Welcome to My Blog

I joined HubSpot in September 2011 as a blogger. At the time, I needed to know how to write and educate through my writing.

Flash forward to today. My content role has evolved eons beyond what I could ever have imagined. To conquer lead gen, I mastered ebook production. To help spread data, I learned how to create infographics. When I write blog posts, that typically means designing a SlideShare or other visual element to accompany the posts.

It’s been fun, but it certainly hasn’t been easy. These days, content means so much more than just writing. And for those of you who understand that content marketing is a critical component of inbound success, content will need to mean more than just writing for you, too.

Download our full collection of free content marketing templates here. 

But rather than panic about the endless content formats you need to go master, we’re here to make it easy for you. In this post, you’ll find what I wish I had once upon a content marketer’s dream: a full collection of 386+ free, customizable, content creation templates. Let’s take a look at what’s inside.

Content Planning Templates

A Content Planning/Goal-Setting Template

(Download the content planning template here.)

HubSpot teamed up with Smart Insights to create a content planning template that will help you put together an effective content marketing plan for either your business or those of your clients. These templates will help you complete a SWOT analysis on your content marketing efforts (and develop a plan to improve them), define the right objectives and KPIs for that plan, brainstorm content ideas and map these across your funnel, and create a timeline for your content plans.

A Buyer Persona Template

(Download the buyer persona template here.)

Marketing with buyer personas means marketing smarter. This buyer persona template will help you easily organize your research to create your very own buyer personas. Use it to create beautiful, well-formatted buyer personas that you can share with your entire company, while learning best practices for persona research along the way.

3 Blog Editorial Calendar Templates

(Download the blog editorial calendar templates here.)

Having an editorial calendar for your marketing content will save you a whole lot of time — not to mention sanity — as you plan your content release timeline. We realize there isn’t a one-size-fits all solution, so we’ve created three editorial calendar templates to use at your leisure: one for Google Calendar, one for Excel, and one for Google Sheets. (Read this blog post for a step-by-step guide for using the Google Calendar template.)

2 Social Media Content Calendar Templates (for 6 Social Networks)

(Download the social media content calendar templates here.)

With so many different social networks to manage, a social media manager’s life becomes a lot easier when they can plan which content to share on each account — and when. This easy-to-use social media content calendar for Microsoft Excel lets you organize your social media activities far in advance. Use it to plan your updates and learn how to properly format your content for the six most popular social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and Pinterest.

Written Content Templates 

5 Blog Post Templates

(Download the blog post templates here.)

Here’s the thing with blogging: There isn’t one, easy template you can fill in to produce a quality content offering. You need to spend some time brainstorming a title, outlining core content, and so on. While our templates are by no means a fill-in-the-blank type template, they’ll walk you through the critical steps for creating the following five blog post types:

• How-To Post
• List-Based Post
• Curated Collection Post
• SlideShare Presentation Post
• Newsjacking Post

We’ve seen these formats crush it on our blogs, and we would love for you to use them to hit your own goals.

5 Ebook Templates

(Download the ebook templates here.)

Year after year, marketers cite lead generation as one of their top content marketing goals for the year. If you want to succeed at lead gen, then you need content offers — like ebooks — to help you get there. Our internal creative design team went to work building five, beautiful ebook templates — in both PowerPoint and InDesign — for you to download, customize, and use. 

A Press Release Template

(Download the press release template here.)

While public relations has adapted to be more lovable and less spammy, press releases can be effective when used correctly. Our press release template takes this into consideration and provides an inbound-optimized version. This means the template can help you script press releases and do so in a format optimized for sharing on your company blog. It’s built in Microsoft Word, so you can easily adapt and customize as needed for your PR needs.

50 Call-to-Action Templates

(Download the call-to-action templates here.)

Redesigning your call-to-action buttons can improve clickthrough rates by 1,300% or more. That means visitors will spend more time on your website, and it’ll encourage them to become leads. To help you design clickable calls-to-action, we’ve built 50 pre-designed CTAs for you. These CTAs are super easy to customize, so you don’t need to know any fancy design programs — just PowerPoint!

Bonus: There’s also a handy free tool in there that lets you track your CTA clicks in real time so you can see the exact number of clicks that your designs are reeling in.

Visual Content Templates 

195+ Visual Marketing Templates

(Download the visual marketing templates here.)

Not a designer? Not a problem. We partnered with graphic design software company Canva to create over 195 visual marketing templates that are easy-to-use, work for any industry (finance, dentistry, agriculture, law — we’ve got ’em all), and are completely free. Best of all, they’re ready to edit in Canva’s online design tool, which is included for free with this set of templates. The templates include…

• Infographics templates
• Facebook ad templates
• Facebook post templates
• Twitter post templates
• Email header templates
• Blog title templates
• Facebook cover photo templates
• Twitter header templates
• LinkedIn cover photos templates

15 Infographic Templates

(Download the infographic templates here.)

I remember my first infographic. It was made on a HubSpot hack night in order to help us hit our lead-gen goals. I spent the entire night learning how to design, trying to figure out how to hack it in PowerPoint, and an abundance of other frustrations.

That experience inspired us to create fifteen, pre-designed infographic templates right in PowerPoint. That way, marketers can skip the frustrations I ran into and start creating the graphics right away. Within each template, we even provide guides to teach you how to use the templates effectively. 

100 Social Media Graphics Templates

(Download the social media graphics templates here.)

People are 44% more likely to engage with content on social media that contains pictures. But we know well that creating visual content takes more time and resources — which why we’ve created these 100 customizable templates for you. These templates are in PowerPoint, so they’re very easy to edit — no Photoshop skills required. Simply customize the text on an image, save it, and post it to social media.

3 PowerPoint Templates

(Download the PowerPoint templates here.)

PowerPoint can be a powerful tool for lead generation, brand building, and thought leadership. Don’t let boring slides stand in the way. You don’t have to be a designer to create beautiful slides. To help you get started, we’ve created three, eye-catching PowerPoint templates so you don’t have to start from scratch or rely on standard, old-school styles.

Bonus: We’ve also included four video tutorials on PowerPoint tricks in there so you can learn how to enhance images, clean up your text, install premium fonts, and so on — right in PowerPoint.

5 SlideShare Templates

(Download the SlideShare templates here.)

Creating a SlideShare presentation in PowerPoint doesn’t have to be daunting. With the right and tools at your disposal, you can easily create an engaging, visual presentation — all without fancy design programs, huge budgets, or hiring contractors.

To help you make a SlideShare of your own, we’ve created some free PowerPoint presentation templates for making awesome SlideShares — so your presentations will look great and be a breeze to put together. (Read this blog post for tip on how you can update and edit the templates to suit your specific needs.)

And there you have it, content marketers: over 386 templates to help you start creating content easily and quickly and further your inbound success. Enjoy!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2013 and has been updated and for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 
                                   

 

Ugh, Mondays.

That’s how many of us approach our Monday mornings. With another weekend in the books, we tend to start off the workweek with a bit of a drag in our step.

For some of the world’s most successful people, however, Monday mornings represent an opportunity to start fresh and set the tone for the rest of the week.

Whether they’re practicing yoga or meditation, walking their dog, or tidying their living space, they have a routine that helps them get ready for a productive week from the very start.

What do the most successful businesspeople in the world do to start the week off on the right foot? The folks at DollarsDirect collected the Monday morning habits of some of the world’s business elite and used their findings to create the infographic below. Check it out, and think about how you can reframe your Monday mornings to supercharge your productivity for the rest of the week.

More than ever, students are considering alternatives to academic colleges. Major debt burdens and poor job prospects for recent college grads has sparked a major re-think about the relative advantages of attending a trade school instead of a traditional four-year university.

That means the pool of potential students for your trade school is growing. And inbound marketing is the perfect diving board.

Here are four reasons why vocational schools are primed to succeed with inbound marketing.

Trade School Prospects Do Their Research

People who want to attend trade school are active researchers. They have a very practical outlook. They don’t want to carry a lot of debt. They want good job prospects at the end of their studies. They’ll do the hard work of investigating what school offers them the best potential.

That’s great news for you. Having a prospect pool of prospective students engaged in research means a lot of opportunity for you connect with them. The best way to get started? Draw them in with content.

Your school already has a store of content to start you off: program descriptions, alumni success stories, professor biographies, course syllabi. Talk to admissions to find out what questions prospective students are asking. Create content that answers these questions.

Have they settled on a field of study or do they want career-choice guidance from the school? Do they want to learn more about a specific career to determine if it’s right for them? What do they want to know about campus life, especially since students live off campus? Are they wondering whether there are other students like them, whether they’ll fit in?

Get a group together from admissions, various departments, and marketing to brainstorm a monster list of prospect questions. 

>> Read more about SEO for schools here  

High Opportunity to Connect at Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Because trade school prospects research so heavily, you can attract them at any point during their buyer’s journey. At HubSpot, we break the buyer’s journey into three main phases: awareness, consideration, and decision.

Align each piece of content and call-to-action (CTA) to a specific buyer journey phase. We call this “content mapping.” As your brainstorm team works on your monster list of questions, think about what questions your different personas are asking at each phase.

For example, during the awareness phase prospects are looking to educate themselves about what options exist. They don’t have questions yet about your school. They’re still trying to figure out what types of certifications or training are needed for the career they’re thinking about. Or what the career path for that trade might look like. Their questions also vary by persona. An adult who’s already in the workforce and looking to improve their credentials will have different questions than a high school student who isn’t sure yet what career choice is right for them.

Keep your school-specific content and CTAs for the consideration and decision phases, when they want to know how your school will meet their needs.

Winning at SEO: Long Tail Keywords

One of the components of successful content mapping is knowing what keywords and terms are relevant to your prospects’ search behavior. Trade schools can rock SEO because you can take advantage of very specific keywords, called “long tail keywords” (LTK).

Unlike a traditional 4-year school, your school’s degrees are already tied to specific topics of extreme interest to your prospective students. Have your faculty show off their expertise online. Don’t let them save it for the classroom only.

Help them share their practical expertise online through creating great content — e.g. video snippets of class sessions, PDFs of class handouts, blog posts about a recent principle or lesson students tend to struggle with, or enjoy, etc. Your faculty’s content, by default, should already contain many of the LTKs your prospective students are using to find the degree program and the school they’re seeking.

There is less competition for LTKs, which not only helps you rank high for the right ones, but makes it less expensive for you to do so. You have a wide range of unique strings of phrases that are all applicable for your prospects searching about trade schools and careers.

However mere word count isn’t enough. You need specificity. Your school won’t rank for “online trade schools.” But it might for “accredited online accounting degree.” Add another data point to your monster content topic list. What’s the LTK to be used with each piece of content?

LTKs have a lower search volume than common terms, but the traffic they attract is highly motivated. This is why LTKs have conversion rates up to 2.5 times better than more popular search terms. In fact, 70% of all search traffic comes from LTKs.

You’re Agile

Unlike more traditional academic institutions, trade schools often have a relatively flexible and agile marketing department. Perhaps there are fewer stakeholders who insist on being part of the conversation. Maybe there’s less bureaucracy, or perhaps more urgency.

Whatever the reason, metric-rich inbound marketing works best with a “test, review, and refine” attitude. Marketing teams that have the agility to try new things, and cycle quickly through them, will find the most success with inbound.

Are you hearing your students have adopted a new social media or messaging app? Test out some content there. Are you seeing that a lot of your traffic is coming from mobile devices? Maybe the students in your game development department can put together a fun app.

Conclusion

The winds of post-high school education are shifting. But the field is crowded with trade schools. Use the power of inbound marketing to attract the right kind of student for your school and benefit from increasing trade school enrollments.

We’ve all heard the adage, “Two heads are better than one.” And within your marketing team, the power of collaboration is probably no surprise.

But what about when you’re collaborating with the marketing department of another company via a co-marketing campaign? Are the benefits still worth the stress of it all?

Our experiences say yes. Co-marketing is all about doubling your chances: double your leads, double your resources, all while spending half of the budget. 

But what exactly is co-marketing? In short, co-marketing allows two or more companies to work together on a project with the purpose of sharing in the reward — whether that’s leads, buzz, awareness, or new customers. By leveraging the reach and resources of a partner, these campaigns are designed to deliver substantial results without having to wait for the content to rank in organic search. 

Ready to take on the challenge? To pull off a fruitful campaign, you’ll need top-notch organization and project management skills. The good news is we’ve crafted this comprehensive guide to keep you on track. This guide will teach you how to:

• Choose your partner and make the connection
• Write your co-marketing agreement
• Evaluate your co-marketing goals
• Brainstorm and delegate the content creation
• Promote your content
• Evaluate the partnership value

See how co-marketing can help you surpass your goals. Download our 10-Step Guide to Getting Started With Co-Marketing. 

This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Agency Post. To read more content like this, subscribe to Agency Post. 

If you’ve been shopping recently, you might have noticed a few changes in color options.

Everything from sweaters to couches to kitchen accessories are awash in soft shades of pink and blue — specifically Pantone 13-1520 and Pantone 15-3919. These two palettes, Rose Quartz and Serenity, were named Pantone’s Colors of the Year in December.

This annual announcement, beginning in 2000 when its chosen hue was Cerulean, is the brand’s version of trendspotting and prediction as the authority on all things color, and it has been increasingly a highly marketed and media-covered event, spurring retailers and consumers to reconsider the selected shade.

As Kyle Stock wrote in Bloomberg, “Pantone has effectively become to pigments what Anna Wintour is to the wider fashion world: part trendsetter, part enforcer.” 

What was once a solely utilitarian product for designers and printers, Pantone’s color chips have gained a cult following from design-minded individuals who are accustomed to bloggers distilling weddings and apartments and even movies into corresponding color palettes.

Apparently, the language of color is one we can all understand.

The History of Pantone

Founded in the 1950s, Pantone originally manufactured color cards for cosmetic companies. Lawrence Herbert, a young chemist, saw that the company’s process could solve a more widespread problem: the lack of color standardization. There was no language for communicating about and reproducing colors. There was no consistency, which caused a large amount of rework and reprinting in the graphics industry.

Consider this: Would National Geographic’s iconic yellow border have become so memorable if February’s edition looked more chartreuse while April’s border was tinted a shade of mustard?

Seeing the opportunity, Herbert bought the company in 1962 and forwent medical school to focus on creating a color system now known as the Pantone Matching System (PMS), which began as 10 standardized colors and today consists of more than 10,000.

These colors chips, printed in the recognizable fan book format, give designers and printers the tools to communicate about something color — something most people perceive differently. Pantone created a common language whereby designers, artists, printers, and clients could definitively choose Pantone 212 C, not 213 C or 205 C, and then printers would know how much of 14 different pigments they should add to create that exact color. 

But the brand didn’t stop at creating new combinations of yellow, blue, purple, red, etc. Pantone recently created color standards for the fashion and interiors industry, has a consultancy practice whereby its works with brands, produces color trend forecasting guides, and has launched itself as a lifestyle brand — owning a Pantone-inspired product is just another way for a person to show her appreciation of good design.

How Pantone Branded Color

Pantone’s emergence as the most well-known color standards company — and yes, there are competitors — is partly due to its longevity in the industry. But it’s also because of the brand’s smart marketing plays that Pantone has come to be about more than the science of creating and matching colors. The brand employs color psychologists and color economists who explain the feelings the colors should evoke, not just their chemical makeup.

Leatrice Eiseman, the executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, gave a statement to the New York Times in 2007 on that year’s selection: “Blue Iris brings together the dependable aspects of blue, underscored by a strong, soul-searching purple cast. Emotionally, it is anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic.”

This year’s selection was released with this statement: “As consumers seek mindfulness and well-being as an antidote to modern day stresses, welcoming colors that psychologically fulfill our yearning for reassurance and security are becoming more prominent. Joined together, Rose Quartz and Serenity demonstrate an inherent balance between a warmer embracing rose tone and the cooler tranquil blue, reflecting connection and wellness as well as a soothing sense of order and peace.”

It continues: “In many parts of the world we are experiencing a gender blur as it relates to fashion, which has in turn impacted color trends throughout all other areas of design.”

Source: Pantone’s Instagram

This yearly marketing event is not just about the company showing off its ability to forecast trends in color selection, but also about its ability to understand how societal changes are influencing our visual preferences. While this may seem like a leap, it has played well with the media and partners such as photo-editing app Aviary, which release Rose Quartz- and Serenity-colored filters when the selection was announced. 

But beyond this yearly event, Pantone has found unique and memorable ways to solidify its relationship with designers and garner the adoration of those outside of its target market with licensing deals and quirky products. Here are 10 other interesting examples of marketing from the master of color:

1) Pantone Swag

Pantone has capitalized on its own brand — that rectangle of color with a black text over a white band — by creating its own line of products. These include everything from folding chairs to ornaments to iPhone cases. 

2) Tiffany Blue 

While many think of Audrey Hepburn eating breakfast in pearls and black evening gloves in front of Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue store, the more prevalent image is not an image at all, but a color. 

Who better to mix and standardize the color of all those little blue boxes than Pantone? Tiffany & Co.’s iconic robins-egg blue is actually PMS number 1837 (the brand’s founding year). Pantone created the custom color for the brand, which is trademarked and not available in any fan book. It remains one of the most well-recognized brand-color associations in the world. 

Source: Tiffany & Co. 

Starbuck’s green, the Hermes orange, the red on the sole of Christian Louboutin, and Coca-Cola’s red are all Pantone customized colors under trademark protection.

3) Sephora-Pantone Universe Color of the Year Collection

Going back to its roots in cosmetics, the brand partners with Sephora each year to create a custom makeup palette so anyone can enhance their look with the color(s) of the year. 

4) The Pantone Hotel

Need a vacation to refresh and recharge your creative powers? You can do so surrounded saturated, bold, and pastel color swatches at the Pantone Hotel in Brussels. 

A Pantone licensing venture allowed for this inspired hotel hideaway that has a gift shop full of Pantone-inspired products and consultants available for color education and color psychology sessions.

Source: Fast Company

5) Instagram

It only makes sense that the creator of a color language would be a perfect match for the largest network of visual-based communicators?

Pantone’s Instagram feed is candy for the color-obsessed. Bright Pantone swatches are paired up with foods, books, drawings, clothes, and more of equal color intensity. The brand showcases behind-the-scenes photos at what is largely a chemical company, designers using its color guides, and just plain — yet perfect — images of colors. 

Source: Pantone’s Instagram

6) Minion Yellow

For the release of the Minions movie in 2015, Pantone partnered with Universal Pictures to create an animated character-inspired color — its first release in three years. The chosen hue is meant to exude “hope, joy and optimism.” While the color can be used (unlike Tiffany Blue), it was released as a Pantone “fashion, home, and interior” color, so you’ll have to buy your way to a Minion-colored living room.

7) The Pantone Cycle

In 2012, the brand partnered with bicycle manufacturer Abici Italia to create four color-inspired models: Green 627C, Ruby Red 186C, Turquoise 15-5519, and Mimosa 14-0848. These color code numbers and the Pantone name were prominently displayed on the bike’s chain guard. Who wouldn’t want to show off their design cred while weaving through traffic during a morning commute?

8) The Diamond Jubilee

Working with ad agency Leo Burnett, Pantone release a limited edition color guide inspired by Queen Elizabeth’s “fashion-forward colour statements” to celebrate the monarch’s 60-year reign. The palette highlights the Her Majesty’s love of monochromatic dressing.

Source: Pantone

9) Colorstrology

Are forecasts in love and work based on celestial movements not enough? Maybe the missing piece in planning your future is color.

Michele Bernhardt, a healer and metaphysician, wrote Colorstrology, which blends astrology, numerology, and color theory to define a person’s birthday color and align it with a specific Pantone color. 

10) Celebrate Color Infographic

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, Pantone created this infographic highlighting the changing color preferences by decade. While nothing revolutionary, it shows how well the brand has adapted to digital marketing.

The Influence of Color

Pantone has become so recognizable both within and outside of the design community that its brand has inspired other artists and designers. There have been Pantone dessert tarts and beer cans. And artist  Angelica Dass used Pantone colors to match a person’s skintone and challenge our perception of how we define skin color. 

Pantone has created a language of color and in doing so, created an opportunity for itself to become both the authority on creating and marketing color as a brand. And to think that all this started with a young chemist who had to hand-mix shades for a retail display so women could choose the right shade of pantyhose.