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Have you ever had any formal or informal paid advertising training or education? If you have, you’re one of the lucky few.

Most marketers are presented with a chunk of their company’s marketing budget one day and told to “run some ads.” Don’t let the costs scare you, paid social advertising is incredibly measurable, and can produce real ROI. From managing your budget to choosing channels and measuring success, learn how to get started with paid advertising.

1) How Do I Manage My Budget?

One of the most daunting things about social media advertising is the fact that you are dropping cold hard cash on your campaigns. There are also a huge amount of channels and ad formats you can use — don’t get stuck in the details. Before launching your ad campaigns, align your marketing objectives with your advertising strategy.

If your goal is to drive traffic and leads, top of the funnel content such as blog posts, free tools, or meatier content gated behind a lead generation form should be used. This type of promotion is more light touch and cheaper.

If your objective is to convert leads further down the funnel to marketing qualified leads for your sales team or customers, middle and bottom of the funnel content like free trials or purchase offers should be promoted via retargeting. This type of promotion is higher commitment than reading a blog post, so it will be more expensive.

Use this paid advertising budget template to map out your costs before your launch and update it throughout avoid end of the month panic!

2) What Channels Should I Advertise On?

The landscape of paid social advertising is constantly changing; new technologies, channels and formats are released weekly.

There is no one size fits all answer to the channels you should leverage. Ultimately, testing different channels is the best way to determine what works to meet your objectives.

There are many social networks you can advertise on, but here are four of the most common:

Facebook

With over 1.4 billion users and over 900 million visits a day — Facebook has the largest audience available, which makes it a fit for businesses large and small. But volume is not everything in social ads. The real advantage of Facebook lies in the amount of granular data available to target users.

Demographic Targeting:

You can target based on education, employment, household, and lifestyle details. Categories include location, gender, age, language, education, ethnic affinity, generation, household composition, life events, politics, relationship status, parental status, and work. Zero in on whoever your audience may be: friends of couples who recently got engaged, new fathers, postgraduate students, women who work in engineering — the possibilities are endless.

Interest Targeting:

Allows advertisers to target people based on their interests, activities, pages liked, and closely related topics. Top level categories include business, entertainment, family & relationships, fitness & wellness, food & drink, shopping, fashion, sports, hobbies, and technology. The level of detail available means you can target very specific interests like bodybuilding, tattoos, or heavy metal music.

Behavior Targeting:

Target based on purchase behavior or intent, device usage and more. Categories include digital activities, expats, travel, mobile device users, and events. Behaviors like Chrome users, Facebook Page administrators, and business travelers can be used to segment your audience.

Custom Audiences:

Custom audiences allow you to layer Facebook data on top of your business data. Advertisers can upload lists of customer (or potential customer) email addresses, phone numbers, or user ids and target these specific lists of people. Pixel based targeting of website or webpage visits is also possible. Advertisers can create “lookalike” audiences from your custom audiences to target similar Facebook users who have a higher propensity to convert.

Instagram

Instagram is growing in popularity with advertisers every day and presents a huge new opportunity for anyone running social advertising campaigns. Now boasting 400 million users, as of April 2016, Instagram is a more popular channel than Twitter or Snapchat.

Advertisers must use their Facebook ad account to create Instagram ad campaigns. In fact, the option to promote your ad on Instagram only appears at the advert set level in Facebook:

Despite the fact that you can easily select the same ads to be shown on Facebook and Instagram at this level, you should keep your ads separate. The two platforms are very different and you should think about how the audience and experience differs.

Instagram is a visually driven platform, so make sure your ads look authentic and fit in with the user-generated content that exists in your audience’s feed.

Instagram is often seen as better fit for lifestyle and creative industries like fashion, food and fitness. Don’t let that assumption deter you from trying Instagram, B2B brands have seen success, too.

Twitter

Twitter’s ad platform is not as advanced as Facebook. Demographic and interest based targeting options are available, but they are more limited than other platforms.

Demographic Targeting:

Basic options only available here — age, language and location.

Behavioral Targeting:

Behavioral targeting exists for the U.S. only at the moment. Options include retail, lifestyle, finance, technology, travel, and more.

Interest Targeting:

Categories include health, beauty, business, careers, hobbies, society, sport, and more. One thing to keep in mind — if you were promoting a piece of content on SEO, the closest you could get is the Marketing topic as a whole. The options are not as granular as other platforms.

Follower Targeting:

Targeting specific Twitter accounts and followers means that you can build lists of industry or regional influencers to create niche audiences.

Keyword Targeting:

One of Twitter’s major advantages is the ability to target specific keywords and hashtags. Advertisers can target people who have tweeted using a specific hashtag with their ads. This allows very specific, targeted content to be delivered to people who are actively engaging with a topic on Twitter.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an obvious choice for B2B companies due to its professional user base. If you segment your audience based on their professional information, like role, company, industry, etc., you can be very confident in relying on LinkedIn data to be up-to-date and relevant. If professional information is not an important part of your buyer persona, LinkedIn probably isn’t the best fit for you.

While the ad platform is not as advanced as others in some respects (due to the lack of behavioral and interest targeting), the professional data is hugely valuable for certain industries.

Targeting:

Criteria available includes language, location, industry, company, job title/function, and membership for specific LinkedIn groups.

Costs tend to be higher on LinkedIn than other networks, but conversions and quality can be higher than other networks and can provide valuable leads for some industries.

For example, here at HubSpot, we promoted an industry-specific piece of content — The Little Book of Inbound for Finance Marketers — on both LinkedIn and Facebook. The cost per click (CPC) of the LinkedIn campaign was 4x the Facebook CPC. Clicks cost a lot on LinkedIn, but what about actual conversions? LinkedIn traffic converted 52% better than Facebook traffic and LinkedIn conversions were half the cost of Facebook conversions. LinkedIn was the clear winner in terms of targeting and channel “fit” in this case.

3) How to Create Ads that Convert

Make It Relevant:

Social advertising is different to Adwords search advertising. Your Adwords campaigns are centered around demand fulfillment — targeting specific keywords that people are searching for right now. Social advertising is about demand generation, fulfilling a need your audience has even though they are not actively searching for it.

Let’s take this example — this ad appeared on my Facebook newsfeed:

I am training for a marathon at the moment, so this is totally relevant to me! I was not actively searching for marathon training tips, but the advertisers have clearly targeted interests and demographics (it’s also a female centric ad) to present me with content that will stand out to me when scrolling through my newsfeed.

Make It Visual

The image is often to most important element of a social ad — it’s responsible for capturing your audience’s attention when they are browsing a social network.

Take a look at the two below Instagram ads:

The first is from DaPulse and the second from Squarespace. While the DaPulse ad has a beautiful design, it’s clearly an ad, and doesn’t quite fit in with the visually focused Instagram feed. The Squarespace ad captures my attention. It looks like it belongs in my feed and I’m interested in what it is about before reading any copy. The image suits the visual theme that exists on Instagram and elicits and emotive reaction from the user.

Create Copy That Converts

Ad copy is limited and you have to make every character count, when you are writing your ad copy make sure to:

• Be compelling
• Communicate your value proposition
• Be Actionable

Take this example from Inbound.org: 

• Be compelling : I’m going to enjoy life more? Sign me up!
• Communicate your value proposition: The community of intelligent marketers is what makes inbound.org an incredible resource.
• Be Actionable : Asking a direct question ”Will you?” challenges me to take action.

Some days it’s tough to write compelling copy – when I get stuck, I follow this process for inspiration:

•  Use Answerthepublic to map out questions people are asking about your topic.
• Use BuzzSumo to find content that people are sharing around your topic.
• Read Buzzfeed to draw inspiration from the amazingly clickable headlines.

 4) How Do You Measure Success?

Paid social advertising has a multitude of metrics you can (and should) monitor. Impressions, clickthrough rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), likes, shares, frequency, relevance, and much more. Since this can be overwhelming when you’re new to social media advertising, it’s vital to make sure you are focusing in on the metrics that matter most to your campaigns.

The three most important metrics to monitor that tell you how your campaigns are really performing are clickthrough rate, cost per conversion and conversion rate.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

This is a measure of the number of clicks your ad has to the number of impressions it received (clicks/Impressions). Your CTR indicates the relevance of your content to your audience and the quality of the traffic. If you have a low CTR, try narrowing your targeting or creating new ad designs.

Cost Per Conversion (CPC)

Every campaign should have one core conversion goal (signups, app install, downloads, visits to blog post). To calculate, divide the amount of money you have spent divided by the number of conversions resulted. This gives you views to whether your campaigns are profitable and allows you to project future spend.

Conversion Rate

Looking at the conversion rate of the visits to your landing page from your ads gives a good idea of the quality of the clicks you are receiving and the performance of your landing page. You can also benchmark your social ad traffic against the conversion rate of traffic from other sources.

The paid social advertising landscape is always evolving, to be a superstar paid marketer you need to be reactive to new channels, tactics and formats on an ongoing basis. This field is mastered through research, experience and testing – not through formal learning environments. Ready to start creating your own social advertising campaigns?

In an industry fixated on rapid growth, any slow down in user acquisition or monitization sounds alarms. And Twitter, whether it likes it or not, has been sounding a lot of them lately.

Not only is it facing stagnant monthly active user growth, but the revenue generated from those users has disappointed a market accustomed to steady tech progression. In the face of a negative narrative, the company has been quick to take action and has focused predominantly on changes geared toward the user.

Over the last six months, Twitter has made a collection of changes, small and big, to drive user engagement and improve the overall onboarding and experience of the platform. 

We know how tough it can be to keep up with these types of updates, which is why we put together a handful of the more notable features and changes below. Marketers, take note. 

7 New Twitter Features You May Have Missed

1) The 140-Character Count Loophole

As far as debates go, Twitter’s 140-character limit is about as contentious as the oxford comma. Some say the character limit on tweets is essential to Twitter’s identity. It secures Twitter in place as one of the fastest available ways for ideas to spread. Others are ready to see it lifted, arguing that removing the 140-character cap would open Twitter up for a new and engaging range of content and possibly new users. One area where the pain of the character cap is particularly sharp is in adding media to your tweets.

By default, media links can take up 23 characters in a tweet, which is about 16% of your allotted characters. No small portion. That said, images are a boon for interactivity on your tweets: HubSpot conducted a study and found that tweets with images resulted in 18% more clickthroughs and 150% more retweets.

Image Credit: HubSpot & MDM

This week Twitter announced that soon media (e.g., images, polls, videos) attached to tweets will no longer count against your 140-character count. The same rule would apply to the @handle when replying to someone else’s tweet.

This update makes a couple of changes to the way replies and retweets are handled. Users will no longer have to add a character prior to a reply — for example, “.@meghkeaney” — to ensure their reply is seen by all followers. Not to mention, users will be able to retweet their own content if they want to add a thought to a previous post.

2) Accessible Images

Back in October, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made a public appeal to developers to submit ideas for product enhancements:

Developers on Twitter: please tweet your ideas and requests using hashtag #helloworld. We’re listening!

— Jack (@jack)
October 21, 2015

One of the ideas generated out of that invitation focused on making Twitter more accessible to users who are visually impaired. In other words, people using Twitter’s iOS and Android apps can now add alt text descriptions to images within tweets. Websites have long used alt text to help visually impaired visitors understand the messages conveyed by images using assistive technology like a screen reader or Braille display.

Accessible images has to be set up at the user level, a drawback for it gaining mass adoption, but it’s easy enough to set up. In an Android or iOS device, go to your Twitter settings (the gear icon) and follow these steps:

1. Tap Accessibility.
2. Next to Compose image descriptions, turn that feature on.
3. From there, when you add an image to your tweet just tap Add description to insert descriptive text.

Adding accessibility may seem like a win for a small population, but it’s a best practice across the board for businesses and organizations looking to grow their audience and do the right thing.

3) The Connect Tab

In the early days of Twitter a friend who had just joined told me she didn’t get it. She had followed a bunch of news organizations and recommended accounts but it just felt like a news ticker to her.

“When does this get interesting?” she asked.

It was only when I sent her a custom list of people to follow whom I knew she’d like that the value started appearing. If Twitter wants to expand its user base — as a world of investors keep telling them they must — it needs to make it easier to get to that first moment of value.

This May, Twitter took the hint and reimagined the experience of finding people to follow. They released the Connect tab, a new feature that allows you to scan your contacts for people to follow and provides custom recommendations based on your location, activity, existing follower profile, and major interest accounts.

Image Credit: Twitter

Lizzy Plaugic, news editor at The Verge, calls this a smart move for Twitter: “If you’re one of Twitter’s many users who only follows 30 random kids you went to high school with, your timeline is probably stagnant and uninteresting,” she says. “By bumping up the number of people you follow, Twitter is hoping to make your feed something you actually want to look at.”

4) ‘Go Live’ Button for Periscope

Facebook has bet big on live streaming video, giving it its own tab in the mobile app and prioritizing live streams within the newsfeed. As a result of this and the natural appeal of the feature, live streaming videos see 10x the engagement on Facebook as other posts.

Twitter, which acquired Periscope last year, has been slower to prioritize this type of format. All signs point to that changing however. Beginning with Android phones, (see Android fans, sometimes you get things first) a small percentage of users will begin to see a “go live” button when they compose tweets. This button connects to Periscope and enables users to broadcast directly through Twitter.

This feature expands the content types marketers and content creators have to play with. Instead of having a “Tweetstorm” or a complicated Twitter Q&A, user can use live streaming to compile and publish longer form thoughts and responses. This also keeps the clutter down on Twitter feeds and can garner engagement in a live — and arguably more compelling — video format.

The ability to quickly go live is important for Twitter. In a recent earnings statement, the company explained: “We’re focused on what Twitter does best: live. Twitter is live: live commentary, live connections, live conversations. Whether it’s breaking news, entertainment, sports, or everyday topics, hearing about and watching a live event unfold is the fastest way to understand the power of Twitter.”

5) Native GIF Search

Even though this list isn’t weighted for significance, it took real willpower not to place this at number one. As someone whose reliance on GIFs is beyond description, this feature release was a big one for me. In 2015, people shared more than 100 million GIFs on Twitter. When you think about the steps it previously took to share an animated image on Twitter, that number is even more impressive.

Previously you had to leave Twitter, search for the appropriate GIF on any number of GIF search engines, save that image, go back to Twitter, recompose your tweet, and finally, upload the image. Today, with Twitter’s new GIF feature, you just click a button and conduct the search there. No saving or uploading needed.

Image Credit: Twitter

(By the way, if you like GIFs, I highly recommend this post by my colleague. It’s a fascinating history and analysis on why exactly GIFs became so popular.)

6) The Switch to Uncropped Photos

Twitter may have started as a text-based platform, but images are the source of some of its top engagement. That’s why the news that Twitter had adjusted its image size requirements to not force-crop most images came with such praise. The resulting experience means that Twitter is more visual and engaging right off the bat. See the before and after shots provided by Twitter below:

Image Credit: Twitter

Along with the uncropped photo update, Twitter also introduced a new view for multi-photo displays. This update allows users to see even more of the individual photos included in a collage. 

Image Credit: Twitter

7) Increased Anti-harassment Features

One of the most serious complaints against Twitter is how easily harassment can spread and exacerbate on the network. Historically, tweets aimed at threatening or scaring individuals on Twitter have gone unfettered and caused a number of users to delete their accounts or even fear for their safety. In the last six months, Twitter has begun to respond to harassment and threats on the network with a series of features and services aimed a keeping people safe. These additions include:

• Clearer definition of abusive behavior in the platform’s terms of service
• Stronger functionality for blocking, muting, and reporting abuse
• The launch of the Twitter Safety Center and the Trust and Safety Council

These updates are critical to ensuring Twitter stays a welcoming place for all users. In a leaked memo last year, former Twitter CEO Dick Costello underscored the importance of this move, saying:

I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.

We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them. Everybody on the leadership team knows this is vital.”

In all the punditry on the current and future state of Twitter, most of the narrative to this point has focused on the competition. Twitter’s response, however, has been largely focused on its users. While some of these updates may seem small, in aggregate they signal a move to a much more intuitive user experience, fed largely by user feedback. Time will tell if this focus on fan-favorite features amounts to a measurable increase in usage and revenue.

What do you think about Twitter’s latest features? What else would you like to see? Share you thoughts in the comments.

How long does it take to acquire a new skill?

If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book Outliers, you might have heard the number “10,000 hours” floating around. According to Gladwell, who was referring to a 1993 study published by the American Psychological Association, it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert.

But that number has largely been misinterpreted, according to Josh Kaufman in a TED talk he gave in 2013. The key word in Gladwell’s book is “expert.”

It doesn’t take 10,000 hours to learn something. It takes 10,000 hours to become a tip-top performer in a highly competitive field. That 1993 study was looking at professional athletes and world-class chess players, not people who want to learn how to play Taylor Swift songs on the guitar. (And thank goodness, because most of us don’t have that kind of time.)

The real key to learning something quickly is to take a deliberate, intelligent approach to your learning. To help you get a better sense of what that approach looks like, check out the 10 steps outlined below.

(In the spirit of learning how to advance your skills, check out HubSpot Academy’s “World Certification Week” — a week of inspiring and educational talks broadcast on Google Hangouts.)

How to Learn Anything Faster

First thing’s first: You’ll need to get specific about the skill you’d like to learn. “Writing” by itself is a little vague. Do you want to learn to write poems? Blog posts? Essays? Books? Same with “rowing” — do you want to row on a team, or by yourself? Each of these are a little different, and would require you to take different steps.

Once you’ve got a specific skill in mind, follow these steps to learn it quickly.

1) Break the skill into parts, and practice the most important parts first.

Deconstructing a skill into smaller pieces doesn’t just make it seem more manageable; it also lets you distinguish the most important things you’ll need to learn.

“Most of the things we think of as skills are actually big bundles of skills that require all sorts of different things,” said Kaufman in his TED talk. “The more you can break apart the skill, the more you’re able to decide, ‘What are the parts of the skill that will actually help me get to what I want?'”

Then, you can practice those things first. The result? You’ll be able to improve your performance in less time.

For example, let’s say you want to learn how to play the guitar. You can break that skill down into components like reading music, proper posture, proper finger placement, learning scales, learning chords, finger picking, and so on.

So which are the most important? You might argue that learning common chords and the finger placement for those chords are two of the most important skills, since knowing only a few chords means you’ll be able to play a ton of songs.

If you’re not sure what the most important parts of your skill are, then reserve that piece for the next step.

2) Learn from an actual expert.

No matter what skill you want to accomplish, there’s likely someone out there who’s already good at it. The fastest way to get good at something yourself is to find a person who’s already getting the results you want, figure out how they got to where they are, and model your own journey after theirs.

“It doesn’t matter what your age, gender or background is — modeling gives you the capacity to fast track your dreams and achieve more in a much shorter period of time,” wrote Tony Robbins, a motivational speaker and self-help author, in his book Power Talk.

Here’s where you might sign up for lessons, ask to go to coffee with a friend or coworker who’s already good at the skill you’re looking for, watch a film that follows an expert’s journey, and so on. There are a ton of different possibilities for how to learn from someone who has already gotten where you want to be — and thanks to the internet, you have a world of resources available to you.

If you don’t know anyone personally who’s an expert at the skill you want to learn, then you’ll have to do some research. Use your network. Spend some time searching online and you’ll likely start seeing names come up over and over again, who you can then study up on. You can also literally search for experts online using “expert search engines” like ExpertiseFinder.com.

3) Learn from multiple sources.

Studies show that the more different ways you experience a piece of information, the more likely you are to retain it. Why? Because different media activate different parts of our brains — and when several different parts of our brains are working at once, we can retain knowledge better and remember things more quickly.

So don’t just read books and articles related to your skill. Try listening to podcasts, watching videos, using apps to practice, and even jotting down notes as you learn.

But learning things in theory is only a part of building a new skill. Which brings me to my next point …

4) Spend one-third of your time researching, and two-thirds of your time practicing.

You can only learn so much about how to do a skill from researching it. You can spend all the time you want reading about how to shoot a soccer ball, but when you get out there on the pitch, don’t expect to have a perfect shot on your first try. You know what they say: Practice makes perfect.

But if you’re starting from scratch, you’ve obviously got to do some research first, otherwise you won’t know where to begin. So what’s the right ratio between practice and research?

Dan Coyle, author of The Talent Code and The Little Book of Talent, suggests using what he calls the “rule of two-thirds.” It means you should spend only one-third of your time studying up on something, and the other two-thirds of your time actually doing it.

“Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them,” Coyle told TIME Magazine. “This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it’s much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. … If you want to, say, memorize a passage, it’s better to spend 30% of your time reading it, and the other 70% of your time testing yourself on that knowledge.”

Kaufman suggests learning enough in theory to be able to recognize mistakes and self-correct. Once you reach that point, you can move on to focusing most of your time practicing.

5) Pre-commit to practicing for at least 20 hours.

Remember that it doesn’t take 10,000 to get good at something; it takes 10,000 hours to become a tip-top performer in a highly competitive field. To get good at something, Kaufman says it takes about 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice. So once you get into the practicing phase, make a commitment to practice for at least 20 hours before even thinking about quitting.

Now, 20 hours is a lot less than 10,000 hours, but it’s still a big time commitment to carve out our busy lives. It’s the equivalent of about 40 minutes per day for a month.

That time commitment is the part where people have the most trouble — but it’s also the key to success. It’s not necessarily fun to practice the same skill over and over again, day after day. People tend to hit what Kaufman calls “the frustration barrier,” which is when we feel like we aren’t improving quickly despite committing a lot of time and effort. This is where we lose confidence — and it’s where we tend to quit.

That frustration is a barrier to progress. But if you pre-commit to spending at least 20 hours practicing the skill, you’ll have a much better shot at sticking it out through those moments of frustration.

6) Get immediate feedback on your performance.

Once you get into the practicing phase, make sure you’re seeking feedback on your performance and correcting mistakes before they become ingrained. 

According to Gladwell in his book Outliers, what really separated the Beatles from other bands at the time wasn’t just practicing; it was that they got in front of live audiences as much as they could in order to get immediate feedback on their performance.

Feedback can come from a mentor, a coach, a friend — from many different sources, depending on the skill you’re learning. But the point of it is for you to learn where you’re making mistakes that you don’t know you’re making, and learn correct or alternative strategies. The quicker you’re able to get feedback and correct your form and mistakes, the quicker you’ll improve.

7) Give yourself deadlines.

If you’ve done some reading on productivity, you may have heard of Parkinson’s Law. It goes like this:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Remember that paper in college you had all semester to write, and yet you ended up writing the whole thing the weekend before it was due? Yeah, that was Parkinson’s Law.

The trick to turning Parkinson’s Law in your favor is to set deadlines for yourself. When you give yourself less time to get something done, it’ll make you do it more efficiently. In other words, you need to kick your own butt a little bit.

I’ve found that the most effective way to do this is to plan something in advance that’ll require me to practice beforehand. For example, when I decided I wanted to become a better and more experienced public speaker, I planned several speaking events in different cities months in advance. Instead of procrastinating, having actual events on the calendar — ones that I couldn’t get out of, seeing as they were in front of live audiences in different cities — forced me to spend time preparing and learning.

Or, you can do what this woman did: Take videos of your progress over time, and publish a time lapse at the end. Take a look:

Looking for ways to put pressure on yourself in shorter periods of time? Try using the Pomodoro technique, a time management technique based on periods of distraction-free work followed by short breaks. Free tools like e.ggtimer.com and Tomato Timer are especially helpful.

8) Focus, focus, focus.

To learn quickly, it’ll be important to commit your full focus and attention to the time you spend researching and practicing your skill. These days, that’s easier said than done thanks to our short attention spans and constantly buzzing devices.

Multitasking is a common bad habit we’re all guilty of, but research shows it can make us a lot less effective and increase mistakes — not to mention stress. If you think you’re an exception, consider this: Only 2% of the population is actually capable of multitasking effectively. For the other 98%, all it does is cause us to be 40% less productive and make 50% more mistakes than non-multitaskers.

To help you stay focused when you’re working on your skill, start by putting away your cell phone and removing notifications from your computer if you’re using it. The Pomodoro technique can also be helpful here (see #6). 

9) Get enough sleep.

Sleep plays a big role in our ability to learn new information and skills. When we’re awake, new situations and stimuli can prevent new memories from consolidating in our minds. But when we’re asleep, we’re better at consolidating new memories. One study from a German research lab found that sleep helps our memory formation most if you know you will need the information later — like when studying notecards for a test.

In fact, some scientists believe the brain can actually change its own structure and organization in response to changes within our bodies and in our environment, like when we’re learning a new skill.

This is a theory called the brain plasticity theory, and it suggests those all-important structural and organizational changes in our brain take place when we’re asleep. Without adequate sleep, we have a hard time learning something new because our brain doesn’t have the opportunity to review and “absorb” the new information.

When you get enough sleep while you’re learning a new skill, you’ll be able to consolidate those memories faster and make fewer mistakes overall.

10) Don’t quit after the honeymoon phase.

Remember when I talked about those moments of frustration in #5 when people tend to quit? This is what Seth Godin calls “The Dip.” People quit because they run out of time, run out of money, get scared, don’t take it seriously, or lose interest.

When we experience the opportunity to learn something new, we enter what many people call the “honeymoon phase.” This is where we experience releases of dopamine as we experience new things. In other words, we’re hardwired to appreciate and seek out novelty because it makes us feel good.

But when the “honeymoon phase” fades, well … that’s when we experience “the dip.” Our progress slows, we get frustrated, and many of us quit.

This is exactly why we pre-committed to 20 hours of practice before we quit. Make sure you keep track of that time to help motivate you when you feel a dip coming, and fight through it. Commitment through these moments of weakness are game-changers when it comes to getting good at a new skill.

What are your tips for learning new skills quickly? Share your experiences with us in the comments. 

Creating new content on a regular basis isn’t always easy — especially when you’re on a small team. That’s why conversion rate optimization (CRO) is such a valuable practice for marketers to master. Because with the help of CRO, you can optimize the content and pages you already have to generate new leads.

Just how powerful is it? During the 2008 presidential election, the Obama campaign website saw an improvement of over 40% in sign-up rate after running a few conversion experiments. By the numbers, this optimization led to over 2.8 million additional sign-ups and $60 million in additional donations. That’s a huge impact.

While experimentation can seem like a big project to take on, learning how to get it right can pay off in big ways. That’s why Leadin partnered up with SnapApp to bring you the tools you need to start optimizing your website for more conversions.

First, use our experiment template to map out your experiment and start gathering data. Then, plug the results into the simple statistical significance calculator to determine if your experiment has yielded significant results. If it has, finish up the experiment template with your learnings and conclusions, and share the results with your team.

Ready to tackle CRO? You can check out the experiment template here. And the statistical significance calculator here.

If you have great results, tweet at @HubSpot and @Snap_App with your winning experiments!

In the last century, the world saw a massive revolution of innovation.

Beyond modern marvels such as digital advancements and the evolution of the smartphone, artificial intelligence is gradually changing society and how people navigate their lives. Machine learning is gradually being integrated into nearly every aspect of life.

It’s already used in machine translation, email spam filters, ATM check depositing and facial recognition – and that’s just what an average person uses day-to-day.

Predictive intelligence is making businesses more efficient, effective and successful. B2B companies deploying predictive intelligence for marketing activities are closer to the holy grail of understanding each individual customer – and personalizing all content to their needs and interests.

Technology not far from artificial intelligence is making a significant impact on the marketing industry. In fact, 86% of marketing executives have already indicated they have seen a positive return on investment in marketing technology and predictive analytics. The future of B2B marketing will focus on predictive analysis and intelligence, and have a major impact on lead scoring and content targeting.

The Transformation of Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is essentially a points system used to determine where your prospects are in the buying journey. The idea is to look at customers uniquely for a better understanding of what they looking for, what you can provide them with – and if they’re likely to make a purchase.

Manually scoring leads, with this helpful guide, can be an excellent introduction to the strategy of fully comprehending customers. Assigning this responsibility to your B2B marketing team brings consistency, reliability and focus to a personalization approach.

Beyond manual lead scoring lies predictive lead scoring. This is a proactive way to accelerate the sales process by determining which customers are ideal based on past behaviors and purchasing history.

This takes into account other technologies, such as CRM or marketing automation, and demographic information to predict whom sales and marketing should be nurturing closely. Still done semi-manually, this method uses the insight from traditional lead scoring and blends it with modern ways of working.

In terms of the future of B2B marketing, predictive lead scoring using predictive intelligence is yet one step further. This is even more accurate than basic lead scoring, because of its correlation between patterns discovered in both a company’s first-party data and general third-party trends.

It has also become the standard for most companies, especially technology-based businesses. A 2014 study revealed 90% of users agree predictive lead scoring provides more value than traditional approaches. The comprehensive nature of looking at customers holistically and integrating that insight into how you communicate with them can fast track your marketing efforts.

Given that artificial intelligence can predict the status of hundreds of prospects in a matter of minutes, marketers have everything to gain by using this technology.

A recent Gartner study concluded that predictive intelligence is a must-have for B2B marketing leaders. Just as marketing automation is being adopted widely within the marketing industry, predictive lead scoring is likely to follow.

The immediacy of reaching customers, understanding their needs and effectively determining their value to your company has created a necessary place for predictive intelligence in lead scoring.

The Power of Personalized Content Targeting

Predictive intelligence, an important component of predictive analytics, is also critical in learning which pieces of content to target to which customers. After predictive lead scoring reveals where each customer is and might be headed in the buying journey, you can glean insights from predictive analytics for establishing the tone, material and style of content each prospect will respond to most fervently.

An algorithm that determines the factors influencing a prospect can also pull the appropriate content. Just as you would send additional white papers to a manually-scored lead with interest in more in-depth material, this algorithm identifies the many customers to whom whitepapers would apply.

Sending the right content is just as important as creating it in the first place. Predictive analytics also leads to informed idea generation and content development.

Using predictive analytics in your content marketing takes careful consideration, but can be done successfully if you know the right data points to use and what to integrate into your existing strategy.

Seeing what content receives the most engagement and is most worthwhile to your prospects helps you tailor future content to those interests. Even with predictive analytics on your side to help you gain incredibly beneficial insights, it still takes a human to use the insight wisely and proactively.

Marketing professionals who work based on data, emotions and customer connections are the whole package in targeting content most effectively.

A.I. and the Future of B2B Marketing

Although artificial intelligence is not quite at the point of thinking, processing and completing tasks at the speed of a human brain, developments in the science of machine learning are getting closer to a complete takeover of this technology.

The existing uses of artificial intelligence within marketing is a good indication that the future of B2B marketing is bright – and that lead scoring and content targeting will be perfected as the technology matures.

With an already efficient system of analyzing data from thousands of sources to make sense of a single customer, predictive intelligence is making it possible for even small B2B companies to grow at rapid rates and expand their potential faster than traditional methods.