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Words are hard.

Whether you’re a published author or just getting started with blogging, it’s not always easy to string words together in a way that makes sense, sounds good, and makes the reader feel something.

But every marketer should be able to write — and, more importantly, every marketer can write. It’s just a matter of finding the writing environment that works best for you, expanding your vocabulary, asking for feedback (and listening to it), and practicing.

Luckily, there are a slew of great tools you can use to help improve your writing. Check out the list below, and feel free to add the most helpful ones you use in the comment section.

Download The Marketer’s Pocket Guide to Writing Good for free tips on how to become a better writer.

The 31 Best Tools for Improving Your Writing

1) Daily Page

“Writer’s block is a comforting lie we tell ourselves so we can stop writing and go do other, more pleasurable things,” said Beth Dunn, HubSpot’s UX writer and editor. “If your fingers still work, you can write. Sit down at the same time every day and start typing.”

Want to get into the habit of writing every day, but don’t know what to write about? Daily Page emails you a writing prompt every morning, and you have the rest of the day to write your response. Once you’ve written your response to the prompt, you can either share it or keep it private.

2) 750 Words 

Another way to practice your writing is to do a “brain dump” exercise using a tool like 750 Words. “Brain dumping” means getting all that stuff in your head down on paper — without having to worry about incomplete ideas, tangents, and private stuff.

It’s not blogging or status updating — it’s just you, writing whatever you want on a totally private account, without ever having to title your content or tag topics or share with your friends.

What it does do is track your word count so you’re sure to write 750 words (about three pages of writing). Plus, it’s gamified, which makes it kind of fun: You get a point for writing anything at all, two points for writing 750 words or more, and more points if you write consistently. And every time you write, it’ll give you some cool statistics on how much time you spent writing, the feelings and themes of your words, and so on.

Image Credit: 750 Words

3) Twords 

Publishing content on a consistent basis is crucial in the blogging world. Our own research concludes that companies that commit to regularly publishing quality content to their blogs tend get the most website traffic and leads — and those results continue to pay out over time. Tools like Twords can help bloggers commit to writing consistently.

Twords calls itself “the app that nudges you to write.” It notifies you when you haven’t written in a while so you can keep yourself accountable — and even gives you the option to connect with others who will help keep you accountable. It also tracks your writing so you can start to see patterns for the days you’re blogging more versus less, and so on. Finally, it includes some cool resources like a prompt library and articles about habit formation, writing resources, and so on.

Image Credit: Twords

4) Your Own “Swipe File” 

I read about a “Swipe File” on the “Kopywriting Kourse” blog and loved the idea. Basically, a swipe file is just a folder where you can curate cool stuff you come across, like advertisements, copy, emails, etc. “Save things that make you click, sign up, laugh, or go ‘whoa!'” says the post. The purpose? To flip through it for inspiration.

A swipe file can be physical or digital.

• A physical swipe file would be something like a folder or envelope where you can keep print ads, pieces of copy, letters, and so on for inspiration.
• A digital swipe file on desktop would be a digital folder, like one on your desktop. Whenever you see something interesting, screenshot it (by pressing Command + Shift + 4 on a Mac or Ctrl + Shift + 4 on a PC) and dragging that screenshot to your swipe folder.
• A digital swipe on your mobile device is good for all the stuff you see when browsing the internet on your phone or tablet. The author of the post, for instance, created a specific folder in his iPhone and made a Phone Swipe File there. He stores screenshots when he sees something on mobile that grabs his attention.

Image Credit: KopywritingKourse.com

5) Help me Write 

What better way to make sure you’re writing about stuff your audience actually wants to read than by actually asking them? When you create a profile using Help me Write, you can post ideas of what you’re thinking about writing about. Then, you can share those ideas with your network via Twitter, Facebook, email, and so on — and ask your networks what they’d like to read most. They’ll be able to vote on their favorites, and you’ll be able to pick topics and better manage your time. 

6) Blog Topic Generator

Do you have an overarching theme or keywords in mind for your next blog post, but you’re not sure at which angle to tackle it? HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator could come in handy. Simply type in three keywords, and the tool will auto-generate five potential topics for your post. If you’re not keen on the suggestions, you can always click “Try Again” and it’ll give you five more topics.

7) Trello

Writing efficiently and organizing well is a part of writing well. Use a tool like Trello to collect content ideas, assign them to different members of your team, attach due dates, collaborate with other team members, track their progress, and move them from conception to completion.

Here at HubSpot, we add all our blog post ideas to Trello, turning each idea into a card that we can expand on with notes and move from list to list with a simple drag-and-drop.

8) Google Docs

There are many ways you can use Google Docs to improve your writing. For example, you can use the research tool to do online research on the topic you’re writing about, find quotes or educational information, and so on (see #4 on this list). You can use it to request edits or comments from your peers. It even has a built-in dictionary.

One of my favorite ways to use Google Docs to improve my writing is by crowdsourcing ideas from my coworkers. Here at HubSpot, the blogging team uses this method all the time — and it shaves off a significant portion of research time that goes into curated posts. The result? Better examples and more comprehensive posts with less effort.

9) Quora & 10) inbound.org

Speaking of crowdsourcing, Quora is a great place to go for crowdsourced answers if you want to reach outside your network. Simply search for a keyword, follow topics related to the topics you’re interested in, and/or post your own questions.

If you’re looking for answers from inbound marketers specifically, inbound.org is a great place to source answers from professionals. Here’s an example of a post where the author asked about people’s productivity and time management habits.

11) Blog Post Templates & 12) Ebook Templates

If you’re all set on a topic but need help with organizing your writing so it’s interesting to read, you may want to check out our free, downloadable blog post templates or ebook templates, depending what you’re writing.

• The blog post templates will give you an outline of five different types of blog posts: how-to posts, listicles, curated collections, SlideShare presentations, and newsjacks.
• The ebook templates are available as both PowerPoint and InDesign files. All you have to do is paste in your text, drop in your images, add your company’s logo, and voila — a finished ebook.

13) oTranscribe 

If you’re writing something that includes an interview with someone else, oTranscribe is a great tool that’ll make the transcription process much less painful — allowing more time for your own writing and analysis.

There are a lot of transcription tools out there, but this one is one of my favorites. It’s a web app for transcribing interviews created by Elliott Bentley, a graphics writer at Wall Street Journal. The audio player is integrated with the editor meaning you won’t have to click back and forth. You can pause, play, rewind, and fast-forward using keyboard shortcuts. Every second, it automatically saves the transcription to your browser’s storage. You can export it to plain text or Google Docs. Finally, it’s open source under the MIT license.

14) Cofftivity

Ready to start writing? Here’s a tool that’ll boost your productivity. A study out of the University of Chicago found that a moderate level of ambient noise, or “white noise,” helps people be more creative. While there are a lot of white noise generators out there, Cofftivity is my favorite. It offers non-stop café background sounds at varying intensities, from “Morning Murmur” and “University Undertones” to “Lunchtime Lounge” and “Brazil Bistro.”

15) E.ggtimer.com & 16) Tomato Timer

If you like to write with a little pressure (or you’re just on deadline), then tools like e.ggtimer.com and Tomato Timer are useful (and free). Both of these tools offer a “pomodoro” option, which refers to the Pomodoro technique: a time management technique created by Francesco Cirillo based on periods of distraction-free work followed by short breaks — which is supposed to be optimal for productivity.

17) ZenPen 

If you don’t do well with distractions while you’re writing on a computer, then use a tool like ZenPen to help block out all the distractions and focus on your writing. It’s a web app that gives you a “minimalist writing zone.” There are a few, minimalist features available to help you stylize the text, add hyperlinks, and block quotes. Once you’re done, simply copy the text and paste it in your blog editor or wherever you’d like it to go.

18) Power Thesaurus & 19) Thesaurus.com 

Power Thesaurus isn’t just any thesaurus: It’s a crowdsourced thesaurus that provides alternative word choices from a community of writers. The word suggestions are totally original, and are based on the editorial work of a team of writers and years’ worth of reviews visitors’ suggestions.

But hey, when you want a good ol’, regular Thesaurus, you can’t beat Thesaurus.com.

20) Twinword Writer 

Here’s another help that’ll help you if you get stuck on a word and don’t want to leave your browser or skim through synonyms. If you type using Twinword Writer, it’ll automatically sense if you pause because you’re stuck on a word. Then, it’ll analyze the context of your writing and open a box suggesting alternate words you can use. You can also click any word to get suggestions.

21) Prompts 

If you like typing out posts or ideas using your iPhone and tend to hit a wall in the middle of a thought or idea, this $2.99 iOS app may be worth the investment. It uses an algorithm to make suggestions for what you should write next. It also tracks stats about your writing habits, can remind you to write regularly if you allow it, and lets you schedule the best day and time to write based on your writing history.

Image Credit: Prompts

22) Factbrowser

While you’re writing, you may find you need to support your ideas with research. Tools like Factbrowser search facts, stats, reports, studies, and surveys. Their research covers a wide range of topics, including social networks, gaming, specific industries, holidays, coupons, marketing, and so many more.

23) BrainyQuote 

You may also find you want to include a quote from a famous author, politician, celebrity, or other public figure to strengthen your writing or inspire your readers. BrainyQuote is a library filled with millions of interesting quips that you can search by speaker (from Aristotle to Dr. Seuss to Audrey Hepburn) or by topic (like peace, success, leadership, and more).

24) Hemingway App

Ernest Hemingway, admired for his succinct writing style, is the namesake for this handy editing app. Want to make your content more easily readable? Paste your text into this free web app and it’ll assess your writing and identify opportunities to make it simpler. First, it sums up how readable your writing is with a grade. Then, it suggests how to improve readability. (Read this blog post for more tips on simplifying your writing.)

25) AtomicWriter 

Here’s another tool that’ll assess your writing — but this time, it’ll assess it depending on your specific target audience’s reading level and which content they relate to the most. After all, writing for your target audience is an important part of content marketing.

How? Simply hook up your Google Analytics and social media accounts to AtomicWriter, and then paste your content into the app. It’ll analyze your historical data and engagement data from those accounts, and then tell you whether it’s suitable for your target audience. 

(It’s also available as a Chrome Extension here.)

Image Credit: Jeff Bullas

26) Grammarly & 27) Correctica

Once the actual writing part is done, it’s time to edit. While human editors will be able to catch most grammatical errors, editing tools like Grammarly and Correctica are great tools for triple-checking before you press “publish” or “send.” Both free tools check for grammatical errors — and Grammarly even checks for plagiarism.

28) Draft 

When you upload your document to draft (from cloud services like Dropbox, Evernote, Box, or Google Drive), there’s a lot you can do with it. You can edit your document, share it with colleagues or friends, and manage your friends’ suggestions — much in the same way you can with Google Docs.

One big differentiator, though? Draft lets you call on a staff of reviewers to get suggested edits. It calls itself the “Uber for copyediting.” If you don’t have anyone to help you edit your document, simply import your document and press “Ask a Professional.” (Learn about more features here.)

Image Credit: Draft

29) Cliché Finder 

Unleashed too many clichés in your most recent piece of content? To help your writing be more specific, it’s generally best to avoid clichés. To ensure you leave no stone unturned, paste your text into Cliché Finder and it’ll highlight any you missed so you can replace them with more specific text.

30) Listly

When you’re creating list posts — like this one — it’s easy to hit a wall. Sure, you know there are other great examples out there, but you’ve already exhausted the ones you know of. With Listly, you can invite your audience to contribute to your list. The Listly community can then vote on list items to move them up the list. 

You can either embed the interactive list in your post or use it do conduct research before you publish to ensure that the examples, items, or tips you’re including are the best of the best.

31) Style Guide

The more content your business puts out, the more consistent that writing and messaging should be. This includes everything from what official names to call your products or services, down to whether to use an Oxford comma.

At some point, most companies accept that they’ll need to develop a writing style guide: a document that indicates the basic rules of writing we’ll all agree to follow (like whether I should’ve capitalized the “a” after the colon in this sentence).

Most businesses adopt either the AP Stylebook, or the Chicago Manual of Style. If you want to customize your style guide, you can download the writing style guide template we’ve created here.

Which tools for improving one’s writing would you add to the list? Share with us in the comments.

Getting a prospective student’s contact information is not an invitation to immediately send an email telling them to “Apply Now.” Rather, think of their initial interest, and the fact that they volunteered their personal information, as a window to start a conversation.

By volunteering their contact information, prospective students have placed trust in you to communicate with them in a way that is respectful and valuable to their research process. It’s now your job to follow-though with those expectations, and one of the best ways to get started is by learning more about the students you are marketing to. After all, the more you can learn about prospective students, the more ammunition you have to serve them additional content that is relevant and aids in their application decision. Then, when the time is right, clicking “Apply Now” will almost seem like a foregone conclusion.

Steps for Nurturing and Converting Prospective Students

1) Gather the Right Data

Learning the right details about perspective students upfront is your best asset in making communications more personalized down the line. One way to do this is by creating a scenario in which there’s a mutually beneficial exchange of personal information, for a valuable resource like a program specific ebook, webinar, campus guide, or whatever else you can dream up.

After clicking on a call-to-action button on your website or blog for the offer—“Download Now,” “Attend a Webinar,” etc.—prospective students should be taken to a landing page where they are asked to complete form that captures some information. Upon completing the form, their content is delivered and the transaction is complete. 

It’s not enough to just throw any form on a website however, think ahead to segmentation and personalization when deciding what information to ask for. Every form should collect the basics: full name and email address,. From there, get more granular with questions specific to your communication goals. For example:

• Intended Major/Minor/Program
• Geographic Location
• Graduation Year
• Scholarship or Financial Aid Needs

Don’t go overboard when asking for details; test form length to find out where your sweet spot is before visitors stop volunteering their into. 

The information gathered during this process should be aggregated on unique contact records for each prospective student within a central database shared by your entire team. This can help make the communication and hand off process easier between marketing and admissions further down the road.

2) Segment Emails

Once you have a prospective student’s contact information, it’s time to follow-up in an appropriate manner. Remember, your leads likely care about very different aspects of your school or program. You wouldn’t want to send information about your pre-med program to a prospective music major, just as you wouldn’t want to send SAT prep tips to an outgoing college senior. Use self-identified data from your forms to builds lists with which you segment who receives which email—for example, a list of prospects interested in biology or a list of 2017 high school graduates.

After deciding on the appropriate buckets to place contacts in, build ordered workflows around each of these segmented lists to determine the best next touch for contacts. This way, you ensure prospective students are getting only the most helpful, relevant information in emails.

3) Automate, Automate, Automate

Marketing automation helps you nurture prospective students with information tailored to their needs—without having to invest time you don’t have. A workflow is an automated set of marketing actions that execute, based upon a starting condition. You can use them to automate your lead nurturing tasks, complete internal functions, and much more.

For instance, if a potential student attends a live stream of a history lecture, a workflow can automatically queue up a series of related emails for that prospective student. Should they then download something else or even click on any of those emails, a notification with their information could automatically be sent to your admissions department. 

4) Timing Is Everything

Your workflows should be triggered in a relevant and timely manor, or they will likely be more interruptive than helpful. Use the information gleaned from your forms to set up sequences of communications that makes sense for your audiences’ enrollment journey. For example, a prospective student who’s still two years away from high school graduation probably isn’t interested in college essay tips. Likewise, for college seniors who already took the SATs, study prep guides will miss the mark. Take into account everything from macro factors like time of the school year, to smaller details, like day of the week. 

5) Never Stop Educating

All to often schools rush messaging around inquiring or applying. For student’s who aren’t ready to make a decision, this can be demotivating and even invasive. Educational and relevant resources helped you turn prospective students into leads; keep that effort going.

Follow-up emails should focus on delivering helpful content that helps prospective students learn more about your school or a specific area of study. If they attended a webinar of a pre-med lecture, your next contact point could touch on advice for potential pre-med students, the best classes in the pre-med major, and other tailored, relevant content. Make learning more or applying an accessible option, but don’t flaunt it front and center.

6) Think Beyond Content

Ebooks, guides, andwebinars are great ways to inform and connect with prospective students, but remember that more high-touch resources can also go a long way to form relationships and build trust. Always tiecommunications to a real person, and make yourself available for questions throughout the proccess. If possible, offer to connect prospects with other students in their major, alumni, or even make professors available for questions about coursework or campus life.

7) Ask for Incremental Information

As you continue to delight your prospective students with helpful content, ask for new and more granular information. A lead who downloaded an ebook when he or she was a high school junior may have new information to offer as a senior. Ask if prospects’ planned course of study has shifted, ask if the graduation year has changed, and ask follow-up information to see if the content has been helpful. Build this process into your forms by using smart fields to manage these changing questions. If someone has already told you their year of graduation, don’t ask for it again, rather swap in a dynamic form field to gather new information.

When the Time Comes To Ask Students to Apply

After providing enough information, education, and support, clicking the “Apply Now” button will start to feel like a natural step for prospective students. Use the progressive information you’ve picked up along the way to tailor everything from email timing down to the specific language in your email CTAs. If you’ve done your job effectively, students will have a hard time not following through.

The malls are decked with holly, your inbox is filling up with holiday-themed promotions, and you’ve deemed it socially acceptable to start listening to your favorite holiday playlist on Spotify … or maybe that’s just me. 

Either way, the holiday season is here, and marketers are gearing up to finish off the year strong. But just like shopping for gifts, planning your holiday campaign is something you don’t want to shove off until the last minute.

There’s going to be a lot of spending going in over the next month or so, which is why it’s important to have a plan for reaching your customers and prospects before your competitors do.

Haven’t started planning your campaign yet? Don’t panic.

We’ve mapped out a comprehensive guide with everything you need to launch a holiday marketing campaign this season. From offer templates to free holiday-themed stock photos, we’ve peppered this step-by-step guide with resources designed to get your campaign up and running right away.

Download more holiday marketing resources to help your business succeed this season from HubSpot’s #HolidayHub.

Step 1: Create Your Campaign and Offer

While creating content has become ingrained in the day-to-day lives of most inbound marketers, launching a campaign is a little different. Unlike a tweet or an infographic, campaigns require you to align all of your marketing channels around one specific goal or message.

Holiday campaigns — like all campaigns — typically run for a concentrated period of time. Depending on your industry, they can start as early as October and often spill over into January.

Now that you know what you’re in for, let’s not waste any more time. Below we’ll kick off this process by walking you through establishing your campaign and offer.

Decide on your campaign goals and audience.

Before you start creating an offer, you need to determine what it is that you’re looking to achieve. What is the ideal outcome of this campaign? 

Once you define your focus, you can begin to create goals that will be used to benchmark your campaign’s performance once it’s wrapped. Your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART goals, for short). Here’s an example of how to structure this type of goal:

Generate [number] leads focused on [topic/product] by [date]

Depending on what you want to get out of your campaign, your goals might look something like this:

• Generate 1,000 leads who are interested in our annual holiday sale by December 5, 2015.
• Generate 5,000 sign-ups for our holiday shopping app by November 30, 2015. 
• Collect $50,000 in donations for charity XYZ by December 20, 2015.

To help you better align your marketing efforts with SMART goals, check out this free goal setting template. You can use this template to summarize your goals, calculate your greatest marketing need, and set deadlines.

With goals in place, the next step is to define your target audience. The more information you can gather about the people you’re trying to reach, the better. Where are they hanging out on social media? Do they prefer to consume information on their desktop or mobile? This will help you make smarter marketing decisions when it comes time to create content and plan promotions.

If you already have a few buyer personas in place for your marketing efforts, you’ll want to start by narrowing your focus. Does your campaign pertain to all segments of your audience? If not, you’ll need to immediately weed out the folks who you don’t want to include.

If you don’t already have buyer personas or would like to create campaign-specific personas, we recommend you check out our free buyer persona templates. These templates will make it easy for you to build out and organize your persona data.

Create an offer.

The offer that you create will serve as the center point for all of your campaign initiatives. Typically offers take shape in the form of ebooks, whitepapers, templates, online courses, videos, tools, etc. While there are a lot of options to choose from, we advise you to run with an approach that makes the most sense for your intended audience. 

Think about it: If you know the people you’re trying to reach are typically strapped for time — particularly during the holidays — you might want to create a set of easy-to-use templates instead of a lengthy ebook, right?

The former is what my colleague Susannah decided to do when she recently launched a holiday campaign around a 2015 ecommerce marketing calendar. In doing so, she created a one-page printable calendar and an installable calendar for Gmail and Outlook detailing all of the important holidays and shipping dates for this season.

If you decide to take the ebook route, we can help — you can download our free, customizable ebook templates. We’ve already taken care of the design element, so all you have to do is focus on writing the content. And if you’re in search of some compelling visuals to use throughout your offer, download our 250 free holiday stock photos here. 

Create a landing page.

Once your offer is created, you need to provide a place for it to live. This is where the landing page comes in. 

Considering your landing page is the page that you’ll be driving traffic to, it needs to be convincing. Here’s a list of some of the essential elements you should include:

• Compelling headline. This is how you’re going to capture the attention of potential visitors. For tips on how to craft the perfect headline, turn to this guide.
• Interesting visuals. Your landing page shouldn’t just be a jumble of text. Think about how you can provide visual context for your offer.
• The benefits of your offer. This typically takes shape in a bulleted list. The goal here is to drive home what the visitor can expect to get from this offer, and why it matters.
• A form. This is how you’ll collect information in exchange for the offer. Keep in mind that there’s no magic number for form fields. In fact, the amount of information you need to ask for on a form will vary from business to business. That said, if you don’t really need a piece of information, don’t ask for it.

Here’s a look at the landing page Susannah created for her holiday calendar offer:

If you need some more guidance as to what goes into a great landing page, check out this roundup of 15 brilliant landing page designs. 

Step 2: Design a Promotion Plan

Email Marketing

If you already have a list of people you know will be interested in your offer, that’s great. If you want to slice and dice your database to go after a more specific group, you should take care of that segmentation first. For HubSpot customers, it’s easy to segment your database using a smart list in the Lists App. (Here’s a resource to help you get started.)

During the holiday season, we’d argue that segmenting your list is more important than ever. Due to the increased number of incoming promotions and the limited amount of time busy shoppers have, well-targeted emails will often take priority over mass messages. 

Once you’ve squared away your recipients, you can kick off the actual email creation process. Here are some noteworthy elements to keep in mind while crafting your email:

• Subject line. Focus on what the offer solves. Check out this helpful post for tips on improving your subject lines.
• Body copy. The body of your email should be short and sweet, much like the copy on your landing page. This is also a great opportunity to incorporate personalization using personalization tokens. Here are some great examples to get you thinking about personalization opportunities. 
• Sharing Options. Don’t forget to add buttons to your emails that allow recipients to quickly pass your offer along to their network. 

To give you a better sense of how to structure your email, refer to this sample email from my colleague’s holiday calendar campaign:

Blogging

Once you’ve sent an email to get your offer on the radar of your intended audience, it’s time to build out your reach even further. Blog posts serve as an effective campaign element for attracting people to your offer, and can be approached in a couple different ways. 

One way to use your blog to promote your offer is to create a simple “promo post” — that’s what we call them, anyway. This post is typically very short, only offering a quick introduction to the offer, a few value-driven bullet points on what people can expect to learn from it, and a compelling CTA to drive people to the landing page. 

According to a 6-month analysis of HubSpot’s Marketing Blog run by my colleague, Ginny Soskey, promo posts proved to be the most effective lead generators out of the seven post types we typically publish. While this may vary depending on your industry and audience, it’s certainly a type we’d encourage you to explore on your own. (Want to know how we format them? Check out Susannah’s promo post below about her holiday calendar.)

Promo posts aside, it’s also a great idea to add a CTA for your offer to a post that aligns with its subject matter. You can create an entirely new post and revisit older, related posts to swap out their CTAs. This way, if people who reach the end of your post are looking for more information or a deeper dive into the subject, they can click through to the offer.

Social Media

Now that you have some tangible promotional material in place, you can start promoting it through your social media channels. Whether you share the related blog post or a link to the landing page, be sure that you’re switching up the messaging so you’re not repeating the same tweet or Facebook post over, and over, and over …

You’ll also want to tailor the post to the platform you’re posting it on. For example, maybe you create a teaser video for your offer to promote it on Instagram and then use a colorful visual when you serve it up on Twitter:

The holidays are only weeks away! Don’t wait to start planning your marketing: https://t.co/ttsZQ71Ixx http://pic.twitter.com/cK794XcEDh

— HubSpot (@HubSpot)
October 26, 2015

The holidays provide an interesting opportunity for businesses looking to explore platforms they wouldn’t typically try. With busy consumers looking for holiday help and inspiration in all corners of the internet and social media, you may find that it’s worth promoting your campaign on a wider variety of platforms. 

Wherever you’re sharing your content, you’ll need a place to organize and plan your distribution strategy. For that, check out this free social media content calendar. 

PPC

Paid advertising can be a great tool to boost some of your inbound efforts — especially around the busy holiday season.

If your budget allows, you may want to experiment with putting a little money behind some of your campaign assets to promote them on social media. For advice on how to create successful paid advertising campaigns across the three main social media platforms — Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — check out this free guide.

Interested in Google AdWords? We can walk you through that process, too. Download our beginner’s guide to get started.

Step 3: Create Lead Nurturing Paths

What will happen to your leads once you’ve generated them? And once the holidays have come and gone, what will they mean to your business?

Before you launch your campaign, it’s best to design a plan for qualifying and developing your leads once they’ve filled out your form. With marketing automation software, you can use email nurturing to keep leads engaged with your business and move them closer to a sale. 

Email Nurturing

Before you can begin creating emails and workflows, you need to take another look at your list to determine if there are opportunities for segmentation. Dividing your list of leads will make it easier for you to deliver more contextual follow-up emails, which will help you separate yourself from holiday inbox chaos, and ultimately help recipients see the value in your relationship.

Next, determine what content you’ll use to nurture your leads. You can narrow your focus by honing in on what your goals are for this nurturing process. Do you want them turn these people in sales? Subscribers? Are you looking to direct them to a particular page? 

For a campaign like the holiday calendar we’ve been referencing throughout this post, it might make sense to re-engage those leads with more helpful, related resources, such as:

• The Ecommerce Guide to Holiday Shopping & Marketing
• Is Your Website Ready for Black Friday? 7 Last-Minute Tips to Prepare
• Ecommerce Holiday CTA Templates

And to track your progress, make sure you set a goal for your workflow. If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can do so in HubSpot’s Workflow App, which makes it easy for you to gauge the performance of your email sequence. 

Step 5: Take the Campaign Live

Now that you’ve got everything in place — offer, landing page, blog promotion, nurturing workflows, etc. — it’s time to take your campaign live. 

We recommend issuing a “soft launch” before you initiate any promotion, as this will provide you with an opportunity to run through all of the steps yourself to ensure that everything is functioning as it should be. If you can get a few colleagues to fill out the form and run through the stages too, it’ll be much easier for you to spot any glitches or missed marks. 

Once you know everything is sailing smoothly, it’s time to kick up promotion and start driving traffic to your landing page. 

Step 6: Measure and Report 

This is the final — and arguably the most important — step in the process. Once your campaign has had some time to gain traction, you’ll want to dive into its performance and see what you can learn from it. 

Remember those goals we set all the way back in step one? Now is the time to determine if you actually hit them — and if you didn’t, identify what might have prevented you from doing so. Analyzing where people dropped off in your workflows, blog posts that flopped, or areas of your offer that fell a little flat might reveal what held your campaign back from reaching those numbers. Take note of these details, and use them to inform your next campaign strategy.

If you need some help defining what numbers you should actually be concerning yourself with, check out this introductory guide to inbound marketing analytics. This resource will walk you through how to effectively analyze the following: your website and landing pages, search engine optimization, paid search, blogging, social media, email marketing, and lead nurturing and automation.

Another helpful resource to make your marketing reporting a little easier is this collection of Excel templates. Rather than having to start a sheet from scratch, these templates come complete with useful functions and formulas for keeping tabs on our goals across many different channels.

Are you running a holiday campaign this season? Share your favorite tips in the comments section below.

Every year there are tons of amazing marketing events held around the world. Inspiration is shared, knowledge is dropped, and marketers have a chance to geek out over the lineup of speakers.

Trouble is, time and resources can often hold many marketers back from attending these events. So rather than let you miss out on the value, we’ve secured the recordings of the best keynotes from six of the biggest marketing events from around the globe and we’re making them available for one day only.

Join us today, November 18th, and watch six of the best keynotes of 2015 from marketing events like INBOUND, Moz, SearchLove, BrightonSEO, SydStart, and Learn Inbound.

Click here to gain access to the videos, and check out the impressive lineup of speakers below to learn more about each talk. 

6 Top Marketing Talks From 2015

1) “Marketing Innovations: Creative PR, Content, and SEO Strategies”

Lexi Mills, Head of Digital at Dynamo PR

In this session, Lexi Mills shows you how to apply strategies used in emerging markets to grow the success of your PR, SEO, and content work from bathrooms to rock bands.

2) “Reverse Engineering Successful Content”

Paddy Moogan, Founder of Aira  

In this session, Paddy Moogan will show you a process for reverse engineering successful content in your industry and how to feed what you learn into a content strategy.

3) “The Four Corners of Conversion: Understanding the Intersection of Copy, Design, Interaction, and Psychology”

Oli Gardner, Co-Founder at Unbounce 

In this session, Oli Gardner will show you how to combine the four corners of conversion in a data-driven optimization framework that will change how you use landing pages to deliver delightful and high-converting campaign experiences.

4) “9GAG’s Secret Sauce to 2 Billion Page Views: Being Funny is a Serious Business”

Ray Chan, Founder at 9GAG 

In this session, Ray Chan explains the art of using humor in your marketing. He also brings you through building trust, delivering more than expected, and becoming meaningful to people on an emotional level. 

5) “Enterprise SEO Link Strategies for Busy Marketers”

Wil Reynolds, Director of Strategy at Seer Interactive

In this session, Wil Reynolds provides content ideation strategies for busy marketers, and explores tactics to help you streamline your link building efforts. 

6) “Practical Advice for the Future of Search”

Will Critchlow, Founder at Distilled 

In this session, Will Critchlow focuses on the real-world changes you should be making right now to your web presence and campaigns. From making the most of new ranking factors to creating content for mobile, Critchlow has you covered.

Remember: We’re releasing these videos for 24 hours only today, November 18th, 2015. Don’t miss out. Click here to gain access to this exclusive offer.