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Même en essayant de contenter toutes les parties concernées, il est impossible d’éviter toutes les situations difficiles. Un conflit est la conséquence directe d’une différence de point de vue, ce qui risque indéniablement d’arriver lorsque deux entreprises travaillent ensemble. Un conflit peut également émerger face à un manque de communication, à des processus inhabituels, à des changements rapides ou à des attentes différentes.

Dans une agence, la gestion des conflits est essentielle. En effet, 16 % des agences rencontrent des problèmes de fidélisation des clients dus à un manque de stratégies de gestion des conflits adaptées. Au cours d’une relation, et en particulier au début, les agences et leurs clients doivent faire face à des désaccords, car les équipes apprennent à se connaître et les partenariats n’ont pas encore fait leurs preuves. De plus, les clients souhaitent évidemment obtenir les meilleurs résultats au prix le plus bas, alors que la structure de tarif horaire des agences encourage l’approche inverse. 

Néanmoins, un conflit n’a pas qu’un côté négatif. Une bonne gestion des conflits peut consolider les relations et les rendre plus saines, tout en améliorant la collaboration et la productivité des parties prenantes. De plus, la clé pour obtenir des recommandations est d’engager des conversations ouvertes et bienveillantes, créant ainsi un environnement agréable dans lequel toutes les parties prendront plaisir à travailler ensemble.

Une bonne gestion des conflits permettra d’identifier plus rapidement le problème et de trouver la meilleure solution, évitant ainsi de briser des relations importantes tout en permettant de mettre fin à celles qui pourraient nuire à la réputation de l’agence. Il s’agit aussi d’une occasion précieuse pour les deux parties de définir et d’évoquer ce qui leur importe véritablement.

Les différents types de gestion des conflits

Il est nécessaire de comprendre les cinq façons de gérer les conflits présentées ci-dessous pour définir l’approche à adopter face à une conversation ou à une réunion difficile, ou pour appréhender la position et l’approche de l’autre partie.  

1 – Concurrence

Avec cette approche, l’agence ne tient pas compte des désirs de l’autre partie et se concentre uniquement sur son objectif. Cette approche ne doit être utilisée que s’il n’existe qu’un faible espoir de sauver la relation ou si l’agence souhaite une une conclusion immédiate de la situation.

2 – Collaboration

Avec cette approche, l’agence fait preuve à la fois d’affirmation et de coopération, à la recherche d’une solution qui puisse satisfaire les deux parties.

3 – Compromis

Avec cette approche, l’agence sait déjà qu’aucune partie ne sera pleinement satisfaite de la résolution du problème. L’objectif principal est de trouver une solution qui satisfasse au mieux les deux parties. Chaque partie a besoin de faire des concessions. Ce type de résolution de conflits est plus complexe et exige des deux parties qu’elles expriment leurs doutes et qu’elles fassent confiance à l’autre.

4 – Contournement

Cette approche des conflits est bien trop fréquente. L’agence se contente d’éviter le problème, en espérant ne pas avoir à s’en occuper. Parfois, la technique fonctionne et le problème finit par se résoudre de lui-même. Cependant, dans la plupart des cas, il ne s’agit pas d’une solution à long terme, car le problème réapparaît de manière amplifiée.

5 – Conciliation

Avec cette approche, l’agence cherche à trouver une solution et se concentre tellement sur les besoins de l’autre partie ou sur la résolution du problème qu’elle finit par aller à l’encontre de ses propres objectifs.

Il est important d’évaluer le pouvoir dont l’agence dispose dans cette situation par rapport à l’autre partie.

Techniques efficaces de gestion et de résolution des conflits avec les clients

Savoir gérer et résoudre les conflits fera de l’agence un lieu de travail idéal. En effet, disposer de stratégies pour réduire les conflits avec l’agence entraînera une plus grande satisfaction parmi les clients et les salariés.

Face à des priorités, des motivations et des méthodes de travail différentes, il est naturel qu’un conflit se déclenche. En déterminant à l’avance le type de clients avec qui l’agence travaille, il est possible de déterminer comment interagir de façon productive avec eux. C’est là la première étape. Il suffit ensuite d’envisager le conflit comme une façon d’améliorer la communication et le résultat final. Avec cet état d’esprit, il est nécessaire d’examiner les stratégies de gestion et de résolution des conflits ci-dessous.

1 – Déterminer si le problème mérite d’être mentionné

Il n’est pas conseillé par là d’éviter le problème, mais il faut savoir que certaines questions ne méritent pas d’être mentionnées. L’énergie et le temps nécessaires pour les aborder et les résoudre sont disproportionnés par rapport à leur impact négatif sur l’équipe. 

Nombreuses sont les personnes qui craignent les conflits et qui tentent de les éviter à tout prix. En soulevant un problème, il est possible de développer un sentiment d’inconfort et de défense chez l’autre personne. Il existe alors deux possibilités : le problème trouve une solution ou des ressentiments se créent.

2 – Utiliser un langage corporel adapté

La façon dont une personne se tient, ses expressions faciales et le ton employé fournissent de nombreuses informations à l’interlocuteur, qui devine alors l’approche adoptée concernant la résolution du problème.

Selon des recherches, seuls 7 % du message seraient transmis par les mots, contre 38 % par les éléments vocaux et 55 % par des indices non verbaux comme les expressions faciales et la posture.

Si le langage corporel de la personne est positif et montre une certaine ouverture, l’employé aura envie de refléter sa posture et sa position. De manière générale, il est conseillé d’éviter de croiser les bras car cette posture tend à exprimer un sentiment d’agressivité. S’asseoir près de l’autre personne montre également une volonté de collaborer et de communiquer.

3 – Prendre en compte les faits plutôt que les opinions personnelles 

Il est inutile de se laisser aveugler par son opinion de l’interlocuteur en cas de frustration, il vaut mieux se concentrer sur le problème. Il convient dans ce cas de commencer la conversation en décrivant les faits et de faire preuve d’objectivité.

4 – Permettre à tous de s’exprimer 

Les clients qui quittent leur agence se plaignent souvent d’un manque d’écoute. Peut-être ont-ils exprimé un besoin ou souligné un problème que l’équipe a minimisé ou qui n’a jamais été porté à l’attention de la personne concernée.

Si l’agence a déjà identifié un problème et tente de résoudre le conflit, elle doit s’assurer que le client puisse exprimer pleinement ses sentiments et ses pensées. Il peut être utile de poser des questions ouvertes, sans porter de jugement. Il suffit à certains clients de savoir que leurs préoccupations ont été exprimées et qu’elles ont été entendues.

5 – Être attentif au langage

Certains mots peuvent mettre immédiatement les clients sur la défensive ou les inciter à s’interroger sur les raisons qui poussent l’agence à aborder un problème. Lors d’un désaccord avec un client, il vaut éviter l’utilisation de « mais ». Par exemple : « Vous souhaitez que le projet soit terminé d’ici vendredi et notre équipe a déjà une autre échéance. Nous allons trouver un moyen de résoudre cette situation. »

En formulant ainsi la phrase, le client prend conscience de la difficulté rencontrée par l’agence et de la décision à prendre. Même si cela ne résout pas immédiatement le problème, cela peut inciter le client à tenir compte du point de vue de l’agence au cours des conversations.

6 – Recentrer le client sur l’impact

Parfois, les clients peuvent être influencés par certaines erreurs et ils en perdent de vue l’objectif final. Évidemment, manquer une échéance ou ne pas demander certaines informations essentielles sont de véritables erreurs, mais elles n’auront que peu d’impact sur l’objectif final du client.

Il est parfois nécessaire de recentrer le client sur les éléments véritablement importants. Le plus important est de lui présenter des excuses et de lui prouver à nouveau l’expertise de l’agence et son engagement à atteindre son objectif.

7 – Envisager le problème avec empathie

Se concentrer uniquement sur l’impact négatif d’un problème sur l’équipe n’est pas idéal pour aborder la résolution d’un conflit. Il faut plutôt réfléchir aux raisons pour lesquelles le client est contrarié ou déçu, en pensant aux implications pour son équipe ou son travail.

Pour créer de l’empathie au sein de l’agence et chez le client, il peut être utile d’encourager toutes les parties à envisager une situation avec une perspective différente. Cette méthode peut amener un nouvel état d’esprit et rendre les personnes plus disposées à régler un problème.

Satisfaits ou mécontents, vos clients exprimeront souvent leur avis sur vos produits ou services, téléchargez ce guide gratuit pour découvrir les meilleures pratiques pour leur répondre.

Starting a blog is tough. Thinking about what to post and how to promote it requires strategic planning. And will your content resonate with and delight your customers?

We haven’t even covered how often companies should post — a factor that can make or break even the greatest of content.

You might be surprised to know that even though there’s a surplus of hard data about why blog posts are integral to marketing, there’s not much on the frequency of posting. This is because, well, it depends.

If ambiguity gets your heart racing, fear not. Here, we’ll offer suggestions and stats to help inform your decision.

If you’re a marketing team of one, don’t feel the need to constantly pump out content. If you do, you’ll probably find yourself getting burned out and releasing content that’s not beneficial to you or your audience.

Keeping a schedule when blogging is important for two reasons. First, it builds organic traffic. Next, it helps with brand awareness. We’ll get into why below.

Organic traffic

Blogging is important for SEO if you want to increase visits to your website. But, if you are already posting valuable content, it might benefit you to go back and update that content, especially if after a little while, you want to give certain posts a boost.

Blog post traffic is compounding, which means it gains organic results over time. This is why updating posts are important. This gives you more reads, more recognition, and possibly, more fans.

Brand awareness

Because Google can crawl every page of a website for SEO, every blog post you make has the chance to enhance not only optimization but awareness of your brand. For example, if you’re in the beauty industry and you publish high-quality posts about how to apply eyeliner or mascara, you have the opportunity to be seen in those Google search results.

To build brand loyalty, make sure you’re producing high-quality content. If you’re producing content with images, keywords, and industry-relevant content, you can increase your brand awareness.

So, blogging is still of high importance for brand discovery and building leads. If you’re trying to figure out the right publishing frequency for your team and your business, keep reading.

Blogging Frequency

Blogging frequency ultimately depends on what you aim to accomplish with your blog. So, let’s look at the basics of how often you should blog for what you aim to accomplish.

Organic traffic

If your main goal is to raise traffic numbers and bring clicks to your website and content, you want to post frequently. It’s ultimately up to you to determine what that schedule looks like.

As a small blog with a limited team, it can be difficult to brainstorm, create, and promote a new post every day. This is where planning comes in handy. When you’re coordinating your next product launch campaign, plan for blog posts in tandem, and set aside time to outline those posts.

Having the material outlined and organized before you begin writing saves you time. Because you want to publish as much as possible, think of content that will educate your readers. This can look different depending on the blog, but some blog ideas include industry how-tos, campaign round-ups, and listicles.

For more blog post ideas, check out this list of 101 ideas HubSpotters put together.

Brand awareness

When you’re focusing on building your brand, the key is to diversify content. Try to think of the ways blog posts can highlight your brand and help to define it. How can a blog post tell your audience who you are?

Because your focus will be on building a voice for your company, these posts don’t need to be published as frequently as a traffic-building agenda would demand. Instead, smaller businesses should try to fit these in once a week or so.

Building brand awareness gives you a chance to provide useful information to your target audience. Providing branded infographics or statistics about your industry that are branded are good ways to build loyalty.

Content can vary even further, from an “Employee of the month” post celebrating your team to an event recap of a recent company outing, or an infographic that explains your core values.

Below is a graphic that summarizes some goals to shoot for when thinking about blog frequency. Remember that updating posts with new information is a great way to build SEO, no matter the goal.

With proper planning in place, the volume of blogs you produce may surprise you. We chose the soft goal of three to four times a week for smaller blogs focusing on organic traffic because blogging should be a priority if boosting clicks is the goal.

In 2019, HubSpot found that marketers who prioritize marketing efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI. Making blogging a serious portion of your day-to-day is hard work, but rewarding in that you may garner visits and leads.

Larger blogs with a few team members are able to increase volume but should be wary of burnout and over-saturation of search engine results. That’s why the goal is four to five times a week. This ensures new posts have time to gain traffic and updated posts are being boosted properly to round out your campaign goals.

Because content for brand awareness is more specialized and not as focused on gaining traffic, the frequency of blog posts is not as high. We recommend smaller, brand-awareness focused blogs post one to two times a week. While they may not perform as well as researched, traffic-focused content, they give a voice and holistic medium to your blog.

For blogs with more resources, it’s easier to up the frequency of brand awareness posts, especially because large blogs probably already have a decent amount of organic traffic. There’s more room to focus on content that grows a company’s brand and provide thought leadership.

Starting a blog and keeping it consistent can be really difficult, but there’s no exact science to it. Because of this, you can be flexible with how you maintain your blog, as long as you are sticking to your business goals.

Year after year, hundreds of marketers report increased efforts and spending on their content marketing — or the intention to do so.

But great content is a waste if your audience doesn’t know it exists.

Content distribution is an integral part — if not the most important part — of your content strategy.

This guide will equip you with the tools you need to distribute the content you create. By the end, you’ll be able to build a content distribution strategy that gets your content in front of — and consumed by — your audience.

Although the content distribution process happens after you create your content, it should be step one of your content marketing strategy. You should know where and how you’re going to publish and promote your content before you put the proverbial pen to paper. Otherwise, your time and resources could go to waste.

Take a look at these content distribution statistics:

• 60% of marketers create one piece of content each day.
• 952 posts are published on Instagram each second.
• 8,726 tweets are posted to Twitter each second.
• Google answers 3.8 million search queries per minute.

As you can see, in recent years, we’ve seen a rapid influx of content … met with dwindling demand. With almost 4.5 million blog posts published every day, there’s only so much content we can consume. Marketing influencer Mark Schaefer argues that, because of this “content shock”, content marketing may not be a sustainable strategy for every business.

While I won’t agree or disagree with this theory, I will outline everything you need to know to successfully distribute your marketing content.

Before we dive into the various content distribution channels through which you can share your content, let’s cover the different content types you can create for distribution.

Content Types for Distribution

There are many types of content you can create to market your business. But not all types of content are created equal (literally), and each type typically requires its own content distribution plan.

Ebooks

Distribute your ebook content through a gated form on a dedicated landing page. One example of this is HubSpot’s landing pages through which visitors can submit their information to access and read each ebook.

Podcasts and Interviews

Distribute your podcast or interview content through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts. One example of this is HubSpot’s Weird Work podcast, available on all three podcast networks as well as SoundCloud.

Videos

Distribute your video content through YouTube or Video. One example of this is HubSpot’s YouTube channel, which shares brand content, how-to videos, and written content in video form.

Infographics

Distribute your infographic content through Pinterest, as well as on your blog. One example of this is HubSpot’s infographic blog posts that are shareable on Pinterest. HubSpot also has its own Pinterest account on which it shares its own infographics in addition to other brand’s.

Case Studies and Success Stories

Distribute case studies and success stories through a dedicated page on your website. One example of this is HubSpot’s Case Studies page, where visitors can find all kinds of case studies featuring real HubSpot customers.

Webinars

Distribute your webinar content through a dedicated webinar page on your website, as well as calls-to-action (CTAs) on your blog posts. One example of this is HubSpot’s Webinars webpage, where visitors can browse and access free webinar content.

Blogs

Distribute your blog content through — you guessed it — your blog. You can also send out a daily or weekly newsletter with a round-up of your best or recently published content. One example of this is HubSpot’s Marketing, Sales, Service, and Agency blogs, each which has its own dedicated email newsletter.

Content Distribution Channels

Content distribution channels are the channels through which you share and promote the content you create. There are three types of content distribution channels: owned, earned, and paid. The channels you use to distribute your content will vary based on your audience and resources.

1. Owned Content Distribution

Owned channels are the content properties your company owns. You can control when and how content is published on your owned channels. These include your website and blog, your social media profiles, your email newsletter, or a mobile publishing app.

2. Earned Content Distribution

Earned channels (also known as “shared” channels) are when third parties promote or share your content. These third parties could include customers, journalists, bloggers, and anyone who shares your content for free — hence the name “earned”.

These channels include public relations, social shares and mentions, guest articles and roundups, and product reviews. They also include forums and communities like Reddit or Quora — while posting on these sites is free, the content is owned by these third parties and therefore falls under earned channels.

3. Paid Content Distribution

Paid channels refer to when your company pays to distribute your content on certain channels. This primarily includes pay-per-click (PPC), paid social advertisements, and paid influencer content.

The following diagram illustrates how these three content distribution channels overlap and how you can combine them to enhance their impact and reach.

If 70% of marketers lack a content strategy, how many do you think have a content distribution strategy? I’d bet not many.

Moreover, some marketers recommend that you spend 20% of your allotted content marketing time creating your content — and the other 80% promoting it. Sound like something you’re doing? If not, this is where a content distribution strategy comes in handy.

A content distribution strategy is important for a few reasons:

• It boosts your content impact past curation and creation. As I said above, great content is practically useless if nobody’s reading it. A content distribution strategy gets your gorgeous content in front of the right eyes.
• It aligns your team and the teams with which you collaborate to create and share the content. Depending on the size of your company, you may have several cooks in the content marketing kitchen. (I know we do at HubSpot.) A content distribution strategy aligns all these different parties and ensures you’re all collaborating efficiently.
• It sets goal benchmarks against which you can measure your distribution performance. Content distribution can be vague — a simple press of the “Publish” button, and you’re done. A content distribution strategy helps you set benchmarks and hard goals to chase while publishing and promoting your work.

Here’s how to build a content distribution strategy for yourself.

1. Research your target audience.

Content distribution is all about getting your content in front of your audience — not just any audience. You can’t do this properly if you don’t know where they are and what they like to read. Before you build your strategy any further, research your target audience so you know precisely who will be consuming your content.

Start by collecting demographic data from your website visitors, email subscribers, social media followers, and customers. Take a look at your audience’s gender, age, income, location, education, and related categories. You can pull this information from Google Analytics or your social media analytics tools.

Next, collect feedback directly from your customers, email subscribers, and social media followers. Ask them about their pain points and needs as well as how they feel about your current content and distribution efforts.

Use these two data points to create your buyer persona. Your buyer persona(s) act as models of your ideal customers and content consumers and represent their pain points, information preferences, and motivations as you build out the rest of your content distribution strategy.

2. Audit your content.

You may already have some published content out there, such as blog posts, videos, social media content, and more. While your new content distribution strategy doesn’t involve removing that content, you should perform an audit to understand if it’s helping or hurting your distribution efforts. Auditing your current content will also remind you of which topics you’ve already written about and which ones you can expand on.

A thorough content audit is comprised of three main parts:

1. Logging your content. Logging your content can be done manually or with a tool. (We recommend the latter, especially if you’ve been publishing content on multiple properties and channels.) Tools like Screaming Frog can help you crawl and collect your content, listing each URL, title, and description in a spreadsheet. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs. If you opt for a manual content audit, follow the steps in our blog post here.
2. Assessing your content impact. If you crawl your content with SEMRush, the tool will also list content length, social shares, and backlinks. This information can help you assess the impact of each piece of content, alerting you to anything that needs to be updated, rewritten, or erased.
3. Identifying your content gaps. You can also identify gaps in your content using the Ahrefs Content Gap tool or by performing keyword research to discover new keywords or keyword phrases to add to your content, thus helping it rank higher and for more terms.

Check out
this blog post
for 30+ more content auditing tools.

3. Choose your content distribution channels.

Your content distribution channels are arguably more important than your content itself, hence why this step comes before content creation and after target audience research. Once you know your target audience, you’ll have a much better idea of how to get your content in front of your followers and customers.

Depending on your analysis, you may post on forums and communities like Reddit or Quora — and pay to promote your content on those sites, too. Alternatively, you may choose to exclusively share content on social media channels, or perhaps you find that traditional PR is your best route.

Regardless of which content distribution channels you choose, ensure they align with your audience’s preferences and behaviors.

Also, be sure to optimize your owned distribution channels — your blog, email newsletter, and social media profiles — as these are relatively inexpensive and in your control. Even if research shows that your audience prefers forums to social media or news sites to company blogs, never neglect your owned properties as these reflect on your brand and product.

As you work through this step, set aside time to optimize your blog-to-gain readership, brush up on how to send email newsletters (or start sending them), and learn about organic social media marketing.

4. Decide on your content types.

After you determine your distribution channels, consider what types of content you’d like (and have the resources) to create.

Many companies choose to publish all of their content on their blog and then repurpose and re-publish it. Blog posts are universally consumed, easy to repurpose and localize (i.e. translate into other languages), and simple to share — not to mention that almost 50% of buyers read a company’s blog while making purchase decisions.

For these reasons, we recommend building a business blog and then expanding your content types from to share on other channels.

Consider the content types we discussed in the beginning of this guide, and think about how you’ll repurpose and distribute them.

5. Set your content distribution KPIs and goals.

Goals help us recognize where we’re going and what success might look like when we get there. Your content distribution strategy should involve setting goals for your content key performance indicators (KPIs) and their subsequent metrics:

These metrics may vary based on your distribution channel (i.e. you can’t track comments on your email newsletter or top exists on your social media ads), so be sure to choose the metrics that correspond best to each channel. It might take a few months to establish a baseline for each channel, especially if you haven’t used it before.

Set SMART goals for your content using these metrics. Here’s an example:

• Specific: I want to increase our blog’s organic traffic by boosting backlinks from other reputable websites and blogs. This will increase our search engine ranking, thus bringing in more organic traffic.
• Measurable: I’d like 30 new backlinks to our blog.
• Attainable: We’re already generating 10 new backlinks each month without an intentional strategy, so I believe 30 new backlinks this month with our strategy is feasible.
• Relevant: This goal aligns with our broader organic content marketing strategy and could also boost our earned media as we get mentions from press outlets and third-party bloggers.
• Time-bound: I’d like to receive these backlinks within the next month.

6. Build an editorial calendar (and include distribution).

Content marketing and distribution require lots of planning to be successful. This is where an editorial content calendar can come in handy. You can create one in Excel or Google Sheets, or even use Google Calendar. Tools like CoSchedule, Asana, and Trello are helpful, too.

Your editorial calendar, like your content distribution strategy, helps your team stay aligned and work towards common goals. It also gives your writers and editors a roadmap for what they’ll be working on in the coming weeks and months.

Here’s what your editorial calendar may look like (using this post as an example):

Your editorial calendar is the perfect place to include your content distribution plans and goals. Here’s what that may look like on your editorial calendar:

See how the right-hand columns now include categories like “Publish Destinations” and “Repurposing Plans”? Your editorial calendar should serve as your hub for all content creation and distribution plans.

Manage and plan your social media content with our free Social Media Content Calendar Template.

7. Create your content.

After you research your audience, audit your content, decide on your distribution channels and content types, and build your editorial calendar … it’s time to create your content. Content creation will vary based on your resources, team size, industry, and brand, so to get the most pointed, applicable advice, check out our Guide to Content Creation.

As you work on your new content, check out these tools:

• AnswerthePublic, which can help you flesh out topics and understand what your audience is searching for
• Canva, which can help you build gorgeous infographics and images
• Vidyard, which is a video hosting and publishing platform made for marketers
• Anchor, which is a free podcasting tool for beginners

We’ll talk more about content distribution tools in the next section.

8. Distribute and market your content.

You’ve created your content … now it’s time to put it out in the world. Following your editorial calendar and chosen distribution channels, publish and market your new content. As for any marketing channel, be sure you follow rules to optimize your posts on each channel.

For example, our team at HubSpot paid for ads on Reddit and found that it was helpful to organically engage with Redditors as well as pay for ad space. Alternatively, if you’re posting on (or paying for) social media, be sure to follow the guidelines for the best times to post and share content — the same goes for sending emails.

9. Measure and analyze your results.

As always, be sure to keep an eye on your content distribution results. Remember those KPIs, metrics, and SMART goals you established in step five? Time to pull those out.

After you’ve published your content, take a look at Google Analytics, your social media analytics dashboards, and your blog performance — depending on where and how you distributed the content. Make sure you set a routine time to measure and analyze (weekly, monthly, or quarterly) so that you can establish a baseline and know which numbers you can beat the following week or month.

Whew! So, that’s what it takes to build a content distribution strategy. Be sure to iterate on this process; these guidelines may change as you expand your content efforts and scale your team. Now, let’s talk about the tools you need to get it done.

Content distribution can be an arduous process, but thankfully there are many content distribution tools out there to help you get your work discovered and consumed.

Content Tools

These tools help you publish your content on additional networks and forums to reach broader audiences.

1. Medium

Medium is a content platform that individuals and businesses alike use to publish content. You can use Medium in addition to or in lieu of your traditional blog. (We recommend in addition to your blog as this will give your content the broadest reach.)

Medium is where thousands of readers consume content. It’s a one-stop-shop platform for all kinds of content … kind of like Amazon is for products. For that reason, consider publishing to Medium to increase the number of people who see your content.

Price: Free and paid

2. LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn Pulse is similar to Medium except it lives on LinkedIn. While there isn’t a homepage that aggregates all the published content, it’s still a helpful tool for getting your written content in front of your followers (for free). You can publish on LinkedIn Pulse through your personal or company LinkedIn pages by simply clicking “Write an article”.

Note: LinkedIn Pulse is also a mobile application that you can download to receive daily headlines and trending news.

Read more about publishing on LinkedIn Pulse here.

Price: Free

PR Tools

These tools help connect you with journalists and publications to help expand your earned distribution channels and gain backlinks.

3. PR Newswire

PR Newswire is a press release distribution network. The platform helps you target and contact journalists and outlets by specific industries, geographic areas, and topics. It offers packages for state and local, regional, and national press.

Price: Paid

4. HARO

HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out, which is an online platform that connects journalists and sources. In this case, you’d be the source.

When you sign up for HARO, you’re sent daily emails with journalist queries. Respond to these queries to be potentially featured in an article. This is a reactive content distribution tool, but it’s helpful for getting press mentions and backlinks.

Price: Free and paid

Social Tools

These tools help distribute your content on social media and amplify your posts.

5. HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software, meaning its useful for email marketing, analytics, and social amplification. I’ve placed it in the “Social Tools” section because its Social Inbox is incredibly helpful for content distribution.

From your Social Inbox, you can monitor, schedule, and post content to your social networks. You can also access information from your email marketing campaigns so you have the big picture of your readers and customers.

Price: Free and paid

6. ClickToTweet

ClickToTweet is a tool that equips your readers to share soundbites of your content on Twitter with a single click. You create your content soundbites, and ClickToTweet provides a link. When readers click that link, the tool opens their Twitter with the content soundbite already ready to post.

It also links to your Twitter account and content — allowing your readers to distribute your content for you.

Price: Free

7. GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP is a social amplification tool that allows you to aggregate your employee’s social networks and post company content directly to them. Employees have the option to review and improve content before it’s posted or allow it to go through automatically. This is a great alternative to constantly bugging your staff to post on about your business.

You can also use this tool to link to social networks from partners, customers, brand advocates, and more.

Price: Free and paid

8. AddThis

AddThis is an on-page social sharing tool. It allows your readers to share your content without bouncing from your page (and potentially getting distracted). You can also integrate AddThis share buttons into your email newsletter and other assets.

Price: Free

Analysis Tools

These tools help you measure and analyze the impact of your social posts and other distribution efforts.

9. Mention

Mention is a social media monitoring tool that provides social media listening, publishing, crisis management, and more. You can use Mention to monitor any mentions of your brand name, content, or social networks and respond accordingly. This is a great tool for measuring the impact of and engagement around your content and see who is promoting it for you.

Price: Free and paid

10. SharedCount

SharedCount is a tool that helps you measure the engagement of your social media posts. Simply input a URL, and SharedCount will report on its likes, shares, comments, and other engagement measures. While it can’t help you distribute your content, it can alert you to which pieces are performing well and which pieces may need to be updated or scrapped.

Price: Free and paid

Additional Tools

These additional tools help with your content distribution efforts.

11. Outbrain

Outbrain is a paid amplification tool that aggregates your content at the bottom of other articles. You can set up content campaigns with an RSS feed or specific URL(s), and Outbrain will place them under related content, encouraging readers to click and read yours.

Outbrain works with an impressive network, including digital publications like NYT and Mashable.

Price: Pay-per-click

12. WiseStamp

WiseStamp is an email tool that allows you (and your employees) to share your latest content in your email signature. Your email signature is often a forgotten but important piece of digital real estate that practically everyone who opens your emails will see. WiseStamp helps you make the most of that space.

Price: Paid

Distribute Your Content to Grow Better

Amazing content is a waste if no one is consuming it. Content distribution is a critical piece of the content marketing puzzle. It’s is also the key to boosting your brand awareness, collecting loyal followers, and encouraging your readers to click, act, and become customers.

Put these content distribution tips and tools to get your content in front of your audience.

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

Marketing has evolved over time from,“You can have any color you want as long as it’s black” to just-in-time marketing messages that might lead to your brand posting on Reddit.

We’re embracing digital channels and understanding the need to create marketing people love more and more … but do we actually grasp what’s running behind the scenes of all these digital campaigns?Code is what lies behind so many of our great marketing campaigns. Our websites, our emails, our apps and tools that are made to give your customers a better experience — these all run because there are smart coders making them work.

So my question today is this: Since code is the basis for most of our marketing today, should marketers be learning to code?

I’d like to argue yes, we should. Here’s why.

1. Coding saves time and inspires.

Getting to grips with code and understanding the structures that bring your sites, apps, and tools to life will give you a better understanding of what is possible in the first place.

And, here, knowledge is really inspiration. Imagine seeing beyond just what others have done and having the ability to use code to create new and innovative tools that truly delight your customers.

It is key here not just to understand code, but to understand what tools your designer is using (and what other tools are out there). There is an array of helpful apps that let you quickly do anything — from building forms, to creating buttons, to building sites, and other functionality.

You need to know whether the tool offered to you is right, up to date, and will do what you want it to. This will fuel your inspiration, and save costs and time.

2. Coding informs marketers of the process.

My marketing mentor taught me that if you don’t know what’s involved in a process, you’re not getting the most out of your budget. I’m far from saying that all suppliers will try and add a few hours to projects, but wouldn’t it be great to have the confidence to know when something is quoted right?

We all need to know what is involved in building a website or a form, and what it takes to make a change to an app or your site navigation. Only then can we actually have an informed discussion about cost and timeframes with the people who will implement our ideas.

Some coding knowledge will enable you to brief a web designer or developer much clearer on your idea, and you’ll understand when a “no” is a negotiation tactic rather than an actual expression of the impossible.

Having this knowledge about coding also helps you choose the right company or designer to partner with in the first place, as it helps you determine whether they can do what you’re asking at the right price and within the right timeframe.

3. You can make quick fixes with coding knowledge.

I don’t know about you, but if a paragraph is just not doing in your CMS what you’re asking it to do, when an image is not resizing correctly, or the YouTube video you’re embedding is just huge for some reason, you want it fixed … now.

That’s the reason I learned about code. I didn’t want to be in a situation where I would have to call my web designer for every small change. So I went into the HTML view of my CMS, Googled code, and learned how to make small changes on my own.

It has saved hours of my time and budget, and my patience is still intact. At meetings with my designer, I would also ask him to explain small things about code and I started to lose my fear of brackets, slashes, and ampersands. I can’t recommend this highly enough.

4. You can make an impact with even basic skills.

There is no reason why you shouldn’t learn about code. But I don’t think a marketer should necessarily learn to code with the aim of becoming on-par with professional coders. In my humble opinion, you should leave specialized tasks to those who know how to do them right.

Web developers and designers have a very different skillset than marketers. As marketers, we decide on strategic direction and look for return on marketing campaigns. And while we might have a good eye for design and user experience, the actual implementation skills lie with others.

Often, we’re also too close to our brands — whereas a good designer will always bring in the expertise gained from different projects and current trends.

But don’t let this stop you from learning more about how code works.

Where Marketers Can Learn to Code

I started learning how to code by Googling pieces of HTML code. It’s a quick and easy way to find what a piece of code does and how to manipulate it. But this method won’t give you the real hows and whys behind it. Also, it gives you very little idea of how different pieces fit together — like HTML and CSS, for example.

For this level of information, you need to get down and dirty with code and start building from scratch. If you have a developer in your organization who can teach, why not offer a free lunch to him or her while you learn from them?

For something more methodical, I’d also recommend you check out one of the many online courses available. Here are some of the big ones:

1. Code Academy

As they say themselves, this is all about learning how to code interactively and for free. Reviews are great and I know quite a few HubSpotters who used this tool.

2. W3 Schools

W3 schools have a variety of classes for different tools and levels. There is also the option to get certified in your news skill (there is a charge here) so you can show off to your peers!

3. Code Schools

This is another tool that lets you learn from home — from the basics in HTML and CSS, to Javascript and other languages. Courses are paid but affordable, and you’ll get access to a variety of courses for your fee.

4. Make It With Code

They are very active in the debate on whether marketers should code and believe that yes, we all need a good understanding on what’s possible to create. This is a paid course and you’ll have access to support via IM.

Next, let’s look at some alternate routes you can take to coding, such as programs that don’t require manual coding at all.

Coding Alternatives

If you don’t have the time to take up coding immediately, that’s totally cool. That’s also why there are coding programs online to do the coding for you — let’s get into a few.

1. Embed.ly

Price: Free to embed single links, then $9-99/per month

Emded.ly is super quick and clean to use for getting embed codes for a domain. All you have to do is copy and paste a domain in the box and click “embed.” Then, you’ll see this screen, where you can customize a couple of details about the embed.

Some of the details you customize include adding social media buttons to the embed, including dark theme within and making it optimized. When you check or uncheck these boxes, the embed code will automatically update for you to copy below, I checked all three.

2. iFramely

Price: Free for single links, then $29-$399 for paid plans

If you’re a color code person, iFramely will be an absolute vision to you. Copy and pasting your domain into iFramely will generate a color-coded embed for you right underneath it.

The title of your embed is above the code, with the account name and publish date beneath it. Checking the box underneath “Copy code” notates whether the video will autoplay or not, and you can also choose the start and endpoint of the video, if you only need a section.

3. Siteimprove

Price: Contact Siteimprove to request a quote

CMS Plugins streamline the performance of your website. Siteimprove is an example of a plugin that does just that. It integrates key analytics into the optimization of your domain, fixes errors in the code automatically, and allows you to add custom tags.

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4. RedmineUP

Price: $29-$499/per month

With RedmineUP’s CMS plugin, you can build simple pages and leave with code that’s SEO friendly. These pages are fully customizable and come with templates.

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On the website developer page, you can change information at the top to add and change the code in the bottom. With this process, you don’t have to add in any brackets, quotes, or operational systems, just the content you want to see added.

Code is part of our Marketing DNA, and even if we don’t need to be able to build sites from scratch, as marketers today, we need to understand how it works to make informed decisions.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published prior in April 2014 but was updated in November 2019 for comprehensiveness.

In 2019, Google Ads is one of the most effective advertising tools to get more traffic to your website, and generate more leads. In fact, most businesses see an average of 200% ROI on their Google Ad spend.

To create better, more powerful ads on Google, it can be helpful to receive a Google Ads certificate. Additionally, it’s a great resume booster.

If you’re looking to get a Google Ads certificate, you’ve come to the right place. Here, we’ve created a guide that will explain why a Google Ads certification is helpful, and how you can prepare and get certified.

Why get a Google Ads certification?

Years ago when I was applying for work, I interviewed a couple dozen people who worked in the digital marketing industry to learn about their jobs and the application process. Many emphasized the importance of getting a Google Ads certification.

The truth is that many employers search for people with this certification on LinkedIn to find employees for their marketing team. LinkedIn generally offers a talent pool of higher-quality than standard job boards like Indeed. Plus, the demand for marketers skilled in Google Ads is high, while the supply of qualifying candidates is relatively low.

Thanks to the internet, it’s easier than ever before to apply for a job with little effort, so employers are swimming in low-quality choices.

To find qualified employees, then, many hiring managers use LinkedIn’s search engine to find anyone with a Google Ads certification because it’s one of the few defining qualifications that can show proven knowledge and skill. The certification shows the hiring manager that you’re somewhat savvy about the industry.

The good news is that a lot of fresh talent don’t have a certification on their LinkedIn profile or resume since they don’t know the value of it. In other words, you can easily stand out if you get certified.

Even if you don’t want a role in PPC, the certification is still helpful for any marketer. PPC advertising, especially through Google Ads, makes up the bulk of online advertising. If you understand the principles of Google Ads, you can translate those principles to other marketing efforts.

Additionally, having an understanding of neighboring areas of marketing helps with your communication among team members, and empathy. Ultimately, having that certification under your tool belt will only make you look better to employers.

How Applicable is the Certification in the Marketing Industry?

To be fair and objective, let’s acknowledge the case against getting certified.

First, in terms of actual skill and practice, a certification isn’t entirely applicable in a real marketing role. It’s possible to score well or even perfectly on this exam without having actual experience with the platform, especially when there are exam answers online.

The exam can, at times, teach you the best answer in theory, which isn’t close to the best answer
in practice.

Having been in the Google Ads platform myself, I know that a few questions are unnecessarily complicated, not applicable, or biased toward a response focused on spending as much money as possible on Google’s platform. Google makes money when you spend money on ads, regardless of whether the ad leads to a sale, so their intentions make sense.

With all that said, most of the questions are still valuable because they help you learn how to navigate the platform and make accurate calculations. You can grow a lot through preparing for this exam even if you initially have little to no knowledge of Google Ads.

You should take the test without cheating, learn from your incorrect answers, and retake it to improve. Otherwise, you may have a tough time with the platform later on, which can seem detailed and intimidating to beginners.

Here’s another huge reason why you should get certified and make sure you learn a lot during the preparation process, rather than speed through it — any decent marketing agency or department that you’d like to work for is going to test you on your understanding of terminology and pay-per-click reasoning during the application process. They’re going to find out whether you really know what you’re talking about.

Therefore, the knowledge that the exams offer does have some real-world value. That doesn’t mean you have to be a total whiz. But you should understand most of the concepts tested.

Treat the Google Ads exam as an opportunity to learn rather than a task to check-off a list. Your mindset shift will make all the difference because you’ll be learning from every question asked, while others rush through the exam just to finish it.

Topics and Exam Duration of the Google Ads Certifications

There are Google Ads certifications for different topics, including video, mobile, display, and shopping advertising. The most important version is the search advertising exam since that’s the area marketers use most often on the platform. The second most applicable Google Ads test for marketers is likely Google Ads display certification.

Each exam has a different time limit, but it’s usually between 60 minutes and two hours. I’ve got a good sense for how long it actually takes since I’ve sat in a classroom with a dozen people taking the exam and have seen how quickly people finish. It usually takes 50–75% of the allotted time. A small percentage of people will use up to all the time if they’re new or focused on learning from each question.

Once you’ve passed the exam, you get a certification badge that you can show off on your LinkedIn profile. Adding this badge to your profile adds credibility and makes your profile more search-engine friendly. As mentioned, recruiters look for this certification and care about it, so you’ll be showing up more often when they search.

Google Ads Certification Training

The training resources that Google offers are a handy starting point. You can learn a lot about the testing format, style of questions, and concepts that’ll show up on the exam.

Additionally, one of the best ways to prepare for the exams is through YouTube tutorials, demonstrations, and tutorial articles. Most people are visual learners, and they will learn better when they see the platform itself with a video, rather than reading about it. That said, some blog posts have great screenshots throughout to help you better understand their tutorial.

It’s important to note — many of the resources online are overkill. It’s easy for beginners to feel overwhelmed by the details. However, try to focus on learning the fundamental principles — like what to tweak to make a big impact on performance.

If a tutorial article is 5,000 words long, then it’s covering every detail of the platform, which is too much for the certification exam.

Additionally, the exams themselves can be training tools. If you don’t pass the first time, you can learn from your incorrect answers and retake it. You can use your first attempt to get familiar with the format and duration. Reflect on why you got a question wrong so that you can remember the right answer for next time.

Some of the questions asked are recycled and randomized with different numbers. You can gain a lot of applicable math skills by learning the principles behind calculations. Unfortunately, many marketers skip learning from the exam itself and miss out on the bulk of where they can grow.

Take the exam with an attitude of learning, rather than completing.

Tips for When You’re Taking the Exam

Have printed notes on hand that you can consult quickly whenever you forget minor details here and there (don’t expect to rely on these for the entire exam, though). These notes are useful in case Google decides to implement restrictive browsing limits for exam takers in the future.

Make sure your computer is plugged in so it doesn’t run out of battery life while you’re taking the exam. This tip may seem obvious, but you don’t want to find yourself in that painful situation.

Take your time with each question. Most people end up with extra time. Remember — it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You’ll be answering multiple-choice questions for at least an hour.

Hydrate. Get enough sleep. Some people overlook simple things, like making sure you have enough water and food before the exam, which can affect brain performance. Foods high in omega-3 are great for brain power.

Ultimately, getting a Google Ads certification is a worthwhile investment for your career growth. Digital marketing employers look for any valid evidence that you’re above entry-level applicants.

While it’s possible to pass the exam without understanding many of the principles, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice in the long run. Treat the exam as a learning process and an opportunity to shore up your knowledge and application of PPC terms and methodology because it’ll help you during the job interview, and in your career.

You don’t have to know everything about Google Ads since real-world experience can help you learn. But the knowledge you gain in preparing for this exam will give you a head start.

When I first heard the term robots.txt, I’ll admit, I didn’t know what it meant. Instinctively, I imagined R2D2 from “Star Wars” and thought, “What do robots have to do with SEO?”

If you’re anything like me, technical SEO isn’t always easy to understand.

However, in a study with seoClarity and BuzzStream, out of 240 SEO specialists, 59% of all respondents reported that the most effective SEO strategy used was technical onsite optimization.

So, whether we understand it or not, technical SEO will continue to play a large role in our marketing strategies.

Below, we’ll review what a robots.txt file is and how to use it in your strategy. Plus, we’ll cover how to create, add, and edit a robots.txt file on your site.

What is a robots.txt file?

A robots.txt file tells search engines how to crawl and index the pages on your site. It’s important because it helps as search engines crawl your site and index content to serve users looking for that information. You can allow or disallow search engines from indexing a page. Search engines will look for a robots.txt file before crawling your site to see if there are any instructions.

Like any technical aspect of SEO, a robots.txt file has its own language. Here are some of the main terms you’ll see and what they mean:

• User-agent: The search engine.
• Disallow: Tells a search engine not to crawl a certain URL.
• Allow: Tells a search engine it can access a web page.

You might be wondering, why would I want certain pages on my site hidden or to tell a search engine not to crawl my site?

Ultimately, it’s because you want to direct the search engines to crawl the most important pages on your site and not get bogged down with unimportant, private, or similar pages.

Let’s review the best ways to use a robots.txt file:

1. Keep pages on your site private.

Does your site have any internal pages? For instance, perhaps users log on to your site and see gated information. Or, maybe, you have employees log in to your site to see HR information. Either way, you’ll want those pages on your site to be private, meaning you don’t want them to show up in search engines. That’s why you can disallow search engines from crawling those pages in a robots.txt file.

Additionally, if you’re creating a test site for a client, you don’t necessarily want that site to be crawled or indexed by search engines. In fact, you really only want the client to see that site. To do this, you’ll want to disallow search engines from indexing these pages.

2. Prevent search engines from indexing files.

Sometimes you might add PDFs or other files to your site for users to download. This could even be duplicate content on your site that you’re repurposing for marketing purposes. However, you most likely don’t want these files to be indexed by search engines. You can disallow these pages from being crawled by adding them to your robots.txt file.

3. Allow search engines to crawl any page on your site.

Although having a robots.txt file isn’t necessary, if you want search engines to crawl every page, providing instructions can speed up the process. You can easily create a robots.txt file that instructs search engines to crawl every page on your site.

4. Disallow search engines to crawl certain pages or your whole site.

Sometimes, you might not want a search engine to crawl any page on your site. For example, during HubSpot employee training, new hires are expected to create a website using the HubSpot product. However, these sites are just for the project and employees typically don’t want these to be indexed by search engines. That’s why they create a robots.txt file that says to disallow crawling any page on the site.

Additionally, you can block specific search engines from specific pages on your site. For instance, you can label the user-agent as “Google,” and disallow private content.

Although you’ll want to disallow search engines from crawling and indexing certain pages, a robots.txt file can instruct search engines, but not enforce it. That means that even though your robots.txt file might instruct a search engine not to crawl a page, it can’t actually prevent it from being indexed. To do that, you’ll want to use noindex and nofollow directives.

So, you might be wondering why you need to use a robots.txt file, if it can’t prevent a page from being indexed. The answer is that the robots.txt file is there to help search engines crawl your site faster and prioritize the pages it crawls. It won’t technically block any page from the search engines.

How to Create & Add a Robots.txt File to Your Website

Creating a robots.txt file is actually a simple process.

All you need to do is open a plain text editor, like TextEdit or Notepad. Then, you can copy the language and syntax from Google.

For example, your robots.txt file will look something like this:

User-agent: *

Allow: /

You can define the user-agent — an asterisk means all search engines. Then, you can write “allow” or “disallow” and specify the pages.

Before you add this file to your site, you can test it using Google’s testing tool.

Once you’ve written your file, you’ll want to upload it to your site’s top-level directory. This means you’ll go into the Cpanel and click “Add File.”

Keep in mind that robots.txt files may not be supported by all search engines.

Robots.txt files are publicly available, meaning you can add /robots.txt to any site and see their site’s file, if they have one. Additionally, most robots.txt files contain the location of any sitemaps associated with the domain.

Again, editing your robots.txt file isn’t difficult. Just follow these steps:

1. Find your robots.txt file in your CMS.

This process looks slightly different depending on your content management system (CMS). For example, finding it in WordPress and HubSpot are two different processes. Typically, if you go to the editor for your website and click “Settings,” you should find an SEO tab. Here’s where your robots.txt file should live.

If you aren’t using a CMS that makes this process easy, you can also login to your hosting account website, go to “File Management” and look for your robots.txt file. Then, you should be able to open it for editing.

2. Delete the text.

Once you’ve got the file open, delete all the text that’s in there. Yes, that’s all you need to do in this step.

3. Add in text from your plain text editor.

Lastly, copy and paste the text that you wrote in your plain text editor. Then, click “Save.” You’re all done.

Technical SEO and robots.txt files sound more complicated than they actually are. By helping search engines crawl your website quickly, your rankings could vastly improve.

While every business owner likely realizes the integral role marketing plays in a business’s overall success, marketing for marketing’s sake isn’t going to get you anywhere — there has to be a clear strategy and focus behind it.

In my 17+ years of online marketing, I’ve seen far too many businesses lose focus on the bottom line when it comes to their content strategies.

Fortunately, a healthy blend of marketing, sales, and customer success helps you maintain a “growth mindset”, or a laser-sharp focus on your goals.

Essentially, a growth mindset is an experimental and data-driven approach to growing your business and leveraging all the marketing channels at your disposal.

By using a growth marketing mindset approach myself, I was able to help drive 8.2 million unique users to my clients’ sites last year alone.

Here, I’m going to show you how you can achieve real growth by focusing on what’s working for you — and ditching the rest.

Sign up for HubSpot Academy’s Content Marketing Certification course to learn how to grow your business in a human and helpful way.

The 3 Vital Elements of Growth Marketing

1. Focus on the most important and relevant metrics for your business.

The sheer number of metrics that you could measure can be completely overwhelming. But data is only as good as the conclusions you draw from it. That’s why it’s essential to focus on the most important and relevant metrics for your business so you can address your weaknesses and grow.

So how can you identify the metrics you should be tracking? It can be helpful to start at the end and work backwards. For instance, start with your business goals. What are the mechanisms by which you’ll generate revenue? This will incorporate a combination of product development goals and marketing goals.

Let’s say, for instance, that one of your major marketing goals is to generate revenue via your website. Next, you’ll want to identify your website goals — which KPIs are most useful for tracking progress toward these goals? Think about what weaknesses you need to overcome, and — once your strategy for doing so is in place — identify the metrics needed to track the progress of your tactics. Look at the marketing channels that perform best for you, and the most relevant metrics to measure them.

Ultimately, the channels you use will significantly affect the metrics you should be measuring.

For example, marketers using paid social posts need to look at followers, likes, click-throughs, and engagement rates. Alternatively, if you’re focused on email marketing, open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates are king. Lastly, if you’re interested in focusing on SEO, measure traffic growth, changes in keyword rankings, and the number of new backlinks.

Once you’ve identified your most valuable metrics, rip off the bandage and ditch the rest. I’ve found that if you can’t count your metrics on one hand, that’s generally too many to effectively monitor.

A good example of this is my email finder tool, Voila Norbert. We found that our best customers (highest LTV) were on a $49 or $99 subscription. We have higher-priced plans and annual plans, but our customers with the $49 and $99 plans stick around the longest.

As a result of this realization, we made it our goal to increase the number of customers on those two plans. It wasn’t easy — it changed pretty much all of our tactics.

For instance, we no longer needed salespeople (because those two plans are self-service), we changed our strategy to focus on traffic sources targeted at those customers, and we killed our partner program.

All of this helped us stay focused on a handful of marketing and sales activities that were driving the growth of those two plans. An added bonus?

We reduced our marketing and sales spend by 35% and our time by 50%, allowing us to double down on our efforts and grow the company faster.

2. Know your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to marketing.

Identify your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to both marketing and product. Ask yourself where the weaknesses are within your metrics. What tactics are clearly not working for you at the moment? On the flip side, what does your company have that others don’t?

Over 65% of content marketers report having a clear, documented content marketing process. It’s vital you create a strategy for leveraging your strengths and overcoming your weaknesses within that framework.

Alternatively, perhaps you need to go back to the drawing board to tweak your value proposition. Maybe you simply don’t have good product-market fit, and a rethink is needed.

Common weaknesses that hinder growth include:

• A lack of traffic
• A low conversion rate
• Customer churn

From the very beginning at Mailshake, our strengths have been word-of-mouth and simplicity of product. That’s the thing people love about us — our competitors’ weakness is that their tools are very complex, but we’ve built something incredibly simple.

To leverage your strengths, a robust framework is key.

The Bullseye Framework is my preferred model, because it’s so target-driven. Within the framework, the outer ring contains what’s possible for your business (your moonshots), the middle ring focuses on what’s probable (potential big future performers), and the inner ring outlines what’s working (your three most prominent channels).

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If your main focuses (in the middle of the ring) don’t align with the channels that are working for you once you’ve analyzed the data, it’s time for a rethink. Focusing on proven top tactics is vital.

As billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel says — “Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution — not product — is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished. So it’s worth thinking really hard about finding the single best distribution channel.”

3. Get buy-in from teams throughout your business.

It’s easy to build a product that customers don’t want or don’t know how to use, because the people building the product are typically the furthest from the customer. This is why it’s essential to secure buy-in for your growth marketing strategy from teams throughout your organization.

The big win here is leveraging customer-facing teams. Of course you’ll need buy-in from your management team and other departments, too, but I’ve found the most valuable departments to work with on growth marketing are:

• Sales
• Development
• Product
• Support

The sales, business development, and support teams are already talking to customers, so it’s critical you listen to the customer feedback they’re getting. Meanwhile, the development and product teams can help you reduce a friction point, adjust the value proposition, or even build a new feature.

As Sophia Bernazzani writes in HubSpot’s 10 Ways Marketing and Customer Service Can Work Together — “The need for a symbiotic marketing and customer service relationship is only more important now, with consumers increasingly turning to social media as a way to communicate with businesses.”

Once buy-in is achieved, leveraging these teams can involve:

• Getting marketing and/or the CEO talking to customers
• Listening to sales calls
• Concierge onboarding

Getting buy-in and leveraging the expertise of all our teams has been instrumental in making Mailshake a success. From the outset, we realized the product needed to be built around the customer. Our roadmap is driven by sales, customer success, and marketing teams, all of whom who are interfacing with our customers.

In practice, that means that sales, CS, and marketers are creating feature/bugs/feedback lists, and then the product and development teams set priorities and timelines. This puts the customer at the heart of the process, allowing
them to drive the product roadmap.

With concierge onboarding, we use our customer success team to onboard customers, allowing us to customize the experience and minimize the friction, hurdles, and workload a customer must go through to get value from the product.

This helps to identify improvements that could be made to the on-boarding and sign-up processes, and the product itself. For example, we consistently found ourselves educating customers on their approach to email outreach. To improve the customer journey, we created videos covering this topic — now, they’re the first thing our customers see.

Using this approach for over four years has helped us grow 3X year-over-year for the last three years, simply through word-of-mouth — our biggest channel, responsible for bringing in over 40% of our new customers.

Another way to generate word-of-mouth is to use referral and incentive programs. Rewarding people when they share your content, refer new leads, and interact with your brand allows you to speed up the rate at which your brand awareness spreads.

Ultimately, growth marketing focuses on what works, and discards the rest, allowing you to ramp up your efforts on proven performers and stop wasting time.

Additionally, it reduces the feedback loop, allowing real-time customer demand to shape products and the user journey.

And, most importantly, putting growth at the forefront of your marketing strategy gets your business where it wants to be, faster.

“Lisa has recommended you!”

Awww, she has?!

When I get a LinkedIn recommendation from someone I respect and admire professionally, I feel both honored and encouraged to return the favor. But for some reason, I always get writer’s block. I never know how to start or what to say — only that I like this person’s work and I want others to know it.

Unfortunately, simply writing “Lisa is the best!!!!” isn’t reflective of Lisa’s skills — plus it makes you look like a total goon.

Luckily, in the past few weeks I’ve written a couple of LinkedIn recommendations that I think turned out pretty well, and they reflected a pattern that’s easy to replicate in subsequent recommendations. I thought I’d share that pattern with others that suffer the same writer’s block.

Download our ultimate guide to LinkedIn here for more tips about how to use LinkedIn for professional networking.

Here’s a quick little “template” you can use that makes for a LinkedIn recommendation that’s specific, honest, succinct, and helpful for the person you’re recommending.

1. Explain the nature of your professional relationship.

That sounds really serious, but it’s simply a helpful piece of context that acts as an “intro” for your recommendation. Whether it’s a coworker you’ve worked closely with for years, a manager, a direct report, a point of contact at an agency, or something else entirely, it sets the stage for the reader to learn why you’re writing this recommendation.

For Example:

I’ve worked alongside Lisa for close to two years now.

2. Provide details of the position for which you’re recommending the person.

Are you recommending this person for their work in one position? Or are you writing about their work across multiple jobs they’ve held while you worked with them? Either way, a great next step is to explain some of the notable parts of their job(s). It may feel strange — kind of like you’re listing out their job description. But this is very helpful for anyone reading the recommendation, looking to get a feel for what precisely it is they did in their job.

Resist the urge to create a laundry list of their job duties. If they’ve really worn that many hats, I recommend contacting them to see if there’s a certain part of their role they’d like emphasized over others.

For Example:

In those two years, I’ve seen her not only excel at the core elements of her job — like copywriting and copyediting — but also learn other tasks that extend well beyond the scope of her role, like email marketing, event planning, and even championing our company’s internal communications.

3. Explain how they’ve grown at the company.

If this person reports (or once reported) to you, this aspect of a LinkedIn recommendation can go a long way. Explaining how the person you’re recommending has grown — either in their role or from one role to another — can demonstrate an ability to adapt as the organization expands.

Just be careful not to overstate any low points in the person’s career that can dilute the value of the growth you’re trying to highlight.

For Example:

Lisa has grown as quickly as our business has, and her willingness to learn and take on these new responsibilities is something to be desired in any professional.

4. Indicate how their contribution helped grow the team or company.

This could be an explanation of how their performance helped hit hard metrics, or it could demonstrate a contribution toward more esoteric things, like leading their teammates or fostering new initiatives.

For Example:

Lisa’s mastery for both her core role, and the projects that extend beyond it, have been critical to the company’s growth. In fact, her taking on internal company communication aligned with a sharp increase in employee happiness.

5. Explain what these achievements reveal about that person.

By now, you’ve included some specifics — so let’s explain what those specifics mean for the larger theme of your recommendation. Do the examples you’ve detailed reveal that person is hard-working? Ambitious? Great for team morale? Connect their accomplishments with their attributes.

For Example:

This rare mix of productivity and ambition sets a great example for the rest of the team, and explains why everyone loves working with Lisa — no matter where they fall on the org chart.

6. End with a note about the personal aspect of working with him/her.

In this section, hit the message home with a mention of how you felt working with the person, your hopes for their career, or simply a prediction about their future.

For Example:

While Lisa’s work has continued to pay dividends long past her tenure here, I certainly miss working with her every day. I have only optimistic predictions for her career trajectory.

LinkedIn Recommendation Examples

Recommendation From an Employee

In the recommendation below, a person discusses how their supervisor progressed at the company and how this person mentored them so they too could grow as an employee. 

Recommendation from an Employer

In this recommendation, an employer explains how an employee progressed and executed on projects that made a big impact on their company:

LinkedIn Recommendation Sample (for a Manager)

Now, writing a LinkedIn recommendation can seem easier said than done. What if the employee you’re recommending is your superior? This can make it more difficult to recommend the person — even if you’re saying stellar things about them.

To avoid sounding patronizing or tone deaf when addressing a higher-level professional, here’s a sample LinkedIn recommendation — written in full — that a manager would be proud to receive (notice how it embraces every step outlined above).

I’ve worked for Lisa for two years, and in those two years, I’ve seen her quickly take on new responsibilities while having the time to teach this information back into her employees. By inheriting tasks like campaign analytics and email A/B testing — both of which extend beyond the scope of our team — she’s made our department much more agile, and set me up for a promotion last month. Lisa is as great a person as she was a manager, and her next employer will be lucky to have her.

Now proofread, and hit send. Remember, the recipient has the opportunity to review and request changes to your recommendation, so if you’re concerned you haven’t written a recommendation in the most helpful way possible, they can still get in touch with edit requests.

Editor’s note: This blog post was originally published in July 2018, but was updated in November 2019 for comprehensiveness.

Let’s say you’re hiring a freelancer or two to help improve the marketing effort of a campaign. You’ve identified the project they’ll be working on, about how many hours it should take, and the context they’ll need to be successful — but you still haven’t decided on the hourly rate.

Instead of spending hours figuring out how much you should pay your marketing freelancer, take a look at the data we’ll pull for you. We’ve rounded up the national freelance hourly rates of marketing consultants, PR professionals, and SEO specialists.

But, before getting into the details, here’s a basic formula to calculate the hourly rate of freelancers.

Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator

To calculate an hourly rate, start with an estimate of yearly income and divide that by how many hours you typically work in a year. Though the number of hours worked might change depending on industry and job functions, it’s safe to assume that most professionals work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks.

The other two weeks are likely spent on a vacation or sick days. With that in mind, the average full-time professional works about 2,000 hours in any given year.

This makes the basic formula:

Rate = Annual income / Hours worked in the year

This is illustrated in the graphic below:

If your goal is to make $58,000 a year, here is how you’d use the formula to find an hourly rate:

$58,000 / 2,000 = $29/hour

We will continue to use this formula for different industries and professions within the freelance industry.

Hourly Rate for Freelance Marketing Consultant

Marketing consultants are professionals in the marketing industry who act upon strategies built by market research and the professional’s experience. Their primary goal is to drive sales by delivering fresh marketing campaigns and expertise.

Businesses hire a marketing consultant if they need a new outlook on a current project or an entirely different project that’s being taken in a direction that’s usually foreign to the business. Hiring a marketing consultant is a more cost-effective way to bring on more help, since it’s freelance consultants aren’t full-time staff.

The industry standard for a marketing consultant is $47,682/yr in the US, according to Glassdoor. This is illustrated by the graphic below.

Image Source

If you were to use the formula above to find an hourly rate for this salary, you would divide $47,682 / 2,000 for an hourly rate of $23.84.

Let’s say you’re looking for a marketing consultant with years of professional industry experience to work on a project that will take several months. For these levels of experience, you might find hourly rates to range from $125-$150 an hour.

It all depends on your budget, your reasons for hiring, and what’s best for your business. All of these factors come into play again when calculating the hourly rate for public relations freelancers.

Freelance Public Relations Hourly Rate

Freelance public relations professionals help coordinate and define the image of a brand. They also have a hand in managing public perception of their clients’ products and can serve as a point of contact for press inquiries about those clients as well.

Businesses might hire a freelance public relations professional if they are looking for an outside perspective to gain insight into brand building or garner press about their company. Freelance public relations professionals also are a cost-effective way of hiring more help, like marketing consultants.

The national average for a freelance PR professional’s yearly salary is $54,114/yr, according to ZipRecruiter. This is illustrated by the graph below.

Image Source

To use the formula from above, taking $54,114 / 2,000 = $27.05/hr.

Next, we’re going to look at calculating the hourly rate for an SEO specialist.

Freelance SEO hourly rate

Ahrefs is a marketing tool driven by data and powered by backlinks and keywords. Last year, they surveyed over 300 freelance SEO specialists about their hourly rates.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes sure a business’s online content ranks highly on search engines to gain organic engagement. Typically, marketers use websites like Ahrefs to run data reports on where content is being ranked on Google, which words are garnering traction, and where a business falls on search engines.

A business might want to hire a freelance SEO specialist to gain insight into how people are finding their business (or how they aren’t). They also might look into hiring a specialist in this field to gain valuable online data that previously hadn’t been calculated. Ahrefs found that the most popular hourly rate is $100-$150 for SEO specialists.

Image Source

It also provided a graph on how much specialists tend to charge based on years of experience. For example, a specialist with less than two years’ experience is more likely to charge $75 per hour, while someone with over ten years’ experience is more likely to charge $150 per hour.

All it takes is a simple formula to find the hourly rate for freelancers. By using some industry benchmarks, you can easily find a freelancer that fits your budget and goals. And, for freelancers and businesses looking to hire freelancers alike, we have the ultimate guide on that very subject. For more information about the ins and outs of freelancing, check out our post here.