Sometimes, when I tell people that I blog for a living, they roll their eyes. “That’s so easy,” they say. “You get a paycheck for sitting on the internet all day and writing. A monkey could do your job!”

That’s when I roll my eyes. See, people are quick to deem blogging as a no-brainer job. But when they actually sit down to write their first couple of posts, it hits them: This is way harder than I thought. Like any person starting a new job, they mess things up.

That’s okay — it happens to pretty much every new blogger. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to avoid these roadblocks if you know they’re coming.

So for all of you beginner bloggers out there who are looking to get up-to-speed quickly, keep on reading. Below are common mistakes most beginners make and some tips on how to avoid them.

What Is a Blog?

Simply put, a blog is a tool that can help develop an online presence, attract leads, and engage with an audience. It’s often a series of editorial content centered around a central topic that demonstrates industry expertise — for instance, a catering company might write blog posts like “The 11 Best Appetizers to Serve to a Crowd” or “Stress-Free Dinner Parties: Recipes that are Prepared Ahead of Time”.

Blogs can help drive traffic to your website, convert that traffic into leads, establish authority in your industry, and ultimately grow your business. In fact, organizations are 13x more likely to see positive ROI by prioritizing blogging.  

Blog Post Mistakes to Avoid

Most of a blog’s traffic is driven organically — in other words, consumers will search for something on a search engine and click on your blog if it matches their intended topic. However, there are a lot of organizations competing for your audience’s attention, so it’s important to avoid common blog mistakes to stand out. 

Here are the most common blog post mistakes (and their solutions), according to HubSpot bloggers.

1. Create blog posts that serve your larger company goals.

Mistake: You think of ideas that only interest you.

As much as you might read and re-read your blog posts after you publish them, you’re not the only reader, or the intended reader.

When you start blogging, ideas will come to you at random times — in the shower, on a run, while on the phone with your mom. While the ideas may come at random moments, the ideas themselves should never be random. Just because it’s a good idea in general — or something that interests you personally — doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for your company.

Solution: Align your blog posts with company growth goals.

The reason you’re blogging is to solve problems for your audience and, ultimately, to grow your business. So, all of your blog post ideas should help serve those growth goals. They should have natural tie-ins to issues in your industry and address specific questions and concerns your prospects have.

“Your blog is a honeypot, not a megaphone. Make a point to position your content around what your audience wants to discover, not what you want to tell them.”

 

— Amanda Sellers, HubSpot’s Historical Optimization Writer

Need help figuring out what those goals are and how to address them? Chat with your manager about the larger company goals, and then schedule a meeting with someone on the sales team to hear what questions they get asked most often. After both meetings, you should know which goals you need to achieve and have some ideas on how to achieve them.

2. Identify what resonates with your audience. 

Mistake: You forget about your persona. 

If you want your blog content to perform well (i.e. generate traffic, leads, and sales), it must resonate with your audience and compel them to take action. One of the biggest mistakes is assuming that your content will perform if you haven’t actually considered your audience or the actions you want them to take.

Solution: Understand your persona’s pains and solve for them.

By defining your buyer persona and the things that matter to them, you can bridge the gap with your content. 

“Your persona is the basis for everything you create. Writing for yourself won’t always resonate with your intended audience. If you, instead, speak your persona’s pains, challenges, and goals and they feel like you are speaking to them, they are more likely to stay on the page and convert on your offer.”

 

— Christina Perricone, Content Marketing Manager at HubSpot

If you’re not consciously thinking about your persona’s pains, you’re just creating content for content’s sake, which is a waste of resources.

3. Write like you talk.

Mistake: Your writing is too stiff.

Writing a blog post is much different than writing a term paper. But when bloggers first start out, they usually only have experience with the latter. The problem? The style of writing from a term paper is not the style of writing people enjoy reading.

Let’s be honest: Most of the people who see your post aren’t going to read the whole thing. If you want to keep them interested, you have to compel them to keep reading by writing in a style that’s effortless to read.

Solution: Try to write blogs that feel personable. 

It’s okay to be more conversational in your writing — in fact, we encourage it. The more approachable your writing is, the more people will enjoy reading it. People want to feel like they’re doing business with real people, not robots.

So loosen up your writing. Throw in contractions. Get rid of the jargon. Make a pun or two. That’s how real people talk — and that’s what real people like to read.

4. Show your personality; don’t tell it.

Mistake: You think people care about you as a writer.

It sounds harsh, but it’s the truth: When people first start out blogging, they think that their audience will be inherently interested in their stories and their interests … but that’s not the case. It’s no knock against them as a person — it’s just that when you’re new, no one is interested in you and your experiences. People care way more about what you can teach them.

Solution: Infuse your personality without eclipsing the topic.

Even though people don’t really care that it’s you that’s writing the post, you can infuse parts of your personality in your writing to make them feel more comfortable with you. How you do that is entirely up to you. Some people like to crack jokes, some like to make pop culture references, and others have a way with vivid descriptions.

HubSpot’s Director of Content Corey Wainwright is particularly good at this. Here’s an example from the introduction of one of her posts:

To infuse personality into your own writing, try looking for ways to relate to your readers on the topic you’re writing about — then write in the first person as if you’re hanging out with them and chatting about it. Make your tone personal, approachable, and engaging, just like you would in a face-to-face conversation.

5. Make your point again and again.

Mistake: You digress.

Although you are encouraged to let your own personality shine through in your writing, don’t abuse the privilege. It’s one thing to be yourself in the topic you’re covering, but it’s another thing to bring up too many personal experiences that bury the point you’re trying to make.

Don’t digress into these personal anecdotes and analogies too much — your readers aren’t sitting in front of you, which means you can’t guarantee that you have their undivided attention. They can (and will) bounce from your article if they lose patience. 

Solution: Repeatedly assert your argument. 

To prevent your writing from losing its audience, restate your point in every section of the article. The best blog posts commit to an overarching message and then deliver it gradually, expressing it multiple times in small ways from beginning to end.

If you’re writing about how much water a potted plant needs, for example, don’t spend three paragraphs telling a story of how you came home to a dead fern after returning from a two-week vacation. This story offers real evidence of your point, but what is your point? Certain plants can’t go without water for more than 14 days. That’s one possible point, and it should be stated upfront.

6. Start with a very specific working title.

Mistake: Your topics are too broad.

When people start blogging, they generally want to write on really big topics like:

• “How to Do Social Media Marketing”
• “Business Best Practices”
• “How to Make Money on the Internet”

Topics like these are far too broad. Because there are so many details and nuances in these topics, it’s really hard to do a good job answering them. Plus, more specific topics tend to attract smaller, more targeted audiences, which tend to be higher quality and more likely to convert into leads and customers.

So, to get the most short-term and long-term benefits of blogging, you’ll need to get way more specific.

Solution: Begin with a clear, concise idea.

Nailing really specific blog topics is crucial to knocking your first few posts out of the park. Let us help you brainstorm with our Blog Ideas Generator. This tool allows you to enter basic terms you know you want to cover, and then produces five sample blog titles that work for business blogs.

Keep in mind that a working title isn’t final — it’s just a concrete angle you can use to keep your writing on track. Once you nail this stage of the ideation process, it’s much easier to write your blog posts.

7. Specific posts should still tie into the bigger picture. 

Mistake: You’re don’t tie a specific topic into your reader’s broader struggle. 

You already know how important it is to resonate with your buyer persona and understand their pain points. However, there’s a reason why they’re experiencing pain points and what is driving them to get it solved. 

Solution: Understand the challenges and consequences they’re facing.

You should be asking yourself: 

• What is at stake?
• What do they gain by taking action?
• What are they afraid of happening if they don’t take action?

All of these things can manifest in the content that you write for your blog post. Doing so will signal to your reader that you understand what they’re going through and you want to help.

“If you’re uninterested in a particular topic you’re writing about, it’s probably because you haven’t stopped to think big-picture. Understanding how the topic you’re writing about will fit into a reader’s broader challenges will help you find meaning and value in any post you write, and will enable you to connect with your readers better.”

 

— Caroline Forsey, Editor of the HubSpot Marketing Blog

For instance, let’s say you’re tackling a post like “first vs. third-party APIs.” While the topic is dry and allows for little creativity, the big-picture value is huge: to help your readers decide whether they need to shell over the big bucks for an in-house API or whether they can save money and time by asking a third-party to develop their API. Essentially, “first vs. third party APIs” is a question that hits at computer security, efficiency, and budget constraints, all of which could have big consequences for your reader.

8. Use a specific post type, create an outline, and use headers.

Mistake: Your writing is a brain dump.

Sometimes when I get a great idea I’m excited about, it’s really tempting to just sit down and let it flow out of me. But what I get is usually a sub-par blog post.

Why? The stream-of-consciousness style of writing isn’t really a good style for blog posts. Most people are going to scan your blog posts, not read them, so it needs to be organized really well for that to happen.

Solution: Structure your blog with a template, outline, and section headers.

The first thing you should do is choose what type of blog post you’re going to write. Is it a how-to post? A list-based post? A curated collection post? A SlideShare presentation? For help on this, download our free templates for creating five different types of blog posts. Once you have a template down, it’ll be easier to write your outline.

Writing an outline makes a big difference. If you put in the time up front to organize your thoughts and create a logical flow in your post, the rest becomes easy — you’re basically just filling in the blanks.

Using headers is also critical for reader experience. 

“While it’s nice to imagine that your readers hang on your every word, the reality is that they’re probably mostly skimming your posts. As you write, be sure you’re making your piece skim-friendly: including plenty of paragraph breaks, clearly titled sections, relevant images, and formatting that makes it easy to find the piece of information they likely came for.”

 

— Karla Cook, Sr. Manager of the HubSpot Blog Team

To write a blog post outline, first come up with a list of the top takeaways you want your readers to get from your post. Then, break up those takeaways into larger section headers. When you put in a section header every few paragraphs, your blog post becomes easier and more enjoyable to read. (And plus, header text with keywords is good for SEO.) When you finally get to writing, all you’ll have to do is fill in those sections.

9. Give your audience something to walk away with.

Mistake: You’re relying on the conceptual instead of the concrete.

One of the first things you’ll do in your blog research is look up how other publications are writing about a topic. However, if you notice, almost all the results on the first page of Google are writing about conceptual, vague ideas. How can your blog stick out? You can include actual, actionable steps to achieve success.

Solution: Include actionable steps to achieve success.

One of the biggest tenets of content creation is that it should be useful, and that means your audience should walk away with something. 

“People want to learn how to do things in actuality, not just theoretically. When you’re done with a blog, ask yourself, ‘Will the reader know how to implement this idea?’ or ‘Did I provide steps to achieve success?'”

 

— Rebecca White, Jr. Staff Writer at HubSpot

This might come in the form of a “how-to” as you recommend they implement a particular strategy, or it might simply be a suggestion for a tool or tactic to make a process easier.

10. Use data and research to back up the claims you make in your posts.

Mistake: You don’t use data as evidence.

Let’s say I’m writing a blog post about why businesses should consider using Instagram for marketing. When I’m making that argument, which is more convincing?

1. “It seems like more people are using Instagram nowadays.”
2. “Instagram’s user base is growing far faster than social network usage in general in the U.S. Instagram will grow 15.1% this year, compared to just 3.1% growth for the social network sector as a whole.”

The second, of course. Arguments and claims are much more compelling when rooted in data and research. As marketers, we don’t just have to convince people to be on our side about an issue — we need to convince them to take action. Data-driven content catches people’s attention in a way that fluffy arguments do not.

Solution: Use data to support your arguments. 

In any good story, you’ll offer a main argument, establish proof, and then end with a takeaway for the audience. You can use data in blog posts to introduce your main argument and show why it’s relevant to your readers, or as proof of it throughout the body of the post.

Some great places to find compelling data include:

• HubSpot Research
• Pew Research Center
• MarketingSherpa
• HubSpot’s State of Inbound report

11. Use examples to back up why what you’re saying is important. 

Mistake: You’re not adding enough context. 

Meg Prater, Managing Editor of the HubSpot blogs, shared with us that “When I first joined the HubSpot Blog team, I would consistently get the edit that I wasn’t adding enough examples to support my statements. For example (See what I did there?), I might write ‘SMBs should expand their social media strategies to experiment with newer, cheaper channels.’ Sure, that might be true, but it’s a pretty broad suggestion.

Solution: Illustrate ideas with examples, visual aids, and additional content. 

A stronger way to share this with an audience might be to say, ‘SMBs should expand their social media strategies to experiment with newer, cheaper channels. For example, you might test running ads on question-and-answer platform Quora, or simply answer industry questions for which your product or service is an answer.’

“By adding a specific example to my previously broad statement, I’ve made my point easier to understand and more actionable for my readers.”

 

— Meg Prater, Managing Editor of the HubSpot Blogs

As bloggers, we become experts in our industry. Because of this, it’s easy to forget about specificity when giving advice, explaining examples, or walking through a common process. Even Pamela Bump, HubSpot’s Staff Writer for Audience Growth, admits that she has been guilty of not going into enough depth in a first draft.

“When you review your blog post, read it from the point of view of a new grad entering a field or someone who’s just learning about a topic for the first time.”

 

— Pamela Bump, HubSpot’s Staff Writer for Audience Growth

Ask yourself questions like, “Will readers know what this big word means?”, “Will they recognize this acronym?”, or “Can they easily visualize this example, or do I need to add a visual aid?” From there, you can determine where you need to explain something more, or hyperlink potentially confusing words other blog posts that relate to them.

12. When drawing from others’ ideas, cite them.

Mistake: Your content borders on plagiarism.

Plagiarism didn’t work in school, and it certainly doesn’t work on your company’s blog. But for some reason, many beginner bloggers think they can get away with the old copy-and-paste technique.

You can’t. Editors and readers can usually tell when something’s been copied from somewhere else. Your voice suddenly doesn’t sound like you, or maybe there are a few words in there that are incorrectly used. It just sounds … off.

Plus, if you get caught stealing other people’s content, you could get your site penalized by Google — which could be a big blow to your company blog’s organic growth.

Solution: Give credit where credit is due. 

Instead, take a few minutes to understand how to cite other people’s content in your blog posts. It’s not super complicated, but it’s an essential thing to learn when you’re first starting out.

13. Take 30 minutes to edit your post.

Mistake: You think you’re done once the writing’s done.

Most people make the mistake of not editing their writing. It sounded so fluid in their head when they were writing that it must be great to read … right?

Nope — it still needs editing. And maybe a lot of it.

Solution: You’ll never regret time spent proofreading. 

Everyone needs to edit their writing — even the most experienced writers. Most times, our first drafts aren’t all that great. So take the time you need to shape up your post. Fix typos, run-on sentences, and accidental its/it’s mistakes. Make sure your story flows just as well as it did in your outline.

To help you remember all the little things to check before publishing, check out our checklist for editing and proofreading a blog post.

14. At a certain point, just publish it.

Mistake: You try to make every post perfect.

I hate to break it to you, but your blog post is never going to be perfect. Ever.

There will always be more things you can do to make your posts better. More images. Better phrasing. Wittier jokes. The best writers I know, know when to stop obsessing and just hit “publish.”

Solution: Better to publish and update than postpone for perfection. 

There’s a point at which there are diminishing returns for getting closer to “perfect” — and you’re really never going to reach “perfect” anyway. So while you don’t want to publish a post filled with factual inaccuracies and grammatical errors, it’s not the end of the world if a typo slips through. It most likely won’t affect how many views and leads it brings in.

Plus, if you (or your readers) find the mistake, all of you have to do is update the post. No biggie. So give yourself a break once and a while — perfect is the enemy of done.

15. Blog consistently with the help of an editorial calendar.

Mistake: You don’t blog consistently.

By now, you’ve probably heard that the more often you blog, the more traffic you’ll get to your website — and the more subscribers and leads you’ll generate from your posts. But as important as volume is, it’s actually more important that you’re blogging consistently when you’re just getting started. If you publish five posts in one week and then only one or two in the next few weeks, it’ll be hard to form a consistent habit. And inconsistency could really confuse your subscribers.

Instead, it’s the companies that make a commitment to regularly publishing quality content to their blogs that tend to reap the biggest rewards in terms of website traffic and leads — and those results continue to pay out over time.

To help establish consistency, you’ll need a more concrete planning strategy.

Solution: Schedule and publish blogs consistently. 

Use it to get into the habit of planning your blog post topics ahead of time, publishing consistently, and even scheduling posts in advance if you’re finding yourself having a particularly productive week.

Here at HubSpot, we typically use good ol’ Google Calendar as our blog editorial calendar, which you can learn how to set up step-by-step here. Or, you can click here to download our free editorial calendar templates for Excel, Google Sheets, and Google Calendar, along with instructions on how to set them up.

16. Focus on the long-term benefits of organic traffic.

Mistake: You concentrate your analytics on immediate traffic.

Both beginner bloggers and advanced bloggers are guilty of this blogging mistake. If you concentrate your analysis on immediate traffic (traffic from email subscribers, RSS feeds, and social shares), then it’s going to be hard to prove the enduring value of your blog. After all, the half-life for those sources is very brief — usually a day or two.

When marketers who are just starting their business blogs see that their blog posts aren’t generating any new traffic after a few days, many of them get frustrated. They think their blog is failing, and they end up abandoning it prematurely.

Solution: The ROI of your blog is the aggregation of organic traffic over time.

Instead of focusing on the sudden decay of short-term traffic, focus instead on the cumulative potential of organic traffic. Over time, given enough time, the traffic from day three and beyond of a single blog post will eclipse that big spike on days one and two thanks to being found on search engine results pages through organic search. You just have to give it a while.

To help drive this long-term traffic, make sure you’re writing blog posts that have durable relevance on a consistent basis. These posts are called “evergreen” blog posts: They’re relevant year after year with little or no upkeep, valuable, and high quality.

“Your evergreen content is an ongoing asset and in many cases has more potential to perform than a new, unproven post.”

 

— Amanda Sellers, HubSpot’s Historical Optimization Writer

Over time, as you write more evergreen content and build search authority, those posts will end up being responsible for a large percentage of your blog traffic. It all starts with a slight shift in perspective from daily traffic to cumulative traffic so you can reframe the way you view your blog and its ROI entirely.

17. Add a subscription CTA to your blog and set up an email newsletter.

Mistake: You aren’t growing subscribers.

Once you start blogging, it’s easy to forget that blogging isn’t just about getting new visitors to your blog. One of the biggest benefits of blogging is that it helps you steadily grow an email list of subscribers you can share your new content with. Each time you publish a new blog post, your subscribers will give you that initial surge of traffic — which, in turn, will propel those posts’ long-term success.

The key to getting significant business results (traffic, leads, and eventually customers) all starts with growing subscribers.

Solution: How to set up a subscription CTA and email newsletter:

First, use your email marketing tool to set up a welcome email for new subscribers, as well as a regular email that pulls in your most recent blog posts. (HubSpot customers: You can use HubSpot’s email tool to easily set up these regular email sends, as well as set up a welcome email for new subscribers.)

Next, add subscription CTAs to your blog (and elsewhere, like the footer of your website) to make it easy for people to opt in. These CTAs should be simple, one-field email opt-in forms near the top of your blog, above the fold. As for where to put these CTAs, we typically place our blog CTAs at the bottom of our blog posts or add a slide-in, which you can learn how to do using a free tool called Leadin here.

You can also create a dedicated landing page for subscribers that you can direct people to via other channels such as social media, other pages on your website, PPC, or email. (For a list of more simple ways to attract subscribers, read this blog post; for more advanced ideas, read this one.)

Don’t worry if you read through this list and are now thinking to yourself, Well this is awkward … I’ve made literally every single one of these mistakes. Remember: I used the word “common” to describe these mistakes for a reason. The more you blog, the better you’ll get at it — and you’ll reap the benefits in terms of traffic and leads in the process.

We hope you’ll use this list of mistakes as fuel for the fire to step up your blogging game. After all, the benefits of keeping up a healthy business blog will be well worth the time and effort.

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

Are you new to the startup game, and even newer to the content marketing game?

With all the work that goes into starting a business, there’s little time to think about marketing strategies that prove successful and are feasible for a startup’s teams to execute.

If you find yourself in this boat, don’t panic. You probably know the tools that are helpful for startup marketers to use when strategizing — a CMS, social media accounts, and graphic design software, for instance.

Now, what you need to know is how to use these tools, and similar methods, to create campaigns that align with your business goals. You may have seen other startups’ glowing marketing techniques and found yourself wondering how to create a winning strategy.

For that, we’ve got you covered. To get a sense of how a marketing strategy can produce success for your startup, we’re going to lay out some ideas. These ideas are from startups, and will help you visualize how a successful strategy can be helpful for your own marketing goals.

Here, let’s explore startup marketing ideas and strategies you can use to increase brand awareness, leads, and customers for your startup business.

Startup Marketing Ideas

Other than starting an email list, using online software, and taking high-quality images, what else can you do to market your startup? Below are some examples.

If you’re struggling to come up with new marketing ideas, maybe you can put a new spin on one that works for your campaign goals. Like some of the companies mentioned, you can use tools you already have at your disposal to execute a winning campaign.

1. Use paid ads to build a community.

Starburst Data is a B2B that helps companies understand their website analytics. They use a search query engine that organizes data, so customers can interpret large amounts of data quickly. This startup uses ads on LinkedIn to connect with its audience, like this one promoting their software:

Source

A content marketer for a company like Starburst has a good chance of finding its target audience on LinkedIn, since it’s a platform for professional networking. Part of this marketing campaign involves using LinkedIn Ads to build community and provide helpful information.

A similar B2B startup strategy could involve making use of a social media platform’s paid ads offerings to cater to your audience. Alternatively, you can upload offers for free and use hashtags to get them seen by more prospective customers, like #B2BMarketing, or #MarTech.

2. Try social media to connect with customers.

Social media marketing doesn’t have to include spending money — it can be used to grow your audience and connect with existing members. Take Paperless Parts, for example, a manufacturing company with a stellar Facebook page:

It’s free to create a Facebook Business page and optimize it so leads and customers can find it. The Paperless Parts feed begins with recommendations and reviews from happy customers, showing that the business has a dedicated customer userbase. After that, the business posts videos that go behind-the-scenes of the manufacturing process, and also post reminders for webinars and other website content.

A social media page for a startup that showcases customers provides helpful content and encourages audience participation is a free strategy to expand reach, bring clicks to your website, and show credibility in the industry.

3. Crowdfunding marketing, which can generate press.

Are you thinking about starting a crowdfunding campaign? If you do, you could earn great press from publications, expanding your campaign’s reach. Take NeighborSchools, for example, which is a child care startup. NeighborSchools offers unique daycares from licensed and experienced professionals.

Source

When the minds behind NeighborSchools began to seek funding to scale up their service, they turned to crowdfunding to seek out people who believed in the service and were able to invest. This tactic earned the company $3.5 million in seed funding, and the success caught the eye of major publications.

Even if you have just a few customers, you can use your crowdfunding campaign as a marketing tactic to get more people interested in your business.

4. Host a virtual meetup instead of a conference.

Mabl is a Boston-based SaaS provider for machine learning test automation. It makes the lives of developers who have to test their solutions way easier. To build a larger community, Mabl hosted a virtual meetup with industry experts.

Source

The meetup’s speakers educated its attendees about software testing. This idea is a cool, low-cost way to expand your professional network and provide valuable content for customers without hosting a conference.

5. Use user-generated content to tell your story.

Startups don’t usually have the revenue to produce big-budget social media campaigns. For travel agency Hopjump, their marketing team found that the best way to tell their story is on Instagram. The business page is filled with clients enjoying their destination vacations, booked using the service:

My interest in sales and marketing alignment best practices started when our Latin American sales team grew a ton in just a few weeks.

Suddenly, communication between Sales and Marketing (nicknamed “smarketing”) was much harder to get right. When we were a smaller team, I could meet one-on-one with each salesperson and talk about how we could help generate more (and better) leads … but that wasn’t scalable as we grew.

I needed help. To learn what other marketers were doing to work efficiently with their sales teams, I scheduled meetings with several members of our field and channel marketing team.

It turns out that each marketer I spoke with had great advice and processes to better work with Sales … but none of them had the same advice and process.

To help share the information across our team and with anyone else new to Sales and Marketing alignment, I decided to compile everyone’s best practices into a blog post.

Sales Alignment

Before we dive into those best practices, however, let’s take a second and discuss Sales alignment. Sales alignment refers to the steps your sales team takes to ensure they’re aligned with Marketing. Here are a few Sales alignment strategies.

Organize Sales around buyer personas.

Buyer personas aren’t just valuable to Marketing; they also educate Sales on who they’re selling to, what they care about, and how to help them. Consider your buyer personas as you organize your sales team, create sales enablement materials, set up your CRM email templates.

Designate staff to receive and qualify leads.

One avenue through which Sales and Marketing will always be connected is through lead sharing. As Marketing generates leads through content offers and campaigns, they pass them to Sales to qualify, nurture, and convert. 

Who on your Sales team accepts marketing qualified leads? If you can’t answer that question in five seconds flat, you need to review your Sales team structure and designate someone (if not a small team) to receive and assign these leads. If there’s one place where Sales and Marketing need to be aligned, this is it.

Facilitate training between teams if needed.

Have Sales hold product demonstrations for Marketing (perhaps the same ones they give prospective customers). Alternatively, ask Sales if they have had some trouble with specific questions during their calls. Smarketing is just as much about education as it is about alignment.

Sales and Marketing Best Practices

Here are some of the best smarketing tips and tricks that my colleagues use.

1. Meet regularly.

The best way for Sales and Marketing to stay connected is to, well, stay connected. Regular meetings are an effective way to avoid siloing these teams.

Have an onboarding smarketing meeting with every new salesperson.

In order to support Sales successfully, it is very important to share processes, resources, and best practices from the start. Use this time to get to know each other and share how Marketing will be supporting the sales team. If you have a large number of salespeople starting, hold a monthly meeting to set these expectations and field any questions new folks might have.

Attend sales weekly meetings.

Attending weekly sales meetings allows marketers to know how Sales is doing with their quota and goals, and offer support when needed. Use this time to share the upcoming campaigns, content, and offers that Marketing will be promoting that week. Also ask for content ideas and recommendations for your future offers and blog posts.

Have a monthly meeting with sales managers.

Marketing and sales managers should meet on a monthly basis to analyze results and evaluate their SLA. Important metrics to share are lead generation, MQLs, percent of leads worked, and lead-to-customer conversion rate.

Attend events together.

Whether it’s an industry meetup group, happy hour in your office, or an organized conference — spend time together in a casual setting. Attending an event together provides you with a unique opportunity to get to know your Sales department outside of the traditional work environment.

2. Create a team email alias.

Have an email alias that gets sent to both Sales and Marketing teams. Use this strategically to share important information in both directions. This also allows external teams to share pertinent information with both groups.

3. Have a content creation process in place.

Your sales reps are talking with prospects all the time and know what is getting them excited about your company. The problem is that a lot of times they don’t have time to write down this feedback. How can you help? Make sure to put together a process to gather this input.

Hold brainstorm sessions at weekly meetings.

Have a five-minute brainstorm session at a sales meeting to ask what content they would like to have to share with prospects or attract more leads.

Use a shared Google document to collect ideas and references.

Have a shared Google spreadsheet where Sales can add ideas or certain references for content creation.

4. Coordinate your content marketing campaigns with Sales.

Marketers are constantly promoting new offers and content, so it’s important to keep the sales team up-to-date with these promotions so they know what recent offer their leads are receiving.

Here are the basic steps for coordinating your offers with Sales:

Include your promotion on a shared calendar.

Build a Google Calendar and add the date and time of your promotion (it might be an email, webinar, or social media campaign) along with the URL, the main talking points, and description of each offer. Make sure to invite your sales team to this calendar so they can see it on their personal accounts.

Email the offer to Sales.

Once your offer has been promoted and you start getting leads, you should email the sales team with the following information:

• Offer talking points. Include two to three bullets about the offer. Assume the salesperson hasn’t read the offer — what main concepts should they know when talking to prospects? Good talking points usually include: stats, business use cases, or “how to” advice.
• Lead views. Make sure to include the list of the leads your offer is generating so Sales can take action. If you have a CRM, you can easily generate views and share them with your sales team.
• A quote of the week. Similar to the talking points, including a more general quote that Sales can use on their calls can keep the conversations up-to-date. The best quotes are the ones that are data-driven and relevant, so try to include a recent industry trend or stat.

Build follow-up email templates for your promotions.

Offers are a great way to generate new leads and re-engage old leads. Build email templates for your sales team to start a conversation. This email should be specific about the offer and how your company might help with the prospect’s interest.

5. Set shared goals — together.

Historically, Sales and Marketing function with different key performance indicators (KPIs) and, therefore, different goals. Most goals are separate — Sales may be focused on monthly revenue while Marketing hones in on website traffic.

A good smarketing strategy prioritizes shared goals, too. There are a few KPIs — like conversion rate and lead value — that both teams can measure and influence. Identify these KPIs for your sales and marketing teams can work towards.

6. Share your reporting and analysis.

What do your sales and marketing teams track and measure? What do they learn from their analysis? Just as you keep your communication and ideation channels open between Marketing and Sales, make sure each team shares their learnings, too. You never know what your salespeople and marketers could learn from seemingly unrelated KPIs and analyses.

7. Help showcase your salesperson’s expertise.

Marketing is responsible for promoting all aspects of your company, including your products, brand, and salespeople  — the folks your prospective customers will connect with and, hopefully, trust. Leverage your marketing resources to showcase your sales team’s expertise.

Ghostwrite a blog post under your salesperson’s name.

Consider ghostwriting a post under your salesperson’s name. Interview them on the topic, transcribe your conversation, and turn that into a blog post. This can help the salesperson establish credibility and familiarity with their leads.

Get them to use social media.

If your salesperson is active on social media, then encourage them to share your company’s content. You can even write some lazy social media messages for them, so all they have to do is copy and paste them on their favorite networks.

8. Shadow sales calls.

Also, take some time to sit next to your sales team and listen to their calls. This is a great learning experience that will help you step into your sales team’s shoes and see how they illustrate the business use of your product or service. You can also get ideas for future content creation and how to build some of the follow-up emails of your offers.

9. Organize sales enablement resources in one easy-to-access location.

Marketers work hard to create sales enablement resources such as brochures, company overviews, and presentations, but all that hard work goes to waste if your sales team can’t find (and use) them.

So try to keep all your sales enablement resources in one shared place where Sales can easily access them. This location is a great place to also host your campaign calendar, links to relevant offers, and specific content for a market or persona.

10. Have fun and get to know each other.

Finally, some of the most important advice is to try to get to know each other as people. Organize lunches, outings, and celebrations, and just have fun. This helps build trust among team members and ensures that people feel comfortable leaning on each other for support.

Need help coming up with an outing idea? Check out this list of 17 fun ideas — from improv workshops to karaoke.

Sales + Marketing = Smarketing

Aligning your sales and marketing team helps both teams reach their goals and boost company revenue. Apply these sales and marketing best practices to improve your smarketing strategy.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in October 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

This article is part of a series on how business is changing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other pieces in the series include HubSpot’s Chief Customer Officer on Why We Need to Talk About Growth and our VP of Marketing’s Content Marketing Playbook for Times of Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced a plethora of paradoxes.

As the rate of employment has gone down, the stock market has surged. As we find ourselves more socially distant from one another, we’re connecting more than ever with friends and family. And as growth has slowed for many companies, their digital transformation has accelerated. Dramatically.

Companies in nearly every industry have urgently adopted remote tools to allow them to support employees working from home. Millions of marketers have quickly signed up to automation software to help them move their entire marketing strategy online. And brick-and-mortar retailers have hastily acquired website management systems to enable them to spin up ecommerce sites.

Plans for gradual, carefully managed digital transformation have been torn asunder by the pandemic, and the changes that many leaders thought would take years to implement have taken place in a matter of weeks. Entire industries are now waking up in a digitally transformed world awash with new opportunities … and unknowns.

Is a remote workforce a threat to productivity or a boon for hiring? Is a fully online marketing strategy going to bring companies and customers closer together, or drive them further apart? Are rapidly adopted tech tools going to stimulate internal alignment or drive a wedge between teams?

These are the questions that companies are asking themselves as they rewrite their go-to-market strategies and charge headlong into the new economic era. The answers will largely depend on whether they welcome the tides of change or attempt to row against them. Because, with change always comes opportunity, and the businesses that view this period of upheaval as a chance to create efficient new processes, upskill employees, and better serve their customers are the ones most likely to thrive in the coming years.

To help businesses navigate their digital transformation journey with success, we’ve put together a list of five key ways in which go-to-market strategies are changing, along with advice on how to adapt to each.

1. Outside Selling ➜ Inside Selling

The pandemic has turned outside sales teams into inside sales teams overnight. And while some companies may view this change as temporary, most will witness first hand the benefits that come with inside selling and commit long-term to the model.

In the digitally transformed world, prospects and decision-makers are less likely to be located in the same office — or even in the same territory — making it all the more difficult for outside salespeople to arrange meetings. Inside selling, however, gives salespeople the opportunity to connect with prospects at any time, from any location.

Tools like live chat, 1:1 asynchronous video, and sequences — which allow sellers to schedule personalized follow-up emails to prospects — are now available as standard with many sales software products. These features enable salespeople to adapt how they sell to the way prospects want to buy and allow them to increase their productivity without losing the personal connection that comes with outside selling. In fact, inside sales teams make 43% more phone calls, leave 10% more voicemails, and send 9% more emails than organizations predominantly made up of outside sales people.

On top of that, 85% of consumers now conduct online research before making a purchase decision, meaning salespeople’s time is better spent building relationships and providing prospects with helpful information online rather than placing the majority of their focus on running in-person demos.

To successfully adapt to an inside sales model, companies should seek out sales software that’s user-friendly enough to allow their salespeople to get started quickly, while also powerful enough to provide them with a centralized view of customer data — an essential ingredient to delivering a personalized experience to prospects, even without meeting in-person. Sales leaders should also provide training to their teams on how to run effective demos online and set up webcams in a way that’s professional without being impersonal. According to Gong, using a webcam in sales calls increases the likelihood of closing a deal by an eye-catching 41%.

2. Offline Marketing ➜ Online Marketing

If there is one image that illustrates the fact the marketing world is moving from offline to online during the pandemic, it’s that of empty billboards. From Tokyo to Toronto, outdoor advertising canvases that were once in high demand have been left blank as marketers pour all of their resources into online channels. And in most industries, it’s likely to remain that way.

When a marketing strategy is fully online, it enables marketers to manage their budgets and strategies by metrics. Everything from webpage traffic and email open rates to social media engagement and digital ad ROI can be measured accurately, giving marketers a deep insight into which channels are the most effective at engaging customers. It also allows marketers to keep pace with rapid shifts in consumer behavior and adjust messaging and budgets in a matter of hours — something that takes weeks, or even months, to do with offline channels like TV and outdoor advertising.

Never have these benefits been more visible than in recent months. As many offline channels have gone quiet during the pandemic, online engagement between consumers and companies has reached record heights. According to HubSpot data, website site traffic increased by 16% from Q1 to Q2, and marketing email open rates were 18% above pre-COVID-19 levels by the beginning of Q3. Companies that were already invested in these channels have not only been able to stay engaged with customers throughout the current crisis, they have been able to quickly adjust the tone of their messaging to reflect the times and communicate important information to their audiences in a timely manner.

Companies that are embracing fully online marketing strategies for the first time should be cautious, however, to not open up too many new digital channels all at once. Doing so could overwhelm marketing teams as they’re coming to terms with new tools and tactics, and create a disjointed experience for customers. Instead, marketers should prioritize a small number of new tactics, set goals for each, and implement a system to measure progress. For example, instead of setting up accounts on every social media channel at once, which could be difficult to manage, marketers should choose one or two platforms that suit their brand and seek to build an engaged audience there before branching out. Similarly, teams seeking to implement an email marketing strategy for the first time should choose software that includes analytics features like A/B testing in order to closely monitor what’s resonating with audiences.

3. Traditional Customer Service ➜ Self-Service

During the pandemic, the volume of customer-initiated chat interactions has increased by 45%, and self-service options like this will go from being a “nice to have” to a “must have” in the eyes of consumers in the digitally transformed world.

When a business empowers its customers to self-serve, everyone wins. Automated chat, for example, helps customers find solutions to issues more quickly than if they had to email or call a helpline, while also freeing up customer service staff to work on more complex customer issues. Businesses that had a chatbot on their website prior to the pandemic were well-positioned to manage the increased volume of queries that accompanied the crisis, and from here on, customers will expect to be able to have their questions answered in minutes without having to pick up a phone. After all, according to Nuance Enterprise, 67% of customers prefer to use self-service options instead of speaking with a company representative.

Automated chat is just one of a number of ways businesses can provide self-service options to their customers. Companies should also consider building a knowledge base — a collection of resources that offer guidance on common queries — and creating product training videos for new customers. HubSpot’s version of this, HubSpot Academy, saw traffic double between March and May, highlighting the growing desire of customers to engage with high-quality, on-demand video that enables them to become more skilled with the products they use.

4. Funnel ➜ Flywheel

According to research conducted by HubSpot in the midst of the pandemic, consumers cite “customer care” as the single greatest influence on their sentiment towards a company. As more companies come to see customer experience as the key to growth in the post-pandemic world, many will abandon the funnel model in favor of the flywheel.

While the funnel focuses exclusively on acquiring customers, the flywheel is built to delight them over the course of their entire journey with a company. When companies embrace the flywheel, it enables them to place the customer at the center of everything, from how they attract and engage customers to how they help them achieve long-term success. Thinking of the customer journey in this way helps companies to identify the areas of their business in which they can remove friction and apply force in the name of delivering an experience so delightful, customers can’t help but tell others.

There are three key steps to take when adopting the flywheel model.

Firstly, companies should identify their core business metrics so that they can monitor progress and identify areas for improvement. Secondly, they should look for the parts of the flywheel in which they can add more force, in other words, the aspects of their business that have the greatest impact on key metrics. At HubSpot for example, we increased force by introducing a self-purchase option for prospects, expanding our knowledge base, and creating a dedicated customer marketing team to ensure that outgoing communications were consistent.

As a third step, companies should identify points of friction that counteract force in their flywheel. A good starting point for companies seeking to reduce friction is to analyze the experience a customer has when they move from being the responsibility of the sales team to the customer success or service team. Does their new point of contact at the company have historical information about their purchase experience and pain points? If not, there could be an opportunity to remove friction by introducing a process or system that shares new customer information between different teams.

5. Bloated Tech Stack ➜ Lean Tech Stack

As companies accelerate their digital transformation, many are rapidly adopting a vast array of new technologies. The ample choice of powerful tools available at companies’ fingertips is unquestionably a positive thing, but there are potential downsides to consider. For example, when a businesses rushes to move its entire operation online — as many are now having to do — they run the risk of taking on a host of disparate tools that don’t work well together, leaving them with a bloated tech stack that creates data silos, increases administrative work, and makes it difficult for teams to stay aligned.

In the digitally transformed world, we will see an increase in companies seeking to shed their tech debt and construct a lean suite of tools that enables them to move quickly in the post-pandemic era.

When building a tech stack, companies should select a system that gives all internal teams access to a single source of truth on customer data. Without this, customer-facing staff will be working off different information, making it monumentally difficult to deliver the type of seamless, contextual experience that customers now expect. Additionally, businesses should consider how easy or difficult it is to integrate additional tools with their platform of choice. In order to keep a tech stack lean, companies need the freedom to build it in a way that suits their unique needs.

The Great Acceleration

The 1930s brought with it the Great Depression. Ten years ago, the Great Recession took hold. As an optimist, I hope this time will be remembered by businesses as “The Great Acceleration” — a time when companies in every industry and region underwent a rapid digital transformation that defined a new economic era.

The go-to-market playbook for this era will be one made up of inside selling, online marketing, and self-service options for customers, underpinned by a flywheel mindset, and powered by a lean tech stack that enables them to keep pace with customer expectations. Companies that embrace these new strategies are the ones most likely to navigate these times with success and thrive in the post-pandemic world. And it is my hope that in years to come, businesses will look back on The Great Acceleration and remember it not for the economic stagnation that took hold, but rather for the rapid progress that took flight.

 

With a purchasing power of more than $143 billion, Gen Z is expected to shake up the retail industry.

Although many in Gen Z are earning their first paychecks, entering college, or just joining the workforce, studies already show that the generation shops and spends money much differently than its millennial predecessor.

For example, while millennials enjoy primarily shopping online, Gen Z — an age group which is even more connected to technology — surprisingly prefers shopping in stores. Additionally, while millennials and past generations were more loyal to brands, Gen Z is more interested in buying products that will give them the best value based on their price.

Why is Gen Z so budget-conscious?

Why is Gen Z so conscientious about their spending habits? Mounting research suggests that the age groups’ thoughts on money link directly to the economic era they were raised in.

While millennials grew up in more stable financial times, most of Gen Z’s earliest memories took place during the U.S. recession. Much of this generation grew up in highly budgeted households or saw how their families were impacted by economic troubles.

Meanwhile, a large percentage of millennials, as well as those in other age groups. are able to recollect times where their economy was booming. Organizations including the Pew Research Center say these eras have psychologically molded how each generation thinks differently about money. While researchers believe both millennials and Gen Z are money conscious, with goals of avoiding financial instability, millennials are considered to be “more optimistic” future finances.

As Gen Z ages, studies and purchasing behaviors hint that they haven’t been able to shake their concerns of financial instability. Much research shows that to get Gen Z to invest in a product or service, the offering needs to be so valuable to them that they can justify purchasing it.

In recent years, data about Gen Z’s purchasing habits have concerned many brands and marketers, especially those that rely on frills and brand loyalty to sell their products. Many have also asked, “If Gen Z is focused on saving money, what will they actually buy?”

Luckily, there’s plenty of data that reveals which products are most valuable to Gen Z. This data can help marketers learn more about Gen Z’s purchasing motives and execute on campaigns that better acknowledge how their products can be valuable to those in the age group.

To help brands market to Gen Z when they reach full purchasing power, here’s a list of five items, services, or product categories you can expect them to invest in.

5 Things Gen Z Will Spend Money On

1. Gen Z will spend money on education.

While millennials are one of the most highly educated age groups, Gen Z is on track to have the best level of education. At this point, Gen Z’s already been shown to start saving for college at a much younger age than millennials.

As members of the generation enroll in college or begin to spend their own money, news outlets have predicted and reported bursts in school-related purchases fueled by Gen Z shoppers.

Aside from purchasing supplies, Gen Z is also likely to invest in courses or educational programs that will advance their future earnings. In fact, while 62% of Gen Z will take classes or learn new skills if it makes them better at their job, 59% will do the same if it will boost their salary.

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In fact, due to the rising costs of college, most of Gen Z has deprioritized non-essential purchases just to save money for academic investments.

Gen Z’s interest in saving money and frugal purchasing behaviors aren’t that shocking. One recent study projects that three-quarters of Gen Z will have student loans at graduation. More than 60% of the age group is also expected to have college debt beyond $25,000.

Ultimately, many researchers believe that Gen Z’s interest in academia is rooted in their need for financial stability. Many in the age group believe that a good education will lead to a great job with high pay.

As a marketer, it’s important to keep Gen Z’s budgeting and educational goals in mind. This generation wants to learn new things, is saving for college, and prioritizes investments that better their future. You’ll need to convince them that your product is worth buying — even when they’re putting most of their money into a college fund.

As you create your product promotions or campaigns, consider how your product could help or benefit the experiences of someone planning for college, college students, or young professionals.

If your product isn’t specifically geared towards education, your campaigns could zone in on how it could improve a college or work-life experience. For example, if you’re marketing furniture, you could create a promotion that highlights products that would fit in an apartment or dorm room. Or, if you market a clothing company, you could highlight clothing items that could be worn in a job interview in a blog post on your website.

Aside from creating content that directly links your product to career interests or academics, you can also lean into Gen Z’s need to learn new things by developing educational content that teaches audiences about your industry. After viewing your educational content, audiences might want to learn more about your product and develop a stronger sense of trust for your brand. Later, if they’re interested in buying a product related to your brand’s industry, they might consider your brand first.

If you want to leverage educational content, keep the age range of your audience in mind. While younger members of Gen Z might be primarily interested in B2C brand content due to their college or high-school age, Gen Zers entering internships or the workforce might value educational B2B content that can show them how to get ahead in their industry.

2. Gen Z will splurge on experiences.

Despite being linked to heavy social media use, researchers say most of Gen Z likes to take breaks from social media and screens from time to time.

In a recent study, 95% of Gen Z participants under 24 admitted to feeling stressed “somewhat often” or “very often.” Participants then pointed to online activity, homework, and finances as triggers that have caused physical or emotional signs of stress.

To ease stress, many participants of the study said they took breaks from screen time, read books, or left their home to find in-person experiences.

According to Snap Inc. and GlobalWebIndex, Gen Z is actually more intrigued by experiences than millennials. For example, Gen Z is more likely to view local art and try out adventure or extreme sports activities than millennials. Below are just a few of Gen Z’s top overall interests, according to the study:

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While Gen Z values products and services that will benefit their future and help them navigate major pain points, they also still like to budget time and money for experiences such as dining out, local excursions, or occasional travel.

Although Gen Z will invest in something that will offer them positive life experience, you should still keep the age group’s budget conscientiousness in mind if you’re marketing something to them. Because they care about cost and value, Gen Z members might heavily research a restaurant, excursion, or travel service before spending money on it.

If you’re a brand that sells excursion or in-person experiences, simply placing a few colorful stock photos on your website might not pull in Gen Z. You might have to take a step further by including detailed information about your offerings, highlighting positive reviews, and even launching a blog that provides more information and demonstrates your credibility.

If your brand sells physical items rather than excursions, consider creating messaging that highlights how your products can improve or boost an experience.

For example, if you sell coffee, you could create an ad showing a tired young adult energizing themselves with a sip of coffee before a day of adventuring in the wilderness. Or, if you sell clothing, your ads could highlight how they’re perfect for outings like vacations or nice dinners out. Regardless of the product, tell a story about an experience Gen Z is interested in and then explain how your product can help them.

3. Gen Z prioritizes essential products, services, and utilities.

Like millennials, life experiences and education matter to Gen Z. However, as a frugal generation, the age group still wants to make sure they have enough money for essential products such as food, health products, and home supplies.

Putting essential budgeting first was a clear theme that Vice discovered when its journalists interviewed a handful of Gen Z members about their lifestyle and purchasing habits. Almost all of the participants explained that they would invest more in essential products rather than buying products related to fun, entertainment, fashion, or fan loyalty.

If your brand sells essential products, like food, cleaning supplies, or medication, there are two things you’ll want to do.

First, create marketing content that acknowledges and reminds Gen Z audiences of why your products are so essential and worth budgeting for.

Second, keep in mind that even if your products are essential, Gen Zers might still research them, read the box before making a purchase, or compare them to other items in the same aisle. Because many brands make essential products, you’ll want to create messaging that notes why your product is more effective or a better bargain than all the other versions of it out there.

If your brand doesn’t sell an essential product, it’s even more important to create marketing materials that establish a need for your product, how it can help customers solve for daily pain points, and why it’s worth a Gen Z member’s hard-earned money. Remember that Gen Z’s first purchasing priority might not be your product, then think of ways you can still grab their attention anyways.

Not sure how to establish a sense of need when your product isn’t essential? Below is an example of content from InfoArmor, an information security service owned by Allstate. In the recent tweet, InfoArmor shared a blog post about the dangers of information security when working remotely and how InfoArmor could protect remote employee information.

When reading the tweet or the blog post attached to it, a person in Gen Z or any age group might identify where they might run into information security risks and might consider purchasing the product to keep their information safe.

On average, Gen Z spends more than four hours per day online, which trumps past generations — including millennials. As the most hyper-connected generation that’s existed so far, it’s not shocking to think that Gen Z will spend money on technology. However, because they’re financially conscious, many in the age group will prioritize buying the most essential or useful technologies. For example, nearly 100% of Gen Z own a smartphone, 70% own a computer, and 30% own a tablet.

Gen Z will invest in technology.

Aside from technological essentials, Gen Z will occasionally splurge on technological experiences that help them have fun, such as video games. In fact, a 2019 study found that two-thirds of Gen Z men say gaming is a “core component” of who they are.

While you might worry that Gen Z isn’t worth marketing to because they won’t splurge on your products, this age group certainly can be persuaded to make larger purchases that offer fun experiences or improve their daily lives.

But, even though they will invest in higher-priced products, Gen Z will still need thorough convincing before pulling out their wallets. As noted above, it’s incredibly important for brands targeting Gen Z to create content that demonstrates why the age group needs their product, how the product could solve daily boredom or woes, and why it’s better than a competitor’s.

For example, although some consumers might consider Fitbit fitness trackers frivolous, this brand does a great job of explaining why their product can be a necessary tool to use within a fitness routine.

On social media, Fitbit gives facts about why walking and cardio — two activities the bracelet can track — are important to health. And, in a November blog post, Fitbit more deeply connected its product to health needs by discussing how its reporting software could help people communicate better with their doctors. 

While Fitbit doesn’t claim its product is necessary for health, the brand shows audiences how the product can be used to help them track their fitness needs and progress.

When a pessimistic or budget-conscious Gen-Z member researches Fitbit, they might find its content informative and helpful. From there, if they’re interested in a healthier lifestyle, they might realize that Fitbit is a credible brand that could help them with their fitness needs.

Gen Z prefers to buy low-priced clothing.

A recent Business Insider report revealed that Gen Z isn’t easily persuaded by a logo when it comes to clothing. In fact, unlike other generations, brand loyalty is one of the last things they think about when making a purchasing decision. What the generation does focus on is price and value.

In the Business Insider report, a 20-year-old named Amanda Chermin explained, “I can’t afford nicer brands of clothes — I like to save and would rather have money in the bank than be broke.”

Instead of splurging on the hottest brand from New York Fashion Week, the age group, which also prefers to shop in stores, is more likely to purchase cheaper clothing that’s either not from a name brand, on clearance, or re-sold.

Although they aren’t loyal to the same stores and brands millennials zoned in on, Gen Z still feels pressure to buy and wear clothing that’s considered good quality or fashionable. Aside from purchasing affordable clothing, the need to look their best has also led to many in Gen Z to invest in clothing rental services or try-before-you-buy shopping experiences.

Although Gen Z is expected to spend less money on clothing than other generations, researchers believe they still feel pressure to look good in front of their peers. These pressures, which might stem from social media, school, work, or social environments will still drive the age group to clothing stores or ecommerce sites. While retail marketers should expect shifts in spending behaviors from this generation, Gen Z will still buy clothing that looks good on them, is good quality, and has an affordable price.

The themes related to clothing purchases are important to keep in mind — even if you aren’t marketing clothing products. As we’ve established, Gen Zers are always looking for a good bargain and won’t use just a brand name to justify a purchase. Regardless of how popular or well-known your brand is, you’ll still need to highlight why your products are better than cheaper versions from competitors.

Although your logo might not persuade Gen Z to buy your product, you can still use authentic brand trust and popularity to your advantage. Although Gen Z is budget-conscious, they also care about what their peers think of them. This means that they might still feel a need to splurge on a product, such as a clothing item, if they know that people in their age group have it.

If you’re marketing to Gen Z, consider asking popular influencers or happy young adult customers to discuss your product on social media. An authentic product review will not only build a sense of brand trust, but it will also show Gen Z audiences that the product is popular and being used by people they follow. From there, a Gen Z member might research or purchase a product simply because it’s more popular or has better reviews than a cheaper alternative.

How to Market to a Money-Conscious Generation

Based on research noted above, Gen Z is less likely to splurge on frivolous products or brand names. As a marketer, hearing about these mounting studies might make you nervous.

But, in the long run, the consumer trend of putting value first shouldn’t scare or shock you. In fact, it should motivate you to ask, “How can I provide better value to my customers?”

Although Gen Z might seem more budget-conscious, this doesn’t mean they won’t buy anything from you at all. In fact, many of your most frugal prospects will still buy, invest in, or splurge on your brand’s offerings if they seem valuable, help them solve pain points, or provide a positive, memorable experience.

Ultimately, bettering your brand, focusing on the customer experience, and promoting positive company reviews will go a long way with Gen Z and all other audiences.

Interested in learning more about Gen Z? Check out these stats pieces on their demographics and their workforce aspirations. You can also read more about their online content consumption habits her

If you’re looking to learn about both Gen Z and millennials, check out this comparison piece.

Earlier today, I visited Yelp to order lunch. What I always really liked about the site is how easy it is to navigate. If I were accessing the website for the first time, I wouldn’t have any worries about how to use it to my benefit.

Have you ever visited a website and noticed small phrases of text that guide you to your goal? Or, when you make an online purchase, is there text on the web page that lets you know your payment information is secure?

That text is called microcopy, and it’s a wonderful tool for UX. For instance, let’s say I was visiting Yelp for the first time today, without knowing what the website’s purpose was. I wouldn’t have to worry because the microcopy helps fill in that confusion.

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In the search bar, the microcopy tells me the types of things I could search, and where I can set my location. “Burgers, barbers, spas, handymen…” are all examples of what I can find using the site, which is super helpful for a first-time user.

Additionally, the location settings tell me I could search for businesses near me or elsewhere. So when I move in a couple of weeks, I won’t have to wait until I arrive to search for restaurants near my new place.

It’s likely you’ve interacted with microcopy before and it gave you useful information, like how to search for something and secure payment information. It’s meant to add to the user experience of visitors on websites, and in this post, we’ll get into how it works.

Microcopy is a part of almost every website. When you visit a website for the first time and a newsletter pops up, the text you see is an example. When you come across a headline describing the product, or find a sentence that gives a web page more context, you’re interacting with microcopy.

But what exactly is microcopy, and how is it helpful?

When was the last time you tweeted or made a Facebook status? Do you remember the microcopy that shows up before you start typing? This short phrases asks you to complete an action — like typing out what’s happening, or what’s on your mind:

As someone who’s been tweeting for years, I don’t even notice the microcopy. But let’s say I’ve just joined Twitter and have no idea how to compose a tweet, or what to tweet. “What’s happening?” is a useful prompt to help out — I now know I can type what’s going on around me and press “Tweet.”

In this case, the microcopy tells the user how to do something and inspires action with a button. Even though it’s subtle, the addition of microcopy on Twitter gives instructions and answers questions a new user might have before they can ask them.

Microcopy gives extra explanation. For instance, if your website offers a niche product, you can use a microcopy headline to give first-time visitors an idea of why your product is valuable. Alternatively, if you’re introducing a new product, microcopy can describe it in more detail.

If you’ve ever filled in a form, explored a product page, or sourced contact information, you’ve come across microcopy that supports a brand and its services. For instance, if you forget your login to one of your favorite websites, the microcopy most likely reminded you how to do so.

Microcopy is part of the user experience. It’s a tactic you can use to support the overall story as your brand, as well as describe some of the complexities of your product, right off the bat.

To produce great microcopy, you need to have a deep understanding of your target audience. Once you know more about them, the questions they might have, and the information they need to know, microcopy can serve as an effective part of your website.

Let’s look at some examples of brands who know how to speak the language of their customers and make use of effective microcopy.

Microcopy Examples

MIcrocopy can come in a few different forms. It doesn’t have to be extremely tiny, or fit into a search bar. Sometimes, it’s bold. It all depends on the copy’s intended purpose and the design of the website.

Let’s see how some brands are using microcopy effectively to enhance the user experience.

1. HubSpot

This microcopy example on HubSpot’s homepage explains the product. In two sentences, visitors gain an idea of what HubSpot’s tools do, and how it can help them.

The language is personable and easy to read. In support of the CTA, the microcopy leads into the value of getting started or trying out a demo. It inspires action.

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Notice how the text isn’t necessarily small, either. This is alright if the theme of your website allows for larger text. Microcopy is more about communicating a helpful message to your audience, regardless of text size.

2. Wear Your Voice

Wear Your Voice is an online publication dedicated to bringing a spotlight to marginalized voices, sparking communication about topical issues, and providing a safe space for audiences to learn.

This microcopy is what you see on the homepage as part of a newsletter offer. It lets the reader know that they won’t receive spam. Not only that, but the microcopy in the space communicates how to receive the newsletters, by entering an email.

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If you want to use microcopy in a subtle way to increase conversions, utilize a strategy that’s similar. Include it in a form space or to inform browsers about any concern they may have that would stop them from completing the CTA.

3. Honey

Honey is an app extension that saves its users money every time they make an online purchase. Because this service is niche, the website provides helpful microcopy about how it works.

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The headers act as an introduction to the thought, and the microcopy supports the steps. This microcopy is organized, but doesn’t take up too much space. Additionally, the phrases are short and easy to comprehend.

For a service that may seem complicated at first, simplified steps are an excellent measure to ensure leads know how Honey can add value to their lives. If your product or service is niche, consider using microcopy to explain how it works in a comprehensible way, like Honey.

4. Shea Makery

When it comes to branding and brand voice, microcopy is a great asset. Take this example from Shea Makery, a bakery-themed body care ecommerce store. The text used on the site contributes to the overall tone of the brand and ties in a CTA.

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“So much to choose from, all guilt-free with zero calories!” Introduces the brand with fun, compelling microcopy. The short, rhyming sentence plays up the whimsical, cheerful atmosphere of the website, and the baking attribution speaks to the overall theme of the company.

Maybe your business is heavily influenced by a theme, like Shea Makery. If that’s the case, microcopy with sensory details, like sight, can influence leads to browse your offerings.

5. The Canadian African

Rather than have a separate “About Me” page, this health food blog uses microcopy for the introduction. On the right panel of the website, The Canadian African, you can see a short description of the site and the person in charge.

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The copy is short and simple, but still tells the reader what they’ll find on the site. By adding a photo, above the text, the website becomes more personable. So if you’re running a solo venture and want to appeal to your target audience, consider using microcopy to introduce yourself on the homepage.

We’ve seen microcopy in action — and how it comes in many different forms. If you’re pumped to compose some great copy of your own, that’s great! Before you do, make sure you check out these best practices.

Microcopy Best Practices

To make microcopy effective, keep in mind these quick tips before you get going. If you’re struggling to come up with copy that works for you, consider these options when you’re working through adding it to your site.

1. Understand your audience’s needs.

One of the keys to writing great microcopy is understanding your audience. If you know what they’re looking for when they visit your website, what you write can help guide them. For instance, if you know audiences will want to know how to log in to your website, use microcopy in those fields to tell them how.

To learn more about your audience and what microcopy will be helpful, refer to your buyer personas. They’ll outline the challenges of your ideal customer, so you’ll have a clue of how to leverage microcopy. Let’s say your persona is the busy marketer looking for an all-in-one CRM — your product page microcopy can allude to that challenge, like “Our tools take the stresses away from what you love doing.”

Alternatively, you can run a few heatmap tests for your website to gain insight about where your audience is clicking the most. Could the areas that aren’t getting the most traffic benefit from copy that speaks the customer’s language?

2. Focus on brief phrasing.

As marketers, know that one of the “don’ts” of website design is to avoid loads of text. After all, very few of us want to read a novel on a website that sells computer software. So when you’re writing microcopy, make it brief.

The purpose of microcopy is to guide, inform, or support. Typically, it’s no longer than one sentence. This is because it’s not supposed to be the star of your website, but rather, a helpful addition.

When you visit a website for the first time and immediately see an offer, notice the microcopy. Does it have a quippy, witty phrase that persuades you to complete the form? That’s an example of accurately leveraging microcopy to your advantage.

3. Make your copy actionable.

A great way to use microcopy is to get customers to complete an action on your website. We’ve briefly talked about how offer and form microcopy can be useful for conversion.

In addition to forms and offers, microcopy can be used in ads, captions, and on product pages. It could persuade audiences to take the intended action. If you use microcopy in tandem with a CTA, for example, you could make an ad incredibly effective — tell the audiences what the benefit will be after engaging.

If there’s areas on your website that could benefit from an actionable phrase that’s too long for a CTA button, consider making it microcopy instead. That way, it can support the CTA without adding too much text.

4. Add in your brand voice.

Another great use for microcopy is to give more definition to your brand. Maybe you find your website comes off slightly impersonal, but you don’t want to crowd pages with extra body text. Try using microcopy to fill in that gap.

Because microcopy isn’t a headline or body text, there’s more freedom to use it to support your company’s mission, vision, and beliefs. Communicate with your audience in a personable way in a short phrase, and you’ll have a higher chance of building a solid customer relationship.

This tactic will make your web pages more inviting. It’ll spark intrigue with your target audience, and let them know what truly sets your company apart from competitors.

5. Be careful with going overboard.

As we’ve talked about, too much text isn’t appealing. If leads find there’s too much to read on your site, they might become disinterested and click to another. The same is true with microcopy.

Microcopy works best when it supports other text or inspires action. It should serve a purpose and be used sparingly. An overload of microcopy can be too hard to read — remember, the text is usually small.

If you’re worried you’re using too much microcopy, try running an A/B test for your web pages. That way, you can determine the winner based on audience behavior.

Many of us can recall a time in high school when we were sitting in math class and thinking, “When am I ever going to use this stuff in the real world?”

And then we suddenly find ourselves in the real world, only to realize that numbers actually do play a pivotal role in what we do — especially in digital marketing.

The trouble is, many marketers are right-brained, meaning Excel spreadsheets riddled with numbers and formulas aren’t all that inviting. Making them from scratch can be especially intimidating.

While we won’t argue with that, we will say that the advantages of leveraging Excel’s functionality to organize information and streamline tasks are unparalleled. To help those of you looking for a way to sharpen your skills, we’ve put together a detailed list of ways you can start using Excel to simplify your marketing tasks. Complete with templates, these suggestions will have you making strides in no time. Know what’s even better? You can download this full collection of Excel templates in one fell swoop.

1. A Marketing Budget Template

While marketing budgets vary from business to business, the need for structure and a clear sense of alignment between your goals and your spending is critical across the board. To ensure you’re always prepared for unanticipated costs, it’s important that you’re not only allocating your budget thoughtfully and properly, but that you’re also keeping tabs on how closely you’re sticking to your projected expenses.

If you want to avoid a mess at the end of the month or quarter, take a look at this collection of 8 marketing budget templates, designed to help you organize your marketing spend better. From product marketing, to website redesign, to content marketing, to events, these templates serve as a guide for marketers to visualize and track their expenses to avoid overspending.

The collection also contains a master marketing budget template that’ll help you generate a high-level visualization of your marketing budget on both a month-by-month and quarterly basis.

2. Social Media Posting Schedule

You might already use a social media scheduler to manage and publish your posts every week, but you still need a place to draft your social copy and decide which posts will go to which social networks.

And because most social media schedulers allow you to upload social post copy in bulk, from a spreadsheet, it behooves you to have an Excel template designed for this purpose. With that in mind, we created the Excel template shown above.

This social media posting schedule allows you to draft each social post, the date/time it is to be posted, the message you want to publish, and any link you want to accompany your message (that link could be a blog post, registration page, an ebook landing page, you name it).

Once you’ve drafted all of your social posts for the week, month, or quarter, you can sort them by social network and upload your Excel file into your social media platform of choice.

3. A Blog Editorial Calendar

Blogging plays a significant role in your ability to attract visitors and leads to your website. But managing a blog is one of those responsibilities that’s easier said than done.

Whether you’re struggling with ideation, consistency, or simply just lacking organization, an editorial calendar can often serve as the solution you need to refocus your blogging efforts and generate even more traffic and leads from your content. Visualize the blog posts you plan to publish in a given week or month makes it easier to define overarching themes, keep track of ideas, manage contributions, and prioritize strategic distribution.

Use this editorial calendar template as the starting point for keeping track of all of your business’ content. It’ll help you be more mindful of topic selection, buyer personas, keyword inclusions, and CTA alignment.

4. A SMART Goal Matrix

Whether you’re planning for a new year, quarter, or month, defining a clear set of goals is critical for driving the direction of your marketing efforts and priorities.

Do you need help not only setting marketing objectives, but actually achieving them? Start with these SMART goal planning templates. Rooted in specificity, measurability, attainability, relevancy, and timeliness, these templates will help you set your team up for success while providing you with a tool for identifying your greatest marketing needs.

5. An On-Page SEO Template

When it comes to SEO, there’s a lot for marketers to remember in order to see results. (Put another way, there’s a lot for marketers to forget.) With search engines evolving and algorithm changes turning your existing strategy on its head from time to time, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed and push off revamping your SEO strategy. However, SEO should never be treated like an afterthought.

If you’re looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, pull up this handy SEO template created in Excel. Designed to make the process of managing your SEO efforts a whole lot easier, marketers can use this template to guide their strategy step-by-step or pass it off to their webmaster to serve as a helpful guide. It focuses on not keywords and SEO best practices while providing tips and tricks to identify nuances and increase productivity.

6. A Google Ads Campaign Tracker

If you’re doing your Google Ads campaigns right, they probably aren’t exactly walks in the park. That’s because to get the most bang for your buck, you’ve set up multiple campaigns with multiple ad groups and have variations of your campaigns — all with different content. Not only that, you’re (hopefully) also keeping track of those campaigns to determine which ones to shut off, add more money to, or tweak.

Sounds like a lot to keep track of, right? But take a deep breath. This Google Ads tracking template can keep you on top of your Google Ads game. It’ll help you catch mistakes and implement best practices across all the different campaigns and ad groups you’re running — for the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. Not to mention, it’s a perfect complement to that SEO template you’ve started using.

7. A Social Media Content Calendar

Since you’re probably generating tons of clicks from your Google Ads campaigns and writing awesome content thanks to your blogging editorial calendar, you’re going to need some help figuring out how to spread the love on social. We’ve got just the thing.

The social media calendar template is the perfect resource for helping you scale and streamline your social media marketing. When you use Excel to break out separate worksheets for each social network you’re using, you’ll be able to keep a repository of content ideas so you’re never struck by writer’s block, and always have something to post.

It’s also worth mentioning that Excel really comes in handy when it comes to Twitter, as it has the ability to count your characters to help you write tweets that stay within the 140 character limit.

8. Lead Scoring & Tracking Template

It’s no secret that sales and marketing are known to have a pretty rocky relationship history. Sales might think marketing isn’t generating enough leads, while marketing might think their sales reps aren’t capitalizing on the leads they’re sending over. When it comes down to it, though, finger-pointing doesn’t grow a business.

In an effort to better align your sales and marketing teams, turn to this template for creating a service-level agreement (SLA). Generally speaking, an SLA is a contract that defines the expectations sales has for marketing leads (both quantity and quality), as well as the expectations that marketing has for how sales will act on qualified leads.

With this customizable SLA template in your toolbox, you’ll have the information you need to reduce tension, define a concrete monthly lead generation goal, track and measure the success of specific lead generation channels, and keep close tabs on your current sales close rates.

9. A Leads and Traffic Goal Calculator

You have to set a leads goal, but you don’t know where to start. Then, once you finally figure that out, you have to determine how much traffic you need to hit that goal … but you’re not sure what approach to take there, either.

Sounds like you could use hand calculating your leads and traffic goals. Luckily, there’s an Excel template for that. Rather than try to sort of these numbers on your own, this template is designed to take care of the math and leave you with a clear picture of what you need to accomplish in order to achieve your traffic and leads goals and ensure the health of your inbound marketing strategy.

10. Your Monthly Marketing Metrics

Is there a feeling sweeter than hitting all of your goals for the month? How about communicating your success to your boss? Excel spreadsheets can be used to prepare comprehensive reports of your marketing metrics to send off to your boss — and there’s no need to work from scratch. (After all, you’ve already so worked hard this month.)

To simplify your reporting, check out these monthly marketing metrics templates (and the corresponding PowerPoint template). Each, month, you can update them quickly and easily to reflect your monthly visits, leads, customers, and conversion rates. From there, you’ll have everything you need to accurately track and report on which channels are performing best. Every boss loves to see ROI, so you can’t go wrong with these templates.

11. Essential KPI Tracker

If you’re a fan of the monthly metrics template — item #10 on this list — you might want to grab a copy of this template as well. The essential KPI tracker, shown above, takes the metrics your marketing team has agreed to track and describes them in more detail.

KPI stands for “key performance indicator” — they’re basically your most important metrics, each with a unique purpose and place in your marketing strategy. Using this template, you can assign specific employees to each KPI, define the frequency at which you’ll monitor each KPI’s performance, and assign each KPI a color that reflects the quality of that KPI’s performance.

If one of your KPIs is organic traffic, for example, you can set up your template such that 100 page views per month is red (poor performance), 500 page views/month is yellow (stable performance), and 1000 page views/month is green (great performance).

Data is any marketer’s friend, and even though spreadsheets seem like they’ve been around forever, Microsoft Excel has so many capabilities that still make it an amazing resource for displaying, organizing, analyzing, and parsing data. With a little bit of Excel magic, you can streamline your workflow and/or arrive at some a-ha moments from data insights.

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

The definition of a whitepaper varies heavily from industry to industry, which can be a little confusing for marketers looking to create one for their business.

The old-school definition comes from politics, where it means a legislative document explaining and supporting a particular political solution.

In tech, a whitepaper usually describes a theory behind a new piece of technology. Even a business whitepaper can serve a variety of uses and audiences — some more product-focused than others. And although it is put together like an ebook, the two are written quite differently.

We’re here to arm you with the best definition of a whitepaper in the context of business and what to do (and not do) as you create one. This article covers: 

• What is a whitepaper?
• How to write a whitepaper
• Whitepaper examples

What Is a Whitepaper?

A whitepaper is a persuasive, authoritative, in-depth report on a specific topic that presents a problem and provides a solution.

Marketers create whitepapers to educate their audience about a particular issue, or explain and promote a particular methodology. They’re advanced problem-solving guides. Typically, whitepapers require at least an email address for download (usually they require information more than that), making them great for capturing leads.

What Isn’t a Whitepaper?

A product pitch.

Although Investopedia defines a whitepaper as “an informational document issued by a company to promote or highlight the features of a solution, product, or service,” be warned that overtly shilling your own stuff could turn off your readers.

The goal of a whitepaper is to inform and persuade based on facts and evidence, not tell the world why people need to buy your product right now.

How Are Whitepapers Different From Blog Posts and Ebooks?

Speaking of what a whitepaper isn’t … if you’re looking for a quick and interactive way to present your value to the industry, a whitepaper is not your only option. There are also ebooks and blog posts — both of which have various differences from a whitepaper.

What really set these products apart are the size, appearance, and time commitment of each one. Whereas writing blog posts and ebooks can take anywhere between a few hours and a few weeks, a good whitepaper can take between a few weeks and a few months to write and polish. They’re less flashy, much more serious in tone, and more heavily researched than blog posts and ebooks.

Let me show you a comparison. The set below is one of our own ebook templates (which you can get for free here). It’s a thorough but simple read:

  

Now, here is a whitepaper based on our latest research on emerging tech for small to mid-sized businesses (a great report — see the web version here). You can see how much detail whitepapers can go into, both in text and in its images:

   Images via HubSpot Research [PDF]

Ebooks and whitepapers can start on the same template. But ultimately, whitepapers are the academic papers of marketing content. Readers expect a high degree of expertise backed by solid research that is fully documented by references.

Ebooks, on the other hand, are often extensions of a subject you cover regularly on a blog. They can come out of diligent research, but they appeal to a wider audience when unpacking a business subject.

You can imagine this makes them kind of boring in comparison — truthfully, most people don’t actually want to read whitepapers, but they do it anyway to build their knowledge of an operation they need more insight on before making their next move.

For this reason, they tend to be particularly detailed and informative, authoritative, and written by industry experts. And these qualities can make some decision makers feel better about a future purchase.

What Makes a Good Whitepaper?

Technically, there are no minimum requirements for whitepapers. Anyone can call anything a whitepaper — this doesn’t mean you should, though. Without some boundaries on what is and what isn’t a whitepaper, we risk confusing our audience and losing credibility. Here’s what an A+ whitepaper looks like:

• Length: No fewer than six pages, including illustrations, charts, and references. Can be upwards of 50 if the topic requires that much detail. (Chances are, it won’t.)
• Structure: There is usually a title page, table of contents, short executive summary (optional but helpful), introduction, several pages educating the reader about the problem, several pages hypothesizing a solution, several pages offering an example of a company that used that solution to achieve results, and a conclusion.
• Density: Denser than an ebook. Whitepapers aren’t usually easy to skim — in fact, readers usually need to read them over more than once to get every morsel of information out of it.
• Format: PDF in portrait orientation (8.5″ by 11″).
• Style: Professional, serious, well written, and well edited. I’d recommend hiring a graphic designer to design page layout, images, fonts, and colors as well.

Whitepaper Examples for Lead Generation

So, if whitepapers are so boring, why do marketers create them? Well, they’re a great resource for your prospects and sales team, and they help you build credibility and trust with your readers. Also, people who choose to download whitepapers often are further into the customer buying cycle.

With that in mind, here are two use cases for a whitepaper:

A Technical Case Study

It’s been said that case studies, like ebooks, are very different from whitepapers. However, some case studies are long enough that they’re best packaged as whitepapers themselves.

A case study is essentially the story of a customer’s success reaching a goal as a result of their partnership with another party. This success is best conveyed through certain metrics the customer has agreed to be measured on. And depending on how technical or complex the service is that they received, the more research and detail other potential customers will want to see as they continue their buyer’s journey.

Therefore, case study-based whitepapers can be a terrific way of demonstrating thought leadership on a dense concept through a real-world example of how this concept helped someone else succeed.

A Reference Guide

Imagine you work for a company that sells kitchen cleaning equipment to restaurants and you write a whitepaper about the maintenance and inspection of commercial kitchens.

That whitepaper is probably chock full of information about legal requirements for exhaust systems, cooking equipment, and cleanliness documentation that could put even the biggest kitchen maintenance enthusiast to sleep if read cover-to-cover.

But it also serves as an incredibly useful reference for restaurant owners who want to know how to maintain their kitchens to pass inspection. Once they know how clean they need to keep their kitchens, they’ll likely buy some expensive cleaning equipment from you because they see you as a helpful, detail-oriented, credible source.

Many people create whitepapers for this purpose — a resource that their leads can take with them to become better at their trade. Ideally, the better they become, the more qualified they are to work with the organization that gave them the whitepaper.

Now that you know the purpose of whitepapers and how they differ from ebooks, it’s time to get started in creating your own. With the above best practices in mind, here’s the approach you can take to produce an excellent whitepaper for your audience: 

1. Identify your audience’s pain. 

While you’re a subject matter expert in a unique position to provide content, you must consider your audience and what is going on in their lives. By creating a whitepaper that addresses (and solves) for their needs, you’ll better be able to generate demand for your whitepaper. 

To do this, consider creating a buyer persona. This activity will help you put yourself in their shoes. Then, you’ll want to consider what kind of information would attract them, how they’d use the information, and how it would solve their pain or problem. 

2. Do your research. 

Whitepapers are informational in nature, and you’ll want to determine how to provide information your audience can’t get elsewhere. You can do that by:

• Running an original study/survey
• Putting together unique case studies
• Detailing a unique process or project

If you’re unable to do your own research, try drawing statistics from government and/or survey organizations and analyzing them in a unique way (and make sure you cite your sources).  

3. Create an outline. 

Because whitepapers are long-form in nature, an outline can help organize your thoughts. Consider sketching out your topic in the following format: 

1. Introduction and Synopsis – Introducing the topic of the whitepaper, explaining why it’s important (from the standpoint of the audience), and what the whitepaper sets to do, convey, or solve. 
2. Overview – Defining some some of the key terms you intend to use, detailing the variables or parameters involved, and summarizing what you’ll discuss. 
3. Body – Laying out all the key points and highlights you’ll hit. 
4. Conclusion – Explaining the key take-aways from the body and any action items the reader should take.

4. Put pen to paper and flesh out your outline. 

Using an informational and fact-based tone, begin expanding on the ideas you have by using the outline as a guide. In addition, each paragraph should contribute to the overall goal of the piece. 

5. Use imagery to support your points. 

Because whitepapers go deep on research and analysis, visuals such as charts, graphs, and tables can help you present information in a visually interesting way and make the paper easier to read. 

6. Get feedback. 

It’s critical to present the best write-up you can for your readers. The higher quality it is, the more authority you’ll have in your audience’s eyes. Get feedback from someone you trust to catch typos or other issues with readability. 

7. Invest in the formatting and design. 

While it’s not necessary to get too flashy with it, color, layout, and imagery goes a long way to make your whitepaper appealing. 

Whitepaper Examples

To provide even more inspiration, here are modern examples of whitepapers that are emblematic of great whitepaper execution (and why):

1. Not Another State of Marketing Report, HubSpot

HubSpot does an amazing job every year compiling data from experts and partners to convey modern trends in the marketing landscape. This is useful for marketers because they can use the statistics to create marketing and sales content as well as learn from the macro shifts that are happening in the industry. The whitepaper presents this information with attractive graphs and short editorial summaries along with links to more in-depth articles on each topic.

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2. It’s Not You, It’s My Data, Custora

Custora created this whitepaper about customer churn, why it’s important, and how to prevent it. What makes this ebook great is that it promises concrete value to the reader (revenue savings from preventing attrition) backed by a wealth of data and actionable advice. Even better, the whitepaper is modern and attractive, so the reading experience is pleasant. This helps the reader consume the long-form content without friction.

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3. Google Cloud’s AI Adoption Framework, Google

This whitepaper leverages Google’s authority to persuade the reader into adopting AI. By providing a methodology in the beginning, Google aims to give the reader the tools to think through the power of AI as it can be applied to their business. Then, the whitepaper dives into more technical information for advanced readers.

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4. Employees and Cybersecurity, Excedeo

Excedo aims to educate about the security risks that employees may unknowingly pose to businesses when improperly trained. The whitepaper advocates about the types of internal IT policies and training that are essential in today’s world.

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Whitepapers have a long history, and their uses have continued to change. Be sure to decide whether or not a whitepaper will actually serve your audience before spending the months-long process to produce it. Sometimes, an ebook will do just fine. On the other hand, long-form educational content has a place in your content strategy.

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

 

Marketers, can we be honest with each other for a second? On a scale of 1-10, how much do you really understand the world of paid advertising?

Despite the fact that 45% of small businesses use paid ads, pay-per-click is still a concept that eludes many of us. But if half of small businesses are using it, we just can’t afford to ignore this channel, no matter how perplexing.

As a marketer, PPC is a skill that you should have in your tool belt — or at least have a basic understanding of.

This guide will help you grasp pay-per-click marketing in its entirety. To start, we’ll begin with the benefits of paid advertising and then get into some key definitions that you’ll need to know.

When done right, PPC can earn you quality leads. If you can create a seamless user journey (which you’ll learn how to do later in this piece), it could mean a huge ROI for your PPC efforts.

Pay-per-click advertising is most common in search engine results pages (SERPs), like Google or Bing, but is also used on social channels (although CPM is more common). If you’re wondering where you can find pay-per-click ads, they’re the results you see before and to the right of the organic search results. For instance, check out the ad that came up in my search for “cards”.

Benefits of PPC

So, why would you pay for ads when you can reach your audience organically through great content and strategically-placed keywords (otherwise known as SEO)?

The answer is: keywords have become increasingly competitive. This makes it more difficult for a business that doesn’t have the domain authority to get them into the top rankings on a search engine or in front of their target audience on a social platform. In fact, so many businesses are using ads that organic results often don’t even start until you’re further down the page.

That doesn’t mean you should ditch all SEO efforts completely — your paid advertising should complement your SEO strategy as opposed to replace it.

“When people search for your keywords, you know their search intent and can display the most relevant ad to your audience. This means more clicks and a greater chance of conversion.” – Laura Mittelmann, Paid Acquisition at HubSpot

Paid advertising will help you rise to the top in a competitive market and be seen by potential customers who may not know that you exist. It can help you promote your next marketing initiative, improve brand awareness, or rank for difficult keyword terms. In other words, PPC is your shortcut to getting to the top within your niche. And, if done responsibly, PPC can be integral to your inbound marketing strategy.

PPC-Related Terms You Should Know

What’s a marketing channel without a few acronyms and a little jargon? If you’re going to enter the paid advertising space, there are a few terms you should know. Below, we review the main elements of a PPC campaign, ranging from broad to the more specific.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

The objective of all forms of digital advertising is to rank for a target keyword, and that can be done in a number of ways. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to any digital marketing (paid or unpaid) done on a search engine, like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. SEM is an umbrella term that encompasses both paid advertising and search engine optimization, that is, ranking organically for keywords. It’s important to note that not all PPC occurs on search engines — social media has PPC ads, too (think: Facebook Ads).

CPC

Cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount that an advertiser pays for each click on your ad. CPC acts as your bid in an auction that determines where your ad will be placed. As you can imagine, a higher bid equates to better ad placement. You set your CPC at the maximum price you are willing to pay per click on your ad. What you actually pay is determined by the following formula: (Competitor’s Ad Rank / Your Quality Score) + 0.01 = Actual CPC. Let’s go over the terms in this equation so you know what you’re paying for:

Ad Rank

This value determines the position of an ad on a search engine results page. It’s equal to Maximum Bid x Quality Score.

Quality Score

This is the score that search engines give to your ad based on your clickthrough rate (CTR) — measured against the average CTR of ads in that position — the relevance of your keywords, the quality of your landing page, and your past performance on the SERP.

Maximum Bid

This is the maximum you’re willing to pay per click on you ad.

Here’s an image by WordStream that illustrates what I mean:

Source

You can set your CPC to manual, where you determine the maximum bid for your ads, or enhanced, which allows the search engines to adjust your bid based on your goals. One of these enhanced options involves bid strategies that automatically adjust your bids based on either clicks or conversions.

CPM (Cost per Mille)

CPM, also known as cost per thousand, is the cost per one thousand impressions. It’s most commonly used for paid social and display ads. There are other types of cost-pers… like cost-per-engagement, cost-per-acquisition (CPA), but for the sake of preserving your mental space, we’re going to stick with clicks, a.k.a. CPC.

Campaign

The first step in setting up your PPC ads is determining your ad campaign. You can think of your campaign as the key message, or theme, you want to get across with your advertisements.

Ad Group

One size doesn’t fit all. That’s why you’ll create a series of ads within your campaign based on a set of highly related keywords. You can set a CPC for each ad group that you create.

Keywords

Each ad within your ad group will target a set of relevant keywords or key terms. These keywords tell search engines which terms or search queries you want your ad to be displayed alongside in SERPs. Once you determine which keywords perform best, you can set a micro CPC just for keywords within your ads.

Ad Text

Your keywords should inform your ad text. Remember, your Quality Score is determined by how relevant your ad is, therefore, the text in your ad (and landing page for that matter) should match the keyword terms that you’re targeting.

Landing Page

A landing page is a critical piece of your paid advertising strategy. The landing page is where users will end up once they click your PPC ad. Whether it’s a dedicated webpage, your homepage, or somewhere else, make sure to follow landing page best practices to maximize conversions.

Best PPC Platforms

Now that you understand the PPC basics, I’m guessing your next question is: Where should I advertise?

There are dozens of online spaces where you can spend your coveted ad money, and the best way to vet them is by taking a close look at your potential ROI on each platform.

The most popular advertising platforms are effective because they’re easy to use, and, most importantly, highly trafficked. But for a smaller budget, you might consider a lesser-known alternative to these key players. Some additional things to consider when choosing a platform are the availability of keyword terms, where your target audience spends their time, and your advertising budget.

Here a non-exhaustive list of some of the top PPC platforms.

Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords)

How many times a day do you hear the phrase “Let me Google that”? Probably more than you can count … hence why Google Ads is the king of paid advertising. On average, Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second, giving you plenty of opportunities to target keywords that will get your intended audience to click. The downside is that keywords are highly competitive on this platform, meaning a greater ad spend.

If you’re planning to use this popular platform, start with our free Google Ads PPC Kit.

Bing Ads

The perks of using Bing Ads over Google Ads is a slightly lower CPC at the expense of a larger audience, of course.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads blend in with other posts on the platform.

Facebook Ads is a popular and effective platform for paid ads (more commonly used as CPM than CPC), mainly due to its specific targeting options. Facebook allows you to target users based on interests, demographics, location, and behaviors. Also, Facebook allows for native ads, which means ads are introduced and blend into the social feed. Not to mention, you can use Facebook Ads to advertise on Instagram as well.

AdRoll

Chipotle retargeting me as I search for dessert recipes.

AdRoll is a retargeting platform that advertises to people who have already visited your website. For instance, say someone read your article on cheese making. You can retarget them on other sites that they visit with display ads that advertise your online cooking classes. While retargeting is possible with Google Ads, the benefit of using AdRoll is that it can display ads on Google and social media sites, which gives you more opportunities to capture clicks or impressions, depending on your goal.

RevContent

RevContent focuses specifically on promoting content through PPC. It has the same impact as a guest post, where your content is displayed on an external site, except it’s in the form of an ad. You still bid on keywords and your advertisement is displayed next to content that is relevant to those keywords. With this platform, you’ll reap the benefits of a low CPC and highly engaged traffic.

How to Get Started with PPC Advertising

Now that you understand the benefits of PPC, have your key terms, and know what platforms you can advertise on, let’s dive into crafting a quality PPC campaign. You don’t need to tackle these items step-by-step, but you will need to work through each of them to ensure that you create an effective campaign.

Set Parameters

I know I wrote that you don’t need to do these things in order, but you should do this step first. Without parameters, you risk your ad being untargeted and ineffective. You want to put your ad campaigns into the context of your ultimate business goals. Consider how your paid campaigns will contribute to those goals. Then, think about what you want to accomplish with your ads — whether that be visits, sales, brand awareness, or something else — and how much you’re willing to spend to accomplish that goal.

Your ads should encompass a few things:

• Who you want to target
• Theme of your campaign
• How you will measure success
• Type of campaign you will run

Create Your Goals and Goal Metrics

Your campaign goals will give you something to show for your ad spend as long as you determine how you will measure those goals. Your goal metrics should not be confused with your campaign metrics, which we’ll discuss below.

Let’s touch on some common PPC goals and how to measure them.

Brand awareness is how familiar your target audience is with your company. It might be a good idea to look into display ads for this goal so you can supplement your copy with engaging imagery. You can measure brand awareness through social engagement, surveys, and direct traffic.

Lead generation is the direct result of having a relevant and engaging landing page to follow your paid ad. Since you will create a separate landing page for each ad group, you should be able to easily track lead conversions either in the Google Ads interface via a tracking pixel, or through UTM parameters, if you’re using a tool like HubSpot.

Offer promotion is great if you’re running a limited time offer, product or service discount, or contest. You should create a dedicated sign-up page or a unique discount code so you know which users came from your ad.

Sales can be measured by how much of your product or service is sold based on your paid ads. You should be able to track this through a quality CMS software or with attribution reporting.

Site traffic is a great goal if you have high-quality content throughout your website. If you’re going to spend money getting people to visit your site, you want to have some level of confidence that you can keep them there and eventually convert them into leads.

Choose Your Campaign Type

You don’t only need to know where you’ll advertise but also how. There are many different types of paid advertising campaigns, and the one that you choose depends on where you can reach your audience. That isn’t to say that you can’t advertise through various means; you can also try a combination of campaign types as long as you’re consistently testing and revising.

Search Ads are the most common type of PPC and refer to the text ads that show up on search engine results pages.

Display Ads allow you to place ads (usually image-based) on external websites, including social. There are several ways to buy display ads, including Google Display Network (GDN) and other ad networks.

Learn how to integrate Display Ads into your inbound marketing plan.

Social refers to any ads that you see on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. You can pay to show up in your target audience’s social feed or somewhere else within their profile, depending on the platform.

Remarketing can use either cookies or a list of contacts that you upload to target people who have previously engaged with your company through some action. That action could be filling out a form, reading a blog, or simply visiting a page on your website.

Google Shopping is most effective for ecommerce sites. Your ad — including image, price, and a short product description — will show on a carousel on a search page based on your target keywords.

Perform Keyword Research

Each ad group you create needs to be assigned a set of keywords to target — that’s how search engines know when and where to display your ad. The general rule of thumb is to select between one to five keywords per ad group, and those keywords should be extremely relevant — your Quality Score depends on it.

Select keywords that are closely aligned with the specific theme of your ad group. If you find keywords you want to target that fall outside of one theme, you should create a separate ad group for them.

It’s important to note that you’re not stuck with the keywords you start with. In fact, you should closely monitor your keyword list throughout your campaign — eliminating those that don’t bring in the types of visitors that you’re looking for and increasing your bids on those that do. Do your best to select the most relevant keywords, but don’t feel pressured to get it 100% right the first time around.

Set Up Google Analytics and Tracking

Google Analytics is free to use so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t install it on your website. The tool provides you with insights into how your website is performing, how users are interacting with your pages, and what content is attractive to visitors. The information you can gather from Google Analytics can be used for PPC and beyond.

Best Practices for a Quality PPC Strategy

You didn’t think we’d let you spend your hard-earned money on advertisements without providing some best practices to follow, did you? Of course not. We want to make sure you succeed with your next PPC campaign. So, let’s get into some PPC strategy that will help you maximize your efforts and your budget.

As a note, we’re going to dive specifically into paid search ads (those little guys you see in search engines) here.

PPC Ad Copy

Bidding on targeted keywords will get your ad in front of the right people; good ad copy will get those people to click on your ad. Like your keywords, your ad needs to solve for the intent of the searcher — you need to give the searcher exactly what they’re looking for and make sure that is clear through the words you use.

Search ads are comprised of a headline, a URL, and a short description, and each of these have limited character requirements to follow. To make the most of this space, make sure your ad copy does the following:

• Speak directly to your target persona
• Include the main keyword that you’re bidding on
• Provide an actionable CTA so the searcher knows what to do next
• Make the offer appealing
• Use language that matches your landing page copy
• Perform A/B Split tests with your copy

Landing Page Best Practices

Arguably the most important element of PPC (after your ad copy) is the page that you send leads to after they click on your ad. This page needs to be highly targeted, relevant to your ad, deliver what was promised, and present a seamless experience. Why? Because the point of your landing page is to convert your new visitor into a lead or customer. Not only that, but a high-converting landing page will improve your Quality Score, leading to better ad placements. There’s nothing that will diminish PPC profits like a poorly crafted landing page.

What should a PPC landing page include to increase conversions? Glad you asked …

• Strong headline that mirrors your search ad
• Clean design and layout
• Responsive form that is easy to use with a stand-out CTA button
• Copy that is very specific and relevant to your target keywords
• Presents the offer that was promised in your ad
• A/B tested

A/B Testing Your PPC Ads

Rarely will you as a marketer throw something out to your audience that works without testing. PPC campaigns are no different. A/B testing is as critical to your paid ad campaign as is every other element. The goal of testing your ad is to increase both your clickthrough rate and your conversion rate.

The good news is that ads are comprised of just four parts that you’ll need to test: headline, description, landing page, and target keywords. Small tweaks to just one of these elements can significantly alter your results, so you want to make changes one at a time so you can keep track of where improvements come from.

Since there are many variations that you could test one at a time, it’s a good idea to list out all the potential tests you can run and prioritize them by greatest impact. Finally, you should allow your ads to run long enough to gather the data you need and test them early enough so you don’t waste budget on a poor-performing ad.

Maximizing Your ROI

At a high level, maximizing ROI on your ad campaigns means considering customer lifetime value and customer acquisition costs, which will help you determine how much is worth spending on a new lead and how much of that spend can come from paid advertising.

To get more granular, we need to talk inputs and outputs, that is 1) lowering your input (cost per lead [CPL]) and 2) increasing your return (revenue). There are a few factors to keep an eye on that will affect both, so let’s break it down.

Ways to Decrease Inputs

• Determine an ad budget before you get started.
• Create more relevant ads. The more relevant, the lower your CPC.
• Improve your Quality Score. The higher your QS, the less search engines will charge your for clicks.

Ways to Increase Revenue

• Follow landing page best practices to increase conversion rates.
• Go after quality leads by being specific with your ad. The more quality your leads, the more likely they will convert and eventually become customers.

Additional PPC Tips and Tricks

There are a few other things you can do to maximize the ROI of your paid ads, whether it’s time spent, budget, clicks, or conversions.

Audiences

Google allows you to tailor your audience so you save marketing dollars and get in front of the right people. You can upload a customer list so that you don’t waste money on people who have already bought from you. Google also has options for prospecting audiences. For instance, In-Market Audiences employs user behavior tracking to put you in front of prospects who are in the market for a product or service like yours. You can also increase your bid for more relevant subgroups within your target audience — a practice called layering audiences. For example, HubSpot may layer on people who are in the market for CRM software and add a 30% bid adjustment because those people may be more likely to convert.

Bid Adjustments

Bid adjustments allow you to increase or decrease your bids based on performance. You can even make these adjustments based on different categories, like device, demographics, language, and more. For example, if a keyword isn’t performing as well on mobile as on desktop, you can add a negative bid adjustment so that when someone searches your keyword on mobile, you’ll bid X% lower than your normal bid.

Custom Ad Scheduling

You can set up ad scheduling in Google Ads to display your ad only during specific days and times. This can cut down on ad spend and improve relevance for your target audience.

Sitelink Extensions

Sitelink extensions allow you to supplement your ad with additional information. For instance, if you’re running an ad for a seasonal promotion at a local store, you can add a sitelink extension to display your store hours and location. These extensions take up more real estate on SERPs and, therefore, stand out. Not only that, but they play a role in improving your Ad Rank.

Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking monitors how your landing page is performing via a tracking code that you place on the page where people land after completing your form (usually a “Thank You” page). By enabling this feature, you’ll be better equipped to make adjustments that can improve your conversions.

Keyword Monitoring

Don’t let too much time pass before you check how your keywords are performing. You can place higher bids on the keywords that are creating the best results for your campaign, and “defund” or eliminate others.

Match Types

Match Types in Google Ads allows you to choose how closely related you want your ad group to be associated with a search team. There are four match types: broad, modified broad, phrase, and exact match. Google will display your ad in results according to your selection. For example, if your keyword phrase is “how to catch geese” and you select “broad match,” then Google will display your ad for queries that include any word in your key phrase in any order … including “geese catch” and “geese catch how”.

Negatives Keywords

A negative keyword list tells search engines what you don’t want to rank for, which is equally as important as what you do. You might know some of these upfront, but likely you’ll determine these keywords by what isn’t performing so well within your campaign.

Social Media Ads

Although CPM is more common on social platforms, social media sites do offer PPC that works similarly to search engine ads in that you set a budget and bid on ad placements. The difference is social media ads can show up directly in your news feed on most platforms, decreasing the effectiveness of ad blockers. Social platforms, like Facebook, let you set targeted demographics as well as target people based on interests. While paid search is more keyword-focused, paid social is broadens into a demographic focus, leading to more ways to target your persona.

Social media has two paid ad functions that are critical to ad success — retargeting and Lookalike Audiences. Retargeting is remarketing to people based on site visits or manually uploaded contact lists. Lookalike Audiences reviews the people on your marketing list and creates an audience that parallels your list, which expands your potential target. Paid social also allows for a wider variety of ad types, like images, videos, text, and more.

PPC Management and Tracking

Paid advertising is not “set it and forget it.” You need to manage and constantly monitor your ads to ensure that you’re reaching optimal results. Management, analysis, and tracking is crucial to a PPC campaign, not only because they provide you with useful insights but also because they help you create a more effective campaign.

What is PPC Management?

PPC management covers a wide range of techniques, including creating and adjusting goals, split testing, introducing new keywords, optimizing conversion paths, and shifting plans to reach goals.

Managing your PPC means looking at both strategy and spend. On one hand, it means iterating on your plan to optimize keyword effectiveness. On the other hand, it means thinking about how to allocate resources to certain keywords as well as how to adjust those resources to maximize ROI.

A good management strategy also pays attention to providers — like search engines, social platforms, and ad networks — to monitor changes and updates that could affect paid campaigns.

Overall, PPC management is a hefty undertaking, which is why investing in solid PPC management tools could be a great idea.

Use our PPC management tool to monitor all of your paid campaigns.

PPC Tools and Software

With all of the variables that you need to track, PPC management tools should make things easier. You can opt to monitor your ads within platform, but if you’re looking for additional assistance and organization, a robust, easy-to-read spreadsheet or sophisticated software that gives you insight into your ad performance is key.

If you plan to go the software route, there are some features that you absolutely want to look for: multi-user support, cross-platform management, A/B testing, scheduling, reporting, and ad grading.

Here’s a list of some popular, highly-rated PPC software and resources.

• WordStream automates the tedious parts of setting up and managing your PPC campaign.
• HubSpot offers a robust template to help you monitor and manage the moving parts of your campaign, making it easy to keep track of your ad groups, keywords, and A/B tests.
• NinjaCat lets you combine all of your analytics from multiple platforms into one report so you can track your entire campaign in one location.
• Optmyzr has end-to-end PPC support, from creation to reporting … and they offer a free trial of their software.
• SEMRush can help you manage the most important part of your PPC campaign — keywords. You can find relevant keywords, manage and optimize your keyword lists, and create negative lists.

PPC Metrics to Track

Metrics are everything (but you already knew that). Here are some key metrics to track within your PPC campaign.

Clicks refer to the total number of clicks you receive on an ad. This metric is affected by your keyword selection and the relevance of your ad copy.

Cost per click (CPC) measures the price you pay for each click on your ad.

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of ad views that result in clicks. This metric determines how much you pay (CPC). CTR benchmarks vary by industry.

Impressions is the number of times an ad is viewed. Cost per mille (CPM) is determined for every thousand impressions. Impressions are most relevant for brand awareness campaigns.

Ad spend is the amount you are spending on your ads. You can optimize this by improving your Quality Score.

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is the ROI of your ad campaign. This metric calculates the revenue received for every dollar spent on ads.

Conversion rate refers to the percentage of people that complete the call-to-action on your landing page and become a lead or customer.

Cost per conversion refers to the cost to generate a lead. This is calculated as the total cost of an ad divided by the number of conversions.

Quality Score (QS) determines ad positioning, so it’s an important metric to keep an eye on.

By paying close attention to each of these metrics, you can increase the ROI of your paid campaign and spend less for better results.

Go Paid!

Paid advertising is an effective tool that should be a part of your inbound marketing strategy no matter how long you’ve been in business. PPC just might be the boost you need to get an edge on your competition — or at least ahead of them in the SERPs.

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

When I was 14, my dream was to play college baseball. But I had one small problem: I only weighed 100 pounds. And even though I still had four years to bulk up and improve my skills, I knew I had a long way to go. Fortunately, my coach always knew how to give me opportunities to shoot for that kept my drive alive.

I think of SMART goals like my former baseball coach.

In 2018, there were over 3.7 billion email users around the world. By 2022, this number is expected to increase to 4.3 billion.

A group within that large number of users includes your business’s target audience, the people you want to market your brand, products, and services to via email.

To ensure your emails stand out and grab the attention of these target audience members, you must consider email design.

What is email design?

Email design is the process of strategically designing and creating an email that resonates with your business’s target audience, specifically your current email subscribers and customers. The design should be attention-grabbing, aesthetically-pleasing, and on-brand so recipients recognize it’s from your company.

Why is email design important?

The average recipient spends about 1.1 seconds scanning an email prior to deciding whether or not they want to stay or abandon the message.

That’s why email design — design that makes your email organized, attention-grabbing, on-brand, and valuable — is so important to the success of your marketing efforts. It’s how you effectively keep recipients reading and interacting with your email content. 

Now you’re probably thinking: That sounds great, but how do I design my email to attract my target audience and keep their attention on my email?

To begin, keep these 12 email design best practices in mind.

1. Craft a strong subject line.

Your email subject line is the first thing anyone sees when you send them an email. It’s the brief statement that’s supposed to pique the interest of your recipients. It should capture their attention so they want to open the email and continue reading.

Your subject line should do three main things:

1. Grab the attention of your readers in as few words as possible (less is more).
2. Provide some sort of value and/ or information that makes them want to open the email.
3. Summarize what recipients are going to read and/ or see once they open the email.

Here’s what a subject line looks like in your email inbox:

Here’s what a subject line looks like in your mobile device’s email inbox:

You can also review some of the best email subject line examples for more inspiration.

2. Write an attention-grabbing preheader.

Your email preheader is a preview of what the email is about, similar to the meta description of a web page. It’s the second thing recipients see.

Rather than rewriting the first sentence of your email, you can customize the preheader to provide an inside look into what your recipients are about to read in your message.

For reference, here’s what a preheader looks like in your email inbox:

Here’s what a preheader looks like in your mobile device’s email inbox:

3. Be concise.

Remember the statistic above about how you have about 1.1 seconds to hook your audience with your email? This is precisely why your email copy needs to be concise and straightforward.

Think about it this way: How many times throughout the day do you find yourself opening an email thinking, I can’t wait to sit down and take the next 5-10 minutes to really dive into this email in-depth!

If you’re anything like me, the answer is never.

Give email recipients the information they want and need from you without getting into the weeds. This will show them you value their time which has the potential to help you improve email subscriber retainment.

4. Keep your email on-brand.

When your email recipients open your message, they should know the email was sent from your company … meaning your email should be branded to the point that they don’t need to look at who’s sending the message to know it’s from your business.

To keep your email on-brand, consider using the following tactics:

• Use a tone in your email content that complements your other branding and marketing materials (like your website and social media).
• Incorporate the same colors and fonts that you use in your other branding and marketing materials.
• Include your logo, a link to your website, links to your social media accounts, and calls-to-action (CTAs) relevant to your products or services. This is a great way to increase brand awareness and boost conversions.

5. Use the layout to enhance your email’s user experience.

Nobody wants to read a cluttered, unorganized email. Your email will appear too overwhelming and time-consuming to deal with, and you’ll increase your chances of abandonment.

Instead, organize your layout with user experience (UX) in mind — meaning, leave white space and strategically place your written and visual content in the email so it’s organized and easy to navigate. This will also improve your email’s professional, thoughtful feel, which ensures readers are able to find the information they want and need to enjoy their interactions with your business’s email content.

6. Personalize every email.

When you customize an email with your recipient’s name, the email feels more tailored, professional, and personal. This touch helps you foster a relationship between your business and email recipients. Additionally, it has the potential to help you humanize your brand and, in turn, improve email retention.

7. Incorporate unique visual content.

If your recipients and subscribers open an email and only see written content, it’s likely going to be difficult to hold their attention and keep them interested in your message. Include unique images, videos, GIFs, and animations to break up the written content. This is also a great way to complement your branding and enhance the purpose of your email.

Speaking of incorporating creative and unique visual content in your emails, let’s talk emojis.

8. Don’t be afraid to use emojis. 🧡

At first, emojis may seem like an unnecessary or unprofessional addition to an email. While this may be a fair assumption, it’s actually untrue. In fact, when you add emojis to your email subject line and/ or email copy, you can increase your open and click-through rates.

Note: When using emojis for marketing purposes, make sure you know the meaning and connotation of the specific one(s) you incorporate. 😃

9. Use a responsive design.

A responsive design means your email changes format to fit the screen it’s being viewed on, whether it’s on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device. Recipients will be able to read your emails with ease no matter where or how they’re viewing them. Responsive design enhances user experience and improves email subscriber retention.

10. Optimize your email with calls-to-action.

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are used to convert your email recipients — they may be used to get your recipients to follow you on social media, visit your website, or become paying customers. CTAs should be visible, enticing, and clearly show why they’re valuable to click. Additionally, you might choose to personalize your CTAs to tailor them towards specific recipients — this tactic has been proven to increase conversions.

11. Add an “unsubscribe” button.

Email marketing is highly effective as long as you’re providing relevant content to your recipients. The unfortunate but true reality of email marketing is that your recipients and customers change over time — in addition to various factors related to your business as you grow and evolve — making your content no longer relevant to some at different points in time.

For this reason, allow your recipients to leave (or unsubscribe from your emails) on a good note so they can remember your business in a positive light — who knows, they may need your email content, products, or services again in the future. To ensure these people are leaving on positive terms, simplify their lives with an easy-to-use and visible “unsubscribe” button.

Note: According to the Federal Trade Commission and CAN-SPAM Act, you’re legally required to include a “clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt-out of getting emails from you in the future”. Meaning, that unsubscribe button isn’t an option.

If you need some inspiration, check out these effective unsubscribe pages.

12. A/B test your design.

Similar to most other marketing efforts, email design is an iterative process. You might determine you need to make changes and updates to get the most out of your email design. Whether it’s modifying your CTA, colors, font, or tone, don’t be afraid to A/B test designs to determine which one works best in terms of ability to convert, and resonate with, the highest number of recipients.

A great way to incorporate all 12 of these best practices is to use email design software. In fact, many of these best practices will come up naturally while you’re designing and planning your emails this way. Let’s take a look at some of the most common software options for email design along with a few of their features.

Email Design Software

The following commonly-used email design software options each offer capabilities related to your business’s website design as well as marketing and sales efforts. Take a deep look at their features to make the best decision for your overall business goals and email design needs.

HubSpot Email Design Software

HubSpot’s email software allows you to create, design, personalize, and optimize all of your emails. You don’t need any IT or coding knowledge, and you can easily customize mobile-friendly emails and design them to complement your branding. The software allows you to A/B test various email designs to determine which optimization and design efforts are most successful among your recipients.

BEEPro Email Design Software

As a BEEPro user, you can design responsive emails in just minutes. Smart design tools provide you with a quick way to format your emails and ensure your layout complements your content. You can also customize and save various email design templates so your email messaging and branding stays consistent among specific recipients.

MailChimp Email Design Software

With over 100 templates offered, MailChimp allows you to customize your email design for your target audience. If you’re someone who does have coding experience, and you want to take your design a step further, MailChimp offers you the ability to code your template as well.

Stripo.email Email Design Software

Stripo.email requires no HTML knowledge to create and design professional email templates. All of their pre-made templates are responsive so readers can easily view them via any device. You can also sync your current email service provider (ESP) with the software to access all of your email information from a central location.

Chamaileon Email Design Software

The collaborative email builder Chamaileon gives you the ability to invite members of your team to provide input on your designs. The software ensures your emails will have a responsive design and automatically comes with over 100 pre-made templates to customize for specific recipients.

Now that we’ve covered email design best practices as well as the software you can use to assist in designing your perfect email, let’s take a look at some well-crafted examples to inspire your work.

Email Design Inspiration

Email design inspiration provides you with a better idea of what it looks like to combine the best practices we discussed above — these will help you effectively reach your target audience. In addition to the examples we’re going to review here, you can check out this blog post about 13 great examples of email design.

1. Starbucks Rewards Email Design

Starbucks customers and members —the people who have converted and signed up to receive company-related information and rewards — may have seen this email, or something similar, in their inbox:

The email complements all of Starbucks’ marketing materials and branding. There’s plenty of white space to separate the concise yet helpful written information that’s paired with artistic and visually-pleasing photos of their products.

The email includes a CTA to activate their email rewards offer, a link to their website to help drive traffic there, and an unsubscribe button for those who’d like to stop receiving Starbucks emails altogether.

2. Vital Proteins Email Design

Vital Proteins’ emails are sent to current customers as well as anyone who has visited their site and signed up for their email newsletter.

Although this email design contains many images and a lot of information, it’s neatly organized so it doesn’t feel overwhelming to visitors. The email’s colors, font, and unique images are on-brand and feature the company’s products.

It includes an obvious and large CTA that redirects recipients to their Instagram page to increase their number of followers and enhance brand awareness. Lastly, there are buttons at the bottom of the email for unsubscribing, changing email preferences, and forwarding the message to a friend.

3. HubSpot Marketing Blog Email Design

HubSpot sends subscribers Marketing Blog emails every day. These include a few blog marketing-related articles to read and learn from. If recipients choose, they may also subscribe to HubSpot’s Sales Blog and Service Blog emails.

The marketing blog email feature HubSpot branding so readers immediately know who the email is from and what it’s going to include. There are previews and short descriptions of what each blog article in the email is about as well as an interactive pop quiz.

The email has plenty of white space to ensure it doesn’t feel or look cluttered and includes a personal note from the marketing blog editor to humanize the email and foster a personal relationship between readers and HubSpot.

Get inspired with 15 free and downloadable email templates designed for marketing and sales with previously written copy to save you time.

Grow Better With Great Email Design

With great email design, you’ll grow better — meaning, you’ll reach and resonate with your audience members more effectively. Eye-catching and impactful emails will help you build long-lasting relationships and convert more people into paying customers and brand advocates. So, begin designing your emails while keeping the best practices and examples we reviewed in mind.

If your business was a person, your brand would be its personality. It’d be how you introduce yourself to new friends (er, customers) and how you build a trusting relationship with them. Your brand is a living, breathing entity … and it’s your job to help it grow and improve.

This is what we call brand management.

Creating a brand is thrilling, but it’s not enough. As your business scales, grows, changes, and succeeds, your brand must follow suit. That’s why we created this guide — to cover the basics of brand management and equip you with the tools you need to manage and maintain a fantastic brand.

Shall we dive in?

What is brand management?

Brand management is the process of managing your brand reputation and improving your audience’s perception of your brand in a way that builds brand awareness, equity, and loyalty.

While branding is the process of building your brand, brand management is the process of monitoring and maintaining it.

Your brand is a living, breathing thing, which means it’s constantly changing. It’s also very susceptible to external factors like news, trends, and current events. In a world where journalists, influencers, and social media users (just to mention a few) influence virtually every narrative, brand management is how you can take control of your business’s story. It is using your branding and brand assets to communicate value and build loyal relationships with your followers, fans, and customers.

In short, your brand needs a manager to ensure its success. Don’t let your brand be like Kanye.

Source

We’ve discussed in other blog posts how important word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is in retaining and attracting new customers. While you can’t always control what others say about your brand, strategic brand management is the process of responding to them in a way that elevates your brand and remains true to your core brand values — all while remaining consistent across teams and channels.

As an example, read how Zappo’s used brand management to make the most of a $1.6 million mistake.

For that reason, brand management extends far beyond marketing. Brand management should be intertwined with sales, human resources, and customer service — basically, any department that “touches” your followers, customers, and even potential employees.

When done successfully, brand management can:

• Boost your brand awareness
• Allow you to charge more for your products or services
• Influence your audience’s purchase decisions
• Build customer loyalty
• Increase sales
• Create happy customers that become brand advocates

Principles of Brand Management

Brand management is comprised of both tangible and intangible components. We’ll discuss the tangibles in the following section.

The intangible components, however, include the principles that help you measure your brand management efforts and achieve those brand management success indicators that we discussed above.

You’ll also note that each of these principles can influence the others on this list. For example, heightened brand awareness can contribute to brand reputation, and increased brand loyalty can affect brand equity.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is how familiar the general public and your target audience is with your brand. Brand awareness is important because consumers can’t engage with or purchase products or services from your brand if they’re not aware of it.

Brand Equity

Brand equity is how consumers value your brand based on their experiences, perceptions, and associations. (This concept goes hand-in-hand with brand valuation, which is the commercial value of your brand as perceived by the market.) Brand equity is important because a valuable brand can support higher prices and increase your merit among investors, shareholders, and potential buyers.

Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty refers to how consistently your customers and followers engage with and purchase from your brand. While your marketing can’t necessarily influence this, your customer service department can — focusing on satisfaction and relationship-building can bring customers back time and time again. Brand loyalty is important because it creates brand ambassadors who do your marketing for you.

Brand Recognition

Brand recognition is how well a consumer, ideally in your target audience, can recognize your brand — through your logo, tagline, packaging, etc. — without seeing your brand name. This concept goes hand-in-hand with brand recall, which is the ability to think of a brand without seeing or hearing any branding prompts. Brand recognition is important because, by recognizing and recalling your brand, consumers keep your brand top-of-mind and are more likely to choose your brand above the competition.

Brand Reputation

Brand reputation refers to how the general public and your target audience perceive the character, status, and quality of your brand. Your reputation can be influenced by internal factors (customer service, product quality, etc.) and external factors (customer reviews, WOM marketing, news mentions, etc.). Brand reputation is important because it can be some consumers’ first impression of your brand.

Brand Asset Management

Your brand assets are the tangible components of the brand management process, the parts of your branding that your audience can see, experience, and remember. Brand assets include any piece of your branding or marketing that is seen by the “outside world” — customers, employees, or the general public.

Brand asset management is the process of crafting and maintaining these tangible elements as well as keeping them consistent throughout your branding. This could look like:

• Organizing your brand assets (both digitally and physically)
• Creating an accessible digital and/or physical storage system for your brand assets, or implementing a tool that does this for you
• Instructing your team on how to access and use your brand assets
• Conducting routine checks for brand inconsistencies and correcting when necessary

What constitutes a brand asset? Let’s cover the assets you’re likely working with for your business.

Brand Name

Your brand name is the primary identity of your company. As your other brand assets evolve, your brand name likely won’t ever change. If you haven’t trademarked your brand name, we encourage you to do so.

By owning the rights to your brand name, you have better leverage over unauthorized use and any competitors who attempt to copy or steal your brand. Check out HubSpot’s trademarks and Trademark Usage Guidelines as an example.

Your brand name will also likely be reflected in your website domain and social media pages. Keeping these names, identities, and handles consistent will help customers discover and follow your business.

Logo and Color Palette

Your logo and color palette embody the creative representation of your brand. These assets are important parts of your branding as they tap into emotional marketing tactics. If designed properly, they can help you attract and convert customers.

Typography

Your typography refers to your fonts and text-based assets and how they’re used in your branding. These guidelines inform any branding or marketing asset that’s designed on behalf of your business, including your website, paid advertising, social media posts, and more — all the way down to the spacing between the letters.

Graphics

Your graphics include many different brand assets — basically anything specifically designed for your brand or marketing. These could be used on your digital marketing channels (which we’ll discuss next) or developed as standalone assets, such as external slide decks, letterheads, press releases, or even marketing videos.

Your brand graphics will likely be utilized by a wide variety of people (from designers to social media marketers to content writers), so they should be well-organized and have clear instructions on how to use them.

Digital Marketing Channels

Your website, social media, and paid advertising are a few of the most important iterations of your brand. Millions of people access the internet daily, and your digital channels are likely the branding assets the most viewed by potential customers. For this reason, they must reflect your branding, and they must be consistent.

Also included in this section is your employees’ and executives’ social media accounts, as these are a reflection of your brand and a fantastic marketing opportunity to give your audience an inside look at your company and the opportunity to connect with your brand on a personal level. If your employees desire to use their profiles to market your business, ensure their accounts reflect your brand assets and follow your style guide.

Note: If members of your leadership team also manage a personal brand, chat among your team about how to align (or separate completely) this brand with your business brand. If their brand is connected in any way to your company, it should complement yours.

Packaging

If your business sells a physical product, your packaging is a critical part of your branding. For some customers (if not most), your packaging might be their first impression of your brand. Also, one-third of customers say they make purchase decisions on the packaging itself.

Your packaging is also the most tangible, experiential way that customers interact with your brand. For that reason, your packaging should reflect your branding — in its design, colors, size, and feel.

Style Guide

Your style guide is a document that instructs employees, designers, and other businesses on how to use your branding. This is an important brand asset because it informs how all other brand assets should be utilized, designed, printed, and more — all the way down to what size your logo should be and what colors are and aren’t allowed in your marketing materials.

Not only does this help others create on-brand designs; but it also informs them of how to follow branding guidelines and legal/licensing restrictions. Take a look at HubSpot’s Brand Guidelines as an example.

Download our free ebook How to Create a Brand Style Guide and access free templates to take your brand and brand management to the next level.

Brand management can be a serious undertaking, especially when working with a large brand or perhaps a brand with multiple brand extensions. Also, if you’ve outsourced your branding to a creative agency or individual, it can be difficult to assume the task of managing it.

Check out these brand management companies and services that can help you maintain a successful brand.

Northeastern Region

1. Dirigo Design and Development

Dirigo Design and Development is a Maine-based marketing agency. The company offers various marketing services, including branding, strategy, and reputation management. Notable Dirigo clients include Dunkin’ Donuts, Harvard University, and The Wall Street Journal.

2. Jax Media Design Group

Jax Media Design Group is a D.C.-based agency focused on digital design and development. The company creates digital marketing assets using your brand guidelines and helps you implement them in campaigns. Notable Jax Media clients include Geico, AARP, and National Geographic.

3. RP3 Agency

RP3 Agency is a Maryland-based marketing agency. The company offers services for brand strategy and positioning, message strategy, and audience insights. Notable RP3 clients include Coca-Cola, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and Giant Food.

Midwestern Region

4. Hangar 12

Hangar 12 is a Chicago-based agency that specializes in consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. The company focuses on marketing strategy and brand positioning, as well as digital and social media marketing. Notable Hangar 12 clients include Purdue, Conagra, and Hostess.

5. Brandgarten

Brandgarten is a Wisconsin-based agency focused on telling brand stories using customer insights. The company offers brand development and strategy services as well as brand training for your team. Notable Brandgarten clients include Johnson & Johnson, Alliant Energy, and Organic Valley.

6. DEKSIA

DEKSIA is a Michigan-based marketing agency. The company has cross-industry experience in marketing and brand development and management. Notable DEKSIA clients include Visa, Uber, and Twitter.

Southern Region

7. Matchstic

Matchstic is a Georgia-based brand identity agency. The company offers services that help you define, promote, and evolve your brand. Notable Matchstic clients include Chick-fil-A, Prudential, and Spanx.

8. Spire

Spire is a Dallas-based branding and marketing agency. The company specializes in B2B brands and offers brand audit, articulation, and integration services. Notable Spire clients include American Airlines, Texas Capital Bank, and Airbus.

9. Proof Branding

Proof Branding is a Nashville-based branding agency. The company offers services that distill, develop, and deploy brands. Notable Proof Branding clients include Vanderbilt University, Barista Parlor, and The Grand Ole Opry.

Western Region

10. BLVR

BLVR is a San Diego-based branding agency. The company works with customers on brand auditing, brand identity, brand development, and brand strategy. Notable BLVR clients include Andis, Tony Robbins, and World Vision.

11. BrandJuice

BrandJuice is a Denver-based branding agency. The company focuses on strategy, innovation, and design services. Notable BrandJuice clients include Denver International Airport, DISH Network, and Red Canary.

12. modern8

modern8 is a Salt Lake City-based design studio. The company offers services for brand strategy, identity design, and asset management. Notable modern8 clients include Yesco, Architecture Week, and School Improvement Network.

Pacific Northwest Region

13. Parliament

Parliament is a Portland-based brand-focused design studio. The company creates brands, products, and experiences for their customers. Notable Parliament clients include Olympia Beer, Nike, and Capital One.

14. States of Matter

States of Matter is a Seattle-based branding and design agency. The company helps you audit, develop, and deliver their customers’ brand assets. Notable States of Matter clients include Modbar, Dolly, and Blue Nile.

15. S’more Brands

S’more Brands is a Vancouver-based branding and marketing agency. The company offers a Brand Camp that helps businesses develop and manage their brands. Notable S’more Brands clients include Spring Lake Manor and Lemon Wing.

Brand Management Software

If you’d rather manage your brand in-house, there are plenty of tools available to help. These tools are either platform solutions or online software tools, and some provide free accounts or trials that allow you to test them out.

Brandfolder

Brandfolder is a digital asset management platform that helps you collect, organize, and share your brand assets with your team. It allows your team to easily collaborate when creating brand assets, launching new products, or working on marketing campaigns.

BrandVerity

BrandVerity is a brand monitoring tool that helps you monitor for noncompliance and trademark infringement. You can customize the BrandVerity crawler to search for your specific guidelines and trademarks and use the tool’s email templates for easy remedying.

BrandWorkz

BrandWorkz is a system purely dedicated to brand management. It features numerous tools that equip brand and marketing professionals to deliver consistent content through any channel, including digital asset management, workflow and annotation, and brand reporting and analytics.

Bynder

Bynder is a digital marketing asset solution that provides access to your company’s branding depending on your role within your team. It keeps your branding consistent and helps you keep your team up-to-date with any new or upgraded branding assets.

Canva

Canva is an online graphic design tool that helps you create simple, gorgeous designs. It’s helpful for brand management because, with a paid subscription, it allows you to upload your brand assets — your logo, colors, typography, and more — with which you can create designs. Regardless of how many team members you have working within Canva, you can be confident that they’re using the correct brand assets and creating on-brand designs.

Lucidpress

Lucidpress is a tool that offers multiple solutions — a design program, brand management platform, and marketing template library. Similar to Canva, you can upload your brand assets to Lucidpress and have your team create your brand and marketing materials within the software. From there, your team can re-use on-brand templates to ensure consistency in your branding.

TrustPilot

TrustPilot is a review software that can help you build your brand reputation, create brand equity, and build brand loyalty. Collect reviews from real customers and share them with followers and potential customers to harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

Wedia

Wedia is a marketing platform that allows you to manage your creative projects, create and store your digital assets, and distribute your marketing material across multiple channels. It acts as a central location for your team to access your brand assets and allows you to keep your team and creative projects aligned and consistent.

Brand Management Courses

If you’re interested in learning more about managing your brand, there are dozens of fantastic courses available online. We’ve collected some of the leading courses below.

• Measuring Brand Engagement and Emotional Connection by HubSpot Academy
• Design Foundations: Building Brand Guidelines and Consistency by HubSpot Academy
• Brand Management: Aligning Business, Brand and Behaviour by Coursera
• Strategic Brand Management by edX
• Brand Management: Build Successful Long Lasting Brands by Udemy

A Well-Managed Brand is a Successful One

Brand management, as auxiliary as it seems, does affect your bottom line.

Strong brands aren’t built by marketing or product alone but by constantly iterating on your customers’ brand experience. It’s easy to overlook the impact of consistent, intelligent brand experiences — and brand management can help you provide this for your followers, customers, and brand advocates.

In 2020, video outpaced blogging and infographics as the most common content marketing strategy.

As users increasingly turn to video content for entertainment and education, most social media platforms have become more focused on expanding their visual and video capabilities. Now, the average social media user sees videos in the form of live streams, Stories, or Newsfeed posts on a daily basis.

Consumer preference for video over other mediums is only expected to get stronger. Although millennials watch more videos on a regular basis than Gen X and the Boomer generation, the age group’s consumption still pales in comparison to Gen Z.

As a marketer, you likely already know how effective the combination of video and marketing tactics can be.

At this point, we’ve seen millions of brands boost awareness by going live on Facebook and LinkedIn. We’ve also seen brands report gaining traffic from video-based Instagram Stories with swipe-up links.

While video marketing seems like a winning tactic in 2020, you might ask, “What about video-based advertising?”

While posting a marketing video on social media or your website might cause you to gain traffic or brand awareness, launching an ad that encourages viewers to click to your store might provide both of those benefits — plus a more direct path to revenue.

When looking into paid video promotion, one of the common offerings you’ll hear about — especially if you plan to advertise on social media — is in-stream advertising.

An in-stream video ad is a promotion created by a brand that runs before or during a video on a streaming platform, such as YouTube. Aside from appearing in popular videos, these ads can also appear in Stories or live streams on platforms like Facebook.

To give you a visual of what an in-stream ad looks like, here’s a screenshot for an Olay ad that appeared before a YouTube video I recently viewed:

There are a handful of perks to in-stream advertising. The first is that your video can be targeted to audiences similar to your brand’s or can be placed in videos that match your ad’s keyword. With these types of targeting options, you can present your ad to viewers that match your audience’s demographics or interests. Because these viewers might have similar interests and purchasing motives as your customers, a well-targeted in-stream ad could ultimately result in a higher chance of purchases.

Another perk of in-stream ads is that these videos don’t need to be incredibly long or detailed. Depending on the platform you use, you can often launch ads as short as five seconds. While this gives marketers a limited amount of time to grab a viewer’s attention, it also means they’ll need to produce less content than they would for a long-form marketing video.

Aside from length and targeting capabilities, the last and most obvious perk of in-stream ads is their ROI potential. Even back in 2016, shortly before Facebook launched its in-stream ad offering, a Google study revealed that YouTube ads — which are usually in-stream — saw higher returns than television ads.

Sounds great, right?

Although the perks above might have you ready to invest in in-stream ads, there are still a few things you’ll need to research and keep in mind.

Even though in-stream ads are shorter and can be spoon-fed to your audience with ad targeting tools, your content will still need to convince those viewers to click on the ad’s link and buy your brand’s product. This in itself can be a major challenge for video advertisers.

How Consumers React to In-Stream Video Ads

While successful in-stream ads are possible, there are still important user-behavior barriers that you’ll want to keep in mind as you aim to create a winning promo. To help you determine some of the biggest barriers you might run into, I surveyed 400 consumers about how they interacted with in-stream ads.

Do Consumers Actually Click on In-Stream Ads?

Many in-stream ads include a call-to-action that you can click or tap to visit a brand’s website or ecommerce store.

But, do people actually click these CTAs?

To determine how often people clicked on in-stream video ads, I first asked the survey pool, “How often do you click on in-stream video ads that appear before or during a video?”

When you consider that in-stream video ads are sent to target audiences and demographics, rather than a wide pool of users, you might think that people will regularly click on this type of advertisement to learn more. However, the outlook was quite grim for in-stream ads in this particular survey:

Data Source

While 42% of people say they “almost never” click on in-stream video ads, another 22% say they’ll click on an ad “once a week.” Only 22% will click on two to three ads per week, while the remaining 15% say they don’t watch online videos.

As you plan your in-stream video strategy, remember that the results above are just from one small consumer pool. Had we asked this question to a particular demographic or a group of users on a specific platform, the numbers might have been different.

Although you should continue to do research about the pros and cons of in-stream ads, you should still keep the results above in mind. This data speaks to the age-old theory that people either completely avoid ads or mentally tune them out, regardless of their format or type.

While video advertising does offer the perk of audience targeting, you’ll still need to produce intriguing, interesting, or valuable video content to be successful.

In-Stream Ads and Purchase-Related Conversion

Before you start panicking about the results above, there were some optimistic findings in this survey. Although the consumers I polled are less interested in clicking on in-stream ads when they see them, they might still consider buying the promoted product.

When I asked, “Have you ever purchased a product that you learned about from an in-stream video ad?”, more than one-third of respondents — or 37% — say “Yes.” Meanwhile, 52% say, “No.”

Data Source

Of those who haven’t made a purchase related to an in-stream ad, 39% simply selected, “No” while 15% say, “No. I avoid in-stream ads at all costs.” Meanwhile, 9% say they “don’t watch online videos,” and thus wouldn’t have the option to see in-stream ads or make a related purchase.

While the percentage of people who won’t haven’t made a purchase after seeing an in-stream ad is quite large, this is somewhat expected when you consider online attention spans and how most of these consumers also say they don’t usually click on in-stream ads.

On the other hand, the percentage of people who’ve made a purchase after seeing an in-stream ad is still more than one-third of the group we surveyed. This might hint that there is a solid chance your in-stream ad could result in a purchase.

When do consumers click the “Skip” button?

When you look at the results above, you might think to yourself, “Consumers might not click on my ad, or purchase my product, but they’ll still watch the content. — Right?”

The truth is, most types of online content have just a few seconds to grab a consumer’s attention. Video content is not exempt.

As with any video marketing strategy, you can’t expect audiences to watch your content just because it’s right in front of them. Video ads, which often feature a “Skip” button, might have an even smaller window than the average marketing video.

When asked, “When given the option to skip an in-stream video ad that plays before or during your video, how long will you wait before skipping?”, a whopping 37% say they’ll “skip an ad as soon as possible,” while 20% say they’ll click skip in five seconds or less.

Data Source

The interest in skipping isn’t a shocker. We’ve all done it. Sometimes, we just want to watch the video we planned to stream and don’t really care about the ads that are put in front of us.

Although the result above comes from just one small group of consumers, it aligns with mounting research which shows that global attention spans are narrowing — especially online.

While the average consumer’s attention span shouldn’t scare you away from an in-stream ad strategy, you should certainly keep it in mind.

To be successful with in-stream video ads — you’ll need to create content that grabs your viewer’s attention as soon as possible and is valuable enough to ease annoyances related to seeing an ad in their video.

In this example from the job search site Reed.co.uk. The ad immediately draws attention with a video of meowing kittens. Then it embraces its pre-roll placement by calling out YouTube viewers for watching videos because they’re “distracted from their job.” Towards the end of the ad, the site’s founder, tells the viewer to click on the video, which will send them to the job site:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=8ErTZh9zEbg&feature=emb_title

How to Launch a Successful In-Stream Ad

As you’ve seen, there are solid pros and cons to in-stream advertising. While the cons shouldn’t scare you from trying this marketing tactic, you should still keep them in mind in order to create a video that can avoid constant skips from your audience. Here are a few tips to keep in mind

Throw viewers into the action.

Based on what consumers told us, you have anywhere from one to five seconds to grab your viewer’s attention before they zone out or skip your ad. You’ll rarely have more than 10 seconds to sway them.

So, begin your ad with an action-packed scene or concisely explain your product as quickly as possible. Don’t take time to get to the point — even if the ad platform you’re using allots a 30-to-60-second video.

Ask yourself, “Is this content valuable to prospects?”

Audiences will either skip your ad because they just don’t want to see a commercial, or they’re bored by your content and want to get to their video. This is why it’s important to create ads that either entertain your viewer or educate them about a product or brand-related topic they’ll value.

Use examples as inspiration.

Luckily, millions of brands have already tested out in-stream advertising. While this means the pool of advertising could be competitive, it also means that there are plenty of effective ads out there that you can watch for inspiration.

Next time you’re watching a video that begins or features an in-stream ad, watch the content. Take a mental note of why you do or don’t want to skip the ad. If you’re considering engaging with the ad and tapping to learn more about a product, ask yourself, “How did this content persuade me to click?”

If you don’t feel like searching out ads on social platforms, we’ve also got plenty of content to help you. Check out this rundown of effective short-form ads from small businesses and Super Bowl brands.