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Let me ask you a question. If you could learn any skill in one hour, what would it be?

When you’re looking to learn something new, there are plenty of online courses that can help you improve your skills.

HubSpot Academy (HubSpot’s training division) is one of those online providers that offers entirely free education.

If you’re hoping to learn new skills related to professional development, career, or business, then HubSpot Academy is a great place to start. Side note: If you’re looking to improve your virtual golf game, you may want to look elsewhere.

In the HubSpot Academy courses and certifications tab, you’ll find courses covering a range of marketing, sales, and service topics. However, if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, it can be overwhelming.

We know your time is important, so we’ve broken down the top HubSpot Academy Courses (based on total learners who have started the course) that take less than one hour to complete. Happy learning!

1. Graphic Design Essentials: Easy Steps for Creating Your Own Compelling Visuals

Have you always been curious about the fundamentals of graphic design? In this course, you’ll learn how to start thinking like a graphic designer. In fact, over 20,000 learners have started this course.

This course is helpful for anyone in marketing, whether you’re creating or brainstorming content ideas for your campaigns.

2. Using HubSpot’s Free Marketing Tools

Did you know that HubSpot has free marketing tools that you can access in your HubSpot Academy account? If you haven’t checked them out yet, your marketing efforts are missing out. Learn how you can leverage HubSpot’s free marketing tools to nurture and manage relationships with your leads, prospects, and customers.

3. Frictionless Sales Certification Course

This free certification course technically takes 61 minutes to get through all of the lessons, but since it’s the only certification that makes the list, we decided to allow that extra minute.

Not only will completing this course give you a new certification to add to your resumé or LinkedIn profile, but you’ll also find new ways to remove friction for your sales team so they can spend more time selling.

This course is helpful for sales reps or managers, so they can optimize their sales process.

4. Build a Marketing Campaign in Marketing Hub Starter

If you’re new to HubSpot Marketing Starter, this is a great course. You’ll learn how to leverage your subscription to attract visitors, convert them into leads, and nurture them through email.

5. Getting Started with HubSpot Video Powered by Vidyard

Oftentimes, it’s easier to show someone how to do something instead of just telling them. That’s why mastering video is so important for connecting with your audience.

This course will teach you how to use HubSpot Video to connect with your leads and customers in a human and helpful way, so you can resolve issues faster and boost customer satisfaction.

6. How to Build a Paid Media Strategy

This course is designed to educate marketers on foundational digital advertising knowledge so they can think more critically about their overall paid media strategy.

After taking this course, you’ll know how to allocate your paid media budget to drive the most efficient return on investment (sounds like a great investment of 59 minutes).

7. The Search Insights Report: HubSpot’s Strategy for Increasing Organic Blog Traffic

Have you ever wondered how the HubSpot Blog became successful? Do you want to learn how to implement those same strategies for your own blog?

Look no further than this course, which will teach you how to use our Search Insights Report template to grow your blog. You’ll learn our secrets and start growing your traffic now.

8. Introduction to the HubSpot APIs

Calling all developers: HubSpot Academy has education for you, too. Are you interested in getting started with HubSpot APIs? In under an hour, you’ll learn how to create developer and test accounts and make API calls with an API key and/or OAuth.

9. Set Up Your HubSpot CRM for Growth

Setting up your CRM is key for making your flywheel spin. While this might sound like a big dig, this course breaks it down for you in under an hour so you can start importing your data into your HubSpot CRM and understand what to do next.

10. Introduction to Ecommerce Marketing

This free course, created and taught by Groove Commerce, teaches you how to create an ecommerce strategy that’s grounded in the inbound marketing methodology. It’s also one of the shortest courses on this list; you can start selling more online in under 30 minutes.

There’s a lot you can do in an hour, but investing it in education is always a good idea. Once you create a free HubSpot Academy account, you’ll have access to the library of courses and certifications, so when you have more than an hour to spare, you can jump in and learn on the go.

It’s no secret that traditional forms of marketing, which interrupt audience members, are less effective than they once were for reaching prospects and converting leads into customers. That’s why content marketing has become a popular way for businesses to reach and engage their target audience.

By providing audience members with useful content to educate them on your products and services — and show them how those products and services effectively solve their pain points and challenges — you can increase conversions, improve brand awareness, boost revenue, and more.

Sound interesting? Keep reading to learn about the ways your business can implement content marketing tactics and strategies to connect with your audience.

Why is content marketing important?

Today, outbound marketing strategies (or anything that interrupts your audience members) aren’t as effective for reaching audience members and converting leads as they once were. Content marketing has become a popular way for businesses to combat this issue. In addition to expanding your reach, content marketing helps your business:

• Educate your leads and prospects about the products and services you offer
• Boost conversions
• Build relationships between your customers and business
• Connect with your audience to show them how your products and services solve their challenges
• Create a sense of community around your brand

Now that you understand why your business should invest in content marketing, let’s review some examples so you can decide which types of content you want to create.

Content Marketing Examples

Although content marketing is an applicable and useful tactic for almost every company, brainstorming creative and persuasive ways to reach and convert your audience is no simple task. So, how can you succeed at content marketing?

To answer that question, let’s take a look at the various types of content marketing, plus some examples of each. This section will give you a better understanding of how you can incorporate content in your business’s marketing plans.

Types of Content Marketing

There are many types of content marketing your business may decide to leverage. Below are some of the most popular options.

1. Social Media Content Marketing

With over 3.7 billion global users, it’s easy to understand why so many businesses invest in social media content marketing. There are a number of platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Snapchat) to work with and several ways you can create and share social media content on each of them (such as photos, live and pre-recorded videos, and stories).

All of these platforms and ways to share your content provide you with a plethora of opportunities to connect with your audience.

Featured Resource

• Social Media Content Calendar

Example of Social Media Content Marketing

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Lush Cosmetics’ Instagram account is on-brand and complements the rest of their marketing content — if the page didn’t say “Lush Cosmetics” anywhere on the profile, customers would likely still know the profile belongs to Lush.

The Instagram page shares the Lush product line, displays different color and scent options for the products, and shows the various ways each product can be used.

Their profile feels and looks colorful, bright, happy, and uniquely Lush. The page also depicts people of all backgrounds, ethnicities, and genders using their products in ways that fit their specific needs.

2. Infographic Content Marketing

Infographics display content, information, and data in an easy-to-understand, graphic format. With a mix of simple wording, short statements, and clear images, infographics are a great way to effectively communicate your content.

They work well if you’re trying to distill an educational and/ or complex topic down so all audience members can understand it.

Featured Resource: 15 Free Infographic Templates

Example of Infographic Content Marketing

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IBM created an infographic when they launched their Cloud marketplace Their infographic is on-brand, well-organized, and easy to read. It clearly explains what they’re doing with their Cloud marketplace and how customers can benefit from it. It also tells audience members how they can access the marketplace and get started using it.

3. Blog Content Marketing

Blogs are a powerful type of content for inbound marketing and sharing information with your customers and target audience (whether educational, customer-related, or product-related). Blogs can be used to convert readers into customers, boost brand awareness, and/ or build relationships with your audience.

Depending on the goal of your specific blog, you may choose to promote other blog content by linking to various posts, sharing links to your social media pages, linking to your partners’ websites and products, or writing about your product line.

Featured Resource: 6 Free Blog Post Templates

Example of Blog Content Marketing

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Expedia has a blog called “[Out There Starts Here]” that shares travel-related information. Whether about hotel recommendations, unique places to visit, or various activities you can do around the globe, their blog has all of the details.

Expedia regularly publishes their blog content to keep readers interested and engaged. It includes a wide range of topics related to any type of trip you could imagine. The blog is on-brand and all articles relate to the travel technology company’s goal and mission of gaining customers and boosting brand awareness.

They do this by linking to their services and writing about customers who have already had positive experiences with the company.

4. Podcast Content Marketing

Did you know over 6 million people currently listen to podcasts in the U.S.? Podcasts have become a popular content medium because of their convenience — you can enjoy them while relaxing or on-the-go.

That’s why so many businesses have started creating podcasts. They help improve brand awareness, build relationships with audience members, and promote their products, services, and partners.

Featured Resource: How to Start a Podcast

Example of Podcast Content Marketing

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Harvard Business Review (HBR) has a weekly podcast called HBR IdeaCast which features industry leaders in both business and management. You can either subscribe to consistently receive their hundreds of podcasts or pick and choose which ones you want to listen to.

The podcast is on-brand and complements the rest of HBRs published content. It also serves as a great way for HBR to connect with their target audience, enhance brand awareness, and gain a following of audience members through a medium that differs from their typical work (listening to a podcast vs. reading an HBR article).

5. Video Content Marketing

According to a recent HubSpot research, over 50% of consumers say they want to see videos from the brands they interact with.

Additionally, video marketing can boost conversions, improve ROI, and help you build relationships with audience members. You may choose to share your video marketing content on social media platforms, site pages, or on your partners’ websites — expanding your reach across different media.

Featured Resource: The Ultimate Video Marketing Starter Pack

Example of Video Content Marketing

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Much of Dollar Shave Club’s video content has gone viral. Their marketing efforts are on-brand, humorous, and entertaining. In fact, one of their videos has over 26 million views on YouTube. By making a name for themselves through their online video content, Dollar Shave Club has experienced impressive growth and brand recognition.

6. Paid Ad Content Marketing

As I mentioned before, organic traffic created by content and inbound marketing is becoming increasingly popular among all types of businesses.

However, that’s not to say paid content and ads are useless or ineffective for reaching your target audience. Paid content ads can help you reach a broad audience and allow you to position yourself in all of the places you want to be seen.

There are many ways you can create and publish your paid content ads. You might share paid ads on social media or publish digital ads on websites in the form of banners or sponsored content.

Featured Resource: The Ultimate Google Ads PPC Kit

Example of Paid Ad Content Marketing

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Revolve — a clothing and accessories company — uses paid and sponsored ads on social media (like this one on Facebook) to reach their target audience while they browse their news feeds.

The content ads feature some of their products and details about their free shipping and return policies to pull their audience to their website and, hopefully, convert them audience into customers.

We’ve now reviewed the various types of content marketing you can add to your strategy. Now, let’s talk about your content marketing strategy. By implementing a strategy, you can ensure your content marketing efforts are impactful and effective in converting leads and reaching your audience members.

1. Set SMART goals.

The first part of your content marketing strategy is to set SMART goals. These should be specific to your business — they’ll likely complement your broader marketing and company goals. Let’s review some examples of goals you set for your content marketing strategy.

You may want your content to …

• Improve brand awareness
• Boost revenue
• Increase conversions
• Improve brand loyalty
• Increase customer engagement
• Build rapport and trust among prospects and customers
• Attract strategic partners

Featured Resource: Marketing SMRT Goals Template

2. Determine your KPIs.

Next, set key performance indicators (KPIs) for your SMART goals. KPIs are quantifiable data points you can use to measure your actual performance against your goal.

smart goal	related kpi
Brand awareness	Site traffic, social media followers, subscription sign-ups, mentions (by customers and partners)
Revenue	Daily sales, site traffic
Conversions	Conversion rate, shopping cart abandonment rate, associated shipping rate trends, competitive price trends
Brand loyalty	Returning customers, promoters, product reviews, referrals
Customer engagement	Likes, shares, follows, mentions, backlinks
Rapport and trust	Returning customers, promoters, followers, mentions
Strategic partners	New partnerships, mentions, backlinks

3. Decide on the type of content.

Next, choose the type of content you’ll create. To do this, start by thinking about your target audience and buyer personas. Answer the following questions about your target audience to help you narrow down the right types of content for them:

• What do they need from you?
• What challenges are they looking to overcome?
• Why do they need your product or service?
• How can you help them succeed?

Now, take a look back at the various types of content we reviewed earlier to determine which type or types of content you’ll create and share among your audience members and customers.

4. Choose your content channels.

Once you’ve decided on the type of content you’ll market with, it’s time to choose your specific content channels. For some of the content types, the channel you need to work with will be obvious. For example, if you’re creating blog content, your channel will be the blog itself.

However, some channels will be less obvious. For example, if you choose social media, you’ll need to decide which platform or platforms you’ll be marketing on (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). If you choose an infographic, you’ll need to decide which channel will you be sharing it on (social media, website, etc.).

5. Set a budget.

Now, set your budget. Think about the type of content you’re creating and which channels you’re marketing that content on.

Then, ask yourself the following questions to determine your budget:

• Do you need to purchase any software or technology to create the content (such as graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop, a subscription to Canva, a camera to take high-quality photos and videos)?
• Do you need to hire any content team members (such as artists, writers, editors, designers)?
• Do you need to pay for ad space?
• Do you need access to specific tools or resources to enhance or measure your specific type of content?

As you answer these questions, you may notice how your responses impact your expected budget — whether that’s an increase or decrease in what you may have already estimated.

6. Create and distribute the content.

Create and distribute your content so your audience members can consume it — and possibly convert. To ensure you’re consistently producing content and sharing it among your prospects and customers, use a social media calendar or an editorial content calendar.

This can help your team can stay on top of all of the content being created and even schedule it ahead of time.

Use a free editorial calendar to schedule and optimize all of your marketing content to help you boost conversions.

7. Analyze and measure results.

Lastly, analyze and measure your results. This will allow you to make any necessary changes to enhance your content marketing efforts and reach more audience members.

Look at your SMART goals and KPIs to determine the success of your content marketing strategy. Did you achieve your goals and KPIs? Were you close to reaching them, or were you off in your estimations?

Here are some tools to help you with your content marketing strategy analytics and results:

• HubSpot marketing analytics and social media software
• Mention
• SharedCount
• Sprout Social
• Google Analytics

Engage Your Target Audience With Content Marketing

With effective content marketing, you can reach your target audience and increase conversions. There are several ways to market with content to boost revenue, grow your brand awareness and recognition, and build relationships with your prospects and customers.

To get started, determine which type of content works best for your business and audience, and develop a content marketing strategy to begin boosting your bottom line today.

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

The other day, I signed up for a friend’s solidcore Pilates class.

Once I’d paid for the class, I got a text asking me to download the [solidcore] app to review upcoming classes, integrate with my Google Calendar, and buy credits for future classes.

Undoubtedly, the ability to use the business’s app was a major component in me becoming a more loyal member. The app was incredibly easy-to-use and sent me notifications 10 minutes before the class started.

Nowadays, it’s not unheard of for businesses to have their own apps — in fact, 42% of millennial-owned businesses use their own apps to increase sales or provide an alternative platform for their customers to use their tools or services.

Additionally, you’ll notice simply from shifting through your app store that plenty of businesses use their own apps. I’ve downloaded apps from major airlines, investment banks, and even small local restaurants or yoga studios.

So it makes sense if you’re considering creating a mobile app for your own company. But, while a mobile app as a revenue generator can be quite lucrative, the low barrier to entry makes a successful launch all the more challenging.

According to former CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps Alex Ahlund, the average cost to develop a mobile app is $6,453 — and the cost can skyrocket to as much as $150,000 depending on the complexity of the app.

Wherever you fall on that spectrum, the money and resources you dedicate to conceptualizing and developing a truly great mobile app can all be put to waste if you don’t orchestrate a proper mobile app launch.

And then once you’ve launched, your work has only just begun. You then need to think about how to make your app “sticky” — to ensure people come back again and again.

For the purposes of this post, we’re assuming you’ve already come up with a great initial mobile app idea and have a goal to get as many downloads as possible upon launch. Here, let’s explore how to conduct a successful launch, and how to ensure you can retain app users for the long-haul.

How to Launch a Mobile App

1. Do Market Research

As of January 2020, it’s been estimated that a total of 1,800,000 apps are available on the Apple App Store. And that number doesn’t even encapsulate Android apps in Google and Windows app stores either.

So — what does this mean for you? You probably already have a ton of competition. Conducting thorough market research becomes necessary in order for you to truly differentiate your app.

It’s critical you get to know the leading apps in your niche, see where they fall short, and use those insights to make your app even better than the competition’s.

Depending on your budget, you may want to do primary research for prospect users. But even secondary research can give you a lot of insights. Take a look at reviews on competitor app pages on the App stores, as well as checking reviews on YouTube and blogs to see what actual users have said about the competition.

2. Define Success

If you’re aiming for a successful mobile app launch, you need to define what success looks like.

Set some measurable goals around your launch. We recommend measuring success around your active install rate — this tells you retention rate, or the number of people who install your app and then don’t uninstall it — the number of ratings you receive, your average rating in the app marketplace, and if you’re selling your app, revenue generated from your app.

To help you set some benchmarks, most free mobile apps have a higher active install rate during the first month, usually around 50%, after which it levels off around 30%. The average app store rating is a 3-4 (out of 5), for which you should certainly strive much higher to maintain a healthy active install rate.

Later in the post, we’ll explore how to ensure you get high app store ratings post-launch.

3. Consider Cross-platform and Browser Versions of the App

It’s no longer enough to stick to one platform (typically Android or iOS). Now, it’s important to be available across multiple platforms to expand your reach.

As of January 2020, market share between mobile operating systems were at 74.3% for Android, 24.76% for iOS, and the remaining 2% are divided among other operating systems.

Not only is cross-platform development the way to go for more reach, but it’s also more cost-effective in the long-run, especially if you use top-rated IDE software to accelerate app development. Most IDE software even lets you create web browser versions of your mobile apps, giving users more ways to use your app across any device.

Budgeting app Goodbudget, for instance, is available on iOS, Android, and is perfectly accessible on a web browser.

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4. Claim Your Social Media Accounts

Pre-launch, you’ll want to claim your accounts in social media, and use them actively to generate interest or even early sign-ups, as we’ll discuss more in Step 7.

You can use your social media accounts to showcase the app while it’s in development and solicit feedback and ideas from your future users. When your app launches, though, be sure to change the link in your social media bios to direct to the app store download. Remember, your goal isn’t site traffic — you want to drive downloads.

And don’t discount newer social networks like Pinterest for launching your mobile app — the highly visual social network is the ideal place to show other mobile app developers your product in its final stages who may have some great suggestions for UI/UX improvements. Unless, of course, you’re trying to beat a competitor to market!

Finally, if you’re a HubSpot customer, you can leverage another app — the Facebook Welcome app in HubSpot’s app marketplace — to help with your mobile app launch on Facebook.

Generate some pre-release buzz by customizing a page that lets people sign up for an alert when the app launches. We’ll get into some fun pre-launch deals that will generate buzz around your app that you can associate with this email alert in future steps.

5. Create Content

Spend time creating content that clearly explains how to use your mobile app. This content should include blog posts, press releases, social media content, website copy, and email marketing copy.

You can pre-schedule all of this to go live on your launch day, although you should check in periodically on social media during launch week to provide real-time updates that pertain to support issues, reviews, and respond to user recommendations.

6. Record a Demo

You’ll want to create a video that shows how to use your mobile app — you can easily do this with a user-friendly program like Camtasia that allows screen capture and voiceover recording.

In your video, clearly explain what your app does and why it’s useful in real-life scenarios.

Again, there are so many mobile apps out there, so differentiating yours will come down to clear communication in all of your marketing materials. A short video demo is one of the easiest ways to display the value of your mobile app.

For an example of a fantastic mobile app demo, see CanadaQBank.com’s Mobile App Demo, which shows how the app works, and who it’s meant for:

7. Launch a Dedicated Site or Page

You can launch either a dedicated website for your app — more appropriate if your mobile app is a business in its own right — or simply create a page for your mobile app on your website. The latter is what most companies choose to do.

To complement your social media efforts, you should launch these pages even if your app hasn’t yet hit the market, like how PandaDoc did pre-launch. Direct users to this page of your site, let them view your demo video, and encourage them to sign up for a download alert email once your mobile app goes to market.

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8. Choose an App Store

Initially, you’ll want to choose just one app store in which to launch your mobile app. This should help you get the highest concentration of users and ratings possible.

Additionally, you’ll be making lots of changes and improvements to your app during those first few weeks after launch, and having your app in just one store will help you streamline those updates as they roll out. Once your app is more established, feel free to expand it to more app stores.

The most common app stores are the Android Market and the Apple App Store, but there are many other app stores out there (even HubSpot has its own new and improved App Marketplace!). Ultimately, if you’re unsure, do some audience testing to determine which Store is used most by your target market.

9. Use App Store Optimization to Get Discovered

Don’t confuse app store optimization (ASO) with SEO — while both important, you need ASO to get your mobile app discovered specifically within the app stores of your choosing.

Best practices include optimizing your app title with relevant keywords. And when you’re submitting your app to these different app stores, be sure to fill out all the categories most relevant to your app, so users browsing through categories have a good chance of finding you.

Also, you’ll want to include clear screenshots within your app download page that showcase the most common use cases of your app.

In the example below, Todoist uses keywords like to-do lists and project planner. Their app screenshots are also beautifully designed, telling you how you can use the app right away.

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10. Network With Other App Developers

Consider reaching out to other app developers that have created an app that could be complementary to yours, and whose users might also like to use your app. You could set up a mutually beneficial co-marketing opportunity that helps you both increase your install rates.

Just be sure to select developers who have great ratings in the app store. You don’t want to associate your app with a bad product.

11. Pitch Your App

Pitch your story to tech, mobile, and industry journalists and bloggers. Be armed with the video demo you recorded, and be prepared to give them a free download of your app so they can get to know the interface and your app’s capabilities. Make yourself readily available to answer any of their questions, and consider them another test group who can find bugs and make UX/UI recommendations.

You should start pitching at least a few weeks in advance so they have time to experiment with your app and write a compelling story without being rushed. Plus, the more time they have, the more likely they can fit you into their editorial calendar.

12. Tap Your Network for Buzz

Reach out to your business network and ask them to share your content about the app’s impending release on their social channels. Send your network a sneak preview email with a link to your demo video so they can see how your app works, and include social sharing buttons to make sharing your content easy.

This is also a great recourse for bloggers and journalists you’ve contacted who aren’t willing to publish long-form content about your app — you can ask them if they’d be willing to tweet a blog post you’ve written about your app, instead.

13. Set Up Paid Advertising

Because of the Google algorithm’s freshness update, you might gain some organic search tractions at your mobile app launch. Complement that search presence with some paid advertising during launch week.

You can also set up paid, targeted ads on Facebook to drive users to your Facebook fan page, where they’ll be greeted with your welcome screen encouraging them to sign up for your mobile app (refer back to Step 4).

Alternatively, you can redirect people straight to your app downloads page so that they can install it on their phones right away. Which strategy you decide to go with may depend on your app.

For instance, if your app requires some explanation or is fairly innovative in its approach, you can direct users to a dedicated landing page. Meanwhile, apps that users are already familiar with, such as gaming apps, can have ads that take users straight to the app download page.

14. Tap Influencers or Industry Thought Leaders

Influencer marketing is only growing in 2020, so if you want to spread the word for your app, we can’t emphasize this step enough.

Look for different social media influencers, bloggers, and content creators who can help generate buzz for your app before it launches. Choose influencers whom you think will benefit greatly by using yours, and conduct personalized email outreach marketing to effectively build relationships and win them over.

For instance, if you’re launching a mobile app for weight loss, tap different fitness influencers who talk about workout regimes or macro-tracking — whichever features your app has.

15. Launch an Invite-only Beta

Before you take your mobile app live to the public, consider an invite-only beta launch. Websites Spotify, Google+, and Pinterest have used this tactic with great success. It not only creates an air of exclusivity that generates buzz around your product, but it also lets you get feedback from a trusted network so you can fix bugs and UX/UI problems before rolling your app out full scale.

You can use the email list referenced in Step 4 as your pre-launch beta test group, and supplement it with an email marketing send to a segment of your current customer list that would benefit from using your mobile app. You can position the launch as the opportunity for free, exclusive access to your mobile app before it launches, and even ask them to write a review of your app in exchange for that free, exclusive access.

Alternatively, you can use TestFlight to launch a beta version of your app and invite users to give it a test run until your official launch.

16. Partner With Affiliates to Promote Your App

We’ve mentioned influencers and industry thought leaders in Step 14, but you can take your partnership the extra mile by creating an affiliate program to encourage downloads or purchases.

Identify key influencers — these can be media contacts or social media influencers with bigger followings — whom you can incentivize for pushing your app. Give them a special link that tracks purchases or downloads, so they automatically get instant rewards when their audience does a desired action.

17. Put Download Links Everywhere

Congrats — you’re officially ready to go live to the public!

You’ll want to put links to download your mobile app on your blog, your website’s home page, in your marketing emails, and on your social media accounts — you can even add a mobile tab to your Facebook page.

For instance, take a look at Waze app page below, which includes three calls-to-action above the fold, all of which are to download the app:

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18. Have a Launch Party

A launch party doesn’t have to be anything big. In fact, you can have a small intimate digital launch party through a webinar. Invite early adopters, influencers, tech journalists, and others to take part in a short launch.

You can announce special live discounts or perks while giving attendees all the details they need to download your app or spread the word.

Below, developers of Summerian announced a launch party happening on Product Hunt, while giving interested users a peek of what to expect during the launch:

19. Monitor Feedback and Encourage Reviews

Finally, you’ll want to monitor peoples’ feedback about your app, and strongly encourage users to post reviews.

It’s not just that the apps with the best reviews get the most visibility and downloads — this process also helps you identify bugs you wouldn’t otherwise know about and make quick changes to improve the user experience and make your app stickier.

Keep users updated on your progress as you make it so they know you’re listening and responding to their feedback, and take a look at Steps 21 and 22 if you want to take this even further while involving and updating users on new features and updates.

20. Identify Potential Integrations

The average smartphone user has between 60 to 90 apps on their phones, and you might have noticed some apps integrate with one another — for instance, you can log into your account on Pinterest using Facebook, or integrate your native Health app with your calorie counting app or fitness tracker.

This is more convenient for users, and best of all, you can increase retention when you integrate seamlessly with apps your users already have.

In HubSpot App Marketplace, for example, you can find all the apps that integrate with HubSpot seamlessly. Get to know who the developers for these apps are and strike up a partnership. You’ll never know how many doors these app integrations can open for you.

21. Publish an App Update Log

Transparency is becoming a very important thing for consumers, and one way to be more transparent with users about your mobile app is to keep them up-to-date with any changes and features over time.

An update log is the easiest way to do this. Send these logs to your app store pages, and even have a dedicated update log page on your website for users to easily see changes you’ve implemented the past several weeks.

By keeping users updated with your app changes, you can also increase retention rates as users see different updates they might have been waiting for or may benefit to learn more about. If an update is particularly big — such as a big interface change or even an exciting new feature — you can send push notifications and in-app pop-ups for users to see a breakdown of these new features on a dedicated page on your website.

Sometimes a brand will even inject their personality into these app updates. Just take a look at one of Medium‘s app updates from 2016:

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22. Keep a Hub of ‘Coming Soon’ and ‘Wishlist’ Features

If you want to let users know you’re listening to their suggestions and feedback like we mention in Step 19, then you can create a hub of your Coming Soon or wishlisted features.

Loom is a great example of a software app that does this. While they’re not a mobile app, the way they keep users updated with features that are coming soon or may be considered for development is a great way to keep your current customers on your app.

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Create a button or page on your mobile app that lets people submit feedback or requests for new features. Once they’ve submitted their thoughts, you can send them to this Coming Soon hub so they see all the exciting things you have in the works. They’ll be much more likely to stay on board to see these features come to life, and you’ll be increasing your retention rates and customer loyalty in the long run.

To help you manage your updates and still keep your app running for users, it’s best to use a NoSQL database, considering its popularity for helping mobile app developers worldwide manage their apps in a more streamlined way while lessening downtime for users.

Launch Your Mobile App the Right Way

Are you ready to launch your mobile app this year? Simply follow the steps above to make sure you’ve got everything covered for your launch, while making sure you can keep users around for the long haul. I’m excited to see your app come to life.

Whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve been using the same approach for a while, it never hurts to revisit your content strategy plan — to make sure it’s up-to-date, innovative, and engaging for your customers, no matter when or how they intend to buy.

After all, you’ve got more competition than ever. According to HubSpot’s Not Another State of Marketing Report, almost 70% of businesses are actively investing in content marketing in 2020.

The first step to getting a leg up on the competition — and actively engage your audience — is to have a solid, smart content marketing plan in place.

If you’re having trouble planning for the upcoming year or need some fresh ideas to include in your plan, read on.

In this post, we’ll dive into what content strategy is, why your business needs a content marketing plan, and what steps you need to take to create your strategy.

What is content strategy?

Content strategy refers to the management of pretty much any tangible media that you create and own: written, visual, downloadable — you name it. Content strategy is the piece of your marketing plan that continuously demonstrates who you are and the expertise you bring to your industry.

You might’ve heard how important content creation is to the growth of your business, but as you’ll see throughout this post, it needs to have a well-planned purpose.

When you develop a content strategy, there are a few questions to answer.

1. Who will be reading your content?

Who’s the target audience for your content? For how many audiences are you creating content? Just as your business might have more than one type of customer, your content strategy can cater to more than one type of reader or viewer.

Using a variety of content types and channels will help you deliver different content to each type of audience you have in mind and engage everyone your company does business with.

2. What problem will you be solving for your audience(s)?

Ideally, your product or service solves a problem you know your audience has. By the same token, your content coaches and educates your audience through this problem as they begin to identify and address it.

A sound content strategy supports people on both sides of your product: those who are still figuring out what their main challenges are, and those who are already using your product to overcome these challenges. Your content reinforces the solution(s) you’re offering and makes your customers more qualified users of your product.

3. What makes you unique?

Your competitors likely have a similar product as yours, which means your potential customers need to know what makes yours better — or, at least, different. This is where content comes in.

In order to prove why you’re worth buying from, you need to prove why you’re worth listening to.

4. What content formats will you focus on?

What forms will your content take? Infographics? Videos? Blog posts? Having identified the topics you want to take a position on, you’ll need to determine which formats to budget for so you can best express that position.

5. What channels will you publish on?

Just as you can create content in different formats, you’ll also have different channels you can publish to. Channels can include owned properties, such as your website and blog; and social media properties, such as Facebook and Twitter. We’ll talk more about social media content strategy in the step-by-step guide later in this article.

6. How will you manage content creation and publication?

Figuring out how you’ll create and publish all your content can be a daunting task. It’s important for a content strategy to know who’s creating what, where it’s being published, and when it’s going live.

Today’s content strategies prevent clutter by managing content from a topic standpoint — as explained in the video above. When planning a content editorial calendar around topics, you can easily visualize your company’s message and assert yourself as an authority in your market over time.

Why Marketers Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing helps businesses prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads. If you can create just one blog post that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, an embedded link to an e-book or free tool will continue generating leads for you as time goes on — long after you click Publish.

HubSpot’s blog team found this to be key to increasing traffic to the Sales Blog over time — read about their blog strategy here.

The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will give you the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue, such as sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content. Plus, your content will not only help attract leads — it will also help educate your target prospects and generate awareness for your brand.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Now, let’s dive in to learn the specifics of how to create a content marketing plan.

1. Define your goal.

What’s your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan? Know your goals before you begin planning, and you’ll have an easier time determining what’s best for your strategy.

Download this goal planning template for help figuring out the right content goals.

2. Conduct persona research.

To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content’s target audience — also known as your buyer persona.

This is especially important for those who are starting out or are new to marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content that they’ll want to read and convert on.

If you’re an experienced marketer, your target may have changed. Do you want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target audience? Revisiting your audience parameters by conducting market research each year is crucial to growing your audience.

3. Run a content audit.

Most people start out with blog posts, but if you want to venture out and try producing other content pieces, consider which ones you want to make.

For instance, if you’ve been doing weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an ebook that distills all your blog posts into one ultimate guide would be one way to offer information in a different format. We’ll go over several different types of content you can use further down on the list.

If you’ve been in business for a while, review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year by running a content audit. Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals to reach. Now is a great time to align your team’s goals with the rest of your organization’s goals.

4. Choose a content management system.

Have a system in place where you can create, manage, and track your content, otherwise known as a content management system (CMS). A few vital parts of content management include content creation, content publication, and content analytics.

With HubSpot CMS, you can plan, produce, publish, and measure your results all in one place. Another popular CMS is WordPress, to which you can add the HubSpot WordPress plugin for free web forms, live chat, CRM access, email marketing, and analytics.

5. Brainstorm content ideas.

Now, it’s time to start coming up with ideas for your next content project. Here are some tools to get the wheels turning:

HubSpot’s Website Grader

HubSpot’s Website Grader is a great tool to use when you want to see where you’re at with your digital marketing. From your blogging efforts to your social media marketing, Website Grader grades vital areas of your marketing and sends you a detailed report to help you optimize and improve each area.

With this tool, you can figure out how to make your website more SEO-friendly and discover new content ideas.

BlogAbout

Get your mind gears going with IMPACT’s unique content idea generator, BlogAbout. This tool works a bit like Mad Libs, but instead of joke sentences, it shows you common headline formats with blanks where you can fill in the subject you have in mind.

This brainstorming technique helps you put general ideas in contexts that would be appealing to your target audience. Once you have a headline you like, BlogAbout lets you add it to your “Notebook” so you can save your best ideas.

HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator

Get blog post ideas for an entire year with HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator. All you need to do is enter general topics or terms you’d like to write about, and this content idea generator does all the work for you.

Feedly

The Feedly RSS feed is a wonderful way to keep track of trendy topics in your industry and find content ideas at the same time.

BuzzSumo

Discover popular content and content ideas at BuzzSumo. This company offers a number of market research tools, one of which uses social media shares to determine if a piece of content is popular and well-liked. In turn, this information helps you see which content ideas would do well if you were to create content about them.

Blog Post Headline Analyzer

CoSchedule’s Blog Post Headline Analyzer tool analyzes headlines and titles and provides feedback on length, word choice, grammar, and keyword search volume. If you have an idea in mind, run a few title options through the Headline Analyzer to see how you could make it stronger, and to move your idea further along in the brainstorming process.

6. Determine which types of content you want to create.

There are a variety of options out there for content you can create. In the following section, we’ll discuss some of the most popular content formats marketers are creating, including some tools and templates to get you started.

7. Publish and manage your content.

Your marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you’ll create — it should also cover you’ll organize your content. With the help of an editorial calendar, you’ll be on the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website. Then, create a social media content calendar so you can promote and manage your content on other sites.

Many of the ideas you think of will be evergreen — they’re just as relevant months from now as they are today. That being said, you shouldn’t ignore timely topics either. While they may not be the bulk of your editorial calendar, they can help you generate spikes of traffic.

Most people count on incorporating popular holidays such as New Year’s and Thanksgiving in their marketing efforts, but you don’t have to limit yourself to these important marketing dates.

If there are niche holidays that might appeal to your audience, it could be worth publishing content on your blog or on social media. Check out this ultimate list of social media holidays — keep an eye on it when you’re planning your calendar.

These are the eight most popular types of content marketing you can create for your readers and customers.

1. Blog Posts

If you haven’t already noticed, you’re currently reading a blog post. Blog posts live on a website and should be published regularly in order to attract new visitors.

Posts should provide valuable content for your audience that makes them inclined to share posts on social media and across other websites. We recommend that blog posts be between 1,000 and 2,000 words in length, but you should experiment to see if your audience prefers longer or shorter reads.

Check out our free blog post templates for writing great how-to, listicle, curation, SlideShare presentation, and newsjacking posts on your own blog.

2. Ebooks

Ebooks are lead-generation tools that potential customers can download after submitting a lead form with their contact information. They’re typically longer, more in-depth, and published less frequently than blog posts, which are written to attract visitors to a website.

Ebooks are the next step in the inbound marketing process: After reading a blog post (such as this one), visitors might want more information.

This is where calls-to-action (CTAs) come into play, directing people to a landing page where they can submit their contact information and download an ebook to learn more valuable information for their business. In turn, the business producing the ebook has a new lead for the sales team to contact.

3. Case Studies

Case studies are your opportunity to tell the story of a customer who succeeded in solving a problem by working with you. A case study is perhaps your most versatile type of content marketing because it can take many different forms — some of which are on this list. That’s right, case studies can take the form of a blog post, ebook, podcast … even an infographic.

Your goal in a case study is to show the people who are considering your product that the proof is in the pudding. Before choosing a customer for a case study, you should determine which form the testimonial will take and the area of your business to which you’re trying to drive value.

4. Templates

Templates are a handy content format to try because they generate leads for you while providing tremendous value to your audience. When you provide your audience with template tools to save them time and help them succeed, they’re more likely to keep engaging with your content in the future.

5. Infographics

Infographics can organize and visualize data in a more compelling way than words alone. These are great content formats to use if you’re trying to share a lot of data in a way that is clear and easy to understand.

If you’re ready to get started, get our templates for creating beautiful infographics in less than an hour.

6. Videos

Videos are a highly engaging content medium and are shareable across social media platforms and websites alike. Videos require a bigger investment of time and resources than written content, but as visual marketing increases in popularity — after all, it’s 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content — it’s a medium worth experimenting with.

HubSpot Research recently found that video is the most preferred form of content. Video also captures people’s attention more than any other content format.

7. Podcasts

Starting a podcast will help audiences find your brand if they don’t have time or interest in reading content every day. The number of podcast listeners is growing — in 2018, nearly one-third of the U.S. population has listened to a podcast in the last month.

If you have interesting people to interview or conversations to host, consider podcasting as another content format to experiment with. (Here’s our comprehensive guide to starting a podcast.)

8. Social Media

Once you’ve been regularly publishing content on your own site for a while, it might be time to start thinking about distributing your content on other sites. This could mean repurposing content into new formats and publishing them on your blog, creating original content specifically for external sites or publishing website content on various social networks.

Posting on social media, however, is pivotal to amplifying your brand’s reach and delivering your content to your customers where you know they spend their time. Social networks on which businesses often post include:

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

When launching a business account on any of the social networks above, it’s important to post the type of content your followers expect to see. On Instagram, for example, users want photos, videos, and graphics that reflect current events, show off user-generated content, or even go behind the scenes of your organization.

On Facebook, your options for what to post open up a bit: Not only can you share your blog posts and website content, but you can also post native Facebook videos, product promotions, and original memes that resonate with your customers. You can also interact with other businesses that have a similar audience as your own.

While the goal on social media sites like Instagram or Snapchat is to connect more intimately with your audience, your goal on platforms like Facebook and Twitter is to expand that audience, drive traffic toward your website, and start conversations in your industry. Do some basic market research to discover which platforms your buyers are on, and mold your content to their expectations.

When you’re ready for more ideas, there are a plethora of different content types to diversify your content marketing.

It takes time, organization, and creativity to grow a successful content marketing strategy. From building the foundation of your content marketing plan to adding tools to better manage your content, setting up your strategy for the new year won’t be a hassle if you follow the steps and explore the resources here.

For additional guidance, use HubSpot’s Marketing Plan Generator to create a 12-month strategy in just a few minutes.

Happy creating!

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

On some days, it feels like I communicate with more people on messaging apps than I do in person.

When I’m at work, I’ll use our office’s instant messaging tools to chat with my colleagues. When I get home, I’m sending goofy messages on Snapchat. When I need to have an in-depth conversation with a loved one. I use Facebook Messenger. And, if I want to reconnect to a far-away friend, I’ll use WhatsApp for a global video chat.

By now, you’ve probably used many of these popular messaging apps yourself. As an individual, you might love how they help us stay connected to our loved ones.

But — as a smart marketer — you’re probably wondering how you can interact with each major messaging app’s growing audience.

The truth is, mobile message marketing works — and it’s not new. While many marketers started out by sending simple SMS messages to their prospects, mobile marketing has greatly evolved. Brands can now pick a platform with an audience that matches their own and leverage it for even more in-depth campaigns.

The growing trend of using mobile messaging apps for marketing makes sense. According to a Facebook survey on messaging app use, more than half of the participants preferred to message a brand on one of their messaging apps rather than calling them.

Currently, businesses are heavily using apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. They’ve also dabbled in more niche apps like Snapchat. But, with all the messaging platforms out there, you might be wondering, “Which one is right for me?”

To help you determine which apps to use in your mobile messaging campaigns, here’s a list of 43 helpful stats to know.

General Messaging App Stats

• Over 56% of global messaging app users say they’ve messaged brands to get more information in all stages of the buyer’s journey. (Facebook)
• When a brand is available and active on a messaging app, over 66% of consumers will feel more confident about purchases, while 55% feel more connected to the brand. (Facebook)
• In 2019, 63% of those polled in a recent Facebook survey said they’d been messaging brands more often on messaging apps than in previous years. (Facebook)
• By Q4 of 2019, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger were the most popular messaging apps globally, with 1.6 billion and 1.3 billion users respectively. (Statista)

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WhatsApp Stats

• WhatsApp has over two billion active users globally. (WhatsApp)
• WhatsApp for Business, an app for WhatsApp brands launched in 2019, now has 5 million users. (WhatsApp)
• By Q1 of 2018, 60 billion messages were being sent through the platform each day. (Mark Zuckerberg)
• India, Brazil, and the United States have the biggest WhatsApp audiences, with 340 million, 99 million, and 68 million users respectively. (eMarketer)
• Uruguay and Argentina are the fastest-growing WhatsApp audiences with a 67% and 63% increase in Apple App Store downloads in Q4 of 2019. (Statista)
• In 2018, WhatsApp grew its U.K. user base by 20% (We Are Social Digital Report)
• 46% of WhatsApp users are under 45 years old, with the biggest age group between 26 and 35. (Statista)
• Facebook reportedly paid 21.8 billion to acquire WhatsApp and all of its users. (Investopedia)
• WhatsApp users cumulatively spend 2 billion minutes on calls every day. (WhatsApp)
• There are only 25 countries where WhatsApp doesn’t lead the messaging app market. (Messenger People)

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• 51% of mobile messaging app users say they prefer to contact brands via mobile messages. (Kenshoo)
• In 2018, just over 149 million people had at least one mobile messaging app on their smartphone. That number is estimated to grow to 171 million by 2022. (eMarketer)
• In the U.S., 45.5% of people were using a messaging app in 2018. (eMarketer)

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Facebook Messenger Stats

• In 2019, Facebook Messenger had over 106 million active users in the U.S. (Statista)
• The app has over 1.3 billion monthly active users globally, (Statista)
• There are more than 40 million monthly active businesses on Messenger. (Facebook)
• While WhatsApp is currently the leading messaging app, Facebook Messenger is the second most downloaded app of all time, behind Facebook. (Facebook)
• 410 million users use video chat monthly on the platform. (Facebook)
• In 2019, video chat on Messenger saw a 40% year over year growth. (Facebook)
• Brands quickly eyed Facebook Messenger as an opportunity for chatbots. By 2016, 300,000 company bots were active on this channel. (TechCrunch)
• 23-35 year-olds make up more than 27% of the Facebook Messenger user base. (Statista)
• In 2018, an average of 20 billion messages were sent via Facebook Messenger each month. (Facebook)
• When consumers message brands via Facebook, 80% of the messages ask questions about a product or service before a purchase is made. (Facebook)

WeChat

• WeChat has over 1.5 billion users globally. (Statista)
• By 2021, WeChat is projected to have more than 674 million monthly active users. (eMarketer)
• Nearly 43% of WeChat users were born in the 1990s, while just over 25% of users were born in the 2000s. (ChinaChannel)
• During the Chinese New Year, 28 million people were playing WeChat games each hour. (ChinaChannel)
• The app is owned by Tencent, a China-based corporation which is the fifth-biggest company in the world. (CNN)
• In 2018, the WeChat hosted 410 million video calls. (Sina: Translated with Google Chrome)
• In 2019, 79% of Chinese internet users reported using WeChat. (We Are Social and HootSuite)

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Snapchat Stats

• 38% of Snapchat users aren’t on Facebook or Instagram. (Snapchat)
• Snapchat claims to have over 218 global daily active users. (Snapchat)
• 24% of U.S. adults use Snapchat (Pew Research Center)
• 53% of adult Snapchat users log on to the app at least once a day. (Pew Research Center)
• Most U.S. Snapchat users primarily use the app for conversations with friends. (Snapchat)
• 90% of 13 to 24-year-olds use Snapchat while 75% of 13 to 34-year-olds use the app. (Snapchat)
• More than 15% of the total Snaps sent daily feature a lens made by Snapchatters with the Lens Kit. (Snap Inc.)
• The longest Snapchat streak, or messages consecutively sent between two people, was 1,154 snaps. (Techjunkie)
• In 2017, 3.5 billion snaps of photos were sent on the platform. (Statista)

Navigating Messaging Apps for Marketing

As you choose an app to leverage in your messaging strategy, make sure the platform’s global and age demographics are in line with your target audience. For example, while Facebook Messenger is a great tool to use if you’re targeting U.S. millennials, WhatsApp might be of interest to you if you’re looking to step into a global strategy.

To help you pick the right app or apps, think about your buyer persona. Where are they from? What are they most interested in? And, why would they choose to interact with your brand on a platform? As you answer these questions, you can develop a deeper understanding of which platforms and messaging strategies are right for you.

To learn more about the platforms discussed, check out these posts which highlight the marketing benefits of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and WeChat.

Want to learn more about general messaging-based marketing strategies? Click here.

I’m a huge fan of food magazine Bon Appetit. I love the brand’s voice, messaging, and content, so when I found the corresponding YouTube channel for the publication last year, I was immediately sold.

When you dive into Bon Appetit’s YouTube channel, you’ll find a cast of chefs. They either host their own show, make a recipe video, or both. For instance, my favorite Bon Appetit chef, Carla Lalli Music, hosts “Back to Back Chef” on the channel, but also has a few recipe videos.

Recently, I went to browse the official website to purchase merchandise. (Hey, I have to represent my favorites!) What I found, in addition to the merchandise, was one of Music’s recipe videos for ragu, using a specific brand of sauce from Barilla:

“So, cool,” I thought to myself. “Even though this is an advertorial, I love the content, so I’ll keep watching.”

An advertorial is, like the name suggests, an advertisement. But they are unique in their own way. Let’s define what an advertorial is, and how it can be an excellent marketing choice for you and your team.

A good advertorial doesn’t clearly state that an advertiser made the post in the copy, but it also doesn’t hide that fact. An advertorial should provide the same high-quality content as a blog post or video, but give a spotlight to the product being advertised.

For example, let’s say I’m on the marketing team for a company that offers social media services, and I’m in charge of writing an advertorial. I might write a listicle that talks about the top social media tools in the marketing industry, and include my company’s software somewhere in the list.

This approach accomplishes promoting my company’s services, but also provides valuable information to readers about other tools, like an editorial piece. Advertorials can be used as a valuable marketing technique for visibility and conversion, so let’s explore that, next.

Benefits of Advertorial Marketing

When you use an advertorial, you’re using a marketing technique that’s often used for brand exposure, conversion, and lead generation. In this section, we’re going to talk about how.

1. You can convert leads.

First, if you have blog post ideas that relate to your industry, you might consider sourcing out a publication that is interested in advertorials for your industry. For instance, if you run an ecommerce technology business, a publication like The New Yorker might not be a viable option — instead, you might want to consider a publication like TechCrunch, which specializes in all things technology and commerce.

Your advertorial would be shown to audiences that are the most interested in your industry, so you can increase exposure to the right audiences. You might be able to convert quite a few leads from this method.

2. Advertorials build brand awareness.

Next, let’s say you want to build brand awareness with paid ads, but are looking to advance your efforts past social media or TV ads. An advertorial might be a good alternative. The post, unlike ads, is paid for less often, but has the potential to be found by readers long after the publish date.

For instance, let’s say you pay for an advertorial tomorrow. Generally, you won’t have to keep paying to boost the visibility of your ad, like you would have to with other ads. You can earn organic traffic continuously with an advertorial.

3. Retarget your existing customers.

Lastly, if you’re thinking about advertorial marketing, think about how you can retarget your advertorial on your end. When the advertorial is posted, how can you fit it into your content plan to provide value to your existing customers?

Maybe your advertorial is a filmed interview with an industry thought leader, and your customers respond really well to video. You can post the advertorial on your social media accounts, and boost the fact that you partnered with a publication to bring a new video to your audience.

Similarly, you can embed the advertorial into your email list. Your email subscribers are likely devoted customers, so sharing the post with that audience is most likely going to earn you some traffic.

Encouraging your customers to share the post on social media and tag your company is a great way to increase brand awareness online, promote your advertorial, and gain user-generated content from your audience. User-generated content is a fantastic content idea that gives a voice to satisfied customers to market your product from their point of view.

Does all of this sound like an opportunity that can’t be missed? If your answer is, “Of course!”, you’re probably wondering what goes into an advertorial to make them stunning. So, let’s talk about writing an advertorial, next.

Advertorial vs. Editorial

Including company software among a listicle is just one of the ways to write a successful advertorial. Just like there are multiple ways to market products, there’s multiple ways to create an advertorial.

Ultimately, how you structure your advertorial is dependent on the brand voices of your company and the publication for which you’re writing.

If your brand voice is more formal, but you’re writing for a publication like BuzzFeed, which is known for its less-formal tone, blend the two harmoniously so your advertorial can speak to both audiences. (Alternatively, perhaps your target audience for this campaign supports a change of tone, which is 100% okay).

To make sure you write an effective advertorial that doesn’t sound too much like a blog post or too much like an ad, we’re going to analyze what makes editorial content, like a blog post or product page, vs. what makes an advertorial. These tips will help guide your writing process.

1. Write for value, not to promote.

Your advertorial should include valuable copy. You don’t need to write a blatant ad for your product or company. Instead, advertorials should take the tone of a blog post.

Blog posts are meant to provide information that audiences can find value from. So, when you sit down to create the concept of your advertorial, think about how you can serve your target audience with educational content, first.

Maybe your campaign goal is to increase visibility of your new product. If that’s the case, think of writing a listicle that mentions competitive products and include yours at the top. This provides valuable information to audiences you’re interested in, as well as the other way around.

2. Stick to what your title says.

When your advertorial pitch gets accepted by a publication, or after you’ve written a draft, read it for continuity: Does your advertorial accomplish what you said it would in the title?

For instance, if your post title is, “Marketing Tips for a Team of One,” but you spend the advertorial talking about how wonderful your marketing agency is at building brand awareness, your post is going to sound more like a product page.

It’s important you align the information in your article with your title, so readers know what they’re getting into when they read the title of your advertorial. Additionally, you won’t lose credibility for false advertising, and you can be sure you’re serving your audience.

3. Solve for the customer.

Serving audiences should be one of your top priorities with an advertorial. Yes, advertorials help your company out, but ultimately, solving for the customer generates new ones.

Advertorials aren’t a chance for you to shout out how your company solves all of the challenges presented in your advertorial. Instead, this is a chance for you to reach a new audience with high-quality content.

If you want to place an ad for your company in tandem with an advertorial, discuss the possibility with the publisher. You may be able to purchase ad space that will separate the purposes of your content.

4. Inspire action.

Remember, your advertorial should still be some sort of an advertisement, even if it’s not as visible as others. And, with all ads, you should inspire action by the end of the post.

Instead of including a huge, shiny CTA button that looks amazing on your product pages, weave action into the narrative of your advertorial. For example, if you are going to write one about your latest data report, include a link to read it, or a screenshot of a compelling part of the report that links to the content offer for it.

Similarly, you can make an interactive advertorial, like a quiz, that tests your readers’ knowledge about the subject, then provide a resource where they can learn more about the subject by accessing one of your offers.

5. Avoid only talking about your company.

This is a huge rule of thumb. To ensure your advertorial doesn’t take the form of a long-form ad, avoid only talking about your company in the advertorial.

It’s common to think that this point only applies to listicles, but it’s something to think about regardless of the type of advertorial you’re writing. Even if your content includes a quiz, you can have a couple of the questions mention competitors, and how they fit into the lives of your customers.

Similarly, if you’re writing a “How-to” guide, when you include your company as a resource, be sure to mention another option or two. To diversify your content, add value to the reader, and show your knowledge of the industry, mentioning other brands in the post is key.

6. Delight your readers with exceptional content.

If you’re writing an advertorial, it’s a good chance to try something new to delight your customers — for instance, maybe include animations instead of photos, emojis instead of text, or even a different style of writing that’s different from your typical brand voice.

The chance to participate in something new will engage with those leads. If  you’re writing for the needs of your audience, you want them to feel like their experience reading your advertorial was a delightful one.

You can also try out some new optimization techniques. Maybe you create a content offer that’s specific to a campaign. You can experiment here, and cater to new leads with your piece.

Now that you have some tips about how to create an advertorial, let’s go over some examples you can refer to if you get stuck writing, formatting, or finalizing your post.

Advertorial Examples

If you’re wondering about the effectiveness of your advertorial, we’re going check out these examples to get an idea of how to make one that’s incredible.

1. Cole Haan x Forbes

Forbes runs a series on their website called BrandVoice, which is a series dedicated to expert advice from marketers. This BrandVoice in particular is an advertorial from footwear company, Cole Haan, about exploring creativity:

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At the top of this post is a banner ad for Cole Haan. Putting this ad at the top of the post, rather than the body, reinforces that the post is an advertisement, but doesn’t make the copy suffer for it.This advertorial supports balancing your mind, and moving productively inside your home. While the post itself doesn’t mention the words “Cole Haan,” or promote the company’s products, the content still relates to the concept of moving your feet, which aligns with what the company sells.

If you want your advertorial copy to be a little more low-key, but still include an advertisement for your post somewhere on the webpage, think about adding in a paid ad, similar to Cole Haan’s.

2. Sapphire x Thrillist

Sapphire is a credit card rewards card offered by Chase Bank. Cardholders can earn points and rewards based on how much they spend at restaurants using the card. This advertorial gives a spotlight to must-try restaurants, in efforts to get readers thinking about how to use the Sapphire card:

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This advertorial shows how a listicle doesn’t need to include your product to be successful. Instead, you can write about keywords that reflect your company or industry. As long as the advertorial supports your company in some way, it’s still effective.What’s great about this advertorial is that it takes an intriguing angle. Diving into restaurants that offer unique and futuristic food is an exciting topic. And, in keeping in line with Thrillist’s laid-back, friendly brand voice, the post’s language isn’t as formal.

3. Captain Morgan x BuzzFeed

Similar to the last example, this advertorial for Captain Morgan, an alcohol company, is a listicle from BuzzFeed Germany (Non-native speakers have the option to translate the page). What’s not similar to the last example is that this advertorial mentions the company and its products by name. Even so, this advertorial provides valuable information to the reader, so the advertorial is still effective.

The advertorial’s structure and copy make it an engaging, helpful read, even though it mentions the product more than once. It contains drink recipes that you can make at home, along with pictures to use as a guide:

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Recipes, along with guided pictures and ingredients, accomplishes two things. First, it gives plenty of ideas for fans of Captain Morgan, who may already have the products mentioned, but need inspiration for what to do with it. A simple Google query like “recipes with Captain Morgan” would bring the fan to this BuzzFeed advertorial.

This post can also catch the eyes of readers who want simple rum recipes to try out and need inspiration. It gives enough recipe variations to spark inspiration, and capitalizes on the seasonality, since this post went up during a summer month.

4. Love Beauty Planet x The New York Times

Sustainability is a big focus for beauty company, Love Beauty Planet. One of the company’s values is to produce their products ethically and with recycled materials to reduce their carbon footprint. This emphasis on going green is the focus for the company’s advertorial that was featured in The New York Times:

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Creating an advertorial that’s a little more interactive than a text-only blog post is a strategy you could use to make your advertorial more engaging. If your quiz is shorter, like Love Beauty Planet’s, you can provide valuable, actionable takeaways at the end, to keep your brand in the reader’s mind as they implement the tips.This editorial is an interactive one, which first quizzes the reader’s knowledge of recycling and reducing waste. After answering the five questions, the post shares small things readers can do to reduce their carbon footprint.

5. PwC and RYOT Studio x The Huffington Post

For this advertorial, two companies collaborated to make a paid post that mixed copy with video. PwC and RYOT Studio worked together to produce an entry in PwC’s new series for diversity and inclusion for CEOs. The company offers business solutions for customers, so the angle keeps consistent with PwC’s industry:

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What this advertorial does really well is provide readers with a video to go along with the blog post. The video presents the content really well, so those who don’t usually enjoy interacting with long-form content don’t have to read as much.

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If you have a video that tells the story of your company really well, and want to build some brand awareness, consider submitting it along with a couple of paragraphs of supporting copy for an advertorial. It can expose your company to a new audience, and be awesome for generating leads.

Now, you know how to spot an advertorial and even write one of your own. Advertorials can spice up your content marketing strategy and bring a community of new audience members to your brand, so make sure to put your best foot forward, and good luck!

Despite what you might hear, Facebook marketing is not dead.

Even with the recent rise of other social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, TikTok, and the likes, with over 2.4 billion users, Facebook is still the world’s largest social media platform.

And, of those 2.4 billion users, the vast majority spend an average of 60 minutes on Facebook every day.

Let that sink in for a second — considering the average person sleeps eight hours a day, that means about 7% of their waking hours are spent with their eyes glued to Facebook. With those stats alone, it’s safe to say that Facebook is alive and well.

But why do so many users spend so much time on Facebook? Well, Facebook appeals to its users because it provides real-time information but with a deeper feel. It may not necessarily break news as fast as Twitter, but when it does, it provides greater detail and a platform for discussion.

The key differentiator that has kept Facebook as the most widely-used social platform however, is this: it takes engagement to a deeper level than any other social media network can.

But, with 94% of businesses still actively using Facebook, how can you make your brand stand out?

Here are seven brands that take their Facebook marketing to the next level, to help inspire your own brand’s future Facebook marketing strategy. Keep in mind that the strategies used by these companies can be used by any company out there. Ultimately, you don’t have to be National Geographic or Nike to be successful.

1. Charity: Water

Number of Likes: 488,000

Marketing any charitable organization can be tough because there are thousands of organizations out there that need our help. People love to support brands that give back. How can you pick and choose one great cause over another?

Charity: Water — an organization with a mission to deliver clean and safe drinking water to developing nations — takes a unique approach to non-profit marketing with exceptional storytelling.

Everyone loves a great story. People want to feel connected to a group, to belong. And stories give you a reason to communicate and relate. Stories are stimulating and give you something to believe in. And stories make you feel better, smarter, safer, or even loved.

Business storytelling is similar — it’s about creating alignment between your business and your prospects and customers. This is where Charity: Water excels. They’ve mastered the art of storytelling to raise awareness around the global water crisis all while inspiring people to give.

Take CEO, Scott Harrison’s own story, for example. Before starting Charity: Water, Scott spent a decade as a nightclub promoter and at 28-years-old, found himself spiritually, morally, and emotionally bankrupt. After volunteering aboard a hospital ship for two years, Scott saw the effects of drinking unsafe, dirty water first-hand. He later returned to New York and started what is now Charity: Water.

This strategy of telling compelling stories is not limited to Scott’s background — instead, it’s present in all the content the non-profit produces and shares on its feed. Throughout their content, the non-profit consistently shows, in a very personal way, how bringing clean water to those in need impacts the lives of countless people around the globe, including donors.

How can you incorporate this?

Your goal is to make a human connection. It’s all about resonating with people, people that need your help or guidance. A story is not just your history. A story is why you’re doing what you’re doing, and it’s critical you tell it in a way that appeals to your audience. Think about how you can capture your story and share it with your prospects and customers. And don’t limit yourself to lengthy ebooks, or emails — use video, images, interviews — get creative.

2. GoPro

Number of Likes: 10 million

When you visit GoPro’s Facebook Page, you’re met with videos and images that scream adventure, action, and adrenaline. This can be said about their pages and feeds on other platforms, like Instagram and Twitter, too. It’s not rare to see someone scaling a mountain, jumping out of an airplane, surfing, or doing a backward 360-degree flip on their mountain bike, all with a camera strapped to their head.

The brand’s feed is saturated with this type of content — and it works. They’re able to generate unprecedented engagement with almost every piece of content they produce because they know who their buyer persona is — and as a result, what content will resonate with them.

You’ll rarely see GoPro’s Page post any images or videos showcasing their highly popular action camera. They’re not connecting with their users through their products — instead, they’re connecting with their users through the lifestyle their products enable.

GoPro’s unique marketing strategy enables the company to capture the attention of their target market and showcase what it means to be a part of the GoPro community. Additionally, much of their content is user-generated. By using particular hashtags, like #GoProMillionDollarChallenge, users can tag their videos with the hashtag and have it featured on the company’s Page.

For the #GoProMillionDollarChallenge in particular, users uploaded over 42,000 videos over four months. Talk about driving engagement!

How can you incorporate this?

When it comes to creating great content on Facebook, it helps to know who you’re talking to. Understanding the people who are currently interacting with your Page will help you not only create great content — but create the right content, too.

There are many tools out there that can help you understand who your audience on Facebook is, like Facebook’s Audience Insights tool. Through accumulated information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior, and more, the tool helps you learn more about your target audience and their behavior on Facebook. While it’s easy to jump right into creating content on Facebook, take the time to understand who your audience is. It will pay-off in the long run.

3. Nike

Number of Likes: 33.7 million

Nike is arguably one of the biggest athletic brand names out there. They have a marketing budget that a lot of companies can barely begin to fathom. And yet, when it comes to their Facebook presence, they don’t over-emphasize the need to buy their products.

Even though Nike is such a household name, they still have competitors. Adidas and Under Armour aren’t just going to sit back and let them maintain the majority of the market share. You would think the competitive nature of the industry would encourage them to step up their promotions.

But they don’t have to. They have established and continue to maintain a strong brand image, which resonates throughout their Facebook page. They have quite possibly the most famous slogan out there, so they grab onto that popularity and incorporate it in their cover photo, photos shared, and through a branded hashtag.

Nike’s Facebook Page is a balance of new products, science, charitable initiatives, and encouragement. One way they differentiate themselves from their major competitors is by emphasizing the research and development that goes into every design. Their products are seen as the result of extensive engineering or science experiments, which evoke the idea that these items are both cutting-edge and high-quality.

How can you incorporate this?

Think about how you’ve positioned your business and presence on Facebook as it relates to your brand as a whole. How does your brand message support or complement the products you’re delivering? Does your larger brand message run through the products you’re delivering?

Instead of saturating your Facebook Page with content about your products, can you use it as a place to establish and reinforce your brand message? Ask yourself some of these questions, look at competitors in your industry, and consider what you can learn from them to take your Facebook marketing to the next level.

4. Tasty

Number of Likes: 97 million

If you’ve been on Facebook for any amount of time, you’ve likely come across Tasty. The brand, which is owned by BuzzFeed, produces engaging videos about making delicious food items in a short amount of time.

Tasty does such a good job when it comes to captivating users with their videos, but it’s not for the reasons you might think. Sure, the videos are visually appealing, they’re short, and they’re about food — who doesn’t love videos about food, right?

But there’s something else the brand does better than most: the marketers behind Tasty’s brand understands the context and experience of users on Facebook.

For instance, Tasty’s primary medium for delivering content on Facebook is video. What makes those videos unique is that the videos don’t require audio for a user to engage. This might seem like a minor detail, but it isn’t — for instance, consider scrolling through your News Feed and stumbling across a video that auto-plays, and understanding it without audio. That would make you pause for a bit longer, wouldn’t it?

Ze Frank, president of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures said: “We were really thinking of audio independence. What kind of videos would work seamlessly within a product like that and allow you to share it with your friends?”

They figured out a way to make their content readily available for users no matter the context, whether on their Page or in users’ feeds. So while they benefit from visually appealing video content that’s short and engaging, more importantly, they’ve understood the context of where users would consume that content and crafted an amazing user experience as a result.

How can you incorporate this?

When you’re posting content to your Page, try to think about all the areas where users might interact or engage with that content and make sure it’s optimized for those areas.

It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to create content that fits all areas, but that’s why you need to diversify your specific areas on Facebook. For instance, a video posted to your Page might not work well if you shared it in Facebook Stories, too. It’s critical you consider the context and overall user experience when you’re creating content on Facebook.

5. National Geographic

Number of Likes: 46 million

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t heard of National Geographic. In recent years, the brand has consistently ranked number one among brands on social media in the United States, with well over 2.6 billion social engagements across several platforms.

National Geographic describes itself as being the world’s leading multimedia destination for the best stories in science, exploration, and adventure. And I think it would be tough to disagree with that statement.

One particular area National Geographic excels on Facebook is real-time audience engagement. This was on full display in their “Safari Live” series. Throughout the series, National Geographic scientists, photographers, and other teams broadcast their assignments in real-time using Facebook Live.

In one broadcast, viewers were invited to join the team live on a Safari in South Africa, and watch a female leopard consume its prey. Throughout the broadcast, users were able to post comments and ask questions that the National Geographic team would answer right then and there.

Ultimately, the brand understands that communication and engagement are at its best and most effective when it’s a two-way street. Their broadcasts opened the door to an unbelievable experience, and initiated conversation and engagement among its Facebook audience.

How can you incorporate this?

Think about how you can use tools like Facebook Live for events, trade-shows, or even company outings to engage with your audience in real-time. Encourage your customers and prospects to engage with your business by asking questions, or creating polls. Instead of creating content that focuses on one-way communication, engage with your audience by creating content that invites them into the conversation and encourages feedback.

6. Fitbit

Number of Likes: 2.8 million

Fitbit is a relative newcomer to the market in comparison to the brands previously mentioned, but they’ve made a name for themselves quickly, especially on Facebook.

If you aren’t familiar with Fitbit yet, you probably will be very soon. The company offers trackers and smartwatches that track a variety of health measurements, from how many steps you take in a day to how many hours of sleep you get. If you’re on a weight-loss plan, Fitbit products can also help you track your daily calories burned and overall progress.

For being a brand in a relatively new industry, you might expect their marketing to push a hard sell, like “our wearable tech is projected to be one of the hottest products in the coming years”. However, with Fitbit, you’d be wrong.

They actually do very little product promotion on their Facebook page. Instead, their approach focuses on physical and mental health with exercise tips and encouragement. Their strategy is rooted in empowering fans to set fitness-related goals.

When you like the Fitbit page, it’s almost like you’re joining a fitness support group. Many of their posts consist of inspirational quotes and resources to stick to your health and wellness regimen.

Another way they create a supportive community is by encouraging Fitbit users to share their stats with their Facebook friends. Everything that your Fitbit tracks can be posted directly, so this is a great way to share your successes and stay on track.

They also have a refer-a-friend program through Facebook, where you can get $10 for every person you refer who purchases a Fitbit. Offering incentive programs like this is financially beneficial for existing customers, and it also sets up a support system of friends who’ve joined a fitness journey together.

Even if you aren’t interested in buying a Fitbit, the company’s Facebook Page provides a ton of tips and inspiration that can help you stay on track throughout your fitness journey. Collaborative environments like this can’t help but motivate you to strive towards your health and wellness goals.

How can you incorporate this?

Ultimately, Fitbit manages to create a sense of community and support through the content they post. Best of all, you don’t need to own a Fitbit watch to benefit from the content they share. Think about how you can provide value for your audience even before they become customers. Yes, the goal is to eventually have prospects purchase, but providing significant value first can lead to long term buy-in and loyalty. Ensure your Facebook marketing strategy creates value for your target audience.

7. Netflix

Number of Likes: 63 million

Netflix is easily one of the most well-known video streaming services around the globe. At the end of 2019, the streaming powerhouse had over 167 million subscribers with nearly a third of those being from the U.S. But gaining subscribers by providing well-crafted content is not the only thing Netflix does well.

The brand does a stellar job with its social media strategy too, especially on Facebook. Among others, one thing Netflix does really well on Facebook is creating value by pulling back the curtain and delivering exclusive content that can only be found on Facebook.

Take their “13 Stories” series, for example — a brief series of videos with actors from popular shows on Netflix climbing 13 stories of stairs at Netflix’s headquarters while answering 13 different questions. Each of these videos on average receives anywhere from 300,000 – 800,000 views. The content is not available on Netflix.

Think about the value this brings to Netflix’s fans on Facebook. There is an added incentive for users to engage with the brand on Facebook because they’ll be able to consume exclusive content.

Exclusive content is nothing new in the world of Facebook, either. In fact, 58% of Facebook users expect exclusive content from business pages.

How can you incorporate this?

Think about how you can create value on Facebook that your prospects and customers can’t find elsewhere. If you work for a B2B brand, you might offer downloadable content on a targeted landing page on your website, accessed from a link shared exclusively on your Facebook page. If you’re a B2C brand, you can offer exclusive coupons or promo codes for Facebook fans only.

Ultimately, you want to give your audience a compelling reason to interact with your brand on Facebook.

Looking at these seven brands, you can find several similarities between their Facebook strategies that help them stand out among their competitors. For instance, these companies all use branded hashtags to connect social media platforms together, as well as share user-generated content. These are areas where Facebook can really thrive because they emphasize collaboration and engagement.

Brands like Charity: Water and National Geographic place an emphasis on giving back and helping those going through tough times. Facebook has always been an effective platform for raising money for important causes, and this will probably continue for years to come.

And, most importantly, all of these brands stay true to their company’s core values and mission. Netflix doesn’t try to mimic Amazon in its marketing strategy, just like Nike doesn’t try to mimic Adidas.

Even though these are all highly successful companies, any brand can take some cues from their Facebook strategies. Here are three of the most important takeaways you can use in your own strategy:

1. Find what makes you unique from the competition and play off of that. For example, Nike differentiates itself by emphasizing the science and research that goes into developing their products.
2. Don’t force a hard sell in every post. Share content that fans have shared with you, post pictures, and offer valuable tips and advice for free.
3. Finally, and most importantly, be yourself. People want to engage with authentic brands on Facebook — brands that seem genuine and “get them.”

If you can master these takeaways, your Facebook Page will likely achieve incredibly positive results.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can take your Facebook Marketing Strategy to the next level, check out HubSpot Academy’s new Facebook Marketing Course.

Have you ever double-tapped on an image on Instagram, reacted to a video on Facebook, or clicked a search result in Google, only to realize afterwards that it was actually an ad?

Maybe you never realized it was an ad at all — you just thought it was a cute picture of a dog (guilty!).

More than ever, ads can be contextual, relevant, targeted, and helpful in ways they never could before. In short, ads today are content.

But the online advertising landscape is changing.

New platforms, ad types, and targeting capabilities are popping up all the time.

Let’s dig into everything you need to know about online advertising across ad platforms for social media, paid search, display, and native advertising.

If you’re only interested in learning about a certain type of online advertising, you can use the Table of Contents below to navigate to each section.

Table of Contents

• How to Advertise Online
• Types of Online Advertising
  • Social Media Advertising
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Pinterest
    • YouTube
    • Snapchat
    • TikTok
  • Paid Search Advertising
  • Native Advertising
  • Display Advertising

How to Advertise Online

It can be easy to think of your organic marketing efforts, like blog and content offers, and your paid advertising efforts, including search and social, as separate from one another.

And it makes sense why. They’re often managed by different internal teams with different goals.

Social media marketers are focused on building communities, sharing content, and engaging their audience. Bloggers and content marketers optimize their efforts for organic search and are focused on metrics like traffic and conversion.

Meanwhile, advertisers are focused on performance metrics like cost-per-acquisition and return on ad spend. With such different goals, it’s no wonder that many marketers view organic and paid as separate from one another.

What if I told you that not only can organic and paid marketing work together, but that digital advertising can help you improve your organic efforts? It’s true.

There are three key ways that digital advertising can help you improve the performance of your organic marketing efforts.

With digital ads, organic performance can benefit from:

• An increase in brand awareness by displaying your content to individuals within and outside of your networks.
• A better understanding of your audiences by leveraging the targeting and analytics of the ads platforms.
• The creation of higher-performing content by understanding what ad content helps you achieve your business goals and what doesn’t.

The goal of any ads strategy should be to get a positive return on your investment, which comes down to whether you’re getting more revenue out of the ad campaign than the cost you’re putting in.

How can you determine what your ad spend should be to get the most return on your investment? To start answering that question, we’ll need to understand the bidding system used by the ad networks.

A bid is the maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay for a desired action on your ad. If it sounds like an auction, that’s because it is an auction. Ad networks have a limited amount of ad space, and to determine whether or not your ads are shown to your target audience, they run an auction to see how much each advertiser is willing to pay for ad space.

Just like in an auction, the highest bidder wins. Let’s say you bid $10 for a click on your ad, and the next highest bidder only pays $5 for a click.

Each ad network will only make you pay the lowest amount possible to win the bid. In this example, you might be willing to pay $10, but in reality, you’ll only have to pay $5.01 to win the bid. Winning this “auction,” in addition to the overall quality of your ads, will determine how your ads are displayed on the different ad networks.

Here’s another example of how the ad auction works from WordStream.

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At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, I get how the auction system works. But how do I figure out how much I should actually spend in order to see a return on my investment?”

My advice is to work backwards from your revenue to determine what your maximum bid should be.

Use this equation: Lifetime Value (LTV) x Average Lead-to-Customer Rate x Average Conversion Rate.

Your LTV is how much a customer is worth to you over the course of their relationship with your business. The average lead-to-customer rate is the rate at which your leads become paying customers. And your conversion rate is the rate at which new contacts convert on your content offers by filling out a form.

Combined, these metrics can show you how much you should spend on your paid ads in order to break even.

Let’s say that you want to use digital ads to promote your new content offer. You’re going to need to know what your maximum ad spend should be in order to see a positive return on your investment. Assume that you know the following about your business:

• Lifetime value: $500
• Average lead-to-customer rate: 10%
• Average conversion rate: 20%

Plug these numbers into the equation above to determine what your maximum ad spend should be: $500 x 0.10 x 0.20 = $10. This means that you can spend a maximum of $10 per click on your ad to break even. Your goal should be to spend less than $10 to see a positive return on your investment.

Now that we know more about how to advertise online, let’s dive into the various types of online advertising.

Types of Online Advertising

Social Media Advertising

Every month, there are nearly 2.5 billion active users on Facebook, 1 billion on Instagram, and 330 million on Twitter worldwide.

Whether it’s to chat with friends, stay connected to people across the globe, or for business and networking purposes, consumers are on social media for a multitude of reasons — and marketers know it. Because of the sheer number of active users on these platforms, advertising spend invested in social media channels is at an all-time high. Social media advertising across the world is projected to exceed $8.5 billion this year.

Advertising on social media comes with many advantages. You can:

• Reach very specific target audiences with the help of targeting features and different audiences across all of the social media platforms.
• Leverage a variety of ad formats to advertise in a way that aligns with your business goals.
• Invest in the specific advertising efforts that drive leads and sales for your business.

Let’s take a look at eight popular social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. We’ll cover the audiences and ad types available on each one.

1. Facebook

Facebook is the most widely used social media network. Almost 2.5 billion people around the world use Facebook. That’s more than 30% of the world’s population.

With so many people using Facebook, you’re almost guaranteed to be able to reach an audience that’s relevant to any type of business. That’s where one of the most powerful features of advertising on Facebook comes in: audience targeting. The targeting capabilities on Facebook are unmatched by any other social media network.

There are 3 types of audiences that you can target on Facebook:

• Core audiences: An audience based on criteria like age, interests, and geography.
• Custom audiences: Get back in touch with people who have previously engaged with your business.
• Lookalike audiences: Reach new people whose interests are similar to those of your best customers.

Facebook’s advanced targeting can be used to target your ads to the most relevant audience — and even tap into new audiences you’d otherwise never reach with organic content alone.

Advertising on Facebook includes a range of ad types, including:

• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Story ads
• Lead ads

Photo ads are great for sharing collections of image content. Video ads are great for product explainer videos and branding. Story ads allow you to use a combination of photo and short-form video content. If you want to learn more about the different ad types, here’s a great course from HubSpot Academy all about Facebook Advertising.

Personally, my favorite way to advertise on Facebook is with lead ads because they give you the best of both worlds: sharing visual content and generating leads all at the same time. Facebook Lead Ads allow you to capture lead information without directing people out of the Facebook platform.

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No matter your business’ size or industry, you can use lead ads to find potential customers who are likely interested in your products or services. With lead ads, you provide a helpful piece of content that encourages viewers to sign up for a newsletter, receive a price estimate, or request additional business information. In return, when the viewer fills out the form, the business receives a new lead.

Another way to advertise on Facebook is through Facebook Messenger.

Facebook Messenger is a separate messaging app that comes with its own advertising opportunities. Facebook Messenger is the go-to messaging app in countries including the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Other messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat are the more popular choice in countries throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

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Across the world, 20 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses every month on Facebook Messenger. Ads play a big part in initiating conversations on Facebook Messenger.

There are a few different ways you can use Facebook Messenger as part of your advertising strategy.

• Facebook Messenger call-to-action in ads: Start conversations with ads on Facebook that include a call-to-action to send a message.
• Facebook Messenger Story Ads: Run story ads on Messenger Stories.
• Facebook Messenger Ads: Use messenger ads to deliver content directly into users’ Facebook Messenger chats.

All of these ad types can come together to encourage your audience to kick-off conversations with your business. They can be used to get in contact with a sales team, request more information on a product, or even share other content like blog posts or ebooks.

My favorite way to advertise on Facebook Messenger is retargeting. Retargeting ads in Facebook Messenger are a great way to start targeted conversations and send personalized offers and content.

Sponsored messages allow you to advertise to people who have already interacted with your business in Messenger. This is a great way to re-engage your audience in a personalized way.

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2. Instagram

You can also advertise on Instagram through the Facebook Ads Manager. Instagram has over 1 billion monthly users globally. That’s a little less than half of the number of users on Facebook. The majority of users are between the ages of 18 and 34.

There are 3 ways that you can advertise on Instagram:

• Promote posts and stories directly from your Instagram professional account.
• Create ads from your Facebook Page and promote them on both Facebook and Instagram.
• Create ad campaigns in the Facebook Ads Manager to access full targeting capabilities.

I recommend taking the third option and creating custom campaigns for your audience on Instagram.

Instagram has similar ad types to Facebook, including:

• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Story ads
• Ads in Explore
• Shopping Post ads

By far, the most interesting ad types right now are ads in the Explore Tab and Shopping Post ads. People using Instagram Explore are exploring their interests and discovering new content creators. Ads in Instagram Explore are a great opportunity to put your brand in front of a new audience.

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Shopping Post ads allow you to include a tag that shows the product’s name and price within your image. Clicking on the tag takes your prospects directly to a product page where they can purchase the item — all without leaving the Instagram app.

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3. LinkedIn

The LinkedIn platform has over 660 million monthly-active members worldwide. Users on the platform are largely made up of working professionals which makes LinkedIn a great place for B2B (business-to-business) advertising. LinkedIn is the go-to platform for working professionals, which provides B2B advertisers a large audience pool to reach.

Plus, the advantage of advertising on LinkedIn is definitely its unique targeting capabilities. On LinkedIn, you’ll have access to unique targeting criteria that isn’t available on other platforms.

You can target users on LinkedIn by unique demographics, including job title, job function, and industry. Maybe you only want to advertise to potential customers at the director level who work in customer service within the recruiting industry. LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities make that possible.

Plus, with the option to include lead gen forms in your LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn can be a lead generation machine. This will allow you to not only reach a very specific audience but drive leads without directing them outside of the LinkedIn platform.

The most interesting ad type of LinkedIn is Message Ads. Message Ads allow you to send direct messages to your prospects to spark an immediate action.

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How to use LinkedIn Message Ads:

• Deliver a targeted message with a single CTA.
• Drive stronger engagement and response than traditional emails.
• Measure the impact of your messages.

But a word of warning: Don’t send too many Message Ads to the same people or it will come off like spam. And make sure the messages sound authentic, too – if you were writing a LinkedIn message to a friend, what would you write in it?

If your Message Ads are too stiff, they’ll come off as spammy, too. Remember: This channel is a one-to-one conversation. Direct messages are sacred spaces – if you’re going to advertise there, you need to be extra careful about taking the time to make your Message Ads feel personal and relevant to your end users. Make sure you’re delivering value to them in a way that feels authentic.

4. Twitter

Digital advertising is less common on Twitter because organic reach is still a significant driver of a brand’s performance on Twitter. This is very unique to Twitter – but even so, ads can still deliver strong results depending on what your goals are. Twitter has over 330 million monthly users globally. The majority of users are between 35–65 years old.

Advertisers have discovered a few niches that have high engagement on Twitter: B2B and ecommerce. Many B2B companies are using Twitter as a digital marketing tool, and Twitter users are known to spend a lot of money online. This makes advertising specifically to these audiences a great strategy.

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Twitter breaks down their ads into five goals:

• Awareness: Promote your tweets and maximize your reach.
• Tweet engagement: Promote your tweets and get more retweets, likes, and replies.
• Follows: Promote your account and grow your Twitter following.
• Website clicks: Promote your website and get more traffic.
• App downloads: Promote your app and get more downloads.

All of these can work together to help you grow your audience on the platform and convert users into customers.

5. Pinterest

Pinterest is a unique social media platform with 300 million users who are highly engaged and predominantly female. Some people say that Pinterest is the only platform where users actually want to see ads from brands they love because Pinterest is all about visuals.

How to advertise on Pinterest in four steps:

1. Pick a pin: Promote your best pins so they appear in the most relevant places.
2. Decide who sees it: Set up targeting so the right people see your ads.
3. Pay for results: Choose to pay for engagement or visits to your site.
4. Track what’s working: Once your campaign starts, see how it’s doing and make changes.

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Pinterest is great for businesses relying on photography to sell their products and who have a female target buyer persona.

6. YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine, second only to Google, with over 2 billion monthly active users. Ads on YouTube appear before and during other YouTube videos or as a stand-alone promoted video that’s displayed after performing a search.

Since you can target demographic information and interests, you can serve your videos to specific relevant audiences already watching videos from similar brands or on related topics.

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7. Snapchat

Snapchat’s 218 million users are predominantly made up of people between the ages of 18–24.

Snapchat offers a few ad types, including story ads, sponsored tiles in Snapchat Discover, and augmented reality (AR) lenses.

Snapchat’s ad types feel pretty similar to the advertising options on Instagram. What really makes Snapchat unique is the augmented reality lenses. AR lenses are sponsored by a business to create interactive moments that users can use and share with their friends. It might be hard to believe, but in this example from Dominos that pizza isn’t really there — that’s the AR lens at work.

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8. Tiktok

A new player to the social media advertising world is TikTok. TikTok is all about creating short, creative, and oftentimes funny videos. TikTok has exploded in the past few years and has reached 500 million monthly users.

Advertising options are still limited; they are mainly geared towards driving awareness. TikTok doesn’t hyperlink posts to websites and only recently started allowing advertising, so businesses advertising on TikTok focus on boosting brand awareness rather than leads or traffic.

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Promoting TikTok videos allow brands to build awareness with a young target audience. Most of the posts you’ll see on TikTok are aimed at getting laughs. From a brand perspective, you’ll want to create videos that are funny and align with other content on the platform. Think things like dance challenges and memes. This type of content is the most effective.

Paid Search Advertising

People conducting a search online are looking for something specific and will click on the first result they believe is going to be the most helpful to them. You might be thinking: “I already appear in organic results on search engines. Why should I pay to advertise too?”

Well, there are three key reasons:

• On average, advertisers make $8 for every $1 they spend on Google Ads.
• Advertising on search engines protects you from the competition who may be advertising on your branded terms.
• Search ads appear first in the search engine results pages (SERPs) above the organic results.

Paid search advertising gives advertisers the opportunity to capture the attention of their audience in a more targeted way than with organic search alone.

Search ads allow you to anticipate the wants, needs, and desires of your potential customers and serve ads to them that are highly contextual. Over time, the analytics of your search ads can help you analyze and improve those ads to reach even more people.

But how does Google know how to deliver the right ad to the right person? That’s where keywords come into play. A keyword is one word or phrase that someone uses to describe what they need in search. Basically, advertising on search platforms takes the targeting capabilities available on social media platforms, like demographics and location, and layers it with the addition of keywords.

When a Google user types a query into the search field, Google returns a range of results that match the searcher’s intent. Keywords align with what a searcher wants and will satisfy their query. You select keywords based on which queries you want to display your ad alongside.

Keyword research is just as important for paid ads as it is for organic search. That’s because Google matches your ad with search queries based on the keywords you selected. Each ad group you create within your campaign will target a small set of keywords and Google will display your ad based on those selections.

Let’s say Mary is moving to a different house and is looking for a home mover. So she goes into Google and types “who are the best movers.” By searching “best home movers,” she’s going to see results for advertisers that targeted keywords like “moving companies” and “top rated movers.”

Search engines also take your intent into consideration when choosing the types of ads to display.

In the example above, search ads were the most helpful resource. But what if you’re looking for a location-based business, like a coffee shop? In Google maps, you might see Promoted Pins like these, shown in purple on the map and in the search results on the left. Promoted Pins are a great way for businesses to attract customers to their business based on location.

What if you’re looking to make a purchase? Well, Google might show you a different kind of post to match your intent, such as Shopping Post Ads.

In this example below, Google shows you shopping post ads for the keyword “buy snowboard.” Since my query includes the word “buy,” Google knows that I’m interested in making a purchase, so I am shown ads for products I might be interested in.

So how do you select your keywords?

Keywords typically fall under two categories: brand and non-brand.

A brand keyword is a word or phrase that includes a brand’s name or variations of a brand’s name. For example, some of HubSpot’s brand keywords include HubSpot, HubSpot Free CRM, and HubSpot Marketing Hub. These are all variations of the HubSpot brand and the tools that we offer.

Non-brand keywords are all other relevant keywords that don’t include a brand’s name or variations of a brand’s name. Some of HubSpot’s non-brand keywords include inbound marketing, sales software, and customer relationship management.

While these keywords are not part of HubSpot’s brand name, they are relevant terms that allow HubSpot to reach audiences that might be interested in eventually making a purchase.

Brand and non-brand keywords play a role in your digital advertising strategy. Brand keywords help you protect your brand from your competitor’s ads.

If you don’t run ad campaigns for brand keywords, you’ll leave your business vulnerable to losing website traffic to the competition who is bidding on your brand keywords. Non-brand keywords still have a role to play, too. Non-brand keywords allow you to reach new audiences unfamiliar with your brand.

When it comes to when your ad is displayed, you don’t just want to pick a certain group of keywords and have the ad shown only when those keywords are entered into the search engine.

This is where match type comes in. Since there are an infinite number of ways that people can actually search for one term, Google gives you four match types to choose from: exact match, phrase match, and broad match. Plus, you can also use a broad match modifier and negative keywords to optimize where your ads are delivered.

Let’s take a look at each match type:

• Exact match: A keyword set to exact match will only display your ad if the search term includes that exact keyword, or a very close variation. Exact match keywords are surrounded in [brackets].
• Phrase match: A keyword set to phrase match will display your ad if the search term contains the same order of the words, but it can also contain additional words. Phrase match keywords are surrounded in “quotes”.
• Broad match: A keyword set to broad match displays your ad when the search term contains any or some combination or variations of the words in your keyword, in any order. Broad match keywords don’t include any symbols.
• Broad match modifier: The broad match modifier allows you to select keywords that must be included in the search query for your ad to be displayed. Keywords with a broad match modifier use a +plus sign.
• Negative keywords: Excludes your ads from being shown on searches with that term. Negative keywords include a -minus sign.

Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo

There are a few advertising platforms out there for search, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But Google is by far the most used search engine out there. With 3.5 billion search queries a day, over 70% of the total searches made daily around the world are done on Google. Google brings in six times more searches every day than Bing and Yahoo, combined.

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But this doesn’t mean you should entirely rule out advertising on these other platforms. In some cases, you can achieve impressive results with a smaller ad spend on Bing and Yahoo than you could on Google since there is less competition from advertisers.

My recommendation is to dig into your organic traffic to identify if Bing or Yahoo make up a significant amount of traffic for any given keywords or topics. This might indicate that advertising for those keywords on Bing or Yahoo could be profitable.

Regardless of where you advertise, the good news is that advertising on all of these platforms more or less work and look the same. So knowing how to advertise on one will make advertising on the others easier.

Native Advertising

Publishers like BuzzFeed and The Dodo produce content that snowballs in popularity on social media almost every day. And they make money by helping other brands do it too. Brands will pay these publishers to craft posts and videos that follow the publishers’ formula for virality. They also pay publishers to distribute this sponsored content to their massive audience through social media and their website.

This is native advertising.

Check out this example from Geico. They’ve partnered with BuzzFeed to create this video advertisement on morning workouts. It’s a topic that is loosely related to insurance, which Geico sells, and they’ve tapped into BuzzFeed’s expertise to create this video that feels right at home with the rest of the content on the site.

When you pay for a publisher’s native advertising services, you’ll be able to leverage their editorial expertise and audience reach to help your brand tell captivating stories to a bigger and better viewership. And each publisher is going to support different ad formats and creative types.

During the creative process, you’ll collaborate with publishers to craft sponsored content that covers one of their main topics and looks like a regular piece of content on the publisher’s website.

This way, even though your post is technically promotional, it won’t disrupt their audience’s browsing experience. They’ll enjoy reading your post and won’t feel like you or the publisher are advertising to them. This exposes your work to a huge, engaged viewership and attracts new followers to your brand.

Native advertising creates a symbiotic relationship between publishers and brands. Publishers who do sponsored content right reap the benefits of another revenue stream and gain more audience trust if they promote a native ad from a trustworthy brand — 41% of readers say they trust publishers even more if they publish with a trustworthy brand.

For brands, collaborating with prominent publishers can unleash unprecedented amounts of creativity to help them win over the publishers’ audience and boost engagement — 31% of readers say they’re more likely to buy from a brand after viewing their native ad. For example, T Brand Studio, the New York Times native ad business, crafted sponsored posts that captured as much engagement as some of nytimes.com’s highest-performing articles.

To find the optimal native advertising opportunities for your brand, try using StackAdapt or Nativo.

Display Advertising

Display ads are a controversial topic in the digital marketing community. For almost 25 years, advertisers have abused them by tricking internet users into clicking misleading ads — some malicious display ads have even infected people’s computers with viruses. It’s easy to see why people have developed banner blindness and can’t stop downloading ad blockers: display ads have the reputation of being intrusive, distracting, and irrelevant.

On the other side of the spectrum, though, display advertising technology has advanced to the point where ad networks can leverage data and machine learning to offer advertisers more effective targeting strategies and consumers more relevant ads.

Ad networks like Google Display Network and Facebook’s Audience Network are the leaders in the banner ad renaissance. They can display your ads to the right target audience at the right place and time. And if you want more control of your advertising, they’ll let you decide where to place your ads. Below, we’ll cover each ad networks’ features and targeting capabilities:

1. Google Display Network

When you use Google’s Display Network, you can design visually appealing ads and place them on over two million websites and apps, YouTube, and Gmail.

You can also build new audiences by targeting people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service and remarket website visitors just by importing a list of their contact information.

If you don’t want to build out your ideal audience or deal with bidding, you can let Google Ads do it for you. Its automated targeting and bidding features can identify your highest-converting audience for the best return on investment.

Display ads can be most effective when retargeting an audience that’s already familiar with your brand.

2. Facebook’s Audience Network

With Facebook’s Audience Network, brands can expand their Facebook ad campaigns and use the same targeting data they use on the platform to advertise on a huge collection of websites and apps. Publishers in Facebook’s audience network account for 50% more time spent in mobile apps than Snapchat and Twitter combined.

Brands can place native ads, banner ads, full-screen ads, in-stream video ads, and rewarded video ads (for example, “Watch this video ad to get more tokens!”) on the network’s websites and apps that their Facebook audience frequently visits.

This type of advertising can be particularly effective for mobile games, like in the example below from 5agame who was able to attribute 80% of their revenue through their rewarded video.

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Now that you know about all of the digital ad types that are available, the next step is to learn how to leverage the right ads for your business to achieve your goals. If you want to continue leveling-up your ads training, check out HubSpot Academy’s free course on the Fundamentals of Digital Advertising.

Hi there! Thanks for your interest in writing a guest blog for HubSpot. We’re glad you’re here.

The award-winning HubSpot Blogs have over 7 million monthly visits, and we’re always looking for more brilliant contributors to join our ranks.

If you have exceptional writing and/or design skills and would like to share your expertise with a large audience of marketers, growth hackers, and business owners, we’d love to hear from you.

Please take some time to review this entire page — it should answer any questions you have about what kind of content we’re looking for and how the submission process works.

Also, we value your pitch, but due to the volume of requests we receive, we cannot respond to all submissions.

The Bare Essentials for Every Post We Publish

Successful guest contributions are comprehensive, data-driven, and interesting posts that teach our readers something new about the world of business. While we tend to skew toward content about specific marketing tactics, that’s not all we talk about.

We’re also interested in publishing any topic that marketers care about, which includes things like hiring, team development, job hunting, writing, design, math, and larger internet trends, among other things.

We also look for a few things in everything we publish:

• Original concepts, compelling arguments, and high-quality writing. We will not republish anything that’s been published elsewhere.
• Article reflects the writing style/tone of the Marketing Blog. We aim to be casual, yet helpful, and typically we stay away from buzzwords and jargon.
• Proper attribution of data, quotations, and outside content referenced in the article. Note: All data should have originated within the last two years.
• No more than one link to your company’s website (Note: This includes your website homepage, blog, pricing page, etc …) in the body of the post.
• Link to at least 3-5 other HubSpot blog posts in your piece. For example, if you’re writing a piece on a recent welcome email experiment you’ve run, link to HubSpot’s ultimate guide to email marketing, our roundup of top email marketing services, and our email marketing tips to improve opens.

The Different Post Types We Accept

We’ve conducted extensive studies to uncover which types of blog posts work — and which don’t. Here are some of our most successful blog post types:

• Experiment / Analysis: Did you recently run a marketing experiment the likes of which have never been done before? Or maybe you completed an analysis of your own or your customers’ data that yielded fascinating insights the world show know about? Write it up and send it over. These posts should include hard data, actionable takeaways, and thorough explanations of each step in the experiment or analysis process. Readers should have enough information to replicate your experiment or study if they’d like to.
• Examples of Experiment Posts:
• Disproving Best Practices: The One- vs. Two-Column Form Test
• Why We Unsubscribed 250K People From HubSpot’s Marketing Blog
• Why You Should Start with Copy Instead of Design: A Data-Backed Lesson
• Canonical: These posts give readers in-depth tactical takeaways that are supported by relevant, recent examples, original quotes, original graphics, and current data. While we don’t like to put a word count on our posts, these tend to run at 1,500 words and above. When readers finish this type of post, they should be able to immediately execute on the given topic and have very few questions left on how to do it.
• Examples of Canonical Posts:
• Typography 101: Everything a Beginner Should Know
• The Start-to-Finish Guide to Nailing Your Next PowerPoint Presentation
• How Ad Blocking Works: Everything You Need to Know
• Graphics: These posts rely heavily on an infographic, data graph, or other visual aid created by the author. Usually, they feature a few paragraphs of introduction, the embedded media itself, and not much else. The graphic should be comprehensive and easy to read, have a compelling narrative, contain plenty of white space, and feature up-to-date data that’s properly sourced.
• Examples of Graphic Posts:
• How to Spell Words You Don’t Know: Techniques From Grammar Experts
• A 5-Step Process for Writing a Standout Networking Email
• 12 Data-Backed Tips to Increase Your Conversion Rate on Twitter

While we certainly publish posts from time to time that don’t fall into any of those categories, your post has the best chance of being accepted if it matches one of these formats.

What We Won’t Accept

There are some things we simply can’t accept:

• Anything that’s been covered on our blog before. Please do a search of our site before submitting your articles.
• Anything that may be construed as a link-building scheme.
• Anything that’s too promotional for your company or organization.
• Anything that’s offensive or inaccurate.
• Anything that’s overly critical of individuals or companies — this is not a site to air grievances.

The Not-So-Fine Print

• Submissions must meet the HubSpot blogging team’s quality standards in order to get published. Editors reserve the right to reject contributions at their discretion.
• We cannot allow you to republish your guest post to your own blog, LinkedIn, Medium, or Inbound.org afterward. Here’s more on what you can do besides sharing it like crazy.
• The HubSpot blogging team reserves the right to edit and adapt your guest blog content as we see fit, and update it in the future for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
• HubSpot reserves the right to include calls-to-action to HubSpot content, including but not limited to email newsletters, ebooks, and other downloadable content.
• In rare cases, contributed posts may be removed from the blog and recycle the URL.

How to Submit A HubSpot Guest Blogging Post

Step 1: Conduct a Google site search. If there is only one step you complete to turn in a pitch, this should be the one. Note: This is not a normal website search. Check out how to do a Google site search here and add another skill to your set.

Didn’t click on the link we just provided? You wouldn’t be the first. Simply copy and paste this URL in your search bar: “site:blog.hubspot.com/marketing” and add a space followed by the keyword you’re targeting with your pitch.

For example: “site:blog.hubspot.com/marketing branding trends”. In this example, you’ll see HubSpot has published quite a bit on branding. If you still want to pitch a branding topic, make sure you’re telling us what differentiates it from the dozens of other branding pieces on HubSpot.

Step 2: Format your post appropriately.

• Don’t sacrifice depth for the sake of brevity. We don’t enforce a strict word count on the blog, but most articles should fall in the 1,000 – 1,800 word range. Instead of trying to hit a specific word count, focus on clear, in-depth explanations that readers of different levels can understand and learn from. It’s better to over-explain a concept than under-explain and leave some readers in the dark.
• The best blog copy is simple, accessible, and clear. Don’t get stuck trying to make a complex sentence structure work when a simple one works better. Take the most direct route to your points, use your natural voice, and avoid unnecessary filler words. Looking for more resources on drafting your blog post? Here are a few posts to check out:
• The Anatomy of a Perfect Blog Post
• How to Write an Introduction: A Simplified Guide
• What’s the Best Way to Write a Blog Post? Marketers Weigh In
• 8 Writing Tips I Wish I Knew Before I Started Blogging
• Your Blog Posts Are Boring: 9 Tips for Making Your Writing More Interesting
• Paragraphs should be no more than three to five sentences long and formatted using H2s, H3s, and H4s, when appropriate.
• Add bulleted lists to help break up dense copy chunks. Numbered lists should be formatted as number + period.
• Always include a conclusion.
• When including images, gifs, or screenshots, cite the image source as: “Image source” and hyperlink that text with the page you found the image on.
• Example here
• Tip: Copy and paste your post into Grammarly, or Microsoft Word and run a spell check. We prefer these editing tools for catching sneaky misspellings, and extra spaces. Feeling extra word-nerdy? Use Hemingway Editor to check for run-on sentences, difficult sentence structure, etc …

Step 3: Submit your pitch of finished blog post to guestpost [at] hubspot [dot] com with the following:

• Formatted subject line: “Guest Pitch: [Tentative Title of Post]”
• Your completed post or pitch in a Google Document with editing permissions turned on for “anyone with the link.”
• If you’re including images, make sure they’re compressed and add them into the Google Document, and provide proper attribution below each image (e.g., Image source).
• Short author bio, headshot, and any links to your LinkedIn or Twitter accounts you’d like linked.

If your article meets editorial standards and aligns with our content strategy, we will respond to let you know your article will be published. That process may take up to 2 weeks and the publish date could exceed this timeline based on the needs of our editorial calendar.

Due to the volume of requests we receive, we cannot respond to all submissions.

In the world of social media marketing, the word “engagement” gets thrown around a lot, but few brands actually know how to achieve it.

Brands might pursue the low-effort game of tweeting, “gramming”, feeding Facebook, and Linkedin-ing updates about products, services, and educational content, but see little engagement.

Engagement isn’t always to produce. You have to be, well, engaging. In your business niche, the “Like my page!” approach probably isn’t going to be effective as you’d like.

Let’s look at ideas that could make you a force to be reckoned with. I’ve organized them into an AEIOU list. (I want to call it an acronym, but how would you pronounce the five vowels?) Let’s dive in.

 

A Is For Ask

The best way to engage someone is to ask a question. “How are you?” and “How’s it going?” are popular options in conversion but too dull for social media warfare.

“What’s your name?” probably won’t work and “What’s your email?” might come off as a bit too forceful. How about …

“What do you think?” Yes! That’s a winner.

People like to think things through. They like to hear from other thinkers. Certainly, they want other people to know what they think.

Try prompting your audience with one of the following “What do you think?” strategies:

• Probe their personality. Post a question that invites people to share their opinion or weigh in on something.
• Play the “test your knowledge” game. It’s irresistible.
• Post a poll. It’s easy to create polls on Twitter and Facebook. In addition to engaging your followers, you stand to learn meaningful things about them too.
• Respond to my email. Email from brands are bound to ask you to click-through to read, watch, and try or buy something, but how often do they simply ask you to write back? I find this to be an enormously engaging strategy and have seen it work for my brand and many others. Notice I wrote, “Respond to my email,” not “our email” or “this email.” A human-to-human first-person approach will be the engaging way to call this play.
• Just ask. Interactivity 101: simply post a question. Whether done so in a social stream, blog post, online group or community, or on a Q&A site such as Quora, asking followers relevant, provocative, and timely questions creates some of the most engaging and thought-provoking social media activity of all.

Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Personality quizzes have been red-hot engagement magnets for years on Buzzfeed, and it’s easy to create them to promote your brand with a template-based tool such as ShortStack.

Nice going, AARP. “Test Your Beatles Trivia Knowledge” engaged me, but you could have asked a few easier questions. I went 0–for-8 (and I’m a huge Fab Four fan).

This simple Twitter poll from Airbnb does a great job of engaging followers without any fancy tools.

 

E Is For Expression

“E” is for “expression” because of the way social and mobile have collided, making the ubiquitous smartphone a personal expression machine.

It doesn’t matter how you create content. The camera might be front or rear-facing. Audio might be on or off. Filters, emojis, stickers and so forth may be applied or not. Posts may be permanent or self-destructing. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Smartphone apps enable people to express themselves every which way, and so they do.

Here are a few ways you can encourage your audience to create content featuring your brand:

• Hash it out. The hashtag has become the click-to-connect ticket for bonding with like-minded people. When you put something of interest out there, do a little hashtag research first, or hash out a unique phrase that reflects your brand. Hit that # key, and invite your followers to jump in and hashtag content related
• Conduct media upload contests. Many social media fans adore Instagram and Facebook contests, and are especially engaged in the types that involve shooting and sharing original photos and videos. Contests may call for other forms of self-expression as well, such as recipes, recordings, illustrations, poems, essays, and more.
• Rally reviewers. Thanks to pioneers like Amazon and Yelp, reviews, ratings, and testimonials have been baked into the fabric of ecommerce selling spaces and beyond.
• Showcase customers, partners, and employees. Provided you’re doing something people like, consider creating advocacy programs featuring customers, partners, and employees to catalyze your community, amplify your voice, and engage newcomers by giving them a platform to express themselves.

Let’s take a look at an example:

#KajabiHero is an impressive example of customer advocacy at work. Satisfied customers happily endorse the “knowledge commerce platform,” and wear their t-shirts proudly. They’re rewarded with special features, links to their websites, and social media support.

 

I Is For Incentive

I’ve mentioned numerous forms of interactive content (such as competitions), but have yet to introduce the term “gamification.” People like to play games, compete, keep score, and most of all, win. They especially like to do so on social media.

Satisfy your audience’s competitive spirit by featuring compelling incentives in your social media contests. As incentives go, valuable prizes loom largest, but you may be surprised how even small rewards prove to deliver a sizable lure.

Let’s look at an example by Converse from a post that features37 Facebook contest ideas to inspire fans to bond with your brand.

The entry form on this promotion by Michigan’s Friendship Circle explains each person who casts a vote for their favorite pair of hand-drawn Converse All Stars will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a free pair of the winner. The winning shoe was subsequently reproduced and sold as a fundraiser.

 

O Is For Offer

Your engagement strategy doesn’t need to be interactive or gamified 100% of the time. Your brand can engage customers and prospects the old fashioned way, with attractive offers such as:

• Instant coupons and discounts
• Membership clubs (example below)
• Pick your discount promotions
• Free shipping

The link in Pura Vida Bracelet’s Instagram bio invites you to “join the Pura Vida Club.” BTW, the brand’s Instagram feed (1 million followers) bubbles over with joyous photos, mostly from customers, engaging questions, challenges, posts about charitable causes, and conversations.

Experiment with different types of offers to discover what your customers best respond to.

Facebook makes it easy to promote offers. A flavor of the Facebook ad portfolio is the “offer ad.” Offer ads can be redeemed online and/or be saved by Facebook fans to be redeemed in-store.

This help page from Facebook offers the following best practices:

• Make discounts substantial. Offers with free items or with discounts of at least 20% off will reach more people.
• Use an engaging image. Photos of people using a product often perform better than photos of a product by itself, and both generally perform better than logos.
• Set an expiration date. Give people a few days to discover and claim an offer and allow time for your offer to be shared among friends. The ideal length of an offer is 7 days.
• Promote your offer: After creating an ad for your offer, pin it to the top of your Page to help it get noticed.

 

U Is For Utility

Engagement and utility are close friends on the web today.

Data from a research report about interactive contact from Content Marketing Institute and ion interactive reveals the top two reasons for using interactive content are (1) educating the audience and (2) engagement.

A major majority of savvy B2B marketers put utility at the forefront of their content marketing programs. Useful content created to engage prospective customers could include tools, blog posts, video, infographics, downloadable guides, mini-courses, helpful email sequences, webinars, and much more.

Above is a LinkedIn ad from ConnectWise Automate that offers what appears to be a highly useful guide to help vendors price IT services.

The ad is the pitcher… and here’s the catcher: a highly engaging and smartly designed landing page.

I love the question style headline, the directional cues, the 1/2/3 infographic vignette, the very cool bonus offer (a calculator), and the nicely designed form.

Utilitarian marketing ideas work offline too—and for any size company or individual.

I love the story from Jay Baer’s book Youtility about Taxi Mike. Jay calls an enterprising taxi driver he encounters a “one man Trip Advisor.” The driver created the Taxi Mike Dining Guide (above) and updates it regularly to handout to his passengers.

Engage Your Followers Today

How will you AEIOU engagement with your brand? Here’s a quick review:

• (A)sk questions.
• Invoke (E)xpression.
• Provide (I)ncentives.
• Make (O)ffers.
• Deliver (U)tility.

I hope you found these ideas and examples useful — and engaging!

Whether you’re a new or experienced remote employee, you’ve probably realized how hard it can be to stay on a proper schedule.

In the morning, you might wake up drowsy with no commute or morning team chats to put you in the work mindset. Then, when you finally feel like you’re on a roll and about to get everything on your to-do list done, you might look out the window, realize how dark it is, and discover that you’ve worked straight through dinner.

At HubSpot, where we have a fleet of over 300 full-time remote employees, we hear about the above scenario a lot. And, we’ve also seen that remote workers across companies share the same struggles.

Although the schedule mishap I noted above is fairly common, you definitely don’t want it to become a regular part of your lifestyle. While working late at night occasionally can help you get ahead in your career, doing so regularly can harm your mental health, happiness at work, and your work-life balance.

When it comes to remote work, the stakes of poor scheduling impacting you might be even higher. Research shows that remote employees tend to work longer hours than in-office employees. Remote work can also result in feelings of disconnection, isolation, and loneliness.

If you’ve fallen for numerous scheduling traps as a remote marketer, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad employee or going downhill in your career. A scheduling mishap simply means that you might need some daily structure, like many other people with ambiguous working styles.

Luckily, with all of the scheduling technology we have today, creating an outline of your workweek actually isn’t that hard to do.

In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how to create an effective weekly schedule that allows you to stay on task, manage multiple projects, and take time to maintain your work-life balance.

If you’re interested in building your own Google Calendar and want to steal some of these tips, click here to add this calendar template to your own GSuite account.

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What to Schedule on Your Weekly Remote Work Calendar

1. Block your non-working hours.

One of the biggest challenges that remote employees face is the inability to tune out and unplug after a long day of work. Without social cues to leave the office at the end of the day, many remote employees report working longer hours and having less time for social interaction outside of their home because they get too focused on work.

As a hardworking remote marketer, you might feel like you have to be “always online.” However, many of HubSpot’s own remote marketers actually advise others who work from home to set boundaries for their schedule early on.

“It’s easy to fall into the trap of getting things done during the day, but still feeling like you’ve wasted your time and now need to work later in the evening,” says Rebecca White, a junior staff writer for the HubSpot Blog. “Setting boundaries for yourself and having a routine schedule will help avoid those pitfalls.”

After you discuss your working hours and work-life balance boundaries with your manager, you should note them on your calendar so your team is able to know when you’re available and when you’re logged off.

One handy way to note working and non-working times is by using Google Calendar’s Working Hours setting to visibly mark the times you won’t be on the clock. This allows teammates to see when your preferred work hours are and blocks them from scheduling meetings during off-work times.

To do this on Google Calendar, simply go to your calendar, click Settings, and scroll down to Working Hours on the Settings dashboard.

Once you update your working hours, other calendar viewers will see gray lines during the times and days which you’re unavailable for meetings. If you don’t use Google Calendar, a few other scheduling programs, such as the Microsoft Outlook calendar similarly allow you to mark these times.

2. Schedule time to do regular weekly duties.

Every job has a few weekly duties that you’ll take on regularly. To isolate these regular duties so that they don’t impact bigger projects, consider scheduling a time to do them each day.

For example, in this screenshot, I’ve scheduled the time I’ve devoted to producing and scheduling marketing emails for the HubSpot Blog. This helps me get the emails done early on so I can focus more of my day on creative projects, strategizing, or other heads-down tasks. It also allows me to add some structure to my day, especially when working remotely.

3. Create blocks that say, “Please Request Time Before Booking” for times when you’ll be doing larger projects.

Sometimes, you’ll need to have an hour or more of uninterrupted time to ensure that you get a project done thoroughly. When meetings interrupt these times, they can throw you off your train of thought or hinder your creativity.

As a blogger who’s also managing audience growth strategies, I have a mix of regular small tasks and larger, more intense tasks to accomplish each week. When I’m working in the office, next to my teammates, it’s easy to talk through my schedule and prioritize. But, when I’m working from home, the temptation to check emails and respond to Slack messages can distract me from my heads-down work.

Because of this, I schedule time to do my core, unchanging tasks, as well as time I’ll need to zone in on creative projects, such as content strategies or blog posts. This helps me keep a centered routine and get work done, while also allowing me to pivot to unexpected tasks as needed.

In the example below, I created a time block for blog-writing, which many marketers multitask with a wide range of other duties.

4. Schedule regular check-ins with colleagues you don’t see often.

Two other common challenges remote employees deal with are disconnected from teammates and lack of company visibility. To help avoid these barriers, many remote members of our marketing team schedule regular one-on-one check-ins or virtual coffee chats with other colleagues.

“I schedule monthly one-on-ones with colleagues I work closely with but don’t always cross paths with in meetings,” says Meg Prater, the remote Managing Editor of the HubSpot Blog. “I also grab virtual coffees and lunches with colleagues — and book my calendar with lots of face-to-face catch-ups when I’m in the office.”

As a remote employee, regular meetings help you get to know your team, stay up to date with what’s going on in the office, and gain valuable visibility that you might not get in larger virtual teammeetings.

5. Include your morning routine.

One thing I and my remote colleagues have found is that we feel more productive in our remote work when we have a morning routine. And, this makes sense.

Think about it. When you work in the office, you might wake up in the morning, get dressed, wake yourself up with coffee, and then amp yourself up for your day by listening to music or a podcast on your morning commute. When you work remotely, in your own home, there are less outside factors that can help pep you up for the day ahead.

While you might be tempted to sleep in until your team is online, we’d actually suggest that you give yourself time for a morning routine. Morning routines not only allow you to start your day off on the right foot, but they also offer you time to use self-care, bond with your family, or take care of any errands or chores that could be a distraction later in the day.

Regardless of which morning routine you follow, it can be helpful to time block this in your calendar to remind you to make a bit of time for yourself and your personal life before you get started with your workday.

6. Make time for breaks each day.

Aside from making time for self-care in the mornings, you should also remember to take breaks once you dive into your workday.

Why mark breaks on your calendar if you already work from home? While you might hear people say, “Remote workers have plenty of time for self-care,” this statement is actually one of the biggest and most inaccurate myths we’ve heard.

This is a myth that Prater noted for a recent blog post:

“I always thought I’d turn into a super-athletic woman when I became remote. I thought I’d go to yoga every day during lunch, take up running as a mid-morning break. It turns out, I sometimes forget to take a break long enough to refill my coffee cup — let alone run to a yoga class mid-day,” Prater revealed.

Taking breaks can be challenging when you feel like you’re churning out great content or are wirjubg on a deadline. But, many of our marketers say they can help prevent burnout and boost creativity.

If you think you need to take more breaks, but find it hard to remember to, create a 15 to 30 minute time slot for an afternoon break on your calendar each day. You don’t always have to use that time for a break, but getting the calendar reminder will remind you to take some time for yourself at some point.

 

7. Block time for other work-life-balance needs.

As a career-minded professional, you might be worried that taking time for your family or yourself can leave the impression that you’re not taking work seriously. In fact, this is the opposite.

The workplace is actually becoming more and more accepting of flexible work. According to LinkedIn, 72% of recruiters say flexible schedules will shape future workplaces and hiring success.

If your manager allows you to work flexibly or pause work during the day for a personal life commitment or errand, such as picking up a child from school, you should note these occurrences on your calendar. This will allow your team to know when you’re busy and cannot be booked for a meeting while also giving you uninterrupted time to maintain work-life balance.

8. Consider booking as many meetings as possible within one to two days each week.

One of the best pieces of advice that I’ve gotten from my remote colleagues is to book all of my meetings in a cluster early in the week, which leaves more time open for heads down projects or activities at the end of the week.

This is a strategy often used by one of the blog’s remote content strategists, Allie Decker.

“If you can, group all your meetings so they happen over the course of two or three days. Leave a couple of days wide open to get that heads-down, max-effort work done,” said Decker in a recent blog post.

Decker added that you can also use this time “to get out of the house, change up your workspace, and not have to worry about taking video or phone calls in loud public spots.”

To help you visualize how to schedule your meetings in blocks, here’s an example. Below, I’ve scheduled my check-ins on the same day as my weekly team meeting. Then, by Wednesday, you can see that my schedule is opening up and becoming more flexible for more intensive tasks.

9. Leave some openings in time each day.

If you’re a very organized person, it can be hard to avoid scheduling every second of your day, but for the sake of teamwork, you’ll want to leave some unscheduled space on your calendar.

Why? When you’re working remotely, you might want to have a virtual call with a teammate at the last minute because it’s simply easier to discuss something in-person or through text-based communication.

This strategy can be especially helpful if you’re a team manager who wants to remain accessible to all employees.

“Be ready to jump on a video-call without having to schedule time for it,” says Susanne Ronnqvist Ahmadi, HubSpot’s Vice President of International Marketing. “Let your teams know you’re available over your instant messaging tool and build in “air-time” in your agenda for check ins and quick chats.

Communicating Your Schedule

Remember, a great schedule means nothing if you don’t communicate about your boundaries and work hours with your team. To make sure you maintain your weekly routine, be sure to discuss the schedule you settle on with your manager and notify your colleagues of times that you have set as unavailable. This solid communication will help to ensure that your working hours are both respected and effective.

For more tips about how to be a successful remote employee, check out this blog post with tips from members of our own remote workforce. You might also like these posts related to remote work stats, common myths, and tips for gaining visibility from home.

As marketers, we probably all have that one campaign that we can note as a favorite. Stunning campaigns are striking and evoke emotion: Joy, inspiration, liberation, excitement … the list goes on and on.

For me, when I think of incredible content marketing campaigns, I turn to fast food. Fast food marketers have a history of successfully building massive interest for new menu items or poking fun at competitors via social media. If enough people participate in the exchanges, a campaign can go viral.

Thus, the summer of the chicken sandwich, led by fast food chain Popeye’s, takes the cake for my favorite campaign. When Popeyes’ chicken sandwich appeared on menus, what ensued was a slew of positive tweets, which escalated into a phenomenon.

I love this campaign because the response came as a surprise — such a surprise, in fact, that less than two weeks later, the Popeye’s team had to officially declare they’d run out of chicken:

Y’all. We love that you love The Sandwich. Unfortunately we’re sold out (for now). pic.twitter.com/Askp7aH5Rr

— Popeyes Chicken (@PopeyesChicken)
August 27, 2019

… And then, the sandwich returned a mere month later in a 30-second announcement. An announcement that, in true fast-food wars fashion, took a moment to jab at competitor, Chick-fil-A:

Y’all…the sandwich is back Sunday, November 3rd. Then every day. 🤯🔥 pic.twitter.com/JDxyCIv0zz

— Popeyes Chicken (@PopeyesChicken)
October 28, 2019

Viral marketing campaigns show us how much power there is in marketing. But that’s just my favorite example. Let’s take a look at the favorites of HubSpot content marketers.

1. Pepsi Max’s Uncle Drew

“One of my favorite recent content marketing campaigns is Pepsi Max’s Uncle Drew series. This absolutely ridiculous series of webisodes that ultimately led to a full-length feature film was hilarious, entertaining, memorable, and still highlighted Pepsi products despite having its own plot line. Although the movie’s reviews were subpar, this series and film were awarded with a 2019 Clio Award.”

“I think this is a fascinating example of how a brand marketed its product and ultimately created a character that could get audiences to buy movie tickets for what was essentially a two-hour Pepsi commercial.” – Pam Bump, Audience Growth Writer

For more information about Uncle Drew, check out this Clio winning campaigns post.

2. Nerdwallet’s “You Deserve the Best” campaigns

“I’m in love with how Nerdwallet does content. Nerdwallet’s goal is to become the destination resource for anything money related. Their entire site is a content engine, providing helpful and useful information upfront, like their ‘You Deserve the Best’ campaigns, that provide a roundup of helpful financial resources at the beginning of each year:

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They don’t push their offerings, but they are visible and helpful should someone need to take their money game to the next level.” — Amanda Sellers, Historical Optimization Writer

3. Activia “Don’t Tell Me I Can’t”

“You know it’s a really good content marketing campaign when you send it to your mom with the message: I know it’s technically an ad, but you have to watch this. That’s how I felt about Activia’s ‘Don’t Tell Me I Can’t’ video campaign:

“Activia is a probiotic yogurt company, but the company’s ad has little to do with yogurt and everything to do with authenticity, vulnerability, and what it means to be your own harshest inner critic. I teared up out of a sheer sense of, ‘Oh my God, I think like that, too’ — what more could you want out of a marketing campaign?” — Caroline Forsey, Editor of HubSpot’s Marketing Blog

4. Nike “Show Them What Crazy Can Do”

“This campaign, narrated by Serena Williams, struck the right chord for me. As someone who has been a life-long athlete, the campaign makes me feel a variety of emotions. But no matter what you feel while watching their video, Nike’s motivational and encouraging message to female athletes is clear.” — Kristen Baker, Content Marketing Manager

5. Lover album release campaign

“Every time Taylor Swift is about to drop an album, her fans know about it before the media even catches on. That’s because Taylor Swift’s marketing, while predictable, is extremely effective. For her recent album Lover, she began her marketing campaign by commissioning a mural in Tennessee. People began speculating, and she then transitioned her marketing to Instagram:

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“Without announcing an album, Taylor Swift will begin changing the entire look of her Instagram. Her campaigns are effective because there’s a lot of hints and suspense that come with an announcement.” — Rebecca White, Jr. Staff Writer

6. Squatty Potty’s humorous commercial

“I enjoy anything that makes me laugh (which is admittedly easy). Squatty Potty created a humorous campaign that somehow schooled me on my physiology at the same time — and taught me about the product that I never knew I needed.”

“Their clever and lighthearted approach to an unmentionable topic resulted in a campaign that I’ll never be able to get out of my head. Not to mention, the campaign boosted sales by 600%.” — Christina Perricone, Content Marketing Manager

7. Jeff Hoffman’s email marketing campaigns

“I love Jeff Hoffman’s email marketing campaign supporting his company’s weekly webinars for sales professionals. The cadence of his emails is not overpowering (once/week), but what really grabs me are the subject lines/topics he and his team choose. They are SO relevant to his audience, straight to the point, and really clearly communicated.

“I love a good flashy, multifaceted content marketing campaign as much as the next marketer, but there’s something so refreshing about clear communication, expertly chosen content, and a simple CTA. His emails are also written in a tone that is incredibly conversational — the reader can’t help but be drawn in. One of his recent emails was signed “Happy Selling (Hell, happy anything these days!)” and I loved how it was so in tune with how most sales professionals are feeling right now.” — Meg Prater, Managing Editor, HubSpot Blogs

8. NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest campaign

News radio provider NPR has a lot of programs, but my favorite by far is their Tiny Desk Concert series, which has 3 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Tiny Desk hosts musicians, with audiences small or large, at NPR’s office or in their homes, and they put on an intimate concert:

The team behind NPR’s Tiny Desk series realizes that not every guest has the same level of celebrity as artists like Lizzo or Harry Styles. So, every year, they host a contest, where unsigned, independent musicians can submit a DIY Tiny Desk concert for the opportunity to win one of their own:

This commercial is an excellent promotional tool because it emphasizes the lives that independent musicians may lead. I love this campaign because it gives a spotlight to smaller artists that wouldn’t necessarily have the same kind of exposure to new audiences that NPR has.

The promo is great at being relatable and evoking a feeling that anyone has the possibility to create something memorable. Plus, the contest home page is an excellent resource — submitters can find past winners, their concerts, and can even check out competition under the “Watch Entries” tab.

“Tiny Desk Contest” campaigns make NPR more accessible to its audience of music lovers. It allows audiences to contribute to their favorite publication and build their own careers, and I love how relatable the marketing messages are.

These campaigns each have something marketers can learn from. Whether it’s to connect with the emotions of audiences — like laughter or excitement — or to develop a unique brand voice and apply it to every piece of content.

When you think of your favorite campaign, what stood out to you? For me, I always look for the response of the public. Like seen with the Popeye’s campaign, a successful campaign is always measured, in part, by audience reaction.

Popeye’s got to enjoy an explosion of word-of-mouth-marketing and good timing. What are some of the tactics your favorite campaign used?