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List posts, also called list-based posts or “listicles,” are one of the most popular blog post types out there. Not only do readers like list posts, but blog post authors like to write them too. Why? Because they tend to generate (on average) more clickthroughs, more engagement, more social sharing, more dwell time, more organic traffic, more conversions, more comments, and a lower bounce rate than other blog post types.

Whew! What’s not to love?

But writing a great list post isn’t as simple as it sounds. If you want your posts to perform really well, you’re going to need to make sure they include all the elements of an optimized and highly shareable list post.

For example, did you know headlines with odd numbers generate 20% more clicks than headlines with even numbers? Little tweaks like this can have a big impact on your post’s performance.

To help show you what an optimized list post looks like, the folks at Siege Media created the infographic below. Check it out to learn great tips for creating highly shareable list posts.

Here’s a hypothetical for you: Let’s say your company has decided to invest in a website redesign so you can improve lead generation, and you’re responsible for managing the project. Naturally, one of the first questions you have is, “How much is this website redesign going to cost?”

The answer, of course, is “it depends.” Are you simply switching to a new template and adding some new CTAs, or are you migrating your entire site to a new platform?

If only there were a way to organize your answers to all of these questions; a place where you could enter in estimated costs for all of your line items, and then compare your projected budget to what you actually end up spending …

Good news! Our latest offer, 8 Free Budget Planner Templates to Manage Your Marketing Spend, has got you covered. Included in our eight budget templates bundle is a template to manage your website redesign … as well as templates for both Excel and Google Sheets to help you track your content budget, paid advertising budget, event budget, and more.

Click here to download your 8 free marketing budget templates.

Here’s a peek:

Aligning Your Budget With Your Marketing Goals

What you spend and where you spend it will depend on what you’re trying to accomplish. This is especially true when it comes to paid advertising like search and display ads, social media ads, and so on.

HubSpot’s demand generation marketer Jessica Webb says this about how your costs can change when focusing on lead generation vs. lead conversion: “The majority of money you spend on paid efforts is usually calculated based on volume of clicks or impressions. Because of this, you’ll often want to put more budget toward campaigns with higher-volume offers and audiences.”

“An example, a tweet or Facebook ad promoting a lead generation offer that leans more top of the funnel will likely receive more clicks than something that falls more toward the middle or bottom of the funnel,” she explains. 

Your paid advertising costs will also change depending on how wide of an audience you are attempting to reach. “You can look at Twitter advertising as an example,” Webb explains. “You have to option to target your campaigns based on users’ interests or keywords searched for. Interests are a much broader category, whereas smaller pockets of users are searching for any given keyword, therefore your interests-based audience is going to be much larger and require a larger budget.”

To keep better track of your paid advertising efforts, download the Paid Advertising Budget Template (included in the 8 Budget Templates to Manage Your Marketing Spend).

Beware Hidden Costs

One of the great advantages to having and maintaining a budget spreadsheet is that it helps you avoid those end-of-the-quarter or end-of-the-year freak outs when you realize, “Whoa … what did I spend all that money on?” 

In many cases, unanticipated costs can force marketers to fork over cash that they didn’t plan on spending. Product marketing offers a perfect example. According HubSpot’s VP of Marketing Meghan Keaney Anderson, it’s easy to forget that successfully marketing your products and services requires more than just promotion.

“When people allocate budget for product marketing they tend to think in terms of product launches and promotional activities,” Anderson explains. “That’s certainly an important part of it, but another area of focus to remember is setting aside resources to conduct research and message testing long before the product ever goes to market. Having conversations with customers about the pain points your product will ultimately address is critical to shaping the messaging and having a successful launch.”

To better manage your product marketing efforts, download the Product Marketing Budget Template (included in the 8 Budget Templates to Manage Your Marketing Spend).

Remember Where Your Priorities Lie

Marketing is overflowing with add-ons and extras, upsells, and “premium” versions. One of the best ways to assess what’s nice to have versus what’s absolutely necessary is to (you guessed it) organize all of your expenses. By keeping tabs on where your budget is being allocated, and cross-checking that spending with the results you’re getting, it will be much easier to figure out what should keep getting budget and what should get kicked to the curb.

For an example, let’s look to the world of public relations. In PR, there are countless tools to which you can allocate budget, which could leave you overspending where it doesn’t matter — and underspending where it does.

“Tools abound to help PR practitioners not only create and distribute great content and find and target key stakeholders, but to ultimately measure reach and effectiveness,” says Nathaniel Eberle, HubSpot’s Director of PR & Brand. “The key is making sure you’re laser-focused on who you’re setting out reach and influence, then ensuring that your budget supports how they’ll most likely want to receive (and share) your key messages.

“As the media and digital landscape evolves at breakneck speed, continually reassessing the tools, services, and programs you’re employing is a great way to determine real-time ROI of your overall spend. Today’s measurement tool may be worthless to you tomorrow.”

To get better at prioritizing your PR line items, download the PR Budget Template (included in the 8 Budget Templates to Manage Your Marketing Spend).

It’s Not All About the Benjamins

When you open up these budget templates and check out all the various expenses detailed in them, don’t fret if you can’t tick every box. I’m not advocating for an “always spend more” approach to marketing. I’m advocating for an “always spend smart” approach. The expenses listed out aren’t mandatory — they’re just meant to guide your thinking and to help ensure that you haven’t overlooked any hidden costs.

With that in mind, here’s the full list of budget templates included in the bundle.

The 8 Marketing Budget Templates You Need to Manage Your Marketing Spend

With the 8 Free Budget Planner Templates to Manage Your Marketing Spend, you’ll be able to manage all of the moving pieces of your budget at a monthly and quarterly level. Use the Excel version of the templates to keep all of your budgets in one place. When you download the zip file, you’ll find a separate file for each marketing team, as well as a Master Budget Template to maintain a high-level view of your overall expenses. 

Interested in sharing your marketing budget across a larger team? Try the Google Sheets version of the same eight templates to share access with other Gmail users. For the Google Sheets templates, each team budget is found in a separate tab of the same Google Sheet. No matter which version you choose, each budget is optimized with the same line items, tips, and graphs. Read on to learn how to use each budget template.

1) Master Marketing Budget Template

Download the Master Marketing Budget Template here.

While it’s helpful to have individual budget templates for specific marketing departments and activities, it’s also nice to be able to take a step back and see the bigger picture. The Master Marketing Budget Template let’s you do just that: It’s the place where you can collect the totals from the other seven templates in the bundle and see all of your expenses in one place.

2) Product Marketing Budget Template

Download the Product Marketing Budget Template here.

This template will guide you step-by-step through the process of budgeting for a product launch. From determining product/market fit, to running user testing sessions, to promoting your finished product, our Product Marketing Budget Template will help ensure you don’t overlook any important expenses.

3) Content Budget Template

Download the Content Budget Template here.

The budget required for creating and promoting content can vary greatly from organization to organization. For example, while some organizations keep most of their content operations in-house, others rely more heavily on freelancers and contractors. And while some use many different software products, publishing tools, and services, others take a much simpler approach.

Our Content Budget Template is designed to cover as many content-related bases as possible. So, if you see any expenses listed that don’t apply to your organization, go ahead and delete them. (That’s the beauty of spreadsheets: You can customize them to your specific needs.)

4) Paid Advertising Budget Template

Download the Paid Advertising Budget Template here.

Paid advertising: Does it really qualify as an inbound marketing tactic/channel? That is a loaded question, my friends, and one that I don’t have room to answer in-depth in this post. What I can tell you for sure is that you can do paid advertising in an “inboundy” way — i.e. by targeting specific buyer personas and using paid advertising as a supplement to your organic efforts to help drive awareness and conversion opportunities.

Measuring the effectiveness of your paid advertising campaigns is also paramount to doing things the inbound way. Using our Paid Advertising Budget Template, you can keep tabs on your monthly (and quarterly) ad spending, and then cross-reference the amounts with your lead-generation metrics to determine your cost-per-lead.

5) Public Relations Budget Template

Download the Public Relations Budget Template here.

Public relations expenses amount to more than just paying for press releases. From reputation monitoring software, to traveling (e.g., to events and tradeshows) to applying for awards, there are many PR costs that can be all too easy to overlook.

To ensure you’re accounting for all of your organization’s PR-related expenses, check out our Public Relations Budget Template.

6) Branding & Creative Budget Template

Download the Creative Budget Template here.

In order to produce high-quality, innovative graphics, videos, and other content, the branding and creative teams of today need more than just Photoshop … a lot more. One of the largest — and often most overlooked — expenses is storage.

If your organization is producing a lot of video, storage is especially important. Because as it turns out, when budgeting for video storage, you shouldn’t be thinking on a megabyte (MB) or even a gigabyte (GB) scale, but on a terabyte (TB) scale. FYI: 1 terabyte = 1 trillion bytes. You can keep track of all your storage costs (and other branding and creative costs) using our free template. 

7) Website Redesign Budget Template

Download the Website Redesign Budget Template here.

Budgeting for a website redesign can be seriously tricky. With so many moving pieces to consider, there is a lot of room for underestimating or miscalculating costs. We created our Website Redesign Budget Template so you can keep all of your redesign-related expenses in one convenient location. 

Unsure if your current website is right for a redesign? Check out this HubSpot research report: Does Your Website Make the Grade? Chances Are, It’s Barely Passing. 

8) Event Budget Template

Download the Event Budget Template here.

When planning an event, the associated costs can seem obvious at first. There’s the venue to consider, of course. And the P.A. system and microphones. And then the costs associated with booking and bringing in presenters/performers. That’s pretty much it, right?

Wrong.

For example, does the venue come with tables/chairs, or will you have to rent those separately? Do you want your attendees to wear name tags, and if so, will you be printing out the name tags ahead of time or will attendees be writing their own names on blank tags? If the latter, have you factored in the pens or markers you’ll need to accommodate that? As you can see, planning for an event can lead you down many rabbit holes.

Use our Event Budget Template to stay organized.

How do you manage your business expenses? Let us know if there’s a budget template we missed that you’d find helpful.

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

 
                                   

Every holiday season, it’s like the floodgates burst open: All of a sudden, there are holiday marketing campaigns everywhere. Every business is trying to cash in on the spending frenzy with emails, social media posts, television advertisements, and other related efforts.

While these campaigns can sometimes seem out of control, many brands out there actually do their holiday marketing very, very well.

How? They create campaigns that delight customers. They evoke emotions and promote sharing. And sometimes, they connect people with their loved ones or partner with a charitable organization.

Great holiday marketing campaigns come in many different shapes and sizes. Check out our roundup of 18 examples of delightful holiday marketing campaigns, and use these ideas to fuel your own holiday marketing ideas.

18 Brilliant Examples of Holiday Marketing Campaigns

1) Coca-Cola: Drinkable Place Cards

What better way to celebrate your loved ones at the holiday dinner party than with personalized Coke bottles? Coca-Cola’s been selling cans and bottles with people’s names on them since they first launched their “Share a Coke” campaign in Australia in 2011 — and they’ve seen a rises in sales ever since. The drinkable place cards serve as a holiday-themed promotion of the larger “Share a Coke” campaign, and a great representation of another use case for their product.

Drinkable “place cards” are a refreshing way to eliminate confusion. https://t.co/PTnehlbyrO http://pic.twitter.com/su0Rn72x63

— Coca-Cola (@CocaCola)
November 7, 2015

2) REI: #OptOutside

It started with a letter addressed to its 5.5 million members. The letter announced plans to close outdoor retail company REI’s doors on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S.) at all of its retail locations, headquarters, and distribution centers. Instead, they invited their community to join employees in taking Black Friday off from work — and from shopping — to do what they love most: being outside.

To help inspire people for what to do with their day off, REI’s #OptOutside microsite featured hiking trails and adventure ideas. When the campaign was over, they sent the email below thanking their members for opting to spend time outdoors and with friends and family, rather than shopping in stores and online.

[Click here to see the full email]

3) Dollar Shave Club: Has a Face

Here’s a great example of a simple, funny graphic that’s perfect for social media. Dollar Shave Club used this graphic in a sponsored Facebook post to show their razors are great gifts for any guy — because any guy with a face could use one, whether it’s your husband or your yoga teacher.

You can easily create graphics just like this one using PowerPoint. Here are 30 free PowerPoint templates you can download, which include detailed instructions on how to use the templates to create compelling visuals for social.

4) Hinge: OK to Get Down?

Their timing couldn’t have been better: I received this email from the dating app Hinge on a Thursday, the night before HubSpot’s holiday party — and the night before many other companies chose to have their holiday parties, too. The design of the email is as simple as can be. It’s really the hilarious copy that makes this email so great. Here’s to making good choices!

[Click here to see the full email]

5) Lagavulin: Nick Offerman’s Yule Log

Actor, writer, and humorist Nick Offerman loves his whisky. He’s sung about it before, and this time, he’s filmed a Yule Log video for Lagavulin, his favorite whisky brand. What’s the video of, you ask? It’s 45 minutes straight of Offerman sitting in a leather chair next to a crackling fire … looking calmly at the camera. 

“This is smart branding on Lagavulin’s part,” writes Kristina Monllos for AdWeek. “Creating an extended ad that can serve as a conversation starter—should consumers swap the traditional Yule Log video for Offerman’s at parties—will also get everyone talking about the brand.”

I’ve must say, this might rival Netflix’s “Yule Log” trailer from 2013.

6) JetBlue: How to Be a Thankful Traveler

Airliner JetBlue is renowned for its punny marketing emails, and its Thanksgiving promo email didn’t disappoint. It started with the cheeky, clickable subject line: “Family, friends, food & flying – all of our favorite F words!” Inside, they somehow fit 12 puns into one email. See if you can spot them all.

[Click here to see the full email]

7) Oreo: Design a Pack of Oreos

Oreo continues to pump out fresh, innovative, and fun marketing content, despite having one core product since its debut in 1912. This year, Christmas started early for them: On November 11, they tweeted out an invitation to design and personalize a pack of Oreos for friends and family members. The design variations themselves are pretty simple, but the idea of pimping out an otherwise traditional-looking pack of Oreos is a cool idea and would make for a thoughtful gift.

Design a pack of Oreo cookies this holiday season. Act fast before supplies run out. https://t.co/W3WRy9OTPu http://pic.twitter.com/TKu3DeAwCw

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo)
November 11, 2015

8) Edeka: Wihnachtsclip – #heimkommen

Here’s a tearjerker for you from German supermarket Edeka. Their TV advertisement “Wihnachtsclip – #HeimKommen,” which translates from German to “Christmas Carol – #Homecoming,” is all about realizing what really matters around the holidays: spending time with family and the people you love. 

In the ad, an elderly man prepares to spend yet another Christmas alone, since his kids usually cancel their planned visits last-minute. Then, the ad shows his various grown children receiving letters saying their father has passed away. When they arrive at home, though, they’re surprised to be greeted by their very alive and very healthy-looking father. He says, “How else could I have brought you all together?”

Other than the delicious-looking meal they share at the very end, there’s no hint that Edeka is a supermarket — but you can bet it’s emotional and shareworthy. The ad garnered 33.5 million views on YouTube within a week of posting.

9) HubSpot: #HolidayHub

Microsites are great ways to highlight a specific campaign or target a specific buyer persona. Here’s an example of a holiday-themed microsite HubSpot created, highlighting our #HolidayHub campaign and targeting ecommerce customers. (Check out a few more ingenious microsites in this blog post.) The site is filled with holiday marketing resources, which isn’t a far cry from the type of content we publish to our normal website — except this time, it’s themed.

The animated snow effect was created using HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript. You can learn how to implement an animated snow effect on HubSpot’s Design blog. Alternatively, you could create an animated GIF to create a feeling of animation: Here’s a beginner’s tutorial for creating an animated GIF in Photoshop.

10) Starbucks: Starbucks for Life

You’ve gotta love a good sweepstakes — especially if it involves coffee. For the second year in a row, Starbucks is holding a “Starbucks For Life” sweepstakes for their rewards members. Five lucky people will win one beverage and one food item each day for the next thirty years. (Hey, don’t shortchange me on my lifespan, here!)

Chances are, a sweepstakes like this that’s open to members only does wonders for prompting new sign-ups. Plus, it encourages members to buy Starbucks drinks more often: Registered rewards members get a code each time they make a Starbucks purchase using their rewards card, after which they can log in to StarbucksForLife.com and play a “game” where they enter the code. At the end of the game, they’ll learn whether they won. Not bad.

Here’s one of the handful of cute GIFs Starbucks created to supplement the campaign (which you can easily create on your own):

Image Credit: Starbucks

11) Spotify: A Year in Music

One great way to celebrate a year gone by is by doing a roundup. From the homepage of their “A Year in Music” microsite, you can either log in and see what your own, personal year in music sounds like, or you can opt to not log in and see what an average Spotify user’s year looked like. You can browse popular music from the year by genre, country, or both — which is a great way for Spotify to help its users discover new music. (Full disclosure: I just emerged from a rabbit hole of Turkish pop.)

12) Food52: Holiday Cookies from Around the World

What does a single product look like around the globe? That’s the question Food52 answers with this marketing email, featuring a whimsical graphic followed by photos and stories behind 46 favorite cookie recipes from all over the globe. In the full email, these recipes are followed by gift ideas for bakers including call-to-action buttons for buying cookie cutter sets, mixing bowls, and other fun tools from Food52.

[Click here to see the full email]

13) HBO: 12 Days of HBO NOW

‘Tis the season of sharing, is it not? Well, the folks at HBO came up with a cool idea for letting their users share something that’s seemingly intangible: TV episodes. They’re releasing 12 episodes from their best television shows and letting users share them with an unlimited number of people — probably with the hop that recipients get addicted and want in on HBO NOW. Here’s what that marketing email looked like:

[Click here to see the full email]

14) John Lewis: Man on the Moon

What was that? You weren’t done crying your eyes out after the Edeka ad? No worries: Here’s another touching advertisement, this time from U.K.-based department store John Lewis. As part of the campaign, John Lewis partnered with Age UK, an organization that helps some of the million older people who go for extended periods without speaking to anyone. You can donate to Age UK via the advertisement’s accompanying website.

15) Aldi: Telescope Christmas

If you liked the John Lewis “Man on the Moon” ad, then you might get a kick out of this UK ad for Aldi supermarkets. The ad pokes fun at the type of telescope the man on the moon uses to gaze at Earth, showing that Aldi offers many different kinds to choose from. The ad’s tagline? “Aldi prices are anything but astronomical.”

16) Zazzle: Haha Holidays

Consumers get a lot of emails from ecommerce businesses showcasing gift ideas from their websites. Here’s an example of one of these emails done well. In particular, they do a great job of grouping types or categories of products to make all their options seem much less daunting.

[Click here to see the full email.]

17) Mulberry: #MulberryMiracle

In the battleground that is Christmas advertisements, Mulberry stands out by giving the traditional Christmas Nativity story a twist. In their comedic ad, Mulberry pokes fun at themselves — especially with this line near the end: “Guys, it’s just a bag.” 

18) Nudo Adopt: Final Christmas Delivery Dates

While many ecommerce emails showcase all the different things you can buy from a company, Nudo Adopt took a different approach. The premise of their business is letting customers “adopt” an olive tree in Italy and have its olive oil delivered to their doorstep. To ensure a delivery by Christmas, shipping dates are super important. This is why the holiday marketing email highlights the specific dates customers need to make a purchase by, by region.

An added bonus? A pair of eye-catching emojis in the subject line.

What are your favorite holiday marketing campaigns? Share with us in the comments.