when you’re focused, you’re not able to make connections between different ideas as easily. Breaking that focus is what allows inspiration to seep in.

(For a deeper dive on this topic, read this blog post for a deeper dive into how caffeine, alcohol and other substances affect creativity.)

Where do you draw your inspiration? Share your tips and ideas in the comments section below.

Starting a job search is a daunting task. People often feel pressured to find a new job as quickly as humanly possible — making it all too easy to jump headfirst into the hustle of browsing job listings and sending out applications to everything that looks remotely up your alley.

Not so fast, my friend.

In a world where information about you is readily available on the web and social media, it’s vital that you clean up and update your digital footprint and personal brand — before you start sending out those applications. Trust me, it’ll make your job search go much more smoothly.

Last summer, I found myself in an unexpected job search of my own. As a marketer, I did what I do best: I ran my job search like a marketing campaign. That meant not only updating my resume, but updating my personal brand, my social media profiles, my email signature, and more.

Here are six steps I took during that job search that helped me land my job at HubSpot within a month. (Want your marketing resume to stand out to recruiters? Click here to learn how to get your inbound marketing certification from HubSpot Academy.)

6 Things to Update Before Starting Your Next Job Search

1) Update your resume, and use it to tell a story you’re excited about.

Your resume is still one of the most important parts of your job application. But when it comes to updating it, a lot of people approach them with too rigid a perspective.  Interviewers want to hear more than the projects you worked on and the result you achieved; they want to hear the excitement in your voice as you tell them about those projects.

First, take a look at the last version of your resume. (Download these 10 free marketing resume templates if you’re starting from scratch.) Then, reflect on who you are today compared with who you were when you wrote the last edition of your resume.

Start with the big stories, the home runs, and the campaigns that actually moved the needle for your team, your customers, or your company. Add new skills, technical or not — you know, the supporting evidence to how you accomplished those home runs. Sprinkle in hard numbers wherever you can to make those stories real.

Once you’ve got the content down, refresh your formatting. How you format the document itself clues recruiters and hiring managers in to the way you collect your thoughts and organize your ideas. Also, if you’re three to five years out of college or graduate school graduation, go ahead and move that “Education” section to the bottom — that is, unless you connected with someone through an alumni network or if you know an executive there also went to your school.

2) Update your professional (and personal) brand.

While you’re creating your resume, think about your personal brand. What are you passionate about? What do you do outside of work? If someone were to ask you who you are and what you care about, what’s your thirty-second elevator pitch? If you were to get stuck in that elevator, what’s the long version — with all the details that describe how you got to where you are and where you’d like to be in the future?

When you answer these questions, you’re building your personal narrative. When you do this exercise, be honest with yourself. Be sincere. Make sure this is really a story about you. If you told your closest friends your spiel, would they laugh you out of the room? (Here’s a detailed guide to personal branding if you need some help.)

Once you’ve gotten your message and your branding down, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty.

3) Update your social networks for the mission at hand.

When recruiters and interviewers do research on you to see if you’re a fit, you’d better believe they’re going to take a good look at your social profiles. In fact, a study from Jobvite found that 93% of hiring managers will review a candidate’s social profile before making a hiring decision.

The last thing you want is for your posts to cost you a job opportunity. Here are some steps you can take to audit your social media presence.

Facebook

Consider updating privacy settings to make sure only the posts you want public can be seen by potential interviewers.

First, see what your profile looks to people who aren’t Facebook friends with you (and people with varying degrees of friendship) using Facebook’s “View as” feature. To do that, go to your Facebook profile and click the button with the three dots to the right of “View Activity Log” on your cover photo, and click “View As.” 

When the page refreshes, it’ll show you what your profile looks like to the public. You can also go ahead and type in specific friends’ names to see what your profile looks like to them.

Twitter

In many ways, recruiters might see your tweets are an extension of your personality, interests, and opinions. Take care to read through your last few months of tweets to make sure they represent you in a professional way. In retrospect, that angry tweet you sent to an airline while sitting on the tarmac may not have cast you in the best light …

LinkedIn

First, turn off broadcast notifications so you can make changes to your profile without broadcasting them to your network. To do that, log in and move your cursor over “Profile” at the top of your homepage, and select “Edit Profile.” Then, find the box on the righthand side of your profile that says “Notify your network?” and toggle the button so it says “No.”

Next, add media, examples of your work, a link to an updated portfolio, and any new skills, certifications, and awards you may have gained. (Click here for a complete cheat sheet for updating your LinkedIn profile.)

4) Update your email signature.

Chances are, you’re going to be emailing back and forth with recruiters and potential employers as you search for your next job. An email signature is an easy way to link to places you want them to see, like your Twitter and/or LinkedIn accounts, your blog, your online portfolio, and so on. (Just be sure you’re not making any of these 15 common email signature mistakes.)

Most email clients have a feature that’ll allow you to set up a signature that’ll be automatically appended to any emails you compose.

To set up an email signature in Gmail: Click the gear icon and select “Settings” from the dropdown menu. Stay on the “General” tab and scroll down to the Signature” section. Then, select the option below “No signature” to turn the feature on. (You can find more details here.)

To set up an email signature in Outlook: On the “Home” tab, choose “New Email.” On the “Message” tab in the “Include” group, choose “Signature” and then “Signatures.

Under “Select signature to edit,” choose “New.” In the dialogue box that appears, type in a name for the signature. Under “Edit signature,” type in your signature and then choose “OK” when you’re done. (You can find more details here.)

(HubSpot customers: Click here to learn how to set up your email signature in HubSpot’s CRM.)

5) Update your network, and empower them to help you.

Now that your message, brand, and digital representation are all updated and ready, it’s time to tell your friends, family, mentors, colleagues, and coaches that you’re on the market. (If you’re choosing to be open about it, that is.)

You can prepare for these conversations in a few different ways. If you know the person’s network extends into a company you’re interested in, be direct with them. Ask for an introduction to the person you need to speak to. (Not sure how? Read this blog post for an email template for asking someone to give you an email introduction.)

Or, ask them for a LinkedIn recommendation. My colleague Emma Brudner wrote a blog post about how to ask for LinkedIn recommendations, including an email template. She made a great point in her post: To ensure you get a customized recommendation, prompt the person you ask with a few specific topics or questions. For example:

“I’m really proud of the work we did on XYZ project. Could you write a bit about that initiative and what our collaboration and results were like?”

If you don’t have a target quite yet, be prepared to describe the opportunity you’re looking for: company size, industry, job function, role, and so on. The better you can prepare the people you reach out to, the more likely they are to help you.

6) Refresh your mindset.

Like I said, starting a job search is no easy task. You will get ignored, and you will get rejected. Expect it, and learn from it. Adapt your process. Keep your chin up, and keep your eyes on the prize.

On the other side of that same coin, don’t get overconfident, either. It can be tempting to stop sourcing new opportunities when you have a third-round interview at a company you like. It can feel like you’re going to jinx it, right? Here’s the problem: If that opportunity falls through, you’ll be back at square one and will need to build your pipeline from scratch all over again.

Keep your pipeline of opportunities full so that you can walk into that third-round interview confidently knowing that you have other opportunities developing. If you’re lucky, you might even have multiple offers to choose from.

Good luck!

What other things would you want to update before applying for a new job? Share with us in the comments.

These days, knowing how to use Microsoft Excel is so expected that it hardly warrants a line on our resumes. But, let’s be honest here: How well do you really know how to use it?

You may know how to plug in numbers and add up cells in a column, but that’s not going to get you far when it comes to reporting on your metrics.

Gone are the days when marketers could rely on their gut for important business decisions. More than likely, you’ve already been tasked with identifying trends within customer survey results, performing content topic analyses, or pulling in sales data to calculate return on investment. What do all these things have in common? They require a bit more Excel knowledge than what we learned in grade school. 

Here’s where our handy new guide How to Use Excel: Essential Training for Data-Driven Marketing comes in. Whether you’d like to create prettier charts (and faster), finally understand what pivot tables are, or complete your first VLOOKUP (I promise it’s not as scary as it sounds), this guide will teach you everything you need to make more informed marketing decisions, in less time.

Since we all know that reading about Excel may not be the most captivating topic, we’ve catered this ebook to your unique learning style. Inside, you’ll find:

• Short videos on each topic to help orient you — and for those in search of quick answers
• Deep dives into topics like basic functions, INDEX MATCH, pivot tables, conditional formatting, VLOOKUP, IF functions, data visualization, and more
• Tips, tricks, and advice about using Excel to build reports
• Practice questions at the close of each chapter

So don’t push off mastering Excel another day.

Download How to Use Excel: Essential Training for Data-Driven Marketing.

Think back to the last digital marketing campaign that blew you off your feet. Maybe it was one that made you stop and think. Maybe it was one that made you laugh so hard you cried. Maybe it was one that made you realize you needed something you never even knew existed. No matter what it made you do or feel, the fact that you remembered it means that it was at least somewhat successful.

So how was that company able to connect with you so successfully? It certainly wasn’t just blind luck, you’re too sharp for that!

While I don’t know what the marketers responsible for your favorite digital campaign actually did, I can say with almost 100% certainty that they spent a large amount of time researching their market, analyzing different pieces of data and building out detailed strategies that helped them blow you away through flawless execution.

The fact of the matter is that running a successful digital marketing campaign takes a lot of time and energy, not only during its implementation but also during the build up to go-live. If you’re looking to capture the attention of your target market like your favorite campaign did to you but don’t know where to start or need to hit the refresh button on an existing digital campaign, these 12 pieces of content and strategy have been proven to help establish a solid foundation and direction for inbound marketing to move forward successfully with.

1) Personas

Everyone knows that you should build out detailed personas before starting a campaign so I won’t waste much time here. If you don’t know your target market and the key players within it intimately, you’re not going to have a good time! Work with your sales team, senior marketing members and anyone else with experience working with your industry’s customers (customer service reps, store managers, etc.) to build out a detailed profile around their background, job roles, goals and challenges so that you can better create content that will connect with them.

Tips:

• Interview experts within your company. This will help you build a general idea of who you are targeting and how your product/service connects with them.
• Reach out to current customers for short, 30 minute interviews. Have a list of questions worked out beforehand and spend more time talking about them and their job/company vs. your product/service. This is where you will be able to build out a more well-rounded profile of a qualified persona and how your company can successfully win business.
• Reach out to prospects that your sales team recently lost (if possible). Run them through the same interview as above but try to focus a bit more of your time at the end of the interview collecting information on why they decided against your company. This will help you build out a better understanding of major objections your sales team faces.

Takeaways:

The more time you spend on this single aspect of your campaign buildout, the more likely you are to succeed. While a number of the other items on this list might lend themselves to less prep time and energy to create, personas require more and can make or break your overall campaign.

2) Competitive Analysis

To paraphrase Sun Tzu, “Know yourself and your enemy and you shall win 1,000 battles.” In a time where nearly every prospect compares multiple options online before making a purchasing decision, you can’t afford to ignore what your competition is doing with their digital efforts.

By knowing the ins and outs of all public areas of a competition’s marketing from social media to blogging to offer creation and more, you can better understand who they are targeting with their marketing, what content they are focusing on and where they have found the most success. Once you know this, you can better understand how you can and should position yourself on these different mediums to stay one step ahead of everyone else.

Tips:

• Find a solid list (about 5-7) of both direct and indirect competitors to analyze.
• For an overall look at your competition’s digital marketing efforts, use HubSpot’s Marketing Grader to see where everyone stands.
• Use the Alexa Toolbar to find yours and your competitors’ traffic rankings.
• Search your target keywords and note who comes up on the first page or above you in the results.
• List out what social media sites your competitors are on (they should promote which platforms they are on through their site on either their header, footer or contact page).
• Note how many followers your competitors have on each platform
• Note what content your competitors are sharing and how. Do they promote a lot of their own stuff or industry notes? What tone do take? How much engagement do they get from their followers?
• Search each of your competitors’ sites for a blog. If they have one look at how often they blog, what they are blogging about, and what kind of engagement they are receiving.
• Search each of your competitors’ sites for a resources page promoting any type of offer and try to download them (I know, it sounds sleazy, but get over it. They’re doing the same to you) to see whwat kinds content they produce, what are they doing well and what are they missing.

Takeaways:

The more you know about your competitors, what they’re doing and what they’re finding success with, the more information you will have to create a more advanced and successful campaign of your own.

3) Voice & Messaging

Understanding who your personas and competitors are is one thing. Understanding how to properly connect with those personas and differentiate yourself from your competition in a succinct manner is another. While your sales team may already know how to approach prospective customers in a way that connects to their goals and challenges while differentiating themselves from their competition, do you as a marketer know how to do the same with your content?

Taking the time to go through different exercises to help you verbalize and document how you can position your content to better connect with your personas and differentiate yourself from competitors will help you immensely when it comes to creating content to effectively convert qualified traffic into leads for your sales team.

Tips:

For each of your main personas, answer the following questions to fill in this very telling (slightly run-on) sentence: “We will target (Blank), specifically (Blank), who (blank). We (Blank) that (Blank) unlike (Blank).

• What type of companies (or consumers for B2C) are you targeting?
• Who is the decision maker within that group that you will focus your marketing efforts on?
• What are the major needs and challenges that this persona faces that your company sees as an opportunity to help with?
• How is your company’s solution categorized by this persona? If they had to describe your solution, how would they do it?
• What are the main benefits that this persona gets from your solution?
• How does your solution differentiate positively from your direct competitors? Indirect competitors?

Takeaways:

You almost certainly already know in your mind what your company’s voice and messaging are but having an idea and fully working it out on paper are two very different things. Spend the necessary time to perform a brain dump before organizing it with help from the sentence in the tips above and you will walk away with strong phrases that both you and your sales team can use moving forward.

4) Target Keywords

Successful inbound marketing and content creation campaigns require targeted search engine optimization strategies. Do you know what keywords your personas are using to search for your solution? Do you know which ones you have an opportunity to start ranking for? Having a detailed and focused list of relevant, attainable target keywords for you to optimize your content for is the best way to ensure that you are as effective and efficient as possible when it comes to both SEO and content creation.

Tips:

• Before you start listing off dozens of keywords on a page, narrow your initial list down to about 3 to 5 keyword that your client base would probably be searching. Put yourself in their shoes and try and think about what they would look for.
• Use either Google Adwords or HubSpot’s Keyword Tool for the actual research. Use the keywords you selected above to get related keyword suggestions, average monthly searches, and competition of a keyword.  Make sure you track these keywords and numbers in a spreadsheet.
• Consider how many searches a keyword gets, and what the search results for a keyword look like. In the end, it is best practice to choose about 3-5 target keywords.

Takeaways:

Progress in improved page rankings takes a detailed and realistic strategy regarding the keywords you choose to target with your website and blog content. The more research time you spend uncovering the most relevant and attainable keywords, the more quickly you will be able to improve your search engine rankings and traffic.

5) Optimized Meta Data

Before you start taking your newly selected target keywords for a spin with blog articles and site page content, you should focus first on optimizing your meta data. Do you know what your page titles should include for both search engines and site visitors? What about your meta description? Have you considered your alt text and page URL’s? Knowing what on and off-page optimization areas to focus on when implementing new keywords is extremely important when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines.

Tips:

• Use Screaming Frog to compile a list of pages. Once this list is compiled, make sure to keep track of the links, Meta Titles, and Meta Descriptions.
• Meta Titles are meant to be an accurate description of a page’s content. It is a critical component since it creates value for the search results pages. The optimal page title length is about 50 to 60 characters, but stay around 55 characters to be safe. 
• Meta Descriptions give a concise explanation (roughly 155 characters) of the contents of a webpage. It is most commonly used to give the user a preview snippet for a given page. Although they do not affect search engine rankings, they are extremely important to user clicks to the website.

Takeaways:

Creating a document that tracks your keywords and meta data decisions will allow you to ensure you are checking off all of the “SEO boxes” while making your life easy when it comes to tracking any and all keyword changes that may occur during your campaign. You might not be an SEO expert performing high level optimization techniques, but you will be able to at least cover some of your basic bases here.

6) Funnel Analysis & Offer Strategy

Inbound marketing helps generate leads through the promotion of pieces of free premium content. We all know that but what do you do when you already have a library of resources but are unsure who they are for and where they best fit in the buyer’s journey? You perform a funnel analysis of course!

Understanding what content you currently have live on your site, what assets you can potentially repurpose and convert into premium content and how you can best position them to convert, educate and nurture the right leads will then give you a much better idea of what content you will need to create moving forward in your campaign.

Tips:

• List out every piece of content that you currently have and connect specific offers to both personas and lifecycle stages.
• Create and prioritize a list of offers and pieces of premium content that you will need to either rework, repurpose or create in order to start filling any gaps found in the persona-buyer’s journey table.

Takeaways:

It can be very easy to want to immediately jump into creating a new ebook when starting an inbound marketing campaign or refocusing one already in progress but it’s not always the right option. Documenting and sorting the different assets that you currently have (either live on your site or ready to repurpose) will give you a much more strategic view of what needs to be created and when so that when it is time to create that new ebook, you’ll know who it should be for, how it should be laid out and what you should focus its content on.

7) Lead Management Strategy

While the generation of leads is a key milestone for inbound marketing, it’s not the end goal. Customer creation is. So how do you go from leads to customers? You manage them through various areas of your website and marketing automation to help move them through the buyer’s journey. Mapping out and detailing all of the different elements and tools at your disposal before you begin managing and nurturing leads is crucial when it comes to the overall success of a campaign.

Tips:

• Consider different ways in which you can help leads move through the buyer’s journey through automation
• Are you consolidating the number of forms you’re using in your campaign to reduce clutter and more easily connect form submissions with areas of the buyer’s journey?
• Do your forms ask questions that your sales team needs to know in order to qualify leads when they first fill out a form?
• Are you utilizing progressive profiling to collect added information from contact reconverting on your website?
• Are you using thank you pages over inline messages?
• Are you trying to push for reconversions on offers further down the funnel?
• Are you pushing for the next stage in the funnel (awareness to consideration)?
• Use Smart CTA’s to provide offers are the most relevant to this persona and where they likely are in the buyer’s journey
• Use Inline Personalization to personalize your site’s written content to better connect with the lead?
• Can you use smart content to make sure they find what they’re looking for on that page so that you can more quickly move them through the buyer’s journey?
• Do you know what your different personas need/want to see next in the different stages of the buyer’s journey? Can you create persona and lifecycle-specific workflows that will help automate the nurturing process?

Takeaways:

Lead management is much more than just nurturing workflows. The embarrassment of riches when it comes to the marketing automation tools at your disposal means that you can create a highly complex automated system that can better convert and nurture your database of leads in different ways at different times. The more time you spend mapping out and documenting how you can continue to push leads further through the buyer’s journey faster, the better off you’ll be once you turn the automation on.

8) Sales Handoff Strategy

Leads are great. Qualified leads are even better but sales ready leads? Those are the best. Inbound marketing helps generate these types of leads so that your company spends less time in the selling process but that doesn’t mean it can close the deal on its own. Your marketing needs sales just as much as your sales team needs your marketing.

Without sales, you as a marketer would have a whole list of sales ready leads and no experience or understanding of how to close the deal. Without your leads, your sales team would instead be spending too much time with unqualified leads through cold calling and prospecting. Still, as knowledgeable and experienced as sales may be, contacting and initiating a sale with a warm or hot inbound lead is different than contacting a cold lead.

If you have a sales team who are bought in on getting the most out of the leads your inbound marketing generates, mapping out the process of when, how and to who you will hand off leads as well as how they should be contacted will help you set the foundation for that oh so elusive “closed loop reporting” that your boss has been bugging you about for ages.

Tips:

• Who from marketing will be responsible for tracking and qualifying leads generated from inbound marketing efforts? Who from sales will be responsible for reviewing the leads initially handed off before contacting them?
• How will the leads be generated (what technology will marketing use)? How will the sales opportunities be tracked (what CRM/lead tracking technology will sales use)?
• Does every person connected to this process fully understand why it is important? 
• Understand when sales wants to see leads come to them. Establish a clear set of instructions that will help marketing qualify leads based on these criteria so they can better handoff only qualified leads tosSales.
• Outline the handoff, contact and tracking processes
• Does sales have access to your marketing analytics and insights for the leads handed off? Do they know how to use the tool?
• Does sales know the “do’s and don’ts” of contacting inbound leads?
• How will both marketing and sales track the quality and progress of the prospects generated by inbound marketing?

Takeaways:

While inbound marketing is an incredibly powerful and productive form of lead generation if done properly, every connection between a company’s stakeholders needs to be thoroughly mapped out and signed off on.

Marketing needs to understand what sales is looking for, sales needs to understand how to use the information provided by marketing to the fullest, and key decision makers need to be able to see tangible proof that both sales and marketing are proving ROI through proper tracking and reporting. Until you cover these bases, you’ll never be able to fully defend inbound marketing from internal skeptics that might emerge later on in a campaign.

9) Email Strategy

Just because you’ve created offers that will convert visitors into leads and have built out nurturing workflows that will automate a portion of the education process for personas doesn’t mean that every lead you get will be qualified and ready to talk to sales by the time the workflow ends.

Different leads require different elements of marketing. Some may reach out to your company right when they’re ready to buy while others may take more time to completely understand and compare options, including you. For those leads that may fall in or closer to the latter, there is email marketing. Who will you target with your emails? What content will you share with them? How will you present that content? How often will you send it out? These are all great questions to know the answers to when it comes to building out a successful email marketing strategy.

Tips:

• Do you have a current database of contacts? Does that database meet CAN-SPAM requirements?
• Analyze the data to see what has shown success in the past so that you can work to replicate it in the future with your new strategy.
• Know who you will be emailing so you can tailor your content and voice.
• Know what you will want to generally share.
• Know how often you will want to send emails. Try to set up general timelines where you will want to send people 1 email during then. If it’s once a week, work through your email strategy to ensure that you avoid sending emails to people who have already received an email from you that week.

Takeaways:

Email marketing is not a standalone strategy. It is just one tool in a fully integrated marketing campaign that can and should connect to a number of different elements you create regularly. Knowing who you want to target with your sends, what you want to share with them and how often will help you create a simple, yet effective strategy that will lead to more database engagement and less unsubscribes and harsh email responses.

10) Social Media Strategy

According to LinkedIn, there is an overabundance of “Social Media Experts” yet few businesses really seem to be setting the social media world on fire. Social media marketing can be broken down into 3 areas; strategy, publishing and monitoring and engagement. What sets a good social campaign apart from a great one is the amount of time spent in the first area. Above all else, a social media campaign that knows who it’s targeting, the voice and persona it is portraying and what it is sharing will almost always find success.

Tips:

• Establish a baseline
• Analyze what your competitors are doing? Keep them in mind as your form your strategy moving forward.
• Find and monitor different resources for content. Follow the 10-4-1 rule: out of every 15 posts, 10 come from a third-party, 4 should come from your blog, and 1 should be an offer.
• Pick which social platforms are best for you. Don’t spread yourself too thin by creating a presence on every social media site there is.
• Create a publishing strategy that answers the following questions for every platform you’ve decided to target:
• Establish a monitoring and engagement strategy.

Takeaways:

Social media is much more than #ThrowbackThursdays and cat pictures. It’s about knowing who your target audience is, where they are on social media and what they want to see while there. Once you know that, the more detailed you are and the more prepared you can be for the various things social media throws at you, the more likely you are to be successful in building a strong fan base that you can then use to drive traffic and leads back to your website.

11) Blog Strategy & Editorial Calendar

It would seem that everyone and their mom is blogging nowadays but why is that? Would it be because more and more people are turning to search engines every day with questions that blogs can answer? Is it because blogs help establish and showcase industry thought leadership? Is it because blogs can act as gateways to convert highly qualified visitors into leads? Yes. To all of them.

While there are numerous benefits to blogging, the reality is that the secret is out when it comes to business blogging and as competition rises for content creation on the various frequently asked questions and topics surrounding your industry you will need a strong strategy to help you stand out in the pack.

Tips:

• Review your current strategy and establish a baseline.
• Analyze what your competitors are doing. Keep them in mind as your form your strategy moving forward.
• Spend time reviewing your personas and utilize what you know about their goals and challenges to craft topics as well as voice and messaging that will best connect with them. 
• Create a list of keywords you would like to start ranking for. Keep these keywords in mind when creating and optimizing articles.
• Create a list of relevant long tail keywords and continually add to it as you begin writing. Use Google’s “suggested searches” at the bottom of results to inspire new topic ideas.
• Get buy-in from subject matter experts. Unless you’re a “lifer” in your industry with decades of experience, you most likely are not going to be able to write on every topic your personas are interested in or at least not to the level needed.
• Make an appointment with yourself and keep it. Blogging is one of the easiest things to push, but it has continually proven to be one of the most effective areas of inbound marketing when it comes to traffic and lead generation and you need to make sure you continually churn out fresh, quality content on a regular basis.

Takeaways:

As blogging becomes even more popular in what is now an already saturated environment for content, the action of actually blogging takes a back seat to strategy and topic generation which is what all the great blogs up until this point have already been doing. Understanding who you’re targeting, what they’re looking for online and how you can get the best information live on your blog on a regular basis is crucial when it comes to creating a blog strategy that will actually work.

12) SMART Goals

There’s no point in implementing an inbound marketing campaign (or any other marketing campaign) unless you have plans for growth. And while starting off with a new campaign is great, you need to be able to not only track its success but show that it is (or is trending toward) bringing some sort of return on investment back to the company. While goal setting is one of the hardest things to do properly in a marketing campaign, a genuine SMART goal makes all the difference when it comes to measuring the success of a campaign through reporting.

Tips:

• All inbound campaigns should at least have goals set for website traffic, lead generation, qualified lead generation and customer generation. 
• When finalizing goals, always run every iteration through the SMART framework. Is it specific? Is it measurable? Is it attainable? Is it relevant? Is it time-bound?
• Once goals are set and all major stakeholders have signed off on them, establish a schedule for reporting on these goals to ensure visibility and accountability of all parties throughout the campaign. 

Takeaways:

Everyone in business is (or should be) held accountable for the results they generate. If you are responsible for the success of your marketing, you must take the time to create SMART goals that everyone involved with your campaign knows, understands and accepts before you move forward with any other marketing actions. Only once stakeholders have signed off on them and key members have bought into them will you be able to properly use these goals to guide the marketing actions you’ve mapped out in all the others strategies above.

Wow, that was a lot…

Now that you’ve read through all 12 building blocks, think back to your favorite digital marketing campaign. Try to envision what each building block would have looked like as their marketing team came closer to winning you as a client.

Marketing often gets a bad rap for being nothing but creative types who spend little time on research, analysis and strategy build out. In reality, some of the best and most successful marketing campaigns had multiple hundreds of man hours dedicated to nothing but strategy well before any prospect got a glimpse of the final product.

If you’re looking to take your marketing to the next level, consider these 12 foundational building blocks before starting your next campaign and see where your creativity goes from there.

When I need to have a very productive day, I tell myself it’s going to be easy.

I’ll just wake up early, grab a big cup of coffee, and then begin powering through my to-do list. Maybe I’ll break for a meal, or a stretch, or a quick conversation with a coworker. But I’ll truck on, energy unwavering until bedtime, where I’ll promptly fall asleep for eight, wonderful, uninterrupted hours of sleep. 

Cool fantasy, self. Real life rarely (if ever) is that picture-perfect. Our bodies aren’t designed to operate at a constant 100% efficiency level.

So if you want to be more productive throughout the day, you’re better off relegating certain activities to certain times, and devoting yourself to doing those activities at those times.

And to make sure you get the right things done at the right times of day, you can lean on a plethora of different free or relatively cheap apps and tools. (After all, some things are better together.)

Below, I’ve collected some of the highest-rated and often-recommended productivity apps for each part of the day. Check ’em out, and find your “and.”

12 Tools That’ll Keep You Productive Morning, Noon & Night

Morning

1) Headspace

Price: Free, with subscriptions available on iPhone, Android, Web

Starting your day off with a quick meditation session can be a great way to gear up for the day — even scientists say so. According to a 2012 study, people who mediated “stayed on tasks longer and made fewer task switches, as well as reporting less negative feedback after task performance.” 

Sold … but not sure how to get started? I’d highly recommend downloading Headspace. It gives you 10 free guided meditation sessions, and if you end up getting hooked, you can sign up for a monthly subscription.

2) Prompts or Writing Challenge

Price: Prompts is $2.99 on iPhone; Writing Challenge is $1.89 on Android

You may have heard about the benefits of writing something — anything — in the morning. But actually making morning freewriting a reality can be a challenge. How do you actually find something to write about when you’ve barely had time to make your coffee?

Why, by downloading a writing prompts app, of course. Prompts and Writing Challenge are both great options. They give you a jumping-off point for a piece, and then let you dive right into writing. Prompts is especially cool for folks who like to track their habits to stay motivated because it offers some basic analytics for you to analyze your writing habit progress.

3) Todoist

Price: Free, with premium subscriptions available on iPhone, Android, Web

You don’t have to actually write your to-do lists in the morning, but you should definitely take a look at them before you dive into your work. And if your to-do list is cluttered and confusing, you’ll end up losing precious time to reorganizing and reprioritizing it. 

To prevent that from happening, I’d highly suggest a tool like Todoist. My teammate Lindsay Kolowich recently introduced me to it, and it’s completely transformed the way I keep track of what I need to accomplish. It allows you to add deadlines and labels to each list item, and then automatically sorts your whole to-do list by what you have to accomplish that day. This helps you keep you on top of what you need to accomplish in a given day, and prevents you from getting sidetracked by down-the-road projects.

4) Jell

Price: Free, with premium subscriptions available on iPhone, Android, Web

After you set your own to-do list, chances are, you’ll need to check in with your teammates about what’s on their plate for the day. One super easy way to do this — especially when you have a remote team — is by using an app called Jell. 

Instead of calling a 30-minute meeting to debrief on what everyone’s doing, you simply fill out a form in Jell and it gets sent to the rest of your team. (If you’re using Slack, it has a handy integration to have these messages posted in there, too.)

This way, you can quickly get on the same page with your team, and then move on to the most important work of your day.

Afternoon

5) Do

Price: $10/month on iPhone and Web; Android coming soon

Fast-forward a few hours, and chances are, you’ll have a block of meetings on your plate. (That is, after all, the best time of day to have them.) But if you’re going to take time out of your day for meetings, they’d better be productive. There’s nothing worse than wasting a bunch of people’s time on something that could be handled over email.

Yep, a tool can help you with that too. Do can help you keep yours more organized and actionable — that way, no one’s wasting time sitting in unnecessary meetings. If you’re looking for a free option, Solid (available on Web only) is a great choice.

6) Stormboard

Price: Free, with premium subscriptions available on Web

When your attention starts to wane, it can be hard to get things done. For many people, that tends to happen in the afternoon.

Turns out, this can be a good thing: When you’re less focused, you have more room to be creative. So the afternoon is a great time for brainstorming, collaboration, and breaking through cognitive barriers. 

If you and your team are feeling particularly creative one afternoon, a great tool to consider using is Stormboard. It allows everyone to easily brainstorm and collaborate — even if they aren’t in the same room. Then, you can prioritize the best ideas to be put in action at a later date.

7) Unstuck

Price: Free on iPhone, Android, Web

But what if you’re not focused or feeling creative? You’ve got to get work done, but you’re feeling … stuck. 

Unstuck can help. It’s an app that acts like an in-the-moment personal coach. It’ll ask you a series of questions to unearth what exactly is blocking you, and then give you steps to get through that block. Having this “outside” perspective can be a game-changer to breaking through some seriously inhibiting time-sucks. 

8) Quartz or Inside

Price: Quartz is free on iPhone; Inside is free on iPhone, Android, Web

When you’ve been in the weeds all day getting important projects done, it can be tempting to take some time to catch up on what you missed in the news. 

The trouble is, those reading breaks can sometimes get unruly. That 15 minutes you thought would be enough turns into 45 minutes of reading, and you’re suddenly late for your train home. 

To feel in-the-know about the day without breaking your productivity streak, try catching up via your favorite news summary app. Mine is from Quartz: It’s a chat-themed news summary app that’s quickly become a staple of my phone’s home screen. A few quick clicks, and I’m on my way to catching a ride home.

Night

9) 7 Minute Workout

Price: Free on iPhone, Android

Everyone has their favorite time of day to work out, but science says that your lung function peaks around 5 p.m. So if you want to squeeze in a quick workout sometime in your day, right before dinner might be the trick.

If you don’t have a regular routine or are just trying to do something fast, I’d recommend checking out J&J’s 7 Minute Workout app. You can pick from their programs or design one of your own, and all can be done in less than 30 minutes. 

10) Podcasts or Stitcher

Price: Podcasts is free on iPhone; Sticher is free on iPhone, Android, Web

Chances are, you’ll have spent most of your day looking at things. Reading on the computer. Watching slides on the projector. Scanning news on your phone. So when you leave work, you should strengthen one of your other senses, such as your listening comprehension. It’s an underdeveloped skill — especially in adults — but it can have huge a huge on our professional and personal lives. 

If you want to strengthen your listening skills, try playing a few podcast episodes on your phone on your commute home. If you have an iPhone, you have a Podcasts app already built in. Otherwise, you can access them through Stitcher. 

Want some show recommendations? Read this blog post for a few of our favorite business-related podcasts to listen to.

11) Grid Diary or Journey

Price: Free with premium options on iPhone; Journey is Free on Android, Chrome App

Many might think that journaling is just a teenage pastime … but it has many benefits for people of any age.

If you don’t love the idea of actually penning your ideas and experiences to paper, you can use Grid Diary or Journey. Both allow you to not only capture written recaps of your day, but also add photos to your entries. Plus, they both have built-in prompts — so even on the most hectic of days, you can distill some insights for your future self. 

12) Sleep Genius

Price: $4.99 on iPhone; Free with in-app purchases on Android

Finally. You’ve made it through the day and kept yourself productive all the way through. You take a moment to celebrate … but then realize that tomorrow’s to-do list is already jam-packed. You need a good night’s sleep, and you need it now. 

Sleep Genius might be the cure. The app has built-in relaxation techniques and gentle alarms to wake you up at a natural moment in your sleep cycle, helping make sure you feel rested come morning.

After all, if you’re feeling sluggish the next day, even the best apps might not be effective. (But that cup of coffee might do the trick.)

What are your favorite productivity tools for different times of day? Share with us in the comments.

Last week, Facebook officially rolled out a new feature called “Reactions” to Facebook users worldwide.

The new feature serves as an extension of the Like button. Now, instead of only being able to Like a post, Facebook users can choose from six different emotive reactions: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry.

Why the change? As Facebook’s product design director Geoff Teehan wrote in a post on Medium, not everything that’s shared is meant to be liked. The death of your friend’s dog or an article about an unsavory politician won’t just elicit a single emotion in users – -so why limit them to “liking” it?

The same is true for the posts brands publish to their Facebook accounts, which is why these new reactions are opening new doors for marketers.

Now that we’ve had some time to react to this new feature, we’ve done some thinking about the impact these new reactions buttons might have on both marketing and user behavior. In this post, I’ll first touch on how the reactions buttons work. Then, I’ll walk through a few implications for marketers going forward.

How the New ‘Reactions’ Feature Works

The new reaction buttons are already available to everyone — no need to enable their functionality. They’re also simple to use.

To react to a Facebook post the web, hover your cursor over the traditional Like button on any Facebook post to reveal one of six new emotive icons: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry.

To react to a Facebook post on the mobile app, hold your finger on the Like button until the six options appear. Then, choose an icon by tapping on it. 

The act of reacting may seem simple, but there are some nuances to the feature — especially regarding how to analyze it — that are relevant to marketers. Here’s what we know so far.

Reactions are counted the same as Likes. (For now.)

According to Facebook’s announcement, “if someone uses a reaction, Facebook will infer that person wants to see more of that type of post.” In other words, if you react to a post with the “angry” icon, Facebook’s algorithm will treat it as if it was Liked when deciding where to place it in a user’s News Feed. (Learn more about Facebook’s News Feed here.)

Why would Facebook’s algorithm treat an Angry reaction the same way they count a positive reaction like a Like or a Love? A study by Jonah Berger, author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On,” found that content that triggered an angry reaction in readers is 34% more likely to end upon the New York Times “Most Shared” page, while posts that make people anxious are 21% more likely to end up on that page.

In other words, people want to see the posts that’ll make them angry, just like they want to see the posts that’ll make them happy.

Keep an eye on this, though. In the future, Facebook may choose to rank posts differently based on their reactions. (In fact, some people are concerned Facebook’s already ranking posts differently and just aren’t telling us.)

Limited analytics are available on Facebook Insights.

As of right now, you can’t see the general trends of reactions on your business Page. So if you’re an administer for a business Page and you want to see the number of people who have reacted with a “sad” icon on a post, for example, then have to open the Insights page for that post directly. Also, that number is not currently broken down into organic versus paid, so you can’t see which reactions may be influenced when you boosted a post compared to which ones you garnered organically.

To access Facebook Insights on a post, simply click the reach number of any post. The reach number is located right above the reaction buttons on a post, as shown below:

You’ll be taken to a screen that breaks down the numbers of each reaction net on the post itself and on the post shared elsewhere, if applicable.These posts will still only show interactions on a per-post level. Here’s what the post details look now:

Another way to open Facebook Insights is by clicking “Insights” in your Page’s navigation bar, and then clicking directly into the post you’d like to analyze.

If you want to see which specific users have reacted to your posts and what their reactions were, then go to the post and click on each emotive icon for a list of names.

The same reactions are offered globally.

After first testing a whole myriad of emotive icons in Ireland and Spain, the folks at Facebook settled on the six reactions they believed were the most universally and easily accessible reactions for folks all over the world: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry.

They’d originally tested reactions like “yay” and “confused,” but eventually eliminated them because they proved to be too ambiguous for users. Whether Facebook ever decides to roll out any more remains to be seen, as they’re still testing — but they say there are no specific plans to roll out any other reactions as of now.

(If you want a more detailed breakdown of how the current reaction’s came to be, check out Geoff Teehan’s post on Medium.)

Only the first three reactions people take are shown.

You can click on the number of reactions to see all reactions and the number of each reaction per post, but the first three reactions are the ones that’ll show up to users first, unless they click into the reactions on the post.

You can’t remove a reaction.

Just like you can’t remove a like that another user has left on your post, you can’t remove a “sad” or an “angry” by another user, either.

Now that we have a better understanding of how the new reactions feature works, let’s talk about what it means for marketers.

What Do Facebook Reactions Mean for Marketers?

The introduction of Reactions has definitely changed the Facebook landscape for brands. Now, marketers are armed with deeper insight into how their audiences interact with their content — which opens up a world of testing and experimentation. It also could really diminish the meaning of getting a Like on Facebook, which is something marketers will have to keep an eye on.

You now have deeper insight into how your audience interacts with your content.

Facebook’s reactions feature gives marketers a brand new feedback loop from their audience. Users who may not have previously wanted to Like your content (maybe because they didn’t enjoy it, or didn’t feel it was appropriate) are now able to send more specific signals about how your content makes them feel.

Since any reaction currently counts as a Like in Facebook’s algorithm, people who weren’t previously inclined to touch a brand’s content may now react to it, ultimately increasing the signal to Facebook that the content is worth serving to other audiences. This is going to become extremely important for brands as mobile becomes a bigger deal. Users who may not have wanted to use their phones to comment can now use them to “react” much easier.

Is this more diverse loop a bad thing? No! The exciting thing about this metric is that brands can now pay closer attention to how content is resonating with their audience, and then use that information to take specific actions.

Here are a few ideas for how marketers can gain better insight into their audience with reactions:

a) Test to see whether posts with certain types of reactions perform better.

Do posts that get more “love” end up performing better with your audience? Then create more lovable content. Do posts that “anger” users get more shares? Perhaps it’s time to stir the pot a little bit. (In a respectful way, of course.)

How can you test this? First, determine whether your metric for success is clicks or reach. Then, go into your Page’s Insights panel and sort the posts by that metric, clicking on each post to see which reactions they evoked.

Since Facebook only allows us to view these metrics on a per-post level right now, you may need to use a good old fashioned Google spreadsheet to tabulate results.

Note: Since many old posts may not have additional reactions, skip the sorting for now, and instead click into your most recent posts to determine a baseline.

b) Test the power of “love.”

In his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On,” Jonah Berger writes that people are more inclined to talk about things they love. Test this theory by running a campaign and see how much “love” you can dream up from your users. (Download a step-by-step guide to lovable marketing campaigns here.)

Once you’ve run the campaign, go to the Insights page and assess clicks, views, and shares to see if people are actually reacting to and spreading that lovable content.

c) Take note of “love”-ers.

People who are reacting with “love” to a lot of your posts may make for good brand evangelists. While Facebook currently does not segment these people right now, you may want to dig in to that “love” icon manually to keep an eye out for the names that are showing up over and over again. If you’re starting to notice certain people are “loving” posts often, consider keeping a list of these folks for opportunities so you can take the time to interact with them more on Facebook — and even send them great content later.

d) Don’t discount negative emotions.

in the past, when a Facebook post has triggered a negative emotion for a user, that user has traditionally commented on that post, according to Facebook’s research. Now that users have new emotive options, this may very well change. Keep in mind that users who experience a negative reaction to your posts can now react faster — by tapping a button, rather than typing out a comment.

We may soon discover that this has a big impact on user behavior on Facebook, for negative and positive emotions alike. The biggest implication is that marketers like us may get a higher volume of feedback that is also generally less specific. Keep an eye on how how the comment volume changes compared to typical volume. Pay attention to the types of reactions you’re getting (especially on ads), versus the types of negative comments you may have gotten previously.

At the same time, stay wary of trends in positive or negative volume on your posts as a signal of customer feedback.

The “Like” could become less important.

With all these new emotive options, are Likes going to be enough? In other words, if your posts are only getting Likes now, how do you know whether it’s resonating with your audience?

Don’t get me wrong, Likes are still important — but it’s safe to say the game has changed. Now, the act of simply Liking a post has become the path of least resistance. Yes, some people are still used to using the Like button, so this kind of affinity toward content is something to watch for over time. But as users get more accustomed to these different reactions, the bar for Facebook content quality is inevitably going to rise.

Remember: Any reaction is still better than no reaction. At the end of the day, you want your users to feel moved by your content.

This is only the beginning for Facebook reactions. As Facebook continues to make changes to ads, algorithms, and faces, it’s important for marketers like us to keep getting to know our audiences better, create great content, and appreciate our fans and followers. We will, of course, continue to share what we learn along the way.

How do you feel about Facebook’s “Reactions” buttons? Share your thoughts and questions in the comment section below.

Our Social Media Benchmark 2015 Report found that the nonprofit / education sector leads the pack in the size of their social media communities. Since everyone is on some networks already, social media is a natural platform to communicate with students and parents. It’s a real time channel with maximum reach.

So why limit that reach to your current community? Your prospects are all on social media too. They’re using it to talk about schools and learn from their peers. You need to make your institution part of that discussion. Start using social media to attract and talk with prospective students and parents.

It Always Starts with Your Personas

New social media sites seem to pop up daily. You can’t be on them all. You don’t want to be on them all. Go back to your personas – what social media sites are your prospective students using? What social media sites do they trust to find information?

With so much content to be found, people rely on their social media networks to find quality, credible information. Maybe they found good content through a social search. More likely – someone they trust has shared it with them online. You want to make sure that it’s your content people are sharing. Through social media, you’re enlisting an open-ended band of school ambassadors every time you post something on a social network.

You’ll likely find that different personas hang out on different social media platforms. If you want to leverage your current Facebook presence to reach out to prospects, that’s great. A lot of K-12 parents are discussing school options with other parents on Facebook. You can generate a lot of awareness and engagement with parents from a Facebook campaign. But when you want to reach the kids, they’re all about the chat apps.

For instance, Snapchat, a videochat app, is the current #1 app for this age group. The “My Stories” function lets them string together short videos over their day. Then the story disappears. It’s easy. It’s visual. And it goes away. How about asking prospects who take a campus tour to share their day at your school with their friends via Snapchat? That’s high-credibility content for any teen.

Start your social prospecting strategy by deciding in which social media sites you should invest resources. Pew Research conducts regular, comprehensive research on which demographic groups are using which social media platforms. It’s a great source to consult for some big picture social media usage statistics.

As always – the results of your own persona research should carry the most weight when deciding where to focus your social prospecting strategy. When you interviewed current parents and students to create your personas, hopefully you asked them about which social media platforms they use and why they prefer them. If you didn’t, now is the time to do some more research to refine your personas and their social media habits.

Align Platforms with Your Goals

Your research probably tells you that your personas operate on a number of social media platforms. That doesn’t mean you have to reach out to prospects on all of them. Narrow down your social media platform list once more by setting out your prospecting goals for social media. 

Do you want your social strategy to drive traffic to your website? Get attendees to live events? Get prospects asking questions directly to admissions or campus life officers?

Select the social media platforms that offer most potential to meet your goals. It’s OK (smart, even) to have different goals for different platforms. They all don’t play the same role. Twitter is for conversation. Maybe you start a regularly scheduled Twitter chat so prospects have a chance to talk with a live person from your school. LinkedIn is for the career-minded. Do you have a school page there so you can take advantage of LinkedIn’s Alumni tool to show alumni bios on your website? 

If the goal is to drive visitors to your admissions blog, then post regular links in the most relevant social media sites. Include the keywords and hashtags they’re using to find information about schools on your posts.

Once you’ve selected the social media sites for your strategy, take a deep dive to see what tools they offer. You’ll be surprised to find the scope of distribution, communication, and analysis tools many of them provide to help you reach your audience.

Does This Mean I Need More Content?

You already have a lot of the content. Program pages and faculty bios. Campus publications. Curriculum and social life documentation. You’ll tweak it for social media consumption. That means:

• Images, including video and gifs, optimized for that social media platform. Mixed media posts get the most engagement. Visuals and movement catch people’s eyes. They also communicate with greater impact than words alone.
• Hashtags, tagging, and keywords so it can be found prospects who’ve not yet connected with you
• Understanding the best times to post on a specific network (take a second look at our benchmark report and the Pew research as a starting point, links above)

On certain platforms, the engagement is the content. Have you heard about Ask.fm? Don’t worry. Most people over 18 years old haven’t. Young students are all over it. It’s a site that allows people to ask other users questions anonymously. Maybe your admissions office should set up an account and post the link on your website so kids can ask questions they may be to shy ask otherwise? 

Social Media Metrics that Matter

Starting with your personas is a best practice. Another is to always close the loop on your marketing efforts. Define and track your metrics to validate what’s working and find out what needs work.

When it comes to social media, you have a torrent of metrics. Beware of vanity metrics. Likes and impressions are nice, but they’re not helpful in quantifying the value of your social media strategy. 

Manage metrics that matter. These are the metrics that connect back to your goals. Let’s go back to our driving traffic goal. Tracking URLs tell you what content piece of content brought a visitor to your site and the social media site where she found your link. 

Let’s say you post regular links to new blog articles to three different social media sites. Using a tracking URL lets you drop an identifying token in the link used on each social media site. Looking at your traffic, you see that 60% of your traffic back is coming from just one of the social media sites. That’s valuable intelligence.

In general, the most actionable social media metrics will be those that indicate engagement – clicking through, sharing, commenting and/or responding, growth in your community size, growth in the percentage of community engaging with your content. Each social media platform has its own batch of metrics and they can change.

Distribution is a Pillar of Inbound Marketing

For your inbound marketing strategy to yield results, your content needs to get in front of the right people at the right time. That means the distribution of your content is as critical to inbound success as the content itself.

Social media is primary distribution channel. Don’t overlook its power to connect your school to new prospective students and parents.

Transparency isn’t convenient. You can’t just openly share the good news — you’ve got to share the bad news, too. 

At least, that’s how Patagonia views it. “Transparency is telling the good and the bad,” says Rick Ridgeway, Patagonia’s VP of Environmental Affairs, on this episode of The Growth Show. “It’s having the moxie to openly tell our customers and other external stakeholders about the harm that we are doing.”

In this episode, Rick doesn’t just explain what corporate transparency is; he also shares real examples of sticky situations that have cropped up at Patagonia — and how they actually dealt with them.

Not only that, but he also shared with us some refreshing and eye-opening advice about life. Recently, he was in an accident with his longtime friend, Doug Tompkins (the Founder of The North Face), and on this episode, Rick shares some of the life lessons he’s learned in the aftermath.

To listen to the episode, click “play” in the player below, or download the episode on iTunes.

Check out the latest recaps of The Growth Show episodes by clicking here.