Most social media feeds are almost distractingly busy — full of photos, videos, and text updates from friends and brands you follow. Instagram is different — you can only look at one post at a time.

And while Instagram’s simple, clean interface makes to easy to focus on users’ beautiful photography and interesting videos, it also leaves something to be desired: the ability to easily repost other users’ content.

But fear not: for every problem, the internet has afforded a solution. We tested out four different ways to repost content on Instagram in a few simple steps. All of these methods are free, but some require you to download an app from the iOS App Store or Google Play first.

Disclaimer: Pursuant to Instagram’s Terms of Use, you must first reach out to the Instagram user whose content you want to reproduce and obtain written permission to do so. You can do this by commenting on the image and asking, or by sending them an Instagram Direct Message, which can be accessed by tapping the paper airplane icon in the upper right-hand corner of the app.

Using Repost for Instagram

1. Download Repost for Instagram.

Download Repost for Instagram for either iOS or Android. Both devices are compatible with this app, which integrates directly with Instagram so you can share content from other Instagram users from your mobile device.

2. Identify a photo or video to repost.

Open your Instagram app and find a photo or video you’d like to repost from your own Instagram account. Tap your chosen photo from the original poster’s photo gallery to see its full view, as shown below.

(Psst — do you follow HubSpot on Instagram?)

3. Copy the post’s share URL to your clipboard.

Once you’re on the photo’s or video’s landing page, tap the “…” icon in the upper-righthand corner of the post. Then, tap “Copy Share URL” (the button will look the same on Android devices).

4. Open Repost for Instagram.

Once the photo is copied to your phone’s clipboard, open Repost for Instagram. The post you copied will automatically be on the app’s homepage, as shown below.

Tap the arrow on the righthand side of the post. There, you can edit how you want the repost icon to appear on Instagram.

Tap “Repost.” Then, tap “Copy to Instagram,” where you can add a filter and edit the post.

5. Edit the post’s caption and share your repost.

Tap “Next.” If you want to include the original post’s caption, tap the caption field and press “Paste,” where the original caption will appear with a citation that credits the original poster with your reposted photo.

When you’re ready to share the post, tap “Share” as you would a regular Instagram post. Here’s how the post appears on your Instagram profile:

Using InstaRepost

1. Download InstaRepost.

Download InstaRepost for iOS or Android devices to share content from other Instagram users from your own Instagram account via your mobile device.

2. Give InstaRepost access to your Instagram account.

Open InstaRepost, log in using your Instagram credentials, and authorize it to access photos, friends, and similar content associated with your Instagram account.

3. Use InstaRepost to look up the original poster’s username.

InstaRepost will only show you a small selection from your Instagram feed. If you know what post you’re looking for, tap the magnifying glass icon on the bottom toolbar of the InstaRepost app to access the Explore tab. Enter the username of the person whose photo you want to repost.

4. Save the photo to your phone’s camera roll.

Once you’ve found a post you want to reshare, tap the arrow in the lower righthand corner. Then, tap “Repost,” then “Repost” again. This will first save the photo your mobile device’s native camera roll, where you can retrieve it in the Instagram app.

Navigate to your Instagram app and tap “Library.” You’ll see the post saved to your phone’s camera roll. Tap the photo to pull it into Instagram.

5. Add a filter and a citation, and share your repost.

Add a filter and edit the post as you would any other. Then, select “Next” and tap the caption field to paste the original caption. The repost won’t automatically include a citation, so we suggest adding one by typing “@ + [username]” to credit the content’s original poster. Then, press “Share.”

Here’s how the post appears on your Instagram profile:

Using DownloadGram

DownloadGram lets Instagram users download high-resolution copies of Instagram photos and videos to repost from their own accounts. Luckily, there isn’t an app you need to download to repost using this process. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open Instagram and find a photo or video to repost.

Open your Instagram app and find the post you want to repost. Tap the “…” icon in the upper righthand corner of the post and click “Copy Share URL” (this button will be the same for both iOS and Android mobile devices).

2. Paste the post’s share URL into DownloadGram.

Open your mobile internet browser and navigate to DownloadGram — or simply, downloadgram.com. Paste the URL into the text box that appears on the website’s homepage. Then, tap “Download.”

Tap the green “Download Image” button that appears further down DownloadGram’s homepage.

3. Download the post.

You’ll be directed to a new webpage with the content ready to download. Tap the download icon — the box with an upward-facing arrow, as shown below — then tap “Save image.”

4. Open Instagram and find the photo or video in your camera roll.

Return to your Instagram app. The image will be saved to your phone’s native camera roll, so edit it as you would any other Instagram post.

5. Add a caption and share your repost.

The repost won’t include a citation, so we suggest adding one by typing “@ + [username]” to credit the original poster with the photo or video. Then, press “Share.” Here’s how the post appears on your Instagram profile:

Taking a Screenshot

This method doesn’t require any or other websites to repost on Instagram. It’s worth nothing that this method only works for reposting photos, not videos. Here’s how to do it:

Find a photo on Instagram you’d like to repost, and take a screenshot with your phone.

• For iOS: Press down on the home and lock buttons simultaneously until your screen flashes.
• For Android: Press down on the sleep/wake and volume down buttons simultaneously until your screen flashes.

Tap the new post button in the bottom-center of your Instagram screen. Resize the photo so it’s properly cropped in the Instagram photo editor.

Edit and filter the post like you would any other Instagram post. Keep in mind that your phone will take a screenshot of everything on your screen, not just the photo you want to repost. So, be prepared to crop the sides of the screenshot to capture just the image you want to share with your followers.

The repost won’t include a citation, so we suggest adding one by typing “@ + [username]” to credit the original poster with the photo you’re reposting. Then, press “Share.” Here’s how the post appears on your Instagram profile:

Now that you’ve learned how to repost on Instagram, you can diversify your profile with content sourced from friends, family, and brands. Use the methods above — being sure to cite the source of the original post — to quickly and easily reshare your favorite content.

Looking for more ideas for sourcing and creating Instagram content for your brand? Download our free guide to using Instagram for business here.

Disclaimer: This blog post is not legal advice for your company to use in complying with EU data privacy laws like the GDPR. Instead, it provides background information to help you better understand the GDPR. This legal information is not the same as legal advice, where an attorney applies the law to your specific circumstances, so we insist that you consult an attorney if you’d like advice on your interpretation of this information or its accuracy.

In a nutshell, you may not rely on this as legal advice, or as a recommendation of any particular legal understanding.

It’s not enough to implement a few changes for data protection in your business and forget about it. As part of the GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation that’s now in EU law, businesses need “data protection by design and by default”.

This means building data security and privacy into every aspect of your business’s data management strategy. From data capture to storage, maintenance, transfer, use, and cleaning, it’s essential to take care of your contact data ethically and securely.

While we’re not advisors on GDPR, we can follow the experts and present their recommendations. This includes collecting clear consent for communication, managing data securely, and implementing requirements such as cookie banners and privacy notices.

One of the most straightforward ways to meet these requirements is with GDPR compliance software.

GDPR compliance software helps businesses to manage customer data, consent forms, and data security. Some platforms also enable a company’s customers to edit the personal data that is stored or processed about them.

What is Personal Data Under the GDPR?

Personal data includes information related to people who can be identified from it, whether directly or indirectly. Pseudonymized data can help reduce privacy risks, but it is still personal data by this definition. The GDPR applies to the processing of personal data wholly or partly by automated means, such as a form on your website, or the processing of personal data which forms part of a filing system.

How GDPR Impacts Email Campaigns

When whispers of GDPR first started surfacing many moons ago, one of the questions that most perplexed business owners had was whether they could continue sending emails to their existing contacts.

As an email marketer in the world of GDPR, you need to collect freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent (Article 32) before sending emails.

Adhering to data protection in your email campaigns includes adopting these practices:

• Requiring all leads to specifically opt-in to communications before sending email campaigns.
• Offering contacts an easy way for their personal data to be edited or removed.
• Purging contact data you no longer require or after the communicated storage time in your terms and conditions.

To maintain a clear oversight of all contact data, you can sync your current lead and customer data as well as their latest subscription and consent status between apps with a two-way data sync. You can also implement a consent management platform to collect and manage consent for all contacts.

Simplify GDPR Compliance with a Consent Management Platform

One key part of GDPR is documenting each contact’s consent to store their data and communicate with them. While you can use built-in features in each of your apps, it’s also helpful to choose a dedicated consent management platform, or CMP. Here are some of the top CMPs to consider:

• Didomi is a popular consent and preference management platform with comprehensive solutions to collect, store, and leverage user consents and preferences. After completing the setup process, you can see a compliance score out of 100% for your business. With their Privacy Center, you can also offer customers a dedicated space to easily access and manage their consent and preferences.
• Piwik PRO was built as an analytics platform but now includes a Consent Manager to manage your marketing stack’s compliance in one centralized place. It’s designed to get your tools up to speed with GDPR, California’s CCPA, Brazil’s LGPD, and other privacy laws around the world.

Other Apps to Streamline GDPR Compliance

As well as adopting a consent management platform, there are several other types of apps to help you manage your contacts compliantly. Here are some GDPR-friendly apps to consider adding to your stack:

• LogicGate Risk Cloud is an agile GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) cloud solution. It includes enterprise-level solutions for risk management, compliance management, and data privacy.
• Boxcryptor makes your cloud storage more secure with encryption for OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive among other providers. It’s free to use for one storage provider on two devices, and you can upgrade for unlimited devices, providers, and advanced filename encryption.
• Onna integrates, unifies, and protects knowledge platforms in one centralized and secure place. Connectors include Google Suite, Microsoft 365, Dropbox Business, Zoom, and Slack Enterprise.
• iubenda generates instant cookie banners and terms and conditions that are customized to fit your business, tech stack, and the data you collect. It’s especially valuable for websites and small businesses to comply with legal requirements quickly and simply.
• PieSync and its two-way data syncing tool existed before GDPR, but it has some handy benefits for secure data management and up-to-date contact information, including subscription status. The two-way sync enables you to create a “single source of truth” between your apps and make your customer data easier to use and manage. Next to the subscriptions, you can also sync consent status and preferences between apps with customizable filters and rules.
• Fathom Analytics was co-founded by entrepreneur and author Paul Jarvis, Fathom Analytics offers simple, fast, and privacy-focused website analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics. It doesn’t collect any personal data, so it’s instantly GDPR-compliant and you don’t need to include it in your cookie notice.

Keep Your Company Compliant

To maximize your organization’s GDPR compliance, there are certain steps you need to follow and checkboxes to tick. However, there are ways to streamline the process. GDPR compliance software can reduce many of the headaches and make it easier to meet the most important requirements, enabling you to get back to your other business goals sooner.

In January of 2019, Contently, a content marketing platform that connects enterprise brands with freelance talent, surveyed over 1,000 people in the U.S. about their media and marketing preferences. What they uncovered about people’s preferred content length shattered a seemingly unbreakable convention that longer is always better: 75% of people prefer to read articles under 1,000 words.

With our ever-dwindling ability to concentrate on given tasks, Contently’s discovery makes complete sense. Writing shorter articles is better because people prefer consuming that type of content.

However, longer articles typically rank higher on Google and generate more website visits because these types of resources are more comprehensive and better equipped to solve the searcher’s intent. 

So how do you reconcile these two ideas, and when is it appropriate to craft concise content? Fortunately, the answer lies in microblogging.

This form is best used when: 

• The topic or post has low search intent but high potential for virality. 
• You want to take advantage of the communities on common microblogging platforms. 
• You’re covering a live event or providing timely updates. 
• You’re using your microblog as a vehicle for delivering multimedia content without a lot of accompanying text.

The conundrum then becomes how you can create a microblog without filling your site with thin content, which can actually hurt your site when it comes to search because Google sees these pages as low-value. 

While it’s not necessary (as evidenced by the FiveThirtyEight example below), most microblogging actually happens on platforms designed specifically for the purpose. 

1. Twitter

The OG of micro blogging sites, Twitter is not only one of the most popular microblogging sites around, but it’s also one of the most popular social media platforms around.

On Twitter, you can create a profile where all your posts — or Tweets — live. In your Tweets, you can include text, links, photos, videos, GIFs, audio, and more. Each of your Tweets also has a 280-character cap. Additionally, you can reply to and share — or retweet — other users’ Tweets.

2. Tumblr

With over 496 million different blogs, Tumblr is bustling hub of short form content. On the microblogging site, you can create a blog and include links, text, photos, GIFs, videos, Spotify tracks, MP3 files, and more in your posts. When you follow other blogs, their posts will show up in your dashboard. You can also comment on and reblog other blogs’ posts on your own blog.

3. Pinterest

Unlike most microblogs, Pinterest is purely visual. On your profile, you can create Boards, which are collections of pictures curated around a specific topic, post Pins of your favorite pictures, and add Tries, which are notes and photos of ideas you tried, like new recipes you cooked or new places you traveled to. You can also follow other people’s profiles and topics, which are the most popular Boards that cover specific topics.

4. Instagram

While Instagram is mostly a visual platform — like Pinterest — Instagram also lets you add 2,200 character long captions to each photo or video you post on your profile. Some media outlets are even leveraging Instagram to spark a new phase of journalism that focuses on crafting visually appealing articles.

On Instagram, you can follow other profiles and popular hashtags, discover new content based off your user behavior and popular topics, watch long form videos and Instagram stories, comment on posts, tag your friends in posts, and direct message them.

5. Facebook

You might know Facebook as the most popular social media network in the world. But it’s also the most robust microblogging platform out there.

On Facebook, you can create a profile where you can share text-based updates, photos, GIFs, videos, an emotion you’re feeling, an activity you’re currently doing, and the location you’re currently in.

You can also ask for recommendations on where to go when you’re about to visit a location, tag friends and events in your updates, poll your friends, support and donate to a nonprofit, answer a question about yourself, create fun lists, post Facebook Stories, record live videos, interact with your friend’s updates, message, call, and video chat with them, start groups with them, create events, watch long form videos, sell and buy products, and play games.

6. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media platform geared towards business professionals, but it nonetheless has a powerful microblogging arm. Not only can you use LinkedIn’s publishing functionality to post articles, but you can also use status updates for short-form microblogs. With these status updates, you can share a photo, video, event, or link… or you can choose to publish something longer form. Everything you share or engage with can then be found on your profile under “Activity.”

As you probably already noticed, most of the microblogging sites above are also the most popular social media sites — but this shouldn’t be a surprise. People love scrolling through social media because they can consume tubs of snackable content in a short amount of time. And marketers should take this insight and apply it to their content strategy. Because, just like eating a bag of Doritos, you never stop after the first chip. 

Microblog Examples

So you know when microblogging works and the common platforms where it takes place. But what do you end up posting?

Take inspiration from some of these incredible microblogs: 

1. Liz Ryan on LinkedIn

Liz Ryan is a thought leader in the human resources space, and she’s known for her Ask Liz Ryan series where individuals submit their burning career questions. Common topics include job hunting, salary negotiating, and toxic work places. 

Her LinkedIn posts feature these stories as well as helpful human resources tips in a concise microblog format. She actively encourages participation from her followers to create a rich community where people share their stories.

2. Magic Realism Bot on Twitter

The magic realism bot on Twitter automatically generates a premise for a magical story every four hours. Followers can either use these as writing prompts for their own projects or simply bask in the absurdity that it creates. 

The Magic Realism Bot completely fulfills its purpose in less than 280 characters, making it a great example for proving that long-form is not always the form for a content project.

3. Etsy on Pinterest

Etsy is an ecommerce platform where indie creators and collectors can list their products for sale. Because Etsy provides this service and generates revenue from transactions, it’s in their best interest to not only promote themselves as a platform but also the goods that can be found there. 

In this type of scenario, casual browsing is a mighty tool, so they use their Pinterest as a microblog that showcases various gems from Etsy sellers. This tactic doesn’t work as a long-form blog, and the goal is not organic traffic but instead catching the eye of potential customers on Pinterest.

4. FiveThirtyEight’s Live Election Coverage

FiveThirtyEight is a website founded by analyst Nate Silver that covers poll analysis, politics, and economics. On November 3, 2020, their election coverage took the form of a microblog, releasing bite sized updates on the status of vote counts and projections on electoral vote distribution as well as expert commentary. 

Unlike the other microblogs on this list, FiveThirtyEight used their own website to host their microblog posts, with all election coverage accessible on a single page. This helped keep users on their site while providing a good user experience when it came to refreshing for more information as information trickled in live.

5. Will Lucas on LinkedIn

Will Lucas uses LinkedIn to share insights on entrepreneurship and growth. While many of his posts include links to his initiatives as well as status updates on some of his ventures, he also uses the microblog functionality of LinkedIn to deliver video content that provides value to his audience.

6. SparkNotes on Twitter

As a study guide website for humanities classes, SparkNotes’s goal with their marketing is to reach out to their target audience of high school and college students. Their website content is geared toward students who are searching for something specific. However, they use Twitter as a microblog that takes a different approach: Using a viral approach that relies on humor and relatability to generate awareness, earn engagement, and increase reach.

7. Humans of New York on Instagram

The Humans of New York project uses Instagram to highlight real stories about real New Yorkers. Each Instagram post functions as a mini-feature piece about someone that photographer Brandon Stanton comes across.

Because these individuals aren’t famous, there isn’t a lot of search intent, so there’s no need for it to take on the form of a typical search engine-indexed blog post. Instead, Humans of New York relies on the visual aspect of the site to humanize its subjects with short articles that range from touching to absurd, heart-wrenching to hilarious.

With the advice regarding blogging vs. microblogging and the above examples serving as inspiration, start crafting a content strategy that uses form to reflect its purpose so that it can be as useful as possible to your audience.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Your business is getting by just fine – but still, the questions remain: Could you be selling more? Is there an opportunity to increase market penetration? Is there any way you could engage in further product diversification?

Companies hoping to increase revenue can do so in a variety of ways — such as an increase in advertising budget, expanding their sales team, and investing heavily in product development.

However, one of the often overlooked ways to strengthen your gross sales is a purposeful, well-researched, and expertly executed market development strategy.

In this article, we’ll explain what market development is and how you can employ it to increase sales and grow your business.

What is market development?

Market development is the expansion of your total addressable market (TAM) and how much market share you can expect to claim.

A market development strategy can focus on how a business might grow revenue by embracing one or both of the following initiatives:

• Developing a new product line to increase revenue by selling to new customers, or up-selling to existing ones.
• Creating a plan to sell existing products/services to new demographics, through such initiatives as adding locations or expanding delivery radius.

In the first scenario, TAM increases because by offering a new product or service, you’re effectively increasing the maximum amount of revenue you can attain from your existing customer base.

Think of a jeans company that starts to design shirts and jackets – this company might have tapped out their market’s interest in jeans, but those same customers might be willing to also buy clothing other than jeans from this company.

In the second example, TAM increases because you’re simply adding more people to your target market, and are able to service new customers without investing in a new product line. Think of corporate expansion by way of hiring salespeople to service a new region, or a restaurant opening up a second location on the other side of town. 

How to Create a Market Development Strategy

The decision of when and how to develop your existing market should be a methodical process.

Just because your business has struck lightning once does not mean your new expansion plan is a guaranteed success.

Because of that reality, follow these steps and use these resources to determine if you should develop your market, how it should be developed, and whether or not the initiative is successful.

Step 1: Research Your Development Opportunities

It’s always tempting to go after the next big thing – whether it’s adding more areas of focus to your consulting business or adding more items to your restaurant menu.

However, before you spend time, money, or resources on developing your market, take these steps to determine if the expansion is worthwhile.

Review Your Buyer Personas

Featured Tool: HubSpot Buyer Persona Templates

Download These Templates

When expanding your market, you face the potential need for net new or revised buyer personas, which are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

Consider the motivations, demographics, and backgrounds of your new target market to help you decide whether or not the development initiative makes sense.

Research Your Market

Featured Tool: HubSpot Market Research Kit

Download This Kit

Understanding your hypothetical positioning in a market is key before attempting to enter it. To that end, conduct market research exercises like a Porter’s Five Forces Analysis or a SWOT Analysis to determine your strengths, weaknesses, buyer power, threat of substitutes, or other attributes compared to competitors in this new market.

Additionally, you’ll want to calculate market penetration before moving forward with any plans to expand. 

Survey Your Customers

Featured Tool: Customer Satisfaction Survey Templates

Download These Templates

If you’re hoping to expand your current product line to generate more revenue from existing customers, make sure your intended expansion will be warmly received. Asking yourself why this development makes sense coming from your organization is a good first step.

However, talking to and surveying your customers to see if your proposed expansion is beneficial to their lives (and, more importantly, whether or not they would purchase it from you) is a necessary proof point before expanding your offerings as a business.

Step 2: Set Your Growth Goals

A successful market development will come with added sales, profit, employees, customers, products, users, locations, or some combination of these criteria.

Because there’s so much on the line, develop goals for which facets of your business you intend to grow, in addition to what your growth goal for each criteria is.

For example, by adding one more location, you may set the following growth goals:

• Increase customers by 90%.
• Increase revenue by 100%
• Double annual profits after recouping the initial investment.
• Increase employee headcount by 20 people.

During this stage, you should also consider the requirements needed to help you hit your growth goals, such as initial funding, tools, and software to help you get the initiative successfully up and running.

Lastly, the most important metric to measure before attempting to expand or develop your market is ROI. In this step of the process, compare the upfront costs of developing your market as intended with the projected revenue numbers of a successful expansion.

If the ROI is not encouraging enough to move forward with, you may need to go back to the drawing board and determine a new growth strategy and set of goals.

Featured Tool: Growth Strategy and Planning Template

Download the Template

Using the template above, outline your growth goals and strategy to lay the foundation for your market development initiative. This template will help you plan out the steps necessary to achieve your goals and help you determine whether or not they are realistic for this project.

Step 3: Create Your Marketing Plan

An increased market means an increased need for effective marketing.

To generate demand – or to capture existing demand in your market – make sure your marketing plan is up-to-date and reflective of the initiatives it will take to grow your market share to its desired level.

Consider all of the following initiatives and how they’ll play a role in generating more revenue in your newly developed market:

• Email Marketing: Will you communicate with existing prospects via email to alert them of your initiative? Do you have a list of saved contacts who expressed interest in what you sell, were unable to make the purchase, and might now be able to purchase from you?
• Social Media: Do you have organic and paid initiatives to generate buzz and spread the word to grow awareness on social media?
• Content & SEO: Do you have website and blog content planned to capture the interest of website visitors hoping to learn more about what you’re selling?
• Local Marketing: If you’re developing your market on a regional level, are you working with local publications, PR agencies, or advertising platforms to appeal to nearby potential customers?

Featured Tool: HubSpot’s Marketing Plan Template

Download This Template

Document your marketing plan supporting your market development with the template above, and make adjustments to it as needed to ensure you’re reaching your market in an accurate, appealing, and consistent fashion.

Step 4: Go-To Market

The time has come – your research and planning are complete, and you’re ready to formally enact your development strategy, whether it’s opening the doors of your new location or making your new product available for purchase on your website.

But before you start collecting revenue, there are a few final steps to take – specifically, aligning your team on the best way to conduct this go-to-market launch.

Going to market is successfully completed by managing three imperative internal tasks – all of which can be done with this Product Go-to-Market Kit:

Campaign Planning

The campaign plan should be the one-stop shop for anyone who has a stake in the success of this project. It should provide a general purpose for the market development project, in addition to the tactical and strategic elements team members need to adhere to in order to see the project go off without a hitch.

Sales Planning

The sales plan should provide more specific insights for the sales team – especially regarding overall projections, team or individual goals, and strategies for how the organization intends to meet these goals

Team Email Updates

For the company at large – particularly for individuals who need to be informed but may not have set tasks to complete – team email updates are a staple of communication during market development. This messaging should contain a status check for the launch timeline, and outstanding tasks, and any notifications the company should be aware of during their day-to-day work.

Featured Tool: HubSpot Go-to-Market Kit

Download This Kit

To centralize your internal planning and communication efforts during your market development process, use the HubSpot Go-to-Market Planning Kit.

Step 5: Analyze Your Results

Once you’ve taken the necessary actions to develop your market, the work has only begun. After launch day, you’ll need to be sure customers are satisfied, products and services are high-quality, employees are retained, and – most importantly – goals are met.

Start collecting sales data as soon as possible so that you can begin analyzing whether or not you’ll meet your projections. If not, you may have to determine a plan to either adjust your goals to become more realistic, and/or adjust your strategy to ensure your goals are met.

Once data are available, make sure you’re presenting your findings accurately and clearly so that stakeholders can fully understand what the results are, how you achieved them, and what the next steps of your market development strategy are.

Featured Tool: Marketing Reporting Templates

Download These Templates

Available in PowerPoint, Excel, and Google Drive, these templates will help the project driver communicate the results of your market development strategy to your team.

Developing Your Market

Get ready to grow your business – by following these outlined steps and using these free planning resources, you’ll be prepared to turn your market development idea into a reality. As a next step, learn by example and read up on how five prominent companies developed and acted on their growth strategies.

Of the 1.7 billion websites in the world, 600 million are blogs. And the number of US bloggers is set to reach 31.7 million in 2020.

Clearly, blogging is competitive. You’re constantly vying for people’s precious online attention, which is around 15 seconds for more than half of readers. But for many, the benefits of running a blog outweigh the time, cost, and effort involved. That’s because in 2019, marketers who prioritized blogging received 13X more ROI than companies that put it at the bottom of the stack.

Beyond revenue, blogs are a great way to raise brand awareness, share engaging articles, and bring in new customers. Seems like an easy marketing win, right? Not quite. Before you hit ‘publish’ on that first piece, it’s important to consider why blogs fail.

To figure out what causes blogs to flop, let’s look at a handful of blog statistics — and simple ways to make sure yours is a success. But first, let’s answer that nagging question in the back of your brain:

So, we know what percentage of marketers feel their blogs aren’t successful, but what might have contributed to this failure? And how do you avoid these mistakes? Let’s take a look.

Why Blogs Fail

1. The blog lacks a content strategy.

Do you know why your blog exists? If so, does your content support that raison d’être?

One of the main reasons why blogs fail is a lack of purposeful, engaging content. In fact, “original written content” is the most important type for 58% of marketers. If you’re wondering what exactly is a purposeful post, Google defines it as “original content that adds value for users.” And that value is “meaningful content or features, such as additional information about price, purchasing location, or product category.”

The first step to creating valuable content is to make it a priority, like 72% of B2B content creators. Planning starts with a well-documented blog strategy, which you can dive into in our Business Blogging Course.

A strategy may sound like a simple solution — but it works. Sixty-five percent of the most successful North American bloggers have a well-documented content marketing strategy. Among the least successful bloggers, only 14% write down a strategy and 39% admit they don’t have any strategy.

Once your plan is in place, you’re ready to craft engaging content. It’s important to learn what works well for your buyer persona, but you can use these guidelines as a starting point.

• 55% of bloggers see results from blog posts with 2,000 words or more. (Orbit Media)
• 39% of consumers are irritated by content that’s “poorly written” or “too wordy.” (Adobe)
• Articles with images get 94% more total views. (fundera)

2. The blog isn’t optimized for search.

Let’s just say it — search engine optimization (SEO) can be frustrating. Just when you think you’ve done all you can to optimize your blog, the algorithms change. But ignoring SEO altogether is another reason why blogs fail.

You need people to find, read, and share your blog, yet that’s nearly impossible without any optimization. Across all industries, search is the top traffic source for blogs. In 2019, 68% of web traffic came from paid and organic search, beating out channels like display and social media.

Fortunately, certain SEO rules continue to ring true. So, if you focus on the following practices, your blog will be better poised for success:

• Research keywords. Keywords are a short string of words that help search engines understand what a web page is about (e.g., “Why do blogs fail?”). While experts debate whether or not keywords are still relevant for SEO, they do share the intent of your blog and improve rankings. Take a look at our SEO keyword research guide to pick up the best practices.
• Write descriptions for images and videos. Text is the foundation of search, so you’ll rank well if you create copy that algorithms can easily understand.
• Optimize for voice search. With 62% of people in the US aged 12 and older using voice-operated assistants, optimizing your blog for voice search is a way to get ahead of the SEO game.

3. The blog is not well-designed.

Imagine you click on a blog you’ve never visited, only to be met with low-quality images, slow loading times, and an unorganized layout. You’re likely not staying long — and you’re not alone. Ninety percent of people have left a website due to bad design.

While the look of your site is important for reader retention, a well-designed site architecture helps search engines organize and index your blog pages (Both benefit your SEO). If it’s tough for people to navigate your blog, they’re probably going to bounce … and never come back. A bad experience makes 88% of consumers unlikely to return to a website.

The solution to keep people scrolling your site? A good experience.

User experience (UX) design is a speciality all its own. So unless you want to dabble in the psychology of human decision-making, it’s best to work with a professional or a templated web design software like Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress. But you can improve the look of your content by incorporating design elements from these blog statistics:

Blog Statistics

• 40% of content marketers say original visuals, like infographics, perform best in their posts.
• 90% of bloggers boost visual appeal by including images in their article.
• An infinite scrolling feature can reduce a website’s bounce rate. (Think: Your Instagram feed).
• 52% of web traffic worldwide comes from a mobile device. And users are 5X more likely to leave a site if it’s not mobile-friendly.

4. The blog manager posts inconsistently.

On day one of your blogging journey, you have big plans to post every day. Two weeks later, only one article is live. This scenario highlights another reason why blogs fail: inconsistency.

Blogging takes time. In 2019, bloggers spent an average of three hours and 57 minutes writing a single post. You then have to factor time to add images, edit, format, share, and promote. For small companies, it can be too time-consuming to put out content every day. Posting one to four times a week is often enough for smaller teams. Large companies, on the other hand, usually have the resources to share a new piece every day.

Don’t worry if you can’t post seven times a week. The biggest challenge for 52% of bloggers is finding time to create and promote content. Instead, try the following tips to get on a consistent blogging schedule.

• Use templates. You don’t always have to start from scratch. Blog post templates are guided outlines to inspire creative thinking and help you format posts.
• Get inspired. Writer’s block happens to everyone — even bloggers. To get ideas for your next post, look for interesting headlines, formats, and designs. Then, make it your own by adding stats, images, examples, and thoughts.
• Create an editorial calendar. Psychology research has shown that in 90% of cases, specific, challenging goals led to higher performance than easy goals, “do your best” goals, or no goals. You can use goal-setting to your advantage by planning your blog content for the next one, three, or six months with an editorial calendar.

There are hundreds of reasons why blogs fail. But if you avoid these four common pitfalls, you’ll have a better chance of creating a blog that shows up in search results, offers engaging content, and keeps readers coming back.

I’ve written about the importance of sales and marketing alignment before, but the point can’t be understated: businesses undeniably have better success when they align sales and marketing teams.

Plus, having strong alignment between sales and marketing is mutually beneficial for both teams — in fact, sales and marketing alignment can help your company become 67% better at closing deals, and can help generate 209% more revenue from marketing.

If you’re anything like me, however, it’s likely helpful to learn through example. Which is why we’ve reached out to eight brands to learn how they mastered marketing and sales alignment.

I’d encourage you to use the following examples as inspiration for your own process as you work to better align your teams, but remember — marketing and sales alignment will be unique to each individual company.

For that reason, you’ll find the most benefit from this post if you pick-and-choose from these strategies which aspects feel most authentic to your own company culture and business goals.

Let’s dive in!

1. Crossbeam rolled out company-wide OKRs.

Robert Moore, Co-Founder and CEO at Crossbeam, told me: “At Crossbeam, we’ve rolled out company-wide OKRs that change each quarter and can be measured using sales, marketing, and product data from HubSpot.”

He adds, “Everyone at Crossbeam has access to dashboards that update in real-time with our progress toward these key results, and our progress also auto-posts to Slack each morning to keep people in the loop and drive discussions around progress. This keeps the company on the same page and aligned on what matters most.”

Key Takeaway: Ultimately, for strong marketing and sales alignment, it’s critical both teams share key metrics and can iterate on their alignment based on which metrics are exceeding expectations, and which ones are falling short.

2. Rybbon created a Marketing to Sales circle.

Jignesh Shah, CEO of Rybbon, says his company shifted its mindset to create better alignment between sales and marketing: “At Rybbon, instead of a marketing to sales funnel, we believe in a marketing to sales circle. Marketing campaigns are launched and supported by coordinated sales follow-up. Sales and marketing meet weekly to discuss the results of these campaigns and ultimately evaluate their effectiveness. Sales’ feedback to marketing then helps to guide decisions on what campaigns to do next.”

“The circle process keeps sales and marketing teams aligned and results-driven.”

Key Takeaway: To create your own circle process, consider how you might bake weekly or monthly sales and marketing collaborations into your company culture. Ultimately, both teams should feel comfortable working with one another on a regular basis for true, sustainable company alignment.

3. SmartBugMedia aligned its content calendar with its revenue targets.

Hannah Shain, Director of Marketing at SmartBugMedia, told me her team has directly tied its marketing goals with revenue targets to ensure both teams stay aligned and on-track: “Our campaigns and content calendar are directly aligned to revenue targets, resulting in an average of 17.4% increase month-over-month in inbound-qualified sales leads that convert to qualified pipeline at an average rate of 47.73%.”

She continues, “Additionally, our sales team is seeing instant benefits in their HubSpot Sequences. The marketing content being produced is directly on target with their outreach, landing them meetings on the first touch.”

Key Takeaway: To truly motivate and inspire both teams to work together, consider how you might create intersection in key business metrics. For instance, perhaps you tie revenue back to your marketing goals, to ensure marketers stay on-track to serve the same bottom-line goals that matter most to sales, as well.

4. Outreach encourages both teams to avoid blame at all costs.

If your marketing and sales teams are misaligned or don’t communicate well, it might be easy for each team to assign blame when things don’t go as planned.

As Mark Kosoglow, VP of Sales at Outreach, says: “You need to decide not to have a blame-game mindset or culture. When pipeline is viewed as a shared challenge, then it becomes easier to talk about what needs to be done to improve the situation.”

“Sales and marketing is a complex relationship, and assigning blame narrows your ability to create needle-moving solutions.”

Key Takeaway: Create a culture in which your sales and marketing teams feel authentically connected and aligned when it comes to your company’s bottom-line. The more leadership can encourage collaboration over competition, the better.

5. Nextiva focuses on high-quality data analysis to align marketing and sales.

Ultimately, data analysis is critical for understanding the current level of alignment between sales and marketing goals, and iterating to ensure future alignment success.

Nextiva is fully aware of the importance of data for marketing and sales alignment. As Gaetano DiNardi, Director of Growth Marketing at Nextiva, told me: “At Nextiva, we have a joke: ‘Hey marketing, can we just get one more lead?’ Our lead flow is 100% inbound, but with that arrangement comes a unique set of challenges. Sales can often argue that lead volumes are too low. So we’ll go and fix that by ranking highly in Google for important terms like Business VoIP.”

He adds, “Alternatively, when lead volumes are unquestionably above forecast, then sales will say that the lead sizes are not large enough. So we’ll dig into the data and show them how poor their close rates have been on our largest lead sizes. Eventually, there will be an aha moment among both groups on where the biggest problem exists — but that only happens when you can bring the right data to the conversation.”

“Great alignment between marketing and sales comes down to high-quality data analysis and effective communication with an action plan, and accountability on both sides, in order to solve complex problems.” 

Key Takeaway: Bring data into every conversation you have between sales and marketing. To avoid blame, you can use this data to demonstrate where each team might be falling short of helping support the other team’s goals. 

6. BluLeadz’s sales and marketing teams share an ecosystem to improve the customer experience. 

To truly align your marketing and sales teams, you’ll want to consider what tools and platforms each team uses. Is there an opportunity to align your tools to enable each team member to visualize how their individual actions are helping or hurting the other team’s goals — and, ultimately, what the experience looks like for the customer? 

As Dave Stout, an Inbound Specialist at BluLeadz, explains: “Our ability to maintain alignment between marketing and sales comes down to three elements: Process, communication, and shared ecosystems.”

“We collaboratively create processes that we share and refine together. For example, marketing will help us create sales content, and our sales team refines those content assets over time and shares the results. This ongoing communication about what’s working and what is not working is vital.
We maintain an open communication channel by meeting every week to address friction points, establish action items, and hold each other accountable.”

Stout adds, “The most important tactic we use to stay aligned is sharing an ecosystem. Both of our teams use HubSpot, and we share access to each team’s portal and reporting dashboards. This allows us to have impactful conversations about the quality of leads coming from different channels, enabling us to accurately forecast sales and identify touchpoints we can add throughout the buying process to improve the customer experience.”

Key Takeaway: Choose an ecosystem that offers advanced tools for both sales reps and marketers. The more your teams can align on tools and processes, the easier it will be for your entire company to reach tighter alignment. 

7. SuperOffice asked its sales reps to become more active on social media.

In this case study blog post, Steven MacDonald writes about SuperOffice’s experience aligning its own sales and marketing teams.

In 2016, the company chose to bring in Jan Willem Alphenaar, a social selling expert, to instruct the sales team on how to use social media for sales. The sales team shifted their perspective and recognized social media as a tool for capturing B2B sales — not just leads.

As MacDonald writes, “Sales and marketing became much more aligned and now hold frequent meetings to discuss content, campaigns, digital activities and goals – such as what to post online and how often, how to target prospects and build relationships and how to engage with potential customers.”

The results? An increase in business leads by 168%, an increase in social media visits to SuperOffice’s website by 61%, and a business revenue increase of 10% within the first 12 months — with plenty more room to grow.

Key Takeaway: Consider in which aspects of marketing — including social media, blogging, event planning, email, and video — you might ask your sales team to get involved. In this case, the sales team recognized their own power to reach new audiences and convert leads into customers through social media. Your sales reps might have unique opportunities to reach new networks — tap into that.

8. American Express created a content hub with both marketing and sales playing a role.

American Express had a lofty goal: to position itself as a leader in the corporate travel industry.

To make that happen, the company partnered with the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) and conducted extensive research on the experience of global business travelers.

American Express then established a pilot social selling team, comprised of employees across multiple departments and locations, including sales and marketing.

This team created content based on the research from GBTA — and, while marketing took the lead on creating and distributing that content, the sales team provided customer insight and played a critical role in ensuring the content was customer-centric.

American Express’ corporate travel content hub was undeniably successful — with a reach of more than 100 million publications, over 1,500 page visits, and an increase of 100% engagement rate on LinkedIn.

Key Takeaway: While marketers are critical for conducting customer research and understanding the needs of your audiences and prospects, it’s important for marketers to remember that sales reps are the ones who speak most directly to prospects and customers on a daily basis. Consider how your marketing team might collaborate with sales to leverage that unique customer insight for upcoming campaigns or content launches.

Now that we’ve covered some amazing brands mastering sales and marketing alignment, feel free to take a look at Tried-and-True Tips for Sales and Marketing Alignment for a more individualized, step-by-step guide to better alignment.

Gorgeous, on-brand images and lively language? Check. A substantial social following in the channels that matter most for your industry? Check. Leads coming through? Check — and fist bump.

What comes next? Optimizing your social media lead generation so that it converts even more of your engaged audience into clients and customers.

Social media lead generation is the process of turning brand awareness and interest into visitor actions, such as:

• Signing up for your weekly newsletter
• Accessing an ebook or white paper
• Signing up for a free trial of your service
• Attending a virtual event
• Engaging with a chatbot

People who take any of these first steps are more likely to take the next and the next. They’ve demonstrated more-than-passing interest in your products or services, and can evolve into high-value, qualified leads — provided you build trust and offer genuinely helpful content along the way.

Social Media Lead Generation Tools

Social Media Ad Retargeting Tools

Ads on social media are a must for any enterprise business. You already use them to raise brand awareness across platforms and then retarget ads to people who visit your website. But generating more warm leads takes retargeted social media ads segmented to address particular interests or pain points.

Image source: IBM Cloud

For example, retargeted ads for B2B website visitors who explored introductory guides should be different than ads for visitors who explored more complex topics. Tools to help you dive deeper and segment site visitors for retargeting:

1. Google Analytics – Tracking inbound leads generated through social media will quickly pinpoint which social platforms perform best for your business, as well as what is the most effective messaging and images for your audience.

2. Facebook Custom Audiences – The platform allows you to target custom audiences through website visitors and people who have already engaged with your Facebook ads. To track website visitors for audience customization, you need to add Facebook pixel to your website. Once you’ve installed pixel, you can create retargeted ads for people who have visited a specific blog post or product page.

3. YouTube Audience Manager – This is an excellent way to create sequential retargeted ad campaigns for specific audiences. The first step is to link your YouTube channel with your Google Ads account. Then, through Audience Manager, you can create audience lists of people who watched a specific video or channel page.

4. LinkedIn Showcase and Affiliated Pages – Separate from your company page, showcase pages spotlight specific product offerings and initiatives. They are featured on your main page, but they have different audiences and their own followings. For example, IBM features a showcase page for IBM Cloud (pictured above) with nearly 180,000 followers interested in keeping up with that service.

5. Twitter Custom Audiences – Segment your audience for retargeting campaigns based on website or app activity. Your custom audience must be greater than 100 Twitter users to trigger retargeting.

6. Instagram Engagement Custom Audience – Create custom audiences based on website activity, shares, and likes, among other options. Instagram also retargets seamlessly with Facebook, its parent company.

7. AdRoll – This company is known for their retargeting options, including detailed audience segmentation and exclusions triggered by specific parameters. No more flooding customers with ads or sending an ad for a product they purchased yesterday.

8. Perfect Audience – Perfect Audience is an affordable retargeting option for smaller companies that need to keep the process efficient and simple.

Conversational Landing Pages

Nobody puts chatbot in a (lower-left) corner. At least, not on conversational landing pages. Visitors feel more in control of the experience, because they can get answers to their high-level questions immediately and choose their next steps from multiple options presented by the chatbot.

Image source: Landbot

Conversational landing pages are excellent options for freemium tool pages, complex product pages, and product education sign-up pages. They are popular for B2B landing pages in particular because of the subject-matter complexity in comparison to ecommerce.

9. Landbot – This chatbot platform lets you build a customized conversational landing page. Coding skills not required. The chatbot guides visitors through ‘choose your own adventure’ prompts, so they get the answers they need.

Video Tools for Lead Generation

Engaging, polished, and informative videos are powerful lead generation tools. They can answer customer questions before they’re asked and clarify your value proposition for visual learners.

Image source: Animaker

You can use video to capture attention and educate on social media ads, landing pages, and product pages.

10. Biteable – This program reduces the intimidation factor of video and animation production. Their homepage trumpets the ability to make professional videos “on your lunch break.” The top-tier plan allows collaborative editing, production assistance, custom branding, and access to 1.8 million images and clips sans watermark. Be sure to include closed captioning to make the video accessible — and for those who watch social videos with the sound off.

11. Animaker – Animated videos get attention and can be more cost-effective than live-action video production. Animaker streamlines the process for companies with their enterprise option.

12. Shakr – This video making technology for start-ups and global enterprises includes A/B testing, creative services, and support with video ad campaign set up.

13. Magisto Video Editor – An online video editing tool that uses AI to highlight the most emotional moments of your footage, so you can create videos that connect and inspire.

A/B and Multivariate Testing Tools

Small and large changes to your landing pages and your social media ads can make or break a campaign’s lead generation success. With A/B testing you test two distinct options to see which performs better. You can test the design of an entire landing page or a single element, such as a form or CTA.

Image source: HubSpot

Multivariate testing is more complex and measures the impact of several subtle changes on a webpage. Here, you may test different copy options for your landing page H1 and the CTA to discover which combination is most effective for lead generation.

14. Optimizely – This company is all about digital experimentation, making them a strong partner for A/B and multivariate testing. You can do both testing styles with the Optimizely Web Experimentation tool, but only A/B testing with Optimizely Performance Edge.

15. HubSpot – You can conduct A/B and multivariate testing to improve lead generation using the HubSpot CRM. Set up an A/B test of a landing page to see which option results in more form completion. Or, set up multivariate tests to determine whether a distinct combination of copy and background color results in more downloads of a whitepaper.

Social Listening and Competitor Research Tools

These tools track what people are saying about your company and the products and services of your competitors. What do people like? Where do your competitors fall short? This can help you tweak your ad and landing page copy to address frustrations and stand apart from the crowd.

Image source: Sprout Social

16. Hootsuite Insights – This tool lets you track millions of mentions across the major social media platforms, as well as in online forums, the news, and review sites. You can track social sentiment around your brand and industry keywords, as well as social mentions of your competitors.

17. Sprout Social – The social media management tool boasts detailed competitor analysis in their Premium and Advanced plans. To compare your brand’s performance with competitors, Sprout Social breaks reports down by earned (organic) and owned (brand-driven) content and by social platform. This allows you to expand on what’s working and adjust what’s not working.

18. BuzzSumo Competitor Intelligence – This tool helps you track the content that works for your competitors, as well as the content that falls short. Use this information to create content, social campaigns, and landing pages that leverage engaging topics across your industry.

Social Graphics Tools

Original, vibrant graphics capture attention on the feed. Here are a few tools to help you create scroll-stopping images.

Image source: Word Swag

29. Canva – This easy-to-use design tool lets you create social media graphics using ready-to-customize templates or your own designs.

20. Word Swag – This one is for the font fanatics in the crowd. Use Word Swag to create text-only social graphics. You can even A/B test how your text-only social ads perform for lead generation against ads that blend images and text.

Landing Page Optimization Tools

Without a sharp landing page, your inbound lead generation via social media will fall flat. You want your landing page to be frictionless, with information that meets the expectations you set up in your social post, exact next steps, and engaging CTA button.

Image source: HubSpot

Once visitors fill out a form, don’t forget the personable thank-you page that offers a discount, related blog post links, or simply a compelling or charming on-brand image.

21. HubSpot Landing Page Builder – HubSpot’s Landing Page Builder helps you optimize with one-click forms and dynamic content that changes depending on who is visiting the page (first-timers or repeat visitors). HubSpot lets you track the inbound traffic from social media and the performance of CTAs. A/B or multivariate testing will also help optimize the page.

22. Unbounce – The landing page builder and platform helps users create branded pages with an easy drag-and-drop interface. Unbounce specializes in SaaS, ecommerce, and agency landing pages. It’s Social Ads solution helps you create ad-customized landing pages and customizable forms designed to capture more qualified leads.

Social Media Lead Generation Statistics

1. 59% of marketers say social media marketing is one of the most effective tactics for improving lead generation quality. (Ascend2)
2. 61% of marketers say lead generation is their top marketing challenge. (Hubspot)
3. 67% of marketers say social media marketing generates leads. (Social Media Examiner)
4. Approximately 96% of website visitors are NOT ready to make a purchasing decision. (Marketo)
5. You have less than 15 seconds to capture the attention of website visitors before they leave. (Crazy Egg)
6. 72% of adults in the US use at least one social media platform. (Pew Research Center)
7. 73% of adults in the US use YouTube. (Pew Research Center)
8. 69% of US adults use Facebook. (Pew Research Center)
9. 89% of consumers buy from brands they follow on social media. (Sprout Social)
10. In 2020, global digital ad spend is estimated to be $385 billion. (eMarketer)
11. 56% of marketers say sales revenue generated is the most useful metric for measuring lead generation quality. (Ascend2)
12. 54% of marketers say they measure lead quality continuously. (Ascend2)
13. 66% of marketers say they generate social media leads with only six hours of social marketing per week. (Social Media Examiner)
14. 74% of marketers with more than four years of experience in social media marketing say their lead generation proficiency improved. (Social Media Examiner)

How to Measure Lead Generation for Social Media

Analyze, adjust, repeat. It’s a marketing mantra across strategies for good reason, and social media lead generation should be part of your analysis. Here are the essential metrics to track and analyze:

Click-through rate – This metric shows whether you are effectively segmenting audiences for your social ads. If you speak to your customers’ interests, questions, and pain points, your CTR percentage will be higher.

The CTR is calculated by dividing the number of clicks on your social media ad with the number of ad impressions and multiplying the result by 100. That is your CTR percentage for a given ad or campaign.

Conversion rate – This measures the number of people who took the lead generation action you wanted your social ad to prompt, such as joining your newsletter, downloading a whitepaper, or requesting a quote.

Leads per channel – Knowing how many leads you get per channel often tells you where your customers prefer to engage and where you should focus your social ad spend. However, if your campaigns aren’t generating leads on platforms known to yield results for your industry, you may need to A/B test or rethink your social ads strategy on that channel.

Form abandonment – If your form abandonment rate is high, there may be one too many information requirements. Business leads may be hesitant to give their full name, email, company name, and cell phone number.

Leads to qualified leads – How many of the leads you generate via social media are truly qualified? That means they successfully resulted in sales or were, at the least, promising for future business. To get the qualified lead percentage, divide qualified leads by the total number of leads and multiply by 100. To make improvements, you may need to further refine your social media messaging for your target audience.

It’s tempting to set your social media lead generation strategy to autopilot, especially when you get positive results. But gaining a better understanding of your audience and fine-tuning your social ads can deepen trust, enhance your lead generation, and significantly boost their quality.

When was the last time you ran a competitive analysis for your brand?

And most importantly, do you know how to do one efficiently?

If you’re not sure, or if the last “analysis” you ran was a quick perusal of a competitor’s website and social media presence, you’re likely missing out on important intelligence that could help your brand grow.

A competitive analysis can help you learn the ins and outs of how your competition works, and identify potential opportunities where you can out-perform them.

It also enables you to stay atop of industry trends and ensure your product is consistently meeting — and exceeding — industry standards.

Let’s dive into a few more benefits of conducting competitive analyses:

• Helps you identify your product’s unique value proposition and what makes your product different from competitors’, which can inform future marketing efforts.
• Enables you to identify what your competitor is doing right. This information is critical for staying relevant and ensuring both your product and your marketing campaigns are outperforming industry standards.
• Tells you where your competitors are falling short — which helps you identify areas of opportunities in the marketplace, and test out new, unique marketing strategies they haven’t taken advantage of.
• Learn through customer reviews what’s missing in a competitor’s product, and consider how you might add features to your own product to meet those needs.
• Provides you with a benchmark against which you can measure your own growth.

Convinced, yet? Next, let’s dive into how you can conduct a competitive analysis for your own company.

Competitive Analysis in Marketing

Every brand can benefit from regular competitor analysis. By performing a competitor analysis, you’ll be able to:

• Identify gaps in the market
• Develop new products and services
• Uncover market trends
• Market and sell more effectively

As you can see, learning any of these four components will lead your brand down the path of achievement. 

Next, let’s dive into 12 steps you can take to conduct a comprehensive competitive analysis.

1. Determine who your competitors are.

First, you’ll need to figure out who you’re really competing with so you can compare the data accurately. What works in a business similar to yours may not work for your brand.

So how can you do this?

Divide your “competitors” into two categories: direct and indirect.

Direct competitors are businesses that offer a product or service that could pass as a similar substitute for yours, and that operate in your same geographic area.

On the flip side, an indirect competitor is one that provides products that are not the same but could satisfy the same customer need or solve the same problem.

It seems simple enough on paper, but these two terms are often misused.

When comparing your brand, you should only focus on your direct competitors. This is something many brands get wrong.

Let’s use an example: Stitch Fix and Fabletics are both subscription-based services that sell clothes on a monthly basis and serve a similar target audience.

But as we look deeper, we can see that the actual product (clothes in this case) are not really the same; one brand focuses on stylish everyday outfits while the other is workout-centric attire only.

Yes, these brands satisfy the same need for women (having trendy clothes delivered right to their doorstep each month), but they do so with completely different types of clothing, making them indirect competitors.

This means Kate Hudson’s team at Fabletics would not want to spend their time studying Stitch Fix too closely since their audiences probably vary quite a bit. Even if it’s only slightly, this tiny variation is enough to make a big difference.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should toss your indirect competitors out the window completely.

Keep these brands on your radar since they could shift positions at any time and cross over into the direct competitor zone. Using our example, Stitch Fix could start a workout line, which would certainly change things for Fabletics.

This is also one of the reasons why you’ll want to routinely run a competitor analysis. The market can and will shift at anytime, and if you’re not constantly scoping it out, you won’t be aware of these changes until it’s too late.

2. Determine what products your competitors offer.

At the heart of any business is its product or service, which is what makes this a good place to start.

You’ll want to analyze your competitor’s complete product line and the quality of the products or services they’re offering.

You should also take note of their pricing and any discounts they’re offering customers.

Some questions to consider include:

• Are they a low-cost or high-cost provider?
• Are they working mainly volume sales or one-o purchases?
• What is their market share?
• What are characteristics and needs of their ideal customers?
• Are they using different pricing strategies for online purchases versus brick andmortar?
• How does the company differentiate itself from its competitors?
• How do they distribute their products/services?

3. Research your competitors sales tactics and results.

Running a sales analysis of your competitors can be a bit tricky.

You’ll want to track down the answers to questions such as:

• What does the sales process look like?
• What channels are they selling through?
• Do they have multiple locations and how does this give them an advantage?
• Are they expanding? Scaling down?
• Do they have partner reselling programs?
• What are their customers reasons for not buying? For ending their relationship with the company?
• What are their revenues each year? What about total sales volume?
• Do they regularly discount their products or services?
• How involved is a salesperson in the process?

These helpful pieces of information will give you an idea of how competitive the sales process is, and what information you need to prepare your sales reps with to compete during the final buy stage.

For publicly held companies, you can find annual reports online, but you’ll have to do some sleuthing to find this info from privately owned businesses.

You could find some of this information by searching through your CRM and reaching out to those customers who mentioned they were considering your competitor. Find out what made them choose your product or service over others out there.

To do this, run a report that shows all prospective deals where there was an identified competitor.

If this data is not something you currently record, talk to marketing and sales to implement a system where prospects are questioned about the other companies they are considering.

Essentially, they’ll need to ask their leads (either through a form field or during a one- on-one sales conversation) to identify who their current service providers are, who they’ve used in the past, and who else they are considering during the buying process.

When a competitor is identified, have your sales team dive deeper by asking why they are considering switching to your product. If you’ve already lost the deal, be sure to follow up the with prospect to determine why you lost to your competitor. What services or features attracted the prospect? Was it about price? What’s the prospect’s impression of your sales process? If they’ve already made the switch, find out why they made this decision.

By asking open-ended questions, you’ll have honest feedback about what customers find appealing about your brand and what might be turning customers away.

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can start scoping out your competitor’s marketing efforts.

4. Take a look at your competitors’ pricing, as well as any perks they offer.

There are a few major factors that go into correctly pricing your product — and one major one is understanding how much your competitors’ are charging for a similar product or service.

If you feel your product offers superior features to that of a competitors’, you might consider making your product or service more expensive than industry standards. However, if you do that, you’ll want to ensure your sales reps are ready to explain why your product is worth the additional cost.

Alternatively, perhaps you feel there’s a gap in your industry for affordable products. If that’s the case, you might aim to charge less than competitors’ and appeal to prospects who aren’t looking to break the bank for a high-quality product.

Of course, there are other factors that go into correctly pricing a product, but it’s critical you stay on-top of industry pricing to ensure you’re pricing your product in a way that feels reasonable to prospects.

Additionally, take a look at any perks your competitors’ offer and how you might match those perks to compete. For instance, perhaps competitors’ offer a major referral discount, or a month-long free trial version. These perks could be the reason you’re losing customers, so if it feels reasonable for your brand, consider where you might match those perks — or provide some unique perks of your own, if competitors’ don’t offer any.

5. Ensure you’re meeting competitive shipping costs.

Did you know expensive shipping is the number one reason for cart abandonment?

Nowadays, free shipping is a major perk that can attract consumers to choose one brand over another. If you work in an industry where shipping is a major factor — like ecommerce — you’ll want to take a look at competitors’ shipping costs and ensure you’re meeting (if not exceeding) those prices.

If most of your competitors’ offer free shipping, you’ll want to look into the option for your own company. If free shipping isn’t a practical option for your business, consider how you might differentiate in other ways — including loyalty programs, holiday discounts, or giveaways on social media.

6. Analyze how your competitors market their products.

Analyzing your competitor’s website is the fastest way to gauge their marketing efforts. Take note of any of the following items and copy down the specific URL for future reference:

• Do they have a blog?
• Are they creating whitepapers or ebooks?
• Do they post videos or webinars?
• Do they have a podcast?
• Are they using static visual content such as infographics and cartoons?
• What about slide decks?
• Do they have a FAQs section?
• Are there featured articles?
• Do you see press releases?
• Do they have a media kit?
• What about case studies?
• Do they publish buying guides and data sheets?
• What online and offine advertising campaigns are they running?

7. Take note of your competition’s content strategy.

Then, take a look at the quantity of these items. Do they have several hundred blog posts or a small handful? Are there five white papers and just one ebook?

Next, determine the frequency of these content assets. Are they publishing something new each week or once a month? How often does a new ebook or case study come out?

Chances are, if you come across a robust archive of content, your competitor has been publishing regularly. Depending on the topics they’re discussing, this content may help you hone in on their lead generating strategies.

From there, you should move on to evaluating the quality of their content. After all, if the quality is lacking, it won’t matter how often they post since their target audience won’t find much value there.

Choose a small handful of samples to review instead of tackling every single piece to make the process more manageable.

Your sampler should include content pieces covering a variety of topics so you’ll have a fairly complete picture of what your competitor shares with their target audience.

When analyzing your competitor’s content, consider the following questions:

• How accurate is their content?
• Are spelling or grammar errors present?
• How in-depth does their content go? (Is it introductory level that just scratches the surface or more advanced topics with high-level ideas?)
• What tone do they use?
• Is the content structured for readability? (Are they using bullet points, bold headings, and numbered lists?)
• Is their content free and available to anyone or do their readers need to opt-in?
• Who is writing their content? (In-house team? One person? Multiple contributors?)
• Is there a visible byline or bio attached to their articles?

As you continue to scan the content, pay attention to the photos and imagery your competitors are using.

Do you quickly scroll past generic stock photos or are you impressed by custom illustrations and images?If they‘re using stock photos, do they at least have overlays of text quotes or calls-to- action that are specific to their business?

If their photos are custom, are they sourced from outside graphic professionals or do they appear to be done in-house?

When you have a solid understanding of your competitor’s content marketing strategy, it’s time to find out if it’s truly working for them.

8. Learn what technology stack your competitors’ use.

Understanding what types of technology your competitors’ use can be critical for helping your own company reduce friction and increase momentum within your organization.

For instance, perhaps you’ve seen positive reviews about a competitor’s customer service — as you’re conducting research, you learn the customer uses powerful customer service software you haven’t been taking advantage of. This information should arm you with the opportunity to outperform your competitors’ processes.

To figure out which software your competitors’ use, type the company’s URL into Built With, an effective tool for unveiling what technology your competitors’ site runs on, along with third-party plugins ranging from analytics system to CRMs.

Alternatively, you might consider looking at competitors’ job listings, particularly for engineer or web developer roles. The job listing will likely mention which tools a candidate needs to be familiar with — a creative way to gain intel into the technology your competitors’ use.

9. Analyze the level of engagement on your competitor’s content.

To gauge how engaging your competitor’s content is to their readers, you’ll need to see how their target audience responds to what they’re posting.

Check the average number of comments, shares, and likes on your competitor’s content and find out if:

• Certain topics resonate better than others
• The comments are negative, positive, or a mix
• People are tweeting about specific topics more than others
• Readers respond better to Facebook updates about certain content
• Don’t forget to note if your competitor categorizes their content using tags, and if they have social media follow and share buttons attached to each piece of content. Both of these will a ect engagement activity.

10. Observe how they promote their marketing content.

From engagement, you’ll move right along to your competitor’s content promotion strategy.

• Keyword density in the copy itself
• Image ALT text tags
• Use of internal linking

The following questions can also help you prioritize and focus on what to pay attention to:

• Which keywords are your competitors focusing on that you still haven’t tapped into?
• What content of theirs is highly shared and linked to? How does your content compare?
• Which social media platforms is your target audience using and the most active on?
• What other sites are linking back to your competitor’s site, but not yours?
• Who else is sharing what your competitors are publishing?
• Who is referring traffic to your competitor’s site?
• For the keywords you want to focus on, what is the diffculty level? There are several free (and paid) tools that will give you a comprehensive evaluation of your competitor’s search engine optimization.

11. Look at their social media presence, strategies, and go-to platforms

The last area you’ll want to evaluate when it comes to marketing is your competitor’s social media presence and engagement rates.

How does your competition drive engagement with their brand through social media? Do you see social sharing buttons with each article? Does your competitor have links to their social media channels in the header, footer, or somewhere else? Are these clearly visible? Do they use calls-to-action with these buttons?

If your competitors are using a social network that you may not be on, it’s worth learning more about how that platform may be able to help your business, too. To determine if a new social media platform is worth your time, check your competitor’s engagement rates on those sites. First, visit the following sites to see if your competition has an account on these platforms:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Snapchat
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Pinterest

Then, take note of the following quantitative items from each platform:

• Number of fans/followers
• Posting frequency and consistency
• Content engagement (Are users leaving comments or sharing their posts?)
• Content virality (How many shares, repins, and retweets do their posts get?)

With the same critical eye you used to gauge your competition’s content marketing strategy, take a fine-toothed comb to analyze their social media strategy.

What kind of content are they posting? Are they more focused on driving people to landing pages, resulting in new leads? Or are they posting visual content to promote engagement and brand awareness?

How much of this content is original? Do they share curated content from other sources? Are these sources regular contributors? What is the overall tone of the content?

How does your competition interact with their followers? How frequently do their followers interact with their content?

After you collect this data, generate an overall grade for the quality of your competitor’s content. This will help you compare the rest of your competitors using a similar grading scale.

12. Perform a SWOT Analysis to learn their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

As you evaluate each component in your competitor analysis (business, sales, and marketing), get into the habit of performing a simplified SWOT analysis at the same time.

This means you’ll take note of your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats any time you assess an overall grade.

Some questions to get you started include:

• What is your competitor doing really well with? (Products, content marketing, social
  media, etc.)
• Where does your competitor have the advantage over your brand?
• What is the weakest area for your competitor?
• Where does your brand have the advantage over your competitor?
• What could they do better with?
• In what areas would you consider this competitor as a threat?
• Are there opportunities in the market that your competitor has identified?

You’ll be able to compare their weaknesses against your strengths and vice versa. By doing this, you can better position your company, and you’ll start to uncover areas for improvement within your own brand.

How Does Your Business Currently Stack Up?

Before you accurately compare your competition, you need to establish a baseline. This also helps when it comes time to perform a SWOT analysis.

Take an objective look at your business, sales, and marketing e orts through the same metrics you use to evaluate your competition.

Record this information just like you would with a competitor and use this as your baseline to compare across the board.

Ready to get started with the full ebook and template?Click here to access the complete Competitive Analysis Kit.

Editor’s Note; This post was originally published prior to July 2018 but was updated in November 2019 for comprehensiveness.

Some presentations are better than others. Some have gorgeous designs. Some have insanely actionable takeaways. Some just give down-to-earth advice. But the best presentations represent all three.

And if you’re looking to get started making your own presentation, why not learn from the best of the best?

To help you kick your own presentations up a notch, we’ve curated 24 awesome PowerPoint and SlideShare decks below. 

When you’re clicking through the presentations below, notice how they weave an interesting story through the format, design their slides, and make their presentations interactive with features exclusive to the platform on which they were created. These are all crucial elements to making an awesome presentation — ones that you can certainly adapt and apply them to your own, with the right approach.

Even better — you may just learn something new about marketing while you’re at it.

1. Less is more.

Here’s the thing — SlideShare exists for a reason. It allows users to view information in a presentation format without having to go somewhere else to see it presented. When you, a human being, deliver a presentation, chances are that that’s part of the reason why people are tuning in. They care about the topic, but they also are curious about the person speaking on it.

That’s why it can be valuable to keep your slides simple when delivering a presentation to an audience in-person. You want the focus to be on the message, rather than just the slides themselves. Keep the slides on-topic, but simple enough that people can still pay attention to what you’re saying, using the visual presentation to support your message.

2. Keep text to a minimum.

One way to accomplish the aforementioned simplicity is to reduce the amount of text in your presentation. People recall information better when images are paired with it (as opposed to text), so to help your message resonate with the audience, focus on visual content when you create your slides — we’ll cover more on that in a bit.

3. Rethink visuals.

When you reduce the amount of text in your slides, you’ll need compelling visuals to support the message you’re delivering to your audience. But that doesn’t mean you can just throw some nice-looking photos onto your deck and move on. Like any other content strategy, the visual elements of your presentation need to be strategic and relevant.

Templates

While PowerPoint templates have come a long way since the program was first unveiled to the world, chances are, they’re still commonly used. To help make your presentation unique, choose a theme that your audience hasn’t seen dozens of times before — one that matches your brand and complements the topic you’re speaking about.

Sometimes, it pays to look beyond to other presentation platforms other than PowerPoint to find unique templates, like Prezi. There are also many visual content design sites that offer customizable templates that you can adapt for your own brand and topic, like Canva. In fact, in addition to templates, Canva also offers its very own platform for building presentations from scratch. 

Additionally, you can also take a look at Venngage’s free presentation maker for more professionally designed templates, icons and high-quality stock photos that you can use right away.

Charts and Graphs

One of the best ways to support the message you’re delivering in your presentation is by including data and statistics — and the good news is that they, too, can be represented visually, rather than bulleted out in text.

That’s where charts and graphs come in: They provide a colorful and engaging way to present the details that support your point. That said, make sure they fit in with the rest of your presentation’s visual theme — otherwise, it’ll distract the audience from what you’re talking about, rather than enhancing it. 

Color Themes

There’s been some research around the way color can influence our emotions, especially when used in marketing.

And while the goal of your presentation may not necessarily be to make a sale, you might be trying to invoke certain feelings or impressions, which a strategic use of color can help you do. Check out Coschedule’s guide on the psychology of color in marketing, which highlights the ways different tones, shades, and combinations can influence purchasing decisions.

Fonts

When you do include text, you want it to be readable enough for your audience to fully consume and interpret it easily enough to avoid becoming distracted from your message. If you include text that’s too small or dense to easily read, they’ll become too focused on trying to decipher it to pay attention to what you’re saying.

That’s why the designers at Visage recommend choosing Sans Serif fonts that opt for “legibility over fun,” noting that text should not only be big enough for people in the back of the room to read it, but also, presented in the right color to maintain visibility over your background.

Image quality

Incorporating this fabulous visual content into your presentation will go to waste if the images are low-quality. Make sure your photos and other visual assets are high-resolution enough to be crisp and clear when displayed on a huge presentation screen.

4. Incorporate multimedia.

There’s a reason why we love examples. You can give out the best advice available, but sometimes, in order to believe it, people need to see it in practice.

Multimedia is one way to achieve that — in a manner that can also capture and maintain your audience’s attention. A simple Google search for “music in presentations” yields enough soundtrack results to suggests that it’s a unique way of engaging your audience, or at least create a welcoming atmosphere before and after you speak.

Within the presentation itself, video — as it is in so many other applications — serves as valuable visual content to keep your audience engaged. After all, 43% of people want to see more video content from marketers, often because it helps to illustrate and explain theories in practice in a way that the spoken word or photographs can’t do alone.

1. How to Produce Better Content Ideas Mark Johnstone

We all get writer’s block sometimes. You’ll stare at a screen, hoping for inspiration to strike — and for that idea to be amazing.

But that’s not actually the best way to think of ideas. In the presentation below, Mark Johnstone outlines a better way to brainstorm ideas that will help build your business.

2. How Google Works by Eric Schmidt

Ever wonder what it’s actually like to work at Google? The presentation below from Eric Schmidt (Alphabet, Inc.’s Executive Chairman and ex-CEO of Google) could clue you in — it outlines some of the top lessons he and his team have learned from running and hiring for one of the top companies in the world. Besides giving you a peek behind the scenes of a top company, it could inspire you to make changes to the way your business runs.

3. Fix Your Really Bad PowerPoint by Slide Comet

Okay, maybe your PowerPoint isn’t that bad, but this presentation has some awesome takeaways we all could learn from. Even if you’re following all the tips in this presentation (inspired by Seth Godin’s e-book), you can sure be inspired by its expert copy and design.

4. Why Content Marketing Fails by Rand Fishkin

Sometimes, the most helpful pieces of content tell you what not to do. Rand Fishkin’s presentation does just that. He takes an in-depth look at the most common reasons people fail at content marketing — and offers practical, original advice on fixing it.

5. The What If Technique by Motivate Design

Most marketers are looking to grow … but sometimes they can get stuck making incremental improvements. While these improvements are growth, larger, bigger growth jumps are what most people want. To help you get unstuck from incrementalism, Motivate Design outlined a process in the presentation below.

6. Digital Strategy 101 by Bud Caddell

Even though this presentation is almost 100 slides long, its content is pure gold. Caddell answers some of the biggest FAQs about digital strategy in a very accessible way. The reason his slides are so straightforward is because of the way he’s laid them out. He’s really adept at making “animated” slides explain his story — something we all should learn how to do.

7. 10 Ways to Win the Internets by Upworthy

Even though Upworthy’s got a bad rap for creating clickbait headlines, their lessons on going viral are incredibly interesting. Besides having great advice about going viral, Upworthy does a great job of making its presentation interactive using clickable links.

8. Crap: The Content Marketing Deluge by Velocity Partners

Even though this SlideShare is a few years old, it’s one every content marketer should flip through. The reason we love it so much is because the message — and delivery of that message — is pretty much flawless. Definitely take a second to flip through the presentation, as you’ll learn a great lesson while also soaking up a great piece of SlideShare content.

9. What Would Steve Do? 10 Lessons from the World’s Most Captivating Presenters by HubSpot

Not to toot our own horn, but this presentation has been one of our most successful ones, so we wanted to share it with you. I personally love how actionable tips are provided in a visual way. For example, in slides 47 through 49, the author explains the difference between “showing” and “telling” by putting the word “circle” next to a picture of a circle. Although showing, not telling, is a key storytelling technique in writing, it’s especially effective in presentations.

10. How I Got 2.5 Million Views on SlideShare by Nick Demey

Feeling inspired to create a SlideShare of your own? Make sure you flip through Nick Demey’s presentation first. He shares some tried-and-true tips for creating awesome presentations that rack up tons of views.

11. 10 Powerful Body Language Tips for Your Next Presentation by Soap Presentations

This presentation is inspirational from a design perspective — we especially love the color scheme. Using complementary colors (colors opposite each other on the color wheel) can be overwhelming at times, but because Soap Presentations uses them with lots of white space in the background, the colors draw your attention to the content of the slides.

12. What 33 Successful Entrepreneurs Learned From Failure by ReferralCandy

Learning from mistakes is a crucial part of growing in your professional and personal lives. But sometimes, it’s better to learn from others’ mistakes instead of making them yourself. This presentation outlines some core lessons successful entrepreneurs have learned by making mistakes. Read on so you don’t have to make the same ones.

13. Displaying Data by Bipul Deb Nath

We admire presentation for its exceptional display of data — now this post will explain how to do the same in your own presentations. I also love how this presentation is very concise and minimal, as it helps communicate a fairly advanced topic in an easy-to-understand way.

14. Design Your Career 2017 by Slides That Rock

This advice of this presentation is applicable (and its design admirable) even a few years later. The whole black-and-white color scheme really makes the salmon accent color pop — and the SlideShare creatively combines these elements for different slide layouts. Definitely bookmark this presentation as an example of a great SlideShare design.

15. A-Z Culture Glossary 2017 by sparks & honey

The first time I heard the phrase “on fleek,” I had no idea what it meant. (Apparently, it’s a term that means “on point,” in case you were wondering.)

If you’re like me and feel like it’s nearly impossible to keep up with the latest cultural trends, spend time with the presentation below. It’ll outline the most popular trends you should know this year — most definitely worth a read.

16. The History of SEO by HubSpot

SEO’s changed a lot in the past two decades. Most of us are concerned with keeping up with the latest and greatest changes … but have you ever taken a minute to step back in time? The presentation below will walk you through SEO history from the very beginning — it’s been a fascinating ride.

17. 5 Killer Ways to Design the Same Slide by Crispy Presentations

Once you start designing presentations, it’s easy to fall back on tried-and-true layouts, photos, fonts, and colors. While keeping everything consistent can be good for branding or for shipping a deck quickly, it can also prevent people from noticing the awesome new content you’ve put together. The quick presentation below shows you a few different ways you can design the same slide — all depending on what you want it to accomplish.

18. The Seven Deadly Social Media Sins by XPLAIN

Besides having some great takeaways for any inbound marketer, I love how this presentation successfully uses Creative Commons images in almost every slide. It’s pretty inspirational — even if you don’t have budget for stock photos, you can have an engaging presentation.

19. The Minimum Lovable Product by Spook Studio

When they’re first getting started, many startups and agile teams talk about creating a minimal viable product — using the smallest amount of resources to produce something that’s good enough to begin testing. After all, why pour tons of resources into something that you don’t know will work?

This presentation challenges the MVP concept in favor for creating something that people love. Check it out — it has lessons even for those of us who aren’t building technology every day.

20. How to Teach Yourself HTML and CSS This Month by Ryan Bonhardt

Lots of people have “learn to code” on their to-do list … but they never get to it. In marketing, knowing how to navigate code is becoming even more important to being successful. If you’ve been waiting to get started with coding, check out the presentation below.

21. How People Really Hold and Touch (Their Phones) by Steven Hoober

When you hear the phrase “design for mobile” what do you think? Probably that you need to create a responsive website, and that’s about it.

But that’s not all you need to worry about. When you’re creating mobile-optimized content, you need to know how people actually use their phones — and the presentation below will you a great overview of consumer behavior.

22. How to Really Get Into Marketing by Inbound.org

If you’re graduating from school or making a career change and looking to get into marketing, it can feel tough to actually get started. It’s one of those “you need experience to get the job, but you have no experience” conundrums.

Well, that’s where this presentation comes in. Hull growth marketer Ed Fry — once employee #1 at Inbound.org — gives real, actionable tips to help you get your foot in the door at your next marketing gig.

23. Search for Meaning in B2B Marketing by Velocity Partners

Sometimes, it’s easy to get bogged down and think you’re doing “just marketing.” You’re not operating on people and saving lives, right?

From the creators of “Crap: The Content Marketing Deluge” comes the following presentation. If you’re ever feeling down-in-the-dumps about marketing, I’d highly recommend reading it. It’s thoughtful, funny, and a great presentation to keep in your back pocket for a rainy day.

PowerPoint Your Presentation in the Right Direction

The best PowerPoint presentations have gorgeous designs, give insanely actionable takeaways, and provide down-to-earth advice.

Learn from these best PowerPoint presentation examples to create your own that represents all three.

Want more? Read 14 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Building More Creative Slideshows [+Templates].

Blogs and podcasts are both powerhouse marketing tools. Company blogs are well-established inbound marketing channels, while business podcasts are the up-and-comers garnering a lot of excitement in the industry.

A few stats in the blog corner:

• 59% of marketers find business blogging valuable. (DemandMetric)
• Prioritizing blogging gave companies 13X the ROI compared with companies that did not prioritize their blogs. (HubSpot)
• About 70 million new blog posts are published each month on WordPress alone, with 77 million comments added per month. (WordPress)

And in the podcast corner:

• 37% of Americans ages 12 and older listened to a podcast in the previous month. (Edison Research)
• Podcast listening is more prevalent among younger Americans. 49% of people aged 12 to 34 listened to a podcast in the previous month, followed by 40% of people ages 35 to 54, and 22% of people aged 55 and above. (Edison Research)
• The heaviest podcasts users listen while they are away from home; often while at work. (Nielson)

Both blogs and podcasts nurture customer relationships, validate expertise, deepen brand loyalty, capture search, and generate leads. But each tool has benefits and drawbacks, and you probably wonder which will offer your business the most significant ROI.

Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of blogs and podcasts, the audiences for each — and when offering both is best.

Podcast Benefits and Drawbacks

The Pros of Podcasting

1. Podcasts are personable and facilitate connections.

Your podcast host or hosts lend a human voice to your brand. Podcasts put a knowledgeable person from your company in conversation with industry experts to tackle current topics and share advice, often with a touch of lighthearted humor. You can also ask your audience what they want you to cover and whether they have questions they want answered.

2. Podcasts reach younger audiences.

An entertaining and informative podcast is an opportunity to build brand awareness among Millennials and Gen Z.

3. Podcast listeners are growing fast.

The number of people who listened to a podcast at least once increased by 20 million between 2018 and 2019. The number of weekly listeners rose by 14 million in that time.

4. Podcasts increase opportunities to reach your audience.

People can listen to podcasts while driving, working out, or doing the dishes. Reading a blog post requires stopping and reading on a computer or mobile device.

The Cons of Podcasting

1. Podcast tech can be intimidating.

Getting comfortable with podcast technology can feel daunting. Learning the tech and launching a podcast requires time and money, and companies with small marketing teams and budgets can question the ROI.

2. Podcasts take time.

Once you are comfortable, podcast production still requires a significant investment of time. You have to brainstorm topics, reach out to guests, and record, before shifting to post-production and marketing.

3. There’s a call-to-action gap.

People listening to podcasts in their car or on a walk can’t press the CTA button the moment the inspiration hits. Instead, they must choose to return to your website to explore and fill out a form.

Blog Pros and Cons

The Benefits of Blogging

1. Blogs support search engine optimization (SEO).

Including keywords in authoritative and helpful blog posts can drive traffic to your website.

2. Blogs don’t require as much tech knowledge.

For a blog, you need a strong writer and someone who knows how to publish the post to your platform.

3. Blogs draw leads.

Companies that blog earn 67% more leads on average per month than those that don’t.

The Drawbacks of Blogging

1. Blogs face stiff competition.

It’s not enough to pick a topic based on the keywords people are searching in your industry. There are scores of blogs across industries and subject areas. To make your blog stand out you have to go deeper, approach topics from a unique angle, and share must-know expert advice.

2. Blogs must offer value — and it’s no easy task.

With so much pre-existing content online, you have to offer an above-and-beyond return on your reader’s time investment. Then, once you’ve grabbed attention, it’s important to deliver consistent high-value content so your blog becomes a destination for knowledge building rather than a one-time find.

3. Blogs require a strong copy team.

Overcoming the cons of blogging takes a creative group of content strategists, writers, and editors who spot opportunities for engaging blogs that teach and help readers solve real-world problems.

Determine who you need to reach.

Blog readers, podcast listeners, or both? To decide the ideal medium for your content, get clear about who you want to engage with, what they want to know, and how they access their content.

The number of people listening to podcasts on mobile apps increased 60% between 2018 and 2019, and millennials drive that growth. One-third of listeners between ages 25 and 35 pressed play on at least five podcasts per week. Reasons for listening to podcasts range from entertainment, staying updated, and learning something new.

Podcast consumers differ slightly by gender, as well, with 39% of males and 36% of females in the U.S. listening to a podcast in the previous month.

Escape Fitness is an example of a company podcast that knows its fitness-industry audience, and produces audio content that engages. Weekly episodes of the Escape Your Limits podcast feature discussions with entrepreneurs about health, exercise, productivity, and the mindset needed for success.

The HubSpot 2017 Content Trends Survey found that 18% of consumers in the US, Germany, Colombia, and Mexico want blogs from the brands they support. Though that percentage may appear small — it is mighty. Businesses that blog get more website visitors and receive 67% more leads than those that don’t.

Among people who read blogs regularly, 34% read to learn something new, 20% for entertainment, and 12% to learn about news and trends in their job industry.

Because people are there to learn, you should focus on content that makes their life easier at work and beyond. The Grammarly blog does a great job of providing value for students, job-hunters, and people for whom English is a second language. You’ll find to-the-point posts on writing persuasive essays, giving writer feedback, and common writing problems, such as passive voice or run-on sentences.

People skim articles for tidbits of information rather than read them thoroughly. Your blog posts should be easily skimmable with headers that help them understand the topic more deeply, and engaging images or graphics that act as stepping stones from top to bottom. List articles are easy to skim and break your copy into bite-size pieces, and many marketers say they perform well.

When to Consider Both a Podcast and a Blog

Choosing between the two isn’t always necessary, and some companies benefit from offering both, if they have the budget and the time. REI Co-Op has produced four podcasts and has an extensive blog covering the environment, gear, and how-tos.

Here are first-steps to aid your decision making and lay the groundwork for a successful launch whether you share your brand through one or both mediums:

1. Assess your marketing team.

Has someone been pushing your company to create a blog and tossing topic ideas your way for the past year? Maybe they’ve even been writing shorter posts for LinkedIn already.

And perhaps someone else on your team devours podcasts and has heard enough of them from within your industry to understand what works and what doesn’t. Knowledgeable and passionate marketers make developing blogs and podcasts more manageable with a better chance of success.

2. Explore tools and platforms.

If you already have a CMS, such as HubSpot, it’s simple to add a blog. You can focus on building a content calendar, graphic design, and a blog marketing plan.

Recently, podcast platforms to streamline production and releases have also come online. Casted, for example, offers a podcast marketing platform that integrates with a company’s existing customer relationship management (CRM) and content management system (CMS) tools.

The podcast platform also offers a service that helps companies build their podcasts from scratch, so marketers learn the tools while moving production forward.

3. Understand that voice content is here to stay.

You saw those stats above. Like video before it, voice content is fast shifting from nice-to-have to must-have. But if producing a ground-up podcast isn’t in your wheelhouse or the budget, don’t fret; you can make your blog content audio accessible.

For example, Vooozer is an audio marketing solution that extends a blog’s reach with narration by real people and audio players embedded in the blog. People can learn and get advice from your company while they’re driving or on their lunch-break, and the CTA is on the same page to boot.

4. Assess the competition and clarify your value.

You need to know what’s out there so you don’t churn out content that’s already extensively covered. Research long-tail keywords to help you brainstorm niche topics that separate you from the pack on both platforms.

Blogs and podcasts increase your inbound marketing reach and nurture customer relationships. Choose the strategy that makes the most sense for your company, your in-house talent, and your customers, and you’ll see results.

In the world of social media marketing, there are hundreds of tools and software with features capable of helping you with different aspects of your social media strategy. These tools — also known as social media management tools — can assist with social media creation, collaboration, planning, scheduling , sharing, analysis, and more.

In this blog post, we’ll cover what social media management tools are, how your team can benefit from them, and 12 of the best options available today.

Let’s get started.

What is social media management?

Social media management is the process of handling (managing) your entire social media strategy. This includes planning, publishing, engaging, strategizing, and analyzing your social media content across the social platforms your business uses. It also entails understanding your social media strategy’s level of success so you can improve upon it.

Get certified in social media strategy with a free social media marketing course.

Social Media Management Tools

As mentioned above, there are a plethora of social media management tools available today. Some are meant to help with a wide array of social media management needs. Meanwhile, other tools are meant for specific types of social media management (e.g. tools for agencies) or facets of social media management (e.g. social listening or analytics). No matter your needs, goals, or industry, there’s a social media management tool for you.

Why use social media management tools?

Social media management tools assist with your social media strategy — typically, they have scheduling, publishing, collaborating, listening, and/or reporting capabilities. They also often have the ability to streamline interactions with followers cross-platform, offer access to all of your social accounts via a single dashboard, and analyze your success. They may also integrate with other tools your team uses such as your Marketing Software or CRM.

The 12 tools below are separated into categories based on what they’re meant for — as you read their descriptions, keep in mind that some of them overlap categories. For example, many of the general tools are great for small businesses — and many of the free tools are too.

Best General Social Media Management Tools

The following tools are ideal for all social media management teams — you can customize them to help you meet your specific needs and goals.

1.HubSpot Social Media Management Software

HubSpot monitors all interactions, conversations, and audiences on your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles. It allows you to effectively target specific audiences with personalized messaging using context from the contact database in your CRM as well as data from your Marketing Software. Meaning, with HubSpot, you can manage your entire social media strategy — from planning to sharing to analysis — from a single and central location.

Here are some other notable features you’ll get from using HubSpot’s Social Media Management software:

• Turn your content offers into social posts.
• Schedule social posts weeks in advance on all of your profiles.
• Keep up with current trends by monitoring keywords that are important to your brand and audience.
• Reply to anyone who commented on your profile or post through HubSpot.

2. Sprout Social

SproutSocial is a social media management tool that assists with social listening, publishing, engagement, and analysis. The tool streamlines the processes of sharing relevant content on social platforms as well as creating and sending personalized messages to prospects, customers, and followers — all of this support frees up valuable time for social media managers.

Customer service features exist to help you offer assistance to customers on social when they want and need it. With Sprout Social you’ll be able to develop a better understanding of who your audience members are and what they want from you on social as well as how you can improve upon your current strategy.

(Note: Sprout Social’s customer care functionality integrates with HubSpot.)

3. Falcon.io

Falcon.io is a social media marketing platform with a social media management solution that saves you time by helping you maximize reach, impact, and engagement among your audience.

The software has social listening capabilities to help you identify target audience members and prospects, understand what people are saying about your brand on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, and efficiently respond to any customer comments or concerns.

There’s also a content calendar that makes cross-platform social media planning easy and quick. Plus, you can view and respond to all customer messages and questions on one dashboard so no queries go unresolved.

(Note: Falcon.io integrates with HubSpot so you can easily sync customer data for campaigns, create custom audiences, and offer effective customer service via social media.)

Best Free Social Media Management Tools

Here are some effective free social media management tools. It’s not uncommon for tools to have a free version as well as paid plans that you can upgrade to as you grow and require greater functionality from your tool.

1. Hootsuite

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Hootsuite is a social media marketing and management tool. It has a dashboard through which you can manage all aspects of your social media strategy. Although there are paid plans with more capabilities, Hootsuite offers a free plan that works well if you’re a small business. With the free plan, you can schedule up to 30 social posts in advance.

You’ll also be able to manage three different social profiles from your dashboard with Hootsuite’s free plan. Lastly, this option works for small businesses because only one person has access to the account.

2. TweetDeck

Although TweetDeck is just for Twitter users, it’s a powerful social media management tool if you’re on the platform. This free tool allows you to simultaneously manage multiple Twitter profiles via a central dashboard.

Schedule Tweets ahead, monitor your competition, set alerts for your most important Tweets and Twitter activity, and manage your lists with ease. You can also customize your timelines as well as view and respond to conversations and Tweets in real-time via your dashboard.

3. Buffer

Buffer has a free plan that you can move to once you’ve completed your free trial with the software. Similar to Hootsuite, Buffer’s free plan works well if you have a small business with a small social media presence. This plan offers the ability to manage three social channels. You can schedule 10 posts in advance and only one user has access to your Buffer dashboard.

Best Social Media Management Tools for Small Businesses

Here are some social media management tools meant for small businesses.

1. Everypost

Everypost is a social media tool that allows you to manage multiple profiles and accounts at once. Customize your social posts, schedule them in advance, and share them all via a single platform.

Tailor social content for different platforms and then cross-post it from Everypost to streamline the process of sharing content across profiles. Use the tool to collaborate internally and manage roles — this way, you can delegate content to certain people on your team as needed.

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a social media management platform that helps you improve social engagement and relationship building across your social profiles.

With this tool, you can schedule your content, interact with followers, and get reports to determine the success of your strategy and ROI of your engagement. There’s also a single inbox through which you can view, share, and respond to customer comments and questions.

Real-time collaboration makes it easy to send different team members customer inquiries and work on content together. Take advantage of the flexible scheduling features to either schedule individual posts or bulk schedule posts.

Additionally, the Agorapulse CRM that this tool automatically comes with tracks followers and their interactions with your brand so you can learn from those engagements now and reference them in the future.

3. Content Cal

Content Cal is a social media management tool meant for planning and publishing content. There’s an easy-to-use visual calendar you can pair with approval flows to ensure specific posts are shared at the right time.

Pull in content from other tools — such as Facebook, Slack, Google Drive, or Dropbox — to share on social. You can also collaborate with team members and ask for their feedback easily using the tool’s comments feature.

Best Social Media Management Tools for Agencies

The following social media management tools are ideal for agencies.

1. Sendible

Sendible is a social media management platform specifically designed for agencies. The tool has an interactive and customizable content calendar so you and your team can view and collaborate on all social posts that are created, planned, and shared.

Use the content suggestion feature to get new ideas for content that’s likely to resonate with your client’s audience. There’s also a single-view inbox so you can look at all client messages at once — plus a priority filter option which allows you to filter and prioritize chats.

Lastly, set up user hierarchies and workflows to set permissions for certain team members — this way, certain people have to sign off on client content prior to it going live.

2. Nuvi

Nuvi is a social media management, marketing, and customer experience (CX) platform. It includes management tools for social listening, planning, publishing, engaging, reporting, and more — all with an end goal of creating an excellent experience for your customers and clients. Add permissions to your workflows so team members at your agency can collaborate and ensure all content is reviewed by the necessary people prior to it going live.

Create, plan, and schedule your content so it goes live when it needs to. Then, measure performance and keep an eye on competitors to understand what social media strategies are working best for them.

The engagement feature will make it easy to prioritize social media engagement and allow you to organize, prioritize, and share those engagements internally with the correct team members. Plus social listening features will ensure you don’t miss a beat across any of your accounts.

3. HeyOrca!

HeyOrca! is a social media management tool for agencies. The platform allows you to manage all of your social content and clients in a central location so you can offer a seamless and memorable customer experience.

The content calendar allows you to share your plans for scheduled content easily with team members and/or clients. Create multiple content calendars — each with unique team members and social profiles — for each of your clients to keep things organized.

Create mock ups of all content you plan to share on social so your team members and clients can give the go-ahead prior to it being shared. You can also easily share your content with clients via HeyOrca! to get their feedback (and you can choose which versions of that content you want your clients to be able to see or not see).

Lastly, offer clients easy-to-understand reports to show them how successful the content you’re creating for their social media profiles is.

The management tools we reviewed above have the power to help you reach (and exceed) your social media goals. Determine what you need out of a tool to help you identify which option has the capabilities and features needed to help you achieve those goals.

In the first few years of business, small companies come up against a lot of different challenges. Some are harder than others to overcome — and according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of small businesses fail by the end of their first year. By the end of their fifth year, 50% go under; and by the tenth year, that number rises to 80%.

With survival rates like that, it’s easy to understand why folks face the first few years of business with trepidation. But in fact, many common business problems and challenges are actually fixable. Many times, you’ll find you need to take a step back, take the time to understand the pain points you’re feeling, and re-think your strategy.

Here are several challenges every small business faces, along with some tactical advice about how to fix them.

1. Finding Customers

This first one isn’t just a small business problem. The marketers at well-known companies like Apple and Toyota and McDonald’s don’t just sit around waiting for the leads to come in: Even the biggest, most successful companies have people working hard every single day to find new customers.

But for small businesses that aren’t a household name, finding customers can be particularly difficult. For example, there seem to be so many channels you can choose to focus on… How do you know what to prioritize and where to allocate resources?

How to Fix It:

Finding customers starts with figuring how who your ideal customer actually is. Spraying and praying doesn’t work for anybody — you need to make sure you’re spreading the word to the right people.

Craft an idea of what your target customers look like, what they do, where they spend time online by building your buyer personas.

Creating very specific ones can dramatically improve your business results. Once you’ve built your buyer personas, you can start creating content and getting in front of your target customers in the places they spend time online and with the messages that they care about.

2. Increasing Brand Awareness

If your customers don’t know who you are, they can’t buy from you.

It can sometimes seem like today’s biggest brands seemed to have popped up out of nowhere. How did they become a household name? How did they grow that quickly? Can your business grow like that, too?

Of course, most of these companies’ hard work, failures, and rejections happened behind the scenes. But there are strategies for spreading the word about your brand and building a great reputation that you can start right away.

How to Fix It:

There are many ways to spread brand awareness, but the three I’ll touch on here are PR, co-marketing, and blogging.

• PR: Public relations is less about paying for a spot in a news blog, and more about focusing your voice and finding your place in the market. I recommend reading this great post from FirstRound Capital on what startups and small businesses often get wrong about PR, which also includes some great, tactical tips on how to figure out who’s covering your industry, building relationships, and working with reporters. You can also download our free public relations kit to learn how to maximize your public relations efforts with inbound marketing and social media.
• Co-marketing: Partnering with another brand will help you inherit some of their image and reputation and create brand evangelists outside your circle. It’s a fantastic way to gain a large volume of new contacts alongside your organic marketing efforts. You can read our ebook on how to get started with co-marketing for more helpful information.
• Blogging: Running a consistently high-quality blog will also help you build brand awareness. Not only does a blog help drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into leads, but it also helps you establish authority in your industry and trust among your prospects. It’ll also help you build an email list, which brings us to our next point…

3. Building an Email List

In order to move prospects along their buyer’s journey to eventually become your customer, you need to build trust by staying top of mind and providing value consistently. 

That starts with getting prospects into your email list.

As if it isn’t hard enough to build an email list, the average marketing database degrades by about 22.5% every year. 

That means you have to increase your email list by almost a quarter to just maintain it, never mind grow it. It’s the marketing team’s job to find ways to constantly add fresh, new email contacts to your lists.

But what many people call “building an email list” is actually buying an email list — and buying an email list is never a good idea. I repeat: Never a good idea. Not only will your email deliverability and IP reputation be harmed, but it’s also a waste of money. If your current strategy is to buy or rent email lists, then it’s time to regroup and find better places to put those resources.

How to Fix It:

Instead of buying or renting lists, build opt-in email lists. An opt-in email list is made up of subscribers who voluntarily give you their email address so you can send them emails.

The act of opting in necessitates website functionality that captures their email address. This can be achieved with a form builder or other conversion tool (more on that later).

The other piece of the puzzle is creating demand. You can do this by creating great blog content and making it easy for people to subscribe — which, at the same time, will help you increase your online presence, build up search authority, and create evangelists from your content.

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You can also revive older lists that you think are mostly decayed by creating an engaging opt-in message and sending it to your old list encouraging contacts who wish to re-opt-in and promising to remove all contacts who don’t respond.

Growing your email list doesn’t necessarily translate into growing your list of sales-qualified leads, which brings me to my next point…

4. Lead Generation

Another problem most small businesses share is lead generation — specifically, generating enough leads to keep the sales team happy.

But generating leads that are both high quantity and high quality is a marketing team’s most important objective. A successful lead generation engine is what turns website visitors into prospective customers and provides a steady stream of sales prospects while you sleep.

How to Fix It:

To make the lead generation process work for your business, you need to first optimize your existing website for conversions. Your website is the most important tool you have for turning prospects into customers. Look through your website and ask yourself:

• Do each of your webpages clearly guide visitors to take action, or do they leave them wondering what to do next?
• Do you use a tool that automatically pulls the submissions from your forms and puts them into your contact database, like HubSpot’s free lead generation tool?
• Are you creating custom landing pages for every single campaign that you run?
• Do you have lead generation CTAs on each of your blog posts? (Do you have a blog at all?)

Prioritize the most popular pages on your website first. Most businesses have a few, specific pages that bring in the majority of their traffic — often the homepage, “About” page, “Contact Us” page, and maybe one or two of your most popular blog posts. Read this blog post to learn how to figure out which pages to prioritize, and how to optimize them.

Then, implement conversion tools such as: 

• Pop-ups
• Hello bars
• Slide-ins

Finally, be sure to take advantage of free lead management software and apps for startups. Affording marketing in general is a big challenge in and of itself, so finding and implementing the most robust free marketing tools can be a game changer.

5. Delighting Customers

Customer satisfaction is a great goal, but customer delight is even better. After all, delighted customers are the ones who buy from you again, write testimonials and agree to case studies, and refer you to people they know. 

In order to achieve true customer delight so that your customers become promoters of your business, you must surpass expectations and deliver an unmatched experience.

How to Fix It: 

It takes work to continue solving for your customer in a way that turns them into raving fans. Here are some steps get you in the right mindset: 

• Understand why your customers chose you and what they need
• Set concrete expectations at the start of the engagement
• Deliver on those expectations (and satisfy your customers’ needs)
• Innovate how you can provide unexpected extras that go above and beyond
• Continue to measure satisfaction and improve the customer experience

6. Hiring Talented People

None of the above can happen at scale without a fantastic team that understands your vision and supports your efforts.

Hiring is often one of the biggest challenges for small businesses, especially since small business executives tend to feel under-resourced to begin with. Hiring new employees is a big deal and a complex process, and the cost of onboarding is an average of over $4,000 per new employee for most companies. And if you don’t hire well, employee turnover can be very, very expensive.

But, as CEO of 2020 On-site Optometry Howard Bernstein said, it’s impossible to know everything yourself. That’s why finding and hiring the right people — and the people who are really excited about what you’re doing — matters.

How to Fix It:

It’s easy to hire with a short-term mindset: send out a job description, screen applicants, and make a decision. But because of the high costs of hiring right, it’s important to invest a significant amount of time in the hiring process. Don’t settle for good employees when you can find great ones, even if it takes longer. It’s the great employees that will help your company get to the next level.

Just like you create buyer personas for your customers, create candidate personas for your job candidates. Your personas should be different for each new role that you’re hiring for, but will share some underlying traits around company culture.

Next, take ownership of attracting candidates to your company’s brand and make them interested in learning more. This will help you build a recruiting pipeline that will give hiring the same predictability as sales. Then, turn those leads into applicants.

7. Managing Workflow

Once you have the people in place to make the magic happen, the next challenge is managing workflow as you scale. You want to ensure that your team has the processes and tools to do good work and do it efficiently. 

At the same time, you can’t be everywhere at once as a business leader. So how do you focus on the business while ensuring that everyone working in the business has what they need?

How to Fix It:

The best ways to diagnose the roadblocks your team faces and increase efficiency is by creating ways for them to provide feedback. This can be done through: 

• Employee satisfaction surveys
• Frequent one-on-one meetings with direct reports
• Ensuring your direct reports implement one-on-one meetings with their direct reports
• Occasional skip-level meetings
• Asking about threats to the business and the issues that give them the most “pain” in their roles
• Finding the commonalities in the feedback you receive and the bottlenecks

8. Financial Planning

In theory, more resources (whether it’s people, tools, or time) increase efficiency and quality. Creating smooth operations starts by providing all the resources you can to your team. 

It sounds simple in theory, but did you notice the caveat, all … you can? Unfortunately, business leaders have budget restrictions based on revenue and margin. 

It, then, becomes a challenge to improve efficiency while working within certain limitations, investing in your business without over-spending outside your means. This is solved by making good decisions based on solid financial planning.

How to Fix It: 

Every business will be different, but you’ll want to use business credit wisely, cut costs where possible, and manage cash flow by staying on top of invoices and bookkeeping. Business accountants and financial advisors can help you analyze your financial situation and help you make good decisions.

9. Scaling

“There’s this mix of building scalability early, versus doing what you have to do to get it all done,” according to Nick Rellas, co-founder and CEO of Drizly.

This is a tricky one, especially since every situation is different. You’ll see this problem arise in all areas of business: in product development, in marketing and content creation, in hiring, and so on.

For example, many business executives will push growth at all costs. But if you grow your company too quickly, you’ll find yourself having to hire quickly. This can overwhelm your experienced team members because it takes a while to train people. And if you don’t train people well, it can end up backfiring.

How to Fix It:

Unfortunately, there’s no perfect answer here. “Depending where you are in your business’ lifecycle,” says Rellas, “the scale will tip one way or the other, but I do think you need both at different times.”

What it comes down to is not obsessing over every detail, but obsessing over the right details. Obsessing over product perfection, for example, might not be as important as obsessing over customer service. It’s better to put your fears aside and launch a product that isn’t perfect because you can always update and improve it. After all, once your products are in the hands of your customers, you can learn much more quickly what’s working and what isn’t.

Obsessing over customer service, however, is worth the extra effort. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos puts it well in his 2016 letter to shareholders: “There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.”

(“Day 1” is what he refers to as a period of growth and innovation, whereas “Day 2” is stasis, irrelevance, and slow demise.)

While these are just a few of the many business challenges facing small businesses every day, there are many others out there. Many of them can be planned for and mitigated with the proper planning and strategy.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

As any marketer will tell you, there are a myriad of benefits to using data to inform your marketing decisions.

For instance, data can help marketers learn from past mistakes and pivot to create increasingly effective campaigns over time.

Additionally, data can provide marketers with insights about their audience and what matters most to both prospects and customers. It also helps marketers earn buy-in from leadership to experiment and test new, innovative strategies for increasing brand awareness and ROI.

Monday.com knows the importance of data all too well. The work OS — used by major brands including Uber, Hulu, and Coca-Cola — has seen incredible growth over the past year, reaching $100 million in revenue and surpassing 100,000 customers.

And, as Rotem Shay, Head of User Acquisition and SEO, told me: “We strongly believe in data-driven decisions for everything we do, from the day-to-day to planning future campaigns.”

Keep reading to learn more from Shay about how monday.com uses data-driven marketing to guide its powerful, effective marketing strategy – and how you might use data in new, unique ways, as well.

Additionally — If you’re a HubSpot customer, take a look at the new powerful integration between HubSpot and monday.com.

4 Tips on Data-Driven Marketing from monday.com

1. Get creative when it comes to the analytics tools your team uses.

Ultimately, data-driven marketing can’t happen without robust analytics tools that enable you to properly measure campaign performance and create A/B tests to ensure you’re providing prospects and customers with the most value.

For monday.com, that analytics tool is homemade: “Our main tool for tracking campaigns is an internal and powerful tool we built here, in-house, called BigBrain.” Shay told me.

“With BigBrain, we’re able to track and centralize all the data in one place so we have one source of truth. We complement BigBrain with Looker, Google analytics 360, HubSpot, and Singular to make sure we don’t miss anything.”

If your company is scaling quickly or demands certain functions that you aren’t finding in one analytics tool, consider how you might combine a few tools or create a unique dashboard to collect the information most critical to your business.

Ultimately, choosing the right analytics tools might take some trial-and-error, but the hassle will be worth it when you find a process that works best for your team. 

2. All metrics matter.

As marketers, it’s easy to focus on a few key metrics and ignore the rest. For instance, HubSpot’s Blog team primarily focuses on traffic and leads. While other metrics — including shares, impressions, and customer lifetime value — still matter greatly to us, it can be easy to become singular in focus to block out the “noise” of various metrics.

However, Shay refutes this kind of thinking. Instead, he suggests: “In marketing campaigns, I believe you need to measure everything and track everything you can — starting from how many impressions you get, until the end of your funnel.”

Shay told me, “In order to make the right decisions, you have to see the whole picture. Sometimes people think that too many metrics or numbers make too much ‘noise’, but I really believe that a marketer should get all the information she can get and, after digesting all the data, clear the ‘noise’.”

Consider how your own marketing team might shift focus to ensure you take the time to gather valuable intel from each potential marketing metric and KPI. Ultimately, each metric contains valuable insights into how your content is reaching and converting leads.

3. Pay attention to both quantitative and qualitative metrics to inform your overall strategy.

It’s critical to remember that you should use data to inform all your future marketing decisions. That includes the types of content you promote on social media, all the way up to the major quarterly campaigns you create to drive revenue for your company.

Of course, there are two different types of data — quantitative and qualitative — and you’ll need to use both to create a more well-rounded picture of both your successes and setbacks.

Shay supports this, mentioning that his team at monday.com uses both types of data when making decisions: “During any brainstorm for future campaigns, we deeply analyze campaign results together with the insights we are gathering from customers’ feedback and user testing. We combine both methods in order to understand and get insights that only numbers can’t give us.”

4. Use data to confirm or disprove hypotheses to ensure you don’t waste valuable resources.

Data doesn’t just tell you how previous campaigns and strategies performed — It can also tell you the potential performance of future campaigns, which can end up saving you both time and resources you might’ve otherwise wasted.

For instance, at monday.com, Shay’s team worried that website visitors perceived monday.com as project management software, and as a result, didn’t feel confident trying out other verticals. His team came to this conclusion through tracking analytics — including homepage user behavior, as well as user activity on the website as a whole.

Shay told me, “We felt that our users weren’t aware that monday.com is both easy to use and robust with additional features. In order to test our hypothesis, we presented different use cases on the homepage using a motion sequence that showed users using monday.com for different verticals, and added a roulette/scroll showing additional use cases.”

The results? A tie, according to Shay’s team’s KPIs — which told them they could continue with the original design of the homepage, rather than making any major alterations. This ultimately saved them from wasting resources re-designing their already successful homepage, and let them focus their energy elsewhere.

Ideally, these monday.com strategies can inspire you to reconsider how you might use marketing analytics in increasingly creative and unique ways. Ultimately, of course, you’ll need to decide for yourself how to use data most effectively for your own needs and goals.

[Note: If you’re a HubSpot customer, take a look at the new powerful integration between HubSpot and monday.com.]

While many landing pages look different and use a variety of interesting strategies to pull in audiences, they all serve one major purpose. These pages get website visitors to convert to the next stage in the buyer’s journey.

Rather than serving as a basic advertisement that shows a customer a product, a landing page aims to engage and delight a customer by offering them something that relates to the product or the company’s industry. When they fill out the form and receive a reward of interesting content, they might be even more likely to trust your brand and become a customer.

Quick tip: Want an easy way to add a form to your landing page? HubSpot’s free form builder tool can help you fill your CRM with leads from your website.

Let’s talk through an example of when a landing page can be especially effective. If a business wants to sell an AI product that helps salespeople, they might create a landing page that offers audiences a free video on how to use AI in the sales industry. Interested audiences might offer their contact information in exchange for the valuable information. If they enjoy the video they’ve received, they might be more likely to respond to or purchase a product from a company rep who calls them.

In another scenario, a publishing company that targets an audience of chief executives might create a landing page that invites audiences to sign up for a webinar hosted by an executive at a major company.

After giving their email address on the signup form presented on the landing page, the leads get an email with the webinar dates and log in information, as well as instructions on how to sign up for the publication’s newsletter or subscription. If the user is pleased by the webinar, they might sign up for the newsletter or a subscription to keep up with similar publication content.

Although their purpose is simple enough in theory, actually designing a successful landing page requires some detailed planning and creative testing.

Even after launching your landing page, you’ll want to pay attention to conversion rates to see how well it’s doing.

To determine your conversion rate, simply divide the number of conversions a webpage generates by the number of people who visited that page.

If your conversion rate isn’t close to the average just yet, don’t worry. Nailing those percentages can be a bit challenging at first, especially is you have a lot of regular page visitors. Luckily, there are a number of simple conversion rate optimization strategies that can help you boost your current rate quickly.

Regardless of what your business is selling or the conversion action you hope to instigate, it’s helpful to get inspired by seeing what other great landing pages look like. And because there’s no one “right” way of designing a landing page, you’ll want to check out examples from lots of different industries for different stages of the buying process.

Want to get inspired? Check out the great landing page examples below.

We don’t have access to the analytics for each of these landing pages, so I can’t tell you specifically how well they convert visitors, contacts, leads, and customers. But many of them do follow best practices while also implementing a few new experiments that could give you ideas for your own landing pages.

13 Great Examples of Landing Page Design

1. Lyft

We love that on Lyft’s landing page, they zero in on their drivers’ main motivation: earning money easily.

We also love that, in addition to the “Apply Now” form, drivers can type their city and the number of hours they might drive for Lyft in a week to calculate how much they’d make. When visitors fill out that information and press “Calculate,” they aren’t taken to a new page. Instead, they see a dollar amount followed by a new call-to-action button to “Apply Now” (which, once clicked, takes drivers up to the form).

By offering these two conversion paths, they’re able to address two different types of people in the conversion path: those who are ready to make the decision now and those who need a little more information before they convert.

2. The Professional Wingman

Okay, so the whole idea of having a professional wingman to help you find dates and a meaningful relationship is already pretty cool. But when you’re faced with the prospect of hiring one, it also raises questions. How does it work? How much does it cost? Is this really going to help me?

That’s why we love this landing page for Thomas Edwards, the original Professional Wingman himself, which outlines exactly what a complimentary coaching session is going to achieve. Plus, it’s clear that it’s complimentary, thanks to the boldly-colored call-to-action button above the fold.

Once you click that button, you aren’t taken to a new page. Instead, an interstitial form appears right there. And while it does request a lot of information — some of it a bit personal — it also sends the message that The Professional Wingman is going to take this seriously, but only if you do, too.

3. Muck Rack

This landing page design has it all. It’s visually appealing and interactive, offers scannable yet descriptive headers about Muck Rack’s services, and uses quotes from industry professionals as social proof. Plus, the page is intuitive and easy to navigate.

The cool part about this landing page is that it can appeal to both of Muck Rack’s audiences. The top of the page is split into two, featuring their two different services side by side. Once a visitor moves his or her mouse over either of the “find journalists” or the “build free portfolio” CTAs, a very simple form appears — and that’s important, so as not to distract the user from the task at hand.

4. Cigital

There are a few things that make this Cigital landing page work. It has simple and relevant imagery. The headline is straightforward and the description of the ebook informs viewers of the specific value they will get by downloading it. There is only one call-to-action — “READ THE EBOOK” — that stands out on the page thanks to a bright yellow CTA button.

The only thing we’d change about this landing page is that we’d remove the navigation bar at the top. They tend to distract visitors and lead them away from the intended action. Not only is this a landing page design best practice, but we’ve also conducted A/B tests that’ve shown removing navigation links from landing pages increases conversion rates.

5. Khan Academy

The hard part about using your homepage as a landing page is that you have to cater to several different types of audiences. But Khan Academy’s homepage does that very well. This page is clearly designed for three different types of visitors: those who want to learn something, those who want to teach, and parents who are interested in using Khan Academy for their kids. Plus, how motivational is the emblazoned “You can learn anything” text at the top?

The remainder of the page is designed for viewers who are not completely familiar with Khan Academy. It colorfully and largely spells out the key benefits of using the learning platform — all of which are easy to scan and understand. There’s also a recurring CTA: “Start learning now.” As soon as viewers feel they have enough information, they can click the CTA to get taken back up to the form at the top of the page without having to scroll.

6. Club W

A little bit of delightful copy can go a long way on your landing page. We love the playful little aside — “(Hint: It’s Wine)” — that Club W included below the header of their corporate gifting landing page. It humanizes the brand and makes them likable, which could have a positive impact on their conversion rate.

The images below that header make a nice use of negative space, showing the user exactly what his or her gift recipient might actually receive, should they choose to gift with Club W. And, of course, there’s that bold call to action — “Email Us”.

The one thing we’d change? The CTA prompts the users email software to open, which drives traffic away from the site and the browser entirely. A form might be more effective here — not only would Club W be able to dictate what information it wants to capture, but also, it would keep the user on-site.

7. Codecademy

I like this page because it’s simple in both copy and design. The image above the fold is a computer screen displaying an HTML bracket with a blinking cursor — a whimsical, clear visual to accompany the form on the right.

The form itself is simple and only requires an email address, username, password, and a validation that you’re not a robot to create an account. Or, you can just use your Facebook or Google Plus login, shortening the conversion path even further.

For visitors who need more information before creating an account, the landing page also offers a video below the fold that explains their concept and value by way of a real-life success story. Again, this helps make the potentially intimidating world of coding more approachable for beginners.

Those who need even more convincing can continue scrolling for additional testimonials and other forms of social proof.

8. Poached

I don’t think we’ve ever lived in a time when, culturally, we’ve been so food-obsessed. Poached has turned that into a B2B model with a platform to connect proprietors and culinary talent.

When you visit the homepage, there’s no mystery about what you’re there to do — the giant “Post a job” and “Choose a city” calls to action help with that. And once you click on one of them, you’re taken to a no-frills form to become a member or log in, or a list of jobs in each city. It’s colorful and comprehensive — and, it makes us hungry.

9. Breather

Here’s another example of clever, delightful design on a landing page. As soon as you visit Breather.com, there’s an instant call to action: indicate where you want to find a space. Plus, it uses location services to figure out where you are, providing instant options nearby.

We love how Breather used simple, to-the-point copy to let the visitor know what the company does, followed immediately by the CTA to select a city. And if you need to scroll down for more information, you can see that Breather played with the microcopy with personality (“no commitment, ever”), reminding us there are real humans behind the design. That brings us a little closer to the brand. The negative space and soothing color scheme are also aligned with the product — essentially, room to breathe.

10. Startup Institute

Visitors to your website won’t hand over their personal information without knowing what they’re going to get in return. On its landing page, Startup Institute makes abundantly clear what will happen after you apply by listing a Q&A right beside the form. It might prompt some people to say, “They read my mind!”

To avoid hesitancy to fill out a form, use your landing page to set expectations upfront. That clears the air, and can also weed out the people who don’t take your content, product or service seriously.

11. Edupath

Who is your landing page’s target audience? While most of Edupath’s website content is directed toward students, there are sections dedicated to advising parents on helping their teenagers through college applications and SAT preparation. The landing page below is in one of these sections.

When parents fill out their teenager’s name, email address, and mobile number, a link to download the Edupath app is sent directly to them. The folks at Edupath know students are likely to do something if their parents ask them to — especially if it means they don’t have to surrender their phones.

Plus, it’s an easy, one-click process. This whole conversion path is a clever and helpful way to get the apps on more students’ phones by way of their parents.

12. Taster’s Club

If there’s anything we enjoy more than a fine whiskey, it’s a whiskey club homepage that makes it easy to either join or learn more about membership. Case in point: Taster’s Club, which immediately serves up those very two CTAs on its landing page — which also happens to be its homepage.

For those to wish to learn more, clicking that CTA will immediately scroll the user down to colorful, image-rich details on what a Taster’s Club membership includes. Keep scrolling, and you get user testimonials.

But clicking the “Join Now” button is where the real fun begins. After doing that, you get to pick your poison — that is, the type of whiskey you like the most — and view the membership or gifting options available for it. Once you make your selections, you’re taken to an easy-to-navigate checkout page to enter your payment information. Good design and ease of use? We’ll drink to that.

13. Microsoft IT Showcase

The landing page below has been used to market and generate leads for one episode of Microsoft’s IT Showcase webinar series.

This simple and straightforward design does a great job of presenting why the webinar being offered is important to IT professionals. Along with a quick blurb describing what the webinar will discuss, the page also includes links to similar webinars, details on the speakers, and links to Microsoft resources that touch on the topics that will be discussed.

An IT company which has access to thought leaders or experts in their industry could similarly use this webinar landing page strategy to generate both leads and prospective customer trust. Audiences who feel informed after reading the landing page might sign up expecting the webinar to be insightful.

If the webinar seems informative and credible, these audiences will think that the IT company has an expertise in the product and might have quality product offerings. This will make them more willing to talk to a representative to learn more or purchase a product.

Ready to build your landing page?

If these examples have inspired you, but you’re not a design expert, we’ve also created a great list of free, professionally designed landing page templates.

If you’re looking for more landing page design examples, check out some of our favorite HubSpot landing page examples. You can also check out this quick guide to landing page design.

Effective marketing is difficult to get right. Between creative demands, budget limits, and channel decisions, marketers have a lot to juggle when developing their marketing strategy.

The biggest determinant of effective marketing, however, is your audience.

If you’re not properly targeting your buyer persona, your promotions and advertisements will likely fall on deaf ears. You might as well not be marketing at all.

Where target audiences vary the most, though, is between individual consumers and businesses. Some companies serve individual shoppers, while others cater to companies and organizations.

Marketing to businesses is very different than marketing to individual consumers. That’s why an entirely different marketing method — B2B marketing — exists, and that’s why we built this guide. By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of B2B marketing, the most effective B2B marketing strategies, and how you can tap into and convert your business audience.

HubSpot is an example of a company that engages in B2B marketing. HubSpot’s customers are other businesses, not individual consumers. Therefore, all of our marketing efforts can be classified as B2B.

B2B vs B2C Marketing

B2B and B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing are very different. B2B and B2C marketing differ in their respective strategies and applications, as well as in their audiences and how they communicate to them.

B2B marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individuals who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, their organization (rather than for themselves), thus making the organization the customer. Here are a few examples of B2B companies:

• A coworking space that leases office spaces to remote teams and freelancers (like WeWork)
• An on-demand order fulfillment, warehousing, and screen printing service (like Printful)
• A marketing software company that sells social media management tools, lead generation software, and other marketing tools to businesses and organizations (like HubSpot!)

B2C marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individual consumers who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, themselves, thus making the individual the customer. Here are a few examples of B2C companies:

• An e-commerce company that sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals (like Poppin)
• A store that sells t-shirts and other clothing and accessories (like Target)
• A music platform that sells streaming subscriptions (like Spotify)

Take a look at this chart comparing B2B and B2C customers.

As much as they differ, though, B2B and B2C also intersect in many ways. While Poppin sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals, they also design corporate office spaces and branded supplies. On the flip side, Printful not only offers order fulfillment and warehousing to businesses; they also fill e-commerce printing orders for individuals.

As distinct as the B2B and B2C marketing audiences can be, B2B marketers can always learn from B2C campaigns, too.

B2B Marketing Strategies

As I said above, marketing depends on its audience. While B2B and B2C marketing vary, not every piece of B2B marketing material is alike, either.

In this section, we’ll talk about various B2B marketing strategies you can implement to reach your specific business audience. Before we dive in, though, make sure you understand the B2B buyer’s journey. Take note of how each of these stages may affect your marketing strategies and how you implement them.

B2B Email Marketing

Email marketing is a tried and true method of reaching both individual consumers and business customers. Did you know that 93% of B2B marketers use email? Are you one of them? You should be. Emails lead to engagement which turns subscribers into leads … and then customers.

Download our guide to optimizing email marketing for conversions and learn how to grow your email list, ensure deliverability, and increase engagement.

Unlike B2C customers who respond best to emotions and entertainment, B2B customers look for logic and positive ROI. Essentially, they’re asking themselves, How can your business help my business grow? Because of this, your email marketing must consistently resonate with your business customers and focus on things that matter to them — like time, money, and resources.

Email marketing is also a powerful vehicle for sharing your brand’s content. 83% of B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing program, and 40% of B2B marketers say these newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success.

With the constant barrage of emails flooding our inboxes today, it’s more important than ever to create and send out effective marketing emails.

B2B Email Marketing Best Practices

• Write enticing subject lines. Think about your email subject lines as a Netflix trailer — if you can’t hook your audience with a two-minute clip (or, in this case, a few dozen characters), don’t expect them to open and watch (or read) the whole thing. We recommend spending almost as much time on your email subject lines as you do on the emails themselves.
• Stick to one call-to-action (CTA) per email. If you think the number of emails you receive is a lot, take a look at the CTAs in those emails … some are packed with two, three, and sometimes up to 10 different CTAs. Don’t make this mistake, which can leave your recipients’ heads spinning, asking “What should I click on first?” and ultimately clicking on nothing. With one CTA per email, you allow your audience to focus on your email content and ultimately one action … a welcome reprieve from today’s frequent decision-making and analysis paralysis.
• Segment your email to reach the most relevant audience. Not every email you send will be appropriate for everyone on your list. Your subscribers may be at different stages of the buyer’s journey or be seeking different solutions. That’s where email list segmentation comes into play. Not only does this help you relate to your audience better, but it gives your emails that personal feel that says “Hey, I’m listening and I know what you’d like to see.” Consumers prefer email quality over quantity anytime.
• Make sure your email designs are responsive. Over 80% of email users access their inbox on their phones, and emails that don’t show up correctly on mobile devices are often deleted in three seconds. Ouch. Don’t let your email be one of those.
• Don’t be afraid of the cold email. As uncomfortable as it is, the right email can convert new customers — like this cold sales email that won 16 new B2B customers.

👉🏼HubSpot Tip: You can’t send marketing emails without any recipients — these people make up your lists. There are plenty of easy ways to grow your email list. Begin with opt-in forms on your website homepage, About page, and blog. Check out HubSpot’s Free Form Builder tool to get started.

B2B Digital Marketing

Every business, whether B2B or B2C should have a digital presence — which is comprised of paid ads, search engine optimization, a website, and any other place your B2B company is active online. Let’s walk through a handful of tactics that can strengthen your B2B digital marketing strategy.

Define your target audience

A strong B2B digital marketing strategy starts with defining your target audience, or buyer persona. This demographic and psychographic information will inform almost every other marketing activity thereafter, ensuring your content and digital material is absorbed by the right eyes and ears (and that no resources go to waste on your end).

Create your website

Secondly, digital marketing can’t quite function without an informative, engaging website. Over 80% of buyers visit a website before making a purchase. Moreover, since the typical B2B sales cycle often involves many key players (such as gatekeepers, decision makers, and other folks who have to buy into a purchase), websites are easy, straightforward ways for influencers to share information about your product or service.

Optimize your digital presence

Your website needs to be more than informative and engaging, though … it needs to be discoverable. You can do this with on-page SEO and technical SEO tactics. These include everything from image alt-text and meta descriptions (what your visitors can see) to structured data and site speed (what your visitors can’t see). Off-page SEO is also at play here, which refers to external linking strategies and social sharing — SEO tactics that take place off your website.

Run PPC campaigns

Finally, round out your digital presence with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which allows you to get your content and brand in front of new audiences via search engines and other advertising platforms. I recommend maximizing your PPC investment by advertising more than your specific products or services — such as your brand personality, blog or social media content, or company tagline.

The best way to see an ROI from your paid ads is by 1) incorporating your buyer persona data and 2) boosting content that they can relate to. For example, it’s highly unlikely a brand new consumer who’s never heard of you is searching for your exact product. They may be searching for a location-based solution or product feature. To reach the greatest number of potential customers, pay to target relevant categories within your brand vs. promoting your product or services.

B2B Content Marketing

We’ve talked about how B2B customers are focused on expertise, driven by logic, and desire to be educated. What better marketing tool to satisfy these priorities than B2B content marketing?

Whereas a traditional PR marketing strategy interrupts a consumer’s day-to-day with promotional material, a content marketing strategy adds valuable information and informs the consumer — which is precisely what B2B customers are looking for. Not to mention that content marketing supports SEO efforts, which involves anticipating what your audience is searching for, helping them discover your website and content … and potentially converting them to customers.

Download our free guide and learn what topics convert at the highest rate with insight from 175,000 B2B & B2C blog posts.

In fact, 80% of business decision makers prefer to get information from an article than an ad. Knowing this, I’d say you should be putting the same (if not more) resources into your content marketing than your traditional advertising strategy.

Because the B2B buyer’s journey is slightly different than the B2C buyer’s journey (which has shorter sales cycles and fewer decision makers involved), the content you create for your B2B content marketing strategy may vary more than the content you’ve seen as a consumer yourself, as illustrated in the below graphic.

Before you start creating content, though, I recommend creating a business blog. (Don’t worry, growing your blog readership is easier than you think.) Your blog will house all the content you create and serve as a home-base for readers to visit and subscribe to.

B2B Social Media Marketing

Did you know that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-Suite executives use social media when making a purchase? That’s right — social media marketing isn’t just for brands targeting individual consumers.

Many B2B companies struggle with social media marketing, though. It can be harder to use social media to connect with business customers, especially because (as we mentioned above) there’s typically a lengthier sales cycle and longer chain of command.

Honestly, B2B social media marketing might not be where you convert the greatest number of leads, and that’s OK. It likely comes into play near the beginning of your customers’ buyer’s journeys.

Social media is a powerful tool for building brand awareness, giving your company an online personality, and humanizing your business — all very powerful factors when it comes to marketing and connecting with potential customers. Like email marketing, social media is also a highly effective channel for sharing your content and enhancing your brand expertise, the latter of which we know B2B customers appreciate.

Overwhelmed by social media? Spend more time connecting with your followers with our time-saving suite of social tools.

While your social media accounts might not convert as frequently as your content or email marketing, they’re just as important. In this case, followers are just as valuable — you never know when they might convert to leads or customers.

👉🏼 HubSpot Tip: Why? Content shared by employee advocates receives over eight times more engagement than content shared by brands. So, involve your employees in your B2B social media marketing strategy. Encourage them to create their own social media channels and share about life at your company. Create a culture account (like our @HubSpotLife Instagram) to show what’s going on at work, not just what you’re selling. You never know — this might attract strong talent, too.

B2B Marketing Examples

A B2B marketing approach that works for one business may not work for another, but that’s not to say we can’t learn something from the pros. Here are four B2B marketing examples of businesses who did it right.

Email Marketing: Mattermark, Raise the Bar Newsletter

Raise the Bar is a daily digest newsletter from Mattermark that features insights from leaders in sales, marketing, and growth engineering. It’s hand-picked by Mattermark executives and easy to scan, which is valuable in a world of elaborate, complicated newsletters and daily digests.

This is a good example of B2B email marketing because Mattermark takes the time to educate their subscribers without blatantly selling to them. This action builds trust with their audience while also equipping them with everything they need to know to make a purchase and become a paying customer.

Digital Marketing: Maersk, Website Homepage

It’s nearly impossible to know the intent of everyone who lands on your website, but Maersk’s homepage design makes it easy for visitors to find their way around.

Source

By offering three main options (“Become a Customer,” “Access Your Account,” and “Start a Career”), Maersk clearly segments their audience and allows visitors to easily navigate to the site content that corresponds with their intent.

This small design tweak also helps Maersk build trust and authority within each of these niche audiences — potential customers, current customers, and even employees.

Content Marketing: LeadPages, Blog + Resources

LeadPages has been bootstrapped since its inception in 2012 … yet it hit over $16 million in revenue just three years later. Its owner attributes its rapid success to its content strategy, which makes it a great example of B2B content marketing.

Source

LeadPages produces many different types of content resources, such as a blog, customer stories, a podcast, and a webinar. The variety in these resources allows the company to reach customers where they are using the method that best resonates with them.

LeadPages offers a blog that covers themes such as A/B testing, lead generation, and other topics that relate to the product and brand, a weekly podcast that chats with everyday entrepreneurs, and even a definitive guide to landing pages, which equips its customers to properly use and optimize the LeadPages product — all for free.

Social Media Marketing: MailChimp, Instagram

Social media is an effective channel on which to engage with your audience. It’s also a fun place to post gorgeous graphics and show off your brand personality. On Instagram, MailChimp has excelled at both.

Source

Fewer than half of its Instagram posts have to do with email marketing or the MailChimp product, but the MailChimp team always finds a way to make the posts relevant to its audience and followers — all while featuring fun, engaging, on-brand graphics and videos.

MailChimp also uses its Instagram to feature real customer stories and testimonials, which can have a big impact on potential consumers in the Consideration and Decision stages. Finally, MailChimp makes use of a took called LinkinBio, which allows Instagram users to click-through to its homepage or other digital content (since Instagram doesn’t offer live links on its platform). This creates a clear conversion path for consumers who discover or research MailChimp on Instagram and want to learn more on its website.

Invest in B2B Marketing and Reach Your Business Customers

Marketing isn’t effective unless you keep your audience in mind, and no other audience is as fickle and critical as business customers. Your marketing should communicate how your business can help theirs … and if it doesn’t, you may as well not be marketing at all.

Use these tips and strategies to understand your B2B audience, round out your buyer personas, and effectively use B2B marketing strategies that reach them. When you’re focused on your audience, your marketing will do the same.

Have you ever heard people refer to themselves as “Apple people,” “Nike people,” or “Trader Joe’s” people?

This is what brand awareness can do for a brand: embed itself into consumer lifestyles and purchase habits so that they don’t have to think twice before becoming a customer — time and time again.

This guide will help you better understand brand awareness, establish it among your audience, and build campaigns that allow it to continually grow and morph with your business. Let’s dive in.

Brand awareness might seem like a vague concept, and in truth, it is. For those marketers and business owners out there who like to gauge success with neat and tidy numbers, brand awareness will likely ruffle your feathers.

But just because it isn’t a metric that can be perfectly determined doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry value. Brand awareness is incredibly important for business success and overall marketing goals. Here’s why.

Brand awareness fosters trust.

In a world where consumers rely on extensive research and others’ opinions before making a purchase, brand trust is everything. Once a consumer bonds to your brand, they’re more likely to make repeat purchases with little to no forethought –– which then bridges the gap between trust and loyalty.

Brand awareness establishes that brand trust. When you put a proverbial face to your brand name, consumers can trust easier. Brand awareness efforts give your brand a personality and outlet to be sincere, receive feedback, and tell a story. These are all ways that we, as humans, build trust with one another. The human/brand relationship isn’t any different.

Brand awareness creates association.

When you’ve had a paper cut, I bet you’ve put on a Band-Aid. When you had a pressing question, I’m sure you’ve Googled it. When you needed to make a few copies, I’m guessing that you Xeroxed them. And when you’ve packed for a nice picnic, I’m willing to bet you grabbed a Coke to drink.

Am I correct? Most likely. But … notice how the some of the words above are capitalized. These are brands, not nouns or verbs.

Speaking in brand-less terms, Band-Aid should be referred to as bandage, Google, as a search engine, and Xerox as a copier. But it’s more fun to refer to the brand itself, even if we aren’t using their specific product.

That’s what brand awareness does. It associates actions and products with particular brands, subconsciously encouraging us to replace common words with branded terms. And before you know it, simple paper cuts or picnics are doing the marketing for us.

Brand awareness builds brand equity.

Brand equity describes a brand’s value, which is determined by consumer experiences with and overall perception of the brand. Positive experiences and perception equal positive brand equity, and the same goes for negative notions.

Here are a few valuable things that come from positive brand equity:

• Higher prices due to higher perceived value
• A higher stock price
• The ability to expand business through product or service line extensions
• Greater social impact due to brand name value

How does a brand establish (and increase) brand equity? By building brand awareness and consistently promoting positive experiences with the brand. Brand awareness is the foundation of brand equity.

Once a consumer is aware of a brand, they start to recognize it without assistance, seek it out to make a purchase, begin to prefer it over other similar brands, and establish a loyalty that not only spurs on other purchases but also inspires recommendations to family and friends.

That, my friends, is why brand awareness is so important. It establishes trust with your customers, creates positive associations, and builds invaluable brand equity that allows your brand to become a household name and consumer staple.

How to Establish Brand Awareness

Brand awareness among your audience and the general public doesn’t happen overnight. It also doesn’t happen from a simple advertisement or marketing campaign.

Strong brand awareness is a result of multiple simultaneous efforts that extend beyond trying to get paying customers.

If you expect to raise awareness of your brand by running a few product advertisements on Facebook, you won’t get very far. Not only will the consumer be focused on the product (not the brand), but the ad will also lack impact beyond a simple sale.

Here are some ways to establish a solid brand awareness foundation and make a lasting impact with your audience:

Be a person, not a company.

When you get to know a new friend, what do you like to discover about them? I like to learn about hobbies, passions, likes and dislikes, and more. I also pay attention to how they speak, what they like to talk about, and what stuff gets them excited.

These are the traits your brand should determine and promote about itself. To leave an impact with your audience, you’ve got to define yourself as more than a company that sells stuff. How else would you define yourself? What words would you use if you had to introduce your brand to a new friend?

Socialize.

Introvert or extrovert, outgoing or quiet, all humans benefit from social contact and spending time with one another. It’s how we stay connected, learn new things, and become known by others.

The same goes for your brand. If you only attempt to connect with others when trying to make a sale or get support, you won’t be known as anything beyond a business with a singular intention (and the same goes for a person).

To raise awareness of your brand, you’ve got to be social. Post on social media about things unrelated to your product or services. Interact with your audience by asking questions, commenting on posts, or retweeting or sharing content you like. Treat your social accounts as if you were a person trying to make friends, not a business trying to make money.

Research shows that over 50% of brand reputation comes from online sociability. Being social leads to greater awareness and simply being known.

Tell a narrative.

Storytelling is an incredibly powerful marketing tactic, whether you’re marketing products or promoting your brand. Why? Because it gives something real for your audience to latch onto.

Crafting a narrative around your brand humanizes it and gives it depth. And weaving this said narrative into your marketing inherently markets your brand alongside your products or services.

What should your narrative be about? Anything, as long as it’s true. It can be the narrative of your founder, the tale of how your business had its first product idea, or the little-engine-that-could story of how your small business made it in this big world.

People like hearing stories about each other. Authenticity is impactful, and it can lead to a big boost in brand awareness.

Make sharing easy.

Whatever your industry, product offering, or marketing strategies, make it easy for your audience to share your content. This could be blog posts, sponsored content, videos, social media posts, or product pages. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s shareable.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective way to establish trust and familiarity among customers. If someone sees that a friend or family member is recommending a product or service, they’ll take notice of that product … and brand. Is this a brand worth exploring? Do they have other great products I can rely on? What are their social accounts like, and what do they talk about?

If you make it easy to post about your stuff, consumers will raise brand awareness for you by simply clicking “Share”.

Brand awareness is about impact.

It’s about interacting with your audience in ways that don’t only ask for money, participation, or loyalty.

Imagine if you met a new person who wanted to be your friend. If they asked for any of the above, you’d probably laugh and walk away, right? Not only is that a shallow approach to friendship, but it also leaves no lasting impact on you.

The same goes for establishing brand awareness among your audience.

How to Increase Brand Awareness

What about expanding your established brand awareness and building on that strong foundation? What can you do as a brand to campaign for awareness and constantly increase it?

Here are a few campaign ideas to boost your brand awareness:

Offer freemium.

Freemium is a business model that offers a basic product or product line for free, only charging for any products deemed premium or enterprise-level. It’s a popular pricing strategy for software companies, like HubSpot and Trello.

Offering a freemium option allows customers to get a taste of your brand and product before making a purchase. It’s a try-before-you-buy opportunity that can, technically, last forever (as opposed to a free trial period that some companies choose).

It’s common to offer a freemium option with the condition that the brand’s watermark will be shown on any public-facing parts of the product or service. This makes freemium a win-win situation: The consumer gets the product for free, and the brand gets free advertising when consumers use it. 

TypeForm is another great example of this. TypeForm offers a freemium option of its survey software, but customers must include a thank-you page that features the TypeForm logo and message.

Depending on your type of business and product offer, Freemium may be the best way to raise awareness of your brand among your audience.

Create free content.

Nowadays, creating content is easier than ever … which is a good thing because today’s consumers turn to the internet for any and all questions, concerns, and DIY projects. 

Content is a fun way to raise awareness of your brand because it’s the easiest way to show personality and share opinions and positioning on issues — two major components that personify and humanize your brand.

Content doesn’t have to be in written form, either. You can also create videos, infographics, podcasts (which we’ll cover below), and more. Sure, written content like blogs and downloadable guides are arguably the easiest, but they’re definitely not the only option.

Content doesn’t have to live on just your website, either. Guest posting and sponsored content provide opportunities to get in front of new audiences and diversify the type of content you create.

If your brand isn’t creating content, you might be missing out on some major brand awareness opportunities. Content provides an amazing way to authentically connect with your audience while getting your brand name in front of people.

To learn more about content creation, check out our guide here.

Sponsor events.

How many festivals, concerts, fairs, and exhibitions have you attended? These types of events are typically not possible without the help of brand sponsorships. (Take a look at a t-shirt, koozie, or string backpack you likely grabbed from the event. See any brand names?) 

Sponsoring events is a surefire way to get your brand in front of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people that likely fall into your target audience. From banners to flyers to water bottles, your brand name will be everywhere if you sponsor an event.

Sponsoring an event also allows you to pin your brand name on an event that matches your personality, interests, and passions, meaning consumers will then associate your brand with that event and its aesthetic and character.

Consider Red Bull. Red Bull is an energy drink, and without any brand awareness efforts, we’d simply consider it an energy drink. But, thankfully, Red Bull took their marketing to the extreme — literally — by sponsoring extreme sporting events like cliff diving and motocross. They also sponsor athletes. Now, we inherently associate Red Bull with daring and adventurous … and believe that, if we drink it, we can be the same.

Give your brand a personality.

Treating your brand as a person and defining your narrative are the first steps to giving your brand a personality. The next step would be infusing this personality into your marketing efforts. 

When you market your products and services with personality, you can’t help but boost your brand awareness because your brand will shine right through. Sure, your consumers will take note of the pants or pasta you’re marketing, but they’ll also experience your personality through your advertising.

This is a great strategy when mixing your traditional marketing campaigns with brand awareness campaigns. They don’t always have to be one in the same, but they definitely can be. 

Consider Old Spice. (Did you just picture the man on the horse? I did.) Their advertisements for their hygiene products are overflowing with personality and humor, and they still mention their products throughout. The advertisement not only makes an impact on its viewers, but a mere mention of the “Old Spice man” also sends consumers back to YouTube to watch the commercial … and to the store to buy some deodorant.

Produce a podcast.

More than one-third of Americans 12 and older listen to podcasts regularly. There’s no doubt podcasts play an important role in our lives … and marketing efforts.

Podcasts used to be a complicated process, only created by those with a studio and fancy microphone. Now, it’s easier than ever to create and release a podcast, and doing so can do wonders for your brand awareness efforts. 

Why? Because podcasts, like written or visual content, provide a way to connect with your audience authentically. Instead of blatantly promoting your product or service (which we’ve agreed isn’t the best way to go about boosting brand awareness), podcasts give you the opportunity to educate, inform, entertain, or advise your audience and build trust by doing so.

Here are some examples of great podcasts produced by brands you know and love:

• #LIPSTORIES by Sephora
• Trailblazers by Dell
• The Growth Show by HubSpot

See how these brands have chosen podcast topics that relate to their 1) overall brand message and 2) products or services? Doing this helps them relate the podcast back to their brand and continue to raise awareness, too.

For more information on podcasts, check out our guide here.

Building and growing brand awareness is a never-ending process, just as maintaining a friendship or relationship never really ends.

 Boosting your brand awareness through campaigns gives you a chance to dabble in marketing and advertising opportunities you’d otherwise not invest in — meaning new, powerful ways to connect with your audience.

How to Measure Brand Awareness

How do you know if your brand awareness efforts are working? How do you know if you need to change direction, top the competition, or fix a crisis? Just like any other marketing metric, you measure it.

Wait … I thought you said brand awareness couldn’t be measured!

Aha! You’ve been listening. I appreciate that.

You’re right — brand awareness can’t be measured in the traditional sense. But, you can still review activities and metrics that’ll help you gauge where your brand stands in terms of popularity and consumer awareness.

Here are a few ways to gauge your brand awareness and learn where you can tweak your efforts:

Quantitative Brand Awareness Measures

These numbers can help you paint the overall picture of your brand awareness. To measure quantitatively, check out these metrics:

• Direct traffic. Firstly, direct traffic is the result of people intentionally typing in your URL and visiting your website. Your direct traffic number will tell you how much your marketing is prompting people to visit your website. This is an important metric, as many consumers today discover brands through social media, advertisements, or by typing in keywords related to your brand or product. When consumers go directly to your site, it means they were aware of your brand beforehand.
• Site traffic numbers. This number just reflects overall site traffic, which will tell you how much of the general internet population is checking out your content and spending time with your brand. It won’t quite tell you where people came from, but that doesn’t matter, because they’re aware of your brand enough to check it out.

• Social engagement. Engagement can refer to followers, likes, retweets, comments, and more. It’s a reflection of how many people are aware of your brand and socialize with it, as well as how impactful your content is. For instance, sites like Sparktoro can give you a specific score for your Twitter impact.

Qualitative Brand Awareness Measures

This step is where your brand awareness “score” gets a little murky. But these tactics can still help you gauge who and how many people are aware of your brand. To measure qualitatively, try:

• Searching Google and setting up Google Alerts. Doing this gets you up to speed with how your brand is being talked about online. It will alert you to any news or mentions by third-party press. As your brand grows, its internet real estate will expand beyond your website, so keep an eye on that.
• Social listening. Social listening is monitoring social media management tools for organic mentions and engagement. Who’s tagging your brand, mentioning it in comments, or using your hashtag in their posts? These tools can help you discover that. And the more your audience is discussing your brand on social media, the more they’re aware of it.

• Running brand awareness surveys. This process involves getting direct feedback from your customers and audience and can be incredibly helpful with not only understanding who knows of your brand but also what they think of it. You can release surveys through SurveyMonkey or TypeForm and share them on social media or directly with your customers. This guide will help you create and promote them.

These quantitative and qualitative metrics will help you understand your brand awareness among your audience and the general public. It’ll never be a perfect number, but keeping your pulse on this measure will help influence campaigns and stay connected to your audience. Regardless of how you gauge brand awareness for your company, avoid these common mistakes when measuring brand awareness.

Over to You

Brand awareness is a powerful (albeit vague) concept that can have a major impact on your marketing efforts, consumer perception, and revenue.

Follow these techniques for establishing and building awareness for your brand, and you’ll find yourself with a loyal audience that recognizes your brand among competitors, chooses your products time and time again, and recommends their friends and family do the same.

It’s no surprise you want to become a paid Instagram influencer — heck, the average price for a sponsored Instagram post is $300, and if you become more successful, like yogi Rachel Brathen, you could be making $25,000 per post.

But the idea of getting your posts sponsored might seem laughable to you. You’re not posting pictures skydiving in Australia — you’re posting pictures of your brunch. However, you could be more marketable than you think.

Instagram has become an insanely popular channel for brands to promote their products. In fact, Influencer Central found consumers consider Instagram to be the sixth most effective at influencing their purchasing decisions.

Instagram’s popularity might make you feel the platform is already too crowded for you to stand out. But here’s the thing — brands are quickly realizing the power of normal people to promote their products. Micro-influencers, or people with a small number of followers compared to the big players, see the most engagement out of their audience.

Think of it this way: I’m going to trust my best friend’s advice over Kim Kardashian’s when I’m purchasing a product. I trust my best friend, we share similar interests, and I know she’s genuine with her advice (no offense, Kim … ).

It’s the same concept for micro-influencers — with the right strategy, your audience will begin to see you as one of their real friends. The more they trust your advice when seeking out purchasing decisions, the more likely you are to get sponsored.

Here, we’re going to show you everything you need to do to get sponsored on Instagram, even if you currently have zero followers. Keep reading to get started or click the links below to jump to a specific section of this article.

• How to Get Sponsored on Instagram
• What’s a Sponsored Instagram Post?
• Using #ad and #spon Hashtags

1. Define your brand.

You’ll see the best engagement if you’re able to define your niche. Do you want to post food and health related content, or focus on fashion? Whatever the case, it’s important to establish your brand.

Besides the type of content you post, branding has a lot to do with your overall aesthetic. How do you want to style your posts? What’s your messaging? To further solidify your brand, you might want to consider creating a cohesive feed theme (use these feeds for inspiration).

Specificity is key. A good influencer’s posts are distinguishable and unique — when a user is flipping through her feed, she’ll be able to pause and recognize every time she sees a post from that influencer. As she continues to see similar content, she’ll grow to trust that brand as an expert in the field. If the influencer suddenly and randomly changed course, the user might not understand or trust the content anymore.

Additionally, you might want to connect your Instagram brand with an online presence. Creating a website with similar aesthetic and messaging is a good way to do this — the more you unify your social media accounts, the easier it will be for brands to distinguish how you can help them.

2. Know your audience.

Knowing your audience is critical for convincing a brand to work with you. It’s mutually beneficial for you, as well — if you understand your audience, you’re able to correctly identify which brands will see the most success from using you as their sponsor.

Start by gathering the basics — what is the gender, age, and geographical location of your core demographic? Which of your posts do they like the best? What times of day do they respond best to content, and what can you infer from this?

The demographic information you gather will help you pitch partnerships with brands. Brands want to know who they can reach if they work with you. Explaining “You’ll be reaching thirty-something, working women, primarily from New York, who often use Instagram first thing in the morning and prefer fitness content” is certainly more powerful than saying, “You’ll be reaching women.”

3. Post consistently.

CoSchedule gathered research from 14 studies to identity how often you should post on social media sites. For Instagram, they found you should post a minimum of once a day, but can post upwards of three times a day.

CoSchedule also found 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM, and 2:00 AM, are the best times to post.

To grow your following, it’s critical you post at least once a day. Instagram’s algorithm favors new and fresh content, and you don’t want your audience to unfollow you or forget about you from lack of consistency.

However, you’ll need to figure out what works best for you and your audience. Perhaps your audience feels bombarded when you post three times a day, or maybe they prefer it. Maybe your audience engages most with your posts at noon. It will take some trial and error, as well as Instagram metrics tools, to figure this out.

4. Use hashtags and geotags.

Hashtags make your content more discoverable, so they’re necessary for growing your following. You can use up to 30 hashtags per post, but TrackMaven found nine to be the optimal number for boosting engagement.

You’ll want to use hashtags as relevant to your content as possible. You’ll also need to check to make sure the hashtags you use aren’t broken or banned (take a look at this list of banned hashtags if you’re unsure).

It’s critical you choose hashtags that aren’t too broad. #Healthyliving, for instance, has over 20,000,000 posts, while #healthylivingtips only has 13,000. The less competition, the easier it will be for your content to get discovered.

When you peruse a hashtag’s page, you can also get a deeper sense of what types of content your post will be up against. #Healthylivingtips might typically feature posts with food recipes, while your post is about cycling — this could defer you from using that hashtag.

Geotags are equally important, but for a different reason. Geotags can help people find you if they’re interested in a certain location. This helps you gain more followers, and it also helps you appeal to brands that are interested in reaching a certain demographic. For instance, maybe a boutique sees you often post fashion tips from the California area, and they’re looking to appeal to people in that region — it’s a win, win.

5. Tag brands in your posts.

Okay, now you’re officially ready to begin reaching out to brands. You’ve defined your brand and audience and have created some quality, authentic posts. Now, you should have a pretty good idea what types of businesses would benefit from a partnership with you.

It’s important to start small. If you’re interested in skincare, don’t go straight for Estee Lauder — instead, try tagging small skincare start-ups you’ve seen across Instagram already.

Let’s take a look at an example — @Tzibirita, a travel influencer, posted this image of herself wearing a Paul Hewitt watch. The image is high-quality and fits with her brand, and she tags @paul_hewitt in her description. Even if you’re not paid by Paul Hewitt, you can still post the same type of content and tag their brand in the post. Ideally, it will at least put you on their radar.

Begin with small brands and tag them in your descriptions. Engage with your audience by responding to comments like “Where can I get one?” or “How much?” and the brand will soon see you’ve proven yourself a suitable sales partner.

6. Include contact information in your bio.

Consider your bio a chance to signal to brands your interest in becoming an influencer. Include an email or website so they can reach you, and include a press kit if possible.

For instance, @tzibirita doesn’t waste her bio space. She includes her email and website, and even adds a title — “content creator”. Brands will have no doubt she’s open to doing business with them.

Furthermore, you should use a website or blog as your chance to expand on your brand and demonstrate your versatility. Consider adding a Press Page to your website, so brands can take a look at your services. Once you begin sponsoring brands, you can add them to this page so brands can see you have influencer experience.

7. Pitch paid sponsorships.

There’s nothing wrong with reaching out to brands and offering your services. With the right pitch, you might be able to land some gigs without waiting for brands to find you.

Look for brands that clearly invest time and money into their Instagram presence. You might start by researching what similar influencers in your industry already sponsor. Remember, it’s okay to start small. Working with smaller brands will allow you to build a portfolio.

Once you’ve curated a list of brands that might want to partner with you, send them an email. In your pitch, clearly and briefly outline who you are, what you do, and any achievements you have in the field that make you an expert. Then, explain why you’re a good fit for the brand, and include data such as follower count and average engagement rate.

Alternatively, you might consider sending a brand a DM straight from Instagram. It’s certainly more relevant to the job you’re vying for, but it might get lost if a brand get hundreds of DMs a day.

8. Know your worth.

Make sure you know how much you’re going to charge when brands reach out to you. The industry standard is $10 for 1,000 followers, but it could also vary depending on how many likes you get per post. Additionally, as you grow, you’ll be able to charge more.

While you’ll want to have a minimum set, you can negotiate to encourage brands to pay more. Perhaps for $300, you’ll throw in five Instagram Story posts, and a link in your bio to their website for 24 hours. You can use other Instagram features to sweeten the deal.

Once you have your pricing structure nailed down, you’ll need to know how to sponsor a post on behalf of the brand you’re working with. Now, keep in mind there are two different kinds of “sponsored” posts: those for which brands pay Instagram, and those for which brands pay another user.

Confused? Here’s what I mean:

What’s a Sponsored Instagram Post?

A sponsored post on Instagram is paid for by the poster to reach a wider audience. There are two main types of sponsorships: In one, a brand creates a post and pays Instagram for access to a custom audience. In the other, a brand sponsors another Instagram user — often called an “Influencer” — who creates a post that features the brand in some way.

Here’s more detail on each type of sponsored post:

Promoted Posts & Ads

Just like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, Instagram comes with a native ad management platform. Advertisers can use this tool to customize a target audience — using attributes like age, sex, location, and interests — and invest a specific amount of money to getting their post in front of Instagrammers who identify with this audience.

The thing to remember here is that the advertiser is making and publishing the post. They’re paying Instagram for the audience they want access to, but the post is theirs to create.

Paid Sponsorships

Paid sponsorships take place between a brand and another Instagram user. Typically, this user has a personal brand and attracts an audience of his or her own. This user is often called an “influencer.”

This person can then use the steps explained earlier in this article to find and work with brands that appeal to a similar audience. When they find a brand who wants to sponsor them, they can charge this client a certain amount to create a post that features their product or service. Think of it like social media product placement; just like a business might pay a TV show to have their brand of soda on the countertop in the series finale, they can also pay a person on Instagram to hold that same soda in a picture on their Instagram feed.

Clearly there are more creative sponsorship ideas you can come up with — I decided to go with a cliché …

Influencers are similar to Instagram’s ad manager in the sense that they both draw an audience that brands might not otherwise have access to. However, the differences in this type of sponsorship are that the brand is paying the influencer — rather than Instagram — for access to their audience, and the influencer — rather than the advertiser — is the one creating and publishing the post.

There are numerous influencers for each industry. Here’s a big list of today’s known influencers and the types of audiences they attract.

Using #ad and #spon Hashtags

In the past couple years, brands have come under fire for hiring influencers but not making it clear to the audience that these influencers were getting paid.

Department store Lord & Taylor, for instance, settled charges with the FTC in 2016 after paying 50 influencers to wear a dress in their posts without hashtagging #sponsorship or #ad.

Influencers are supposed to hashtag #ad or #sponsored in posts they’re being paid for, but these tags make some brands uncomfortable because it makes the post appear inauthentic.

In 2017, Instagram released a paid partnership feature to combat this issue — if you tag a brand in a post and the brand confirms the relationship, the ad will be marked at the top with a “paid partnership” label. This also helps the brand gather data regarding how well the campaign is performing.

It’s critical your followers know if you’re getting paid to promote a product. Ethics aside, it could destroy your account’s credibility if you’re caught, and lose everything you’ve worked hard to build — namely, an authentic, trusting community.

If you truly don’t want to post #ad or #spon, there are some ways around it — for instance, Airbnb created the hashtag #Airbnb_partner, to signal a paid partnership without using the word “ad”.

When in doubt, adhere to Instagram’s policies. You can read Instagram’s branded content policies in full here.

Ultimately, getting sponsored on Instagram isn’t easy — it takes time, effort, and perseverance. But if you work hard to differentiate yourself in the industry, and connect on a personal level with your followers, it can be extraordinarily rewarding.

Whether your focus group is there to give feedback on a product or service or help you assess how your brand stands out in your competitive landscape, thought-provoking, open-ended questions are essential to a productive discussion.

However, it’s easier said than done. What can you ask beyond “What do you think of our product?” that can provoke the most useful answers?

Here, we’ve pulled together 53 questions you can ask in your next focus group to pull the most interesting and useful insights you can out of your participants.

Simply copy-and-paste the questions you like below into the notetaking template for a ready-to-go, printable document you can bring to the session.

Featured Resource: Market Research Focus Group Template

Download the Template

For a free template for notetaking during focus groups, a guide on conducting market research, and several other templates, download our Market Research Kit.

Questions for Building Trust Among Focus Group Members

Before diving into deeper questions, it’s best to warm up the group with a couple of open-ended questions that allow participants to get to know each other a little bit. Participants should be able to decide how much they want to share with the group — don’t force anyone to share something they may not feel comfortable sharing.

By including a question that allows people to talk about something tangential to the topic of the focus group, your participants will begin to build empathy for each other. That empathy can grow into trust, which is key for eliciting honest insights out of your group.

Here are a few questions you might ask to build trust:

• Share an aspect of your work or life experience that’s brought you here today.
• Why did you decide to join our focus group today?
• When and how did you first come across our brand/product/service?

Questions to Encourage Follow-up and Continuation of Ideas

The most helpful insights that come out of focus groups are often the most specific points. Challenge your participants to reflect more on the points they’ve made if you hear something that you’re curious about. For instance:

• That’s a fascinating point that [name] just said — what do you all think of that?
• Do you agree or disagree with [name]’s statement, and why?
• [Name], you’ve been a bit quiet recently. Did you have any thoughts on this topic that you wanted to share?

Questions for Understanding Customer Perception of Your Product or Service

These questions will help you understand how people truly feel about your brand, product, or service. The focus here is on your company — not the larger industry landscape or your competitors.

Avoid stopping conversation here unless the group gets completely sidetracked. Open-ended questions can be daunting at first. Participants may not know where to start. However, hearing from the other participants will spark reflection on various aspects of your product or service. Be sure to allow each group member who has something to say to speak up before moving on to the next question.

• How would you describe our company to other people?
• How would you describe our product/service to other people?
• What words or feelings come to mind when you think about our company?
• How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend?
• How well do you feel we incorporate feedback from you, our customers, into our service/product?
• What ultimately pushed you to purchase this product/service?
• Where would you buy this product/service?
• What do you like about this product that you may not find in a similar one?
• When you think about our industry, which brands come to mind first?
• Which other brands in our industry did you consider when you were shopping around?
• Why didn’t you go with one of our competitors?
• What other products/services come to mind when you look at this one?

Questions to Learn What Your Leads and Customers Want to See From You

Listening to your customers’ feedback and suggestions for improvement is crucial to retaining customers and turning them into promoters of your brand. It may be difficult to hear the answers to these questions, but turning customer pain points around will elevate your product or service to the next level.

Avoid defending your product or service or setting any limitations on these questions. Instead, frame them in a way that allows anyone to voice anything at all that they’re feeling. Recognize that it can be daunting for anyone (especially people with whom you’ve built relationships) to share negative feedback, so thank them for their candor.

• If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about our product/service, what would it be?
• What would you most like to add to or improve about this product?
• What do you envision is the lifespan of this product/service before you upgrade or replace it?
• Is there anything we haven’t touched on today that you’d like us to know?

Questions for Understanding Your Buyer Personas

The following eight questions will help you understand what motivates your target buyer persona, their habits, their responsibilities and decision-making power, and their preferences.

These questions are written to spark discussion about topics other than your company, product or service, and the competitive landscape.

Don’t worry if the conversation seems to stray far from your brand, as the insights that people end up sharing will likely reveal what’s significant to them in their life and work. However, it’s important you keep the group focused on the specific question you’ve asked.

• Describe your job title and your day-to-day responsibilities.
• What’s one task on which you feel you spend way too much time?
• How do you define success in your role/your life?
• What is the biggest challenge you face in your role/when it comes to the problem to which this product is a solution?
• When you’re browsing online, on which websites do you spend most of your time?
• What are the first three apps you open on your phone in the morning?
• How do you prefer to receive communications from our company? (Specify what type of communication here — product updates, renewal notices, product/service coaching, meeting reminders, urgent alerts, etc.)
• Would you be the one using this product/service most in your household/job? If not, who would be?

Questions for Getting a Better Sense of the Competitive Landscape

These questions are intended to spark discussion about the brands in your industry that are top-of-mind for consumers. These are helpful in removing any biases that you and your team might have as people who work in the industry and know various players very well.

To encourage honesty, avoid agreeing with any disparaging comments that your participants make about your competitors. Instead, use the opportunity to ask follow-up questions about exactly what the participants don’t like about a specific product or brand.

If you’re looking to do a complementary research-based analysis of your competitors, download our Market Research Kit to gain access to a S.W.O.T. analysis template.

Download the Template

Questions for Generating Content on Your Industry

You might be looking to develop a content strategy for your brand, branch out into a new content medium, or simply generate new content ideas. Any successful content strategy prioritizes what’s most engaging and interesting for your target buyer persona, so a focus group can be an effective way to be sure that you’re producing material on the right topics and in the medium that your audience wants to consume.

• What is one recent trend you’ve noticed in our industry?
• What’s one strategy or tactic you think is underrated in our industry?
• Where do you go to get a pulse on the things going on in our industry?
• Who are the people in our industry who you look to as experts?
• What format of content do you consume to keep up with our industry? Social media posts? Blogs/long-form posts? Podcasts? News outlets?
• Which specific sources do you go to for information on our industry?
• What gaps do you see in the content about our industry online? What are the topics on which you’d like to see more education?

Questions for Understanding Product Demand for Something You Haven’t Yet Put Out in the Market

These eleven questions are intended to help you understand the demand for a new product or service. These questions will uncover buying habits for a product like the one you’re envisioning and whether there’s true product-market fit.

• What is/was your first reaction to the product?
• How often do you/would you use this type of product?
• Would you be the one deciding to purchase this product/service? If not, who would be?
• When and where do you use our product?
• When you think about the product, do you think of it as something you absolutely need, something you could do without, or something that’s somewhere in the middle?
• How much would you be willing to pay for a product like this?
• How would you ideally like to buy this product? Would you talk to a sales rep, or would you rather purchase it on your own?
• What do you think this product is missing?
• How would you describe someone who you think would use this product/service?
• If you ended up liking your experience with this product, could you see yourself repurchasing it? If so, how often?
• If you could either have this product/service or the equivalent dollar value for you/your business, which would you choose? Why? (Specify the dollar value of your product/service when asking this question.)

Questions for Establishing (or Re-establishing) Your Name and Branding

The following questions are helpful for running word association brainstorms and generating potential names or parts of names for a new product or company.

• What words come to mind when you think of our product category? (Example: “What words come to mind when you think of food delivery?”)
• What words come to mind when you think of [insert a word that symbolizes the main value prop of your product/service here – for example, ‘efficiency,’ ‘speed,’ ‘health’]?
• If you have candidate names already:
• What is your initial reaction to this name?
• What words come to mind when you hear this name?
• How would you pronounce this? (Spell out the name on a piece of paper or whiteboard.)

And there you have it! 53 questions you can ask in your next focus group. If you’re unsure how to conduct a successful focus group, take a look at How to Run a Focus Group for Your Business.