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Remember the “Tide Pod Challenge?” That horrendous time at the beginning of 2018 when adolescents filmed themselves ingesting laundry detergent?

While it was a funny (albeit dangerous) start to the new year, this small boost of infamy was a PR mess for the detergent brand in question, Tide, whose crisis communication team had to figure out how to respond to America’s teens swallowing their toxic product. Tide’s parent company, Procter & Gamble, was swift in their response, thanks in large part to their communication plan.

Communication plans clarify the purpose of a business, measure success, and give a definitive definition of an audience. For example, an independent coffee company might define their purpose as “selling coffee and bagels locally,” measure how much of each flavor sold, and describe their audience as “The busy professional or university student looking for an alternative to Starbucks.”

If companies don’t have a communication plan, they’ll be unprepared when disaster strikes. It may be unlikely that your company will find teenagers eating your product for internet fame, but not so unlikely that you’ll never find yourself needing a procedure to effectively handle dire situations.

Now that we’ve gone over how a communication plan can be helpful, let’s learn how to write one that will be effective.

Image source: Prezly

This communication checklist, by Prezly, gives a great overview of the details of a crisis plan from beginning to end. It can be used as an effective guide when drafting a crisis management strategy.

1. Audit

Before sitting down to get rollin’ on that plan, you need to first decide where it’ll fit into your business. Complete a state of the union; an audit of the current climate of communications within your company and identify problem areas.

For example, you might conduct an audit to identify gaps in your marketing plan. To do this, you’d want to carefully gather and interpret data on current marketing plan performance and build a path forward based on those results.

In this example, that path forward might be to grow web traffic (the gap) by increasing blog publishing volume.

2. Goals

After your evaluation, lay out a few goals based on the data from the results. What do you want to achieve with this plan? When in doubt, remember that goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based. If an advertising agency focused on small businesses were to make a SMART goal, an example could look like this:

“To increase employment applications for the client by 25% over the course of one quarter.” This goal is specific, focusing on one area of advertising, measurable by including a percentage, attainable through advertising, relevant to startups looking to hire more talent, and timely by including a timeframe.

3. Audience

If a crisis communication plan is for stakeholders, which ones are you writing for? If not all, your plan should cover a fair amount. Stakeholder examples include employees, investors, customers, local government officials, and media outlets.

If you’re writing for media outlets, a press release detailing your goals is a good idea for keeping the audience in mind. There should be processes for who will speak to the media outlets, an outline of what they will say, and an action plan put in place going forward.

4. Write

When writing the communication plan, work with groups or representatives from your stakeholder groups to improve accuracy. Strategies should solve goals or potential risks. An example of a risk for the advertising agency would be making sure ads deliver the right message before going public, so, in their plan, they would detail different steps to ensure that is taken care of.

5. Estimate a timeline

You should have a ballpark estimate of how much time each step in executing strategy will take. For instance, if your plan needs to go from the higher-ups down to the employees, it’s good to take into account how long going through the chain of command will take. It’s also smart to infer how long a media cycle will last.

For instance, for a minor slip-up on an ad campaign, the advertising agency might estimate the cycle for controlling the issue would take a month to meet with the client, the stakeholders, and employees and discuss steps moving forward.

6. Measure results

There’s always room for improvement. Measure the results of the plan after presenting it to stakeholders, and run a “post-mortem” after executing your plan in times of need.

For example, the ad agency might not have met its goal of increasing prospective applications by 25% within a quarter. They might rework their goals to give themselves more time or pivot their quarterly focus to fit those goals.

Some aspects of building a communication plan can be a “choose your own adventure” journey. The key is choosing aspects that best reflect what your business needs in times when effective communication is key. What do your stakeholders need to know, and how are you going to best communicate that?

Communication Plan Examples

A basic communication plan should include an analysis for the stakeholders you’d respond to and the procedures for what to include in those conversations. You might also include an overview of your business, potential communication challenges, and risk management strategy.

Bright Hub Project management has an example that includes how to put this information — and more — into your communication plan as a project manager. This example is great because it details how communication managers write crisis plans and acknowledges that sometimes the busy marketer or project manager does as well.

Source: Bright Hub

The National School Public Relations Association has a free version of a sample communication plan in PDF format. It’s a great example of how to format a crisis strategy and how to fit your budget into the plan.

Here are some extra tips to keep in mind to help your plan shine.

When describing procedures for handling crises, include who the situation involves. This lets stakeholders envision decision-making processes.

If you’re part of a larger company with a broad stakeholder list, it’s okay to split up target audiences for your plan. For instance, maybe your audience is more than just “consumers.” Split stakeholder groups for easier comprehension and more distinct solutions.

Communication Plan Template

Need a free, easy-to-use communication plan template? HubSpot has 12. Check out this toolkit for everything you need to build your own.

This is part of a template offered in the toolkit. For this particular template, the organization is separated into phases, a description of that phase, and who needs to complete that action. Communication plans can get tricky, but writing an effective one will prove itself with its longevity.

Image Source: HubSpot

Selling on Instagram just got a lot easier with the launch of Instagram’s shoppable posts feature.

In the past, the only way to connect your followers with your products was through the link in your bio, or links in Instagram Stories, this new feature provides a seamless experience for people to shop products directly from your posts.

Of course, with more than half a billion monthly active users and over half a million advertisers, it was only a matter of time before users could start buying products right from the app!

Ready to get started with selling on Instagram? Here’s everything you need to know about how to create shoppable posts:

Why Your Business Should Be Using Instagram Shoppable Posts

Shoppable posts are Instagram’s next big step in becoming a more business-friendly platform.

Thanks to the new feature, Instagram users can complete their buying journey, from discovery to checkout, without ever leaving the Instagram app.

And with 80% of Instagram’s 800 million users already following an “active shopping business” account (and 200 million users visiting one or more business profiles daily), giving people the ability to shop natively within the Instagram app makes a lot of sense.

With the new feature, Instagram has made it easier than ever for businesses to reach their consumers, noting “once a business has a product catalog connected to their account, tagging a product is as simple as tagging a person in a post.”

Instagram shoppable posts are marked with a “Tap to View Products” pop-up or small white circle with the shopping bag icon:

On a business’s Instagram account, Instagram shoppable posts will be marked by a shopping bag icon in the top-right corner. Users will also be able to browse your “Shop” feed directly from your Instagram profile:

At the end of the day, Instagram’s new shoppable posts feature offers an incredible opportunity for businesses to turn their followers into customers.

If you’re a small business or publisher looking for an alternative solution to drive traffic from Instagram, using a feature like Linkin.bio might work best for you. With Linkin.bio, you can send your followers anywhere by linking your Instagram posts to specific product pages, blog posts, or websites.

There are a few eligibility requirements you’ll need to check off before you can get started with Instagram shoppable posts:

• 1. You must be located in one of these countries: United States, Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, or Australia
• 2. You need an Instagram business account
• 3. You must be on the latest version of the Instagram app on either iOS or Android.
• 4. Your business must sell physical goods that comply with Instagram’s merchant agreement and commerce policies.
• 5. Your business profile must be connected to a Facebook catalog. This can be created and managed on Business Manager, directly on your business’s Page on Facebook, or through Shopify or BigCommerce.

If you meet the above requirements, you can simply add the Instagram sales channel to your Shopify or BigCommerce store at no additional cost, and then, once your store is approved, enable the feature by selecting Shopping under Business Settings in the Instagram app.

Here’s how to connect your business profile to a Facebook catalog:

Once you start adding shoppable posts to your feed, let your audience know with an Instagram story! It’s a great way to spread the word and drive more traffic to your posts.

1. Create a Facebook Catalog with Facebook Business Manager.

A Facebook catalog in Facebook Business Manager is essentially a file that contains a list of all the products you want to sell.

To get started, head to the Business Manager account that owns the Facebook Page that’s linked to your Instagram business account.

From your Business Manager account, you can create a new catalog or identify an existing catalog you’d like to use.

Start by opening your Business Manager Settings and clicking on People and Assets. Here you’ll find a Catalogs option. Click on “+ Add” and choose Create a New Product Catalog.

You have to give your product catalog a name and select the types of products you’re adding to your catalog before you can add it to your product feed.

Here’s a Facebook guide on how to do it.

It’s very important to keep your product catalog synced with your Facebook Page, and that your product descriptions and prices are accurate. If you’re running a sale or promotion, make sure your product catalog reflects it.

2. Create a Shop on Facebook with Shopify or BigCommerce.

A second way to connect you Instagram business profile to a Facebook catalog is to do it directly with Shopify or BigCommerce.

Shopify

Before you get started, you need to have the Facebook sales channel (included in all paid Shopify plans) installed on your Shopify store, which creates a Shop tab on your Facebook page that displays your Shopify products.

For specific details on how to connect your Facebook page to your Shopify account, you can view the Shopify guide here.

Once you’ve done the above, you can easily add the Instagram sales channel to your Shopify store, which connects the product that you have in Shopify to your Instagram business profile.

To do this, head to your Shopify admin and click to “+” button beside the “Sales channels” heading.

Next, on the “Add sales channel” dialog, click Instagram and then Add channel.

You’ll need to log into your Facebook account page to authenticate your Instagram account in the sales channel.

Once the Instagram sales channel is installed, you can enable the feature by visiting Shopping under Business Settings in the Instagram app.

BigCommerce

You can also use BigCommerce to connect your store’s catalogue to your Facebook Page.

Start by opening Channel Manager on your BigCommerce account and clicking Get Started next to Facebook.

On the next screen, confirm that you’re using a compatible currency, sign up for a Facebook account (if you don’t have one), review the product requirements, then click Get Started.

Next, fill out your details on the Configuration page, including your Business’ contact email, phone number, and the Facebook Page you’d like your Shop to appear on.

Here’s the complete BigCommerce guide on how to it.

Once Facebook approves your catalog, head back to Channel Manager, click Get Started next to Instagram, and confirm that your store meet the necessary requirements.

3. Connect your online shop to your Business’ Instagram Account.

Once you’ve completed the steps above, your account will be reviewed by Instagram before you can access their shoppable posts feature. The approval process can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days according to Instagram. Once you’ve been approved, you will receive a notification letting you know you’re ready to start selling on Instagram.

The next step is to connect your product catalog to your Instagram account. Head back to the Shopping section in your Instagram settings and tap on Products.

Here you’ll be able to select a product catalog to connect to your business profile. Once you’re finished, tap Done.

Optimizing Your Posts for Shoppable Purchases

6. Create posts that feel natural to the Instagram feed.

While selling on Instagram is easier than ever, it’s important to remember your audience shouldn’t feel like they are being sold to. Businesses should maintain their current content strategy, incorporating shoppable tags on photos that are a natural fit for their profile.

A great way to organically add shopping tags to your post is by leveraging high-quality UGC. Millennials trust UGC 50% more than other types of media, so it makes sense that these images would work well for shoppable posts.

For example, Madewell recently shared this phoppable post from a fan photo, showing off their summer jeans:

Madewell does a great job at seamlessly incorporating Instagram’s shopping feature into their current strategy, without being too “salesy.”

7. Leverage influencer posts. 

You can also optimize your Instagram sales strategy by using influencer posts. Instagram influencer collaborations and sponsorships have nearly replaced traditional ads and are a huge part of a social media strategies today.

Below, popular fashion model Michelle Dee is shown sporting a Herschel Supply suitcase on the company’s profile:

An Instagram influencer’s stamp of approval goes a long way and is a great strategy to drive sales from your Instagram shoppable posts!

8. Optimize your post with tags and hashtags.

Lastly, including multiple shopping tags in your photos will help your audience explore and browse through your products quickly. You can also try adding shopping tags to carousel posts to test their performance again single-photo posts.

9. Activate the Shop tab on your Instagram profile.

Create at least nine shoppable posts to activate the “Shop” tab on your Instagram profile! This will group all your shoppable posts under one tab for easy shopping and product discovery.

Measuring the Results of your Shoppable Posts

Instagram business accounts also have access to analytics for their shoppable posts, including how many people viewed product information or clicked-through to its product page. This information is super helpful in determine what type of products (and product tags) resonate with your Instagram followers, or where there might be a disconnect in the buyer’s journey.

As with all of your social media marketing efforts, performance data should be measured to see what drove the best results (and why), and then used to inform future posts.

Once your business begins selling on Instagram, it’s important to keep experimenting with images, copy, shopping tags per post, or any other factors that may contribute to your Instagram sales success.

No matter what type of products you sell, delving into your Instagram analytics allows you to understand your audience’s wants, improves your content, and ultimately helps you drive more traffic and sales.

You may have noticed some changes in Instagram over the past year or so. For instance, the fancy new API for iMessage that autoplays Bachelor in Paradise commercials you send to your friends. Or the option to “Tag a Business Partner” when you open a story feature. To know more about why some of your third-party apps aren’t working, or what a “Graph API” is, we have the latest changes to Instagram’s API, explained.

If you’re wondering what the heck an API is, don’t fret. API stands for Application Programming Interface. Simply put, APIs are how different apps talk to each other. If you wanted to tweet this article using the bar on the left, that’s possible because Twitter’s API talks to HubSpot’s API and they work together to make that happen.

So, Instagram’s API lets other apps use Instagram’s interface for their business. Lately, Instagram has been changing how its API talks to third-party apps and which apps it talks to.

Instagram API Changes

In 2018, Instagram shut down its public API. Meaning, third-party apps can no longer access the API from Instagram without permission. Third-party apps now need to be approved by Instagram before they can access the API.

What does this mean for marketers? Apps that are approved by Instagram now have limited features. So, if you were using Hootsuite to post on your company’s Instagram in 2018, that’s no longer possible without an Instagram Business Account.

This change, though announced, was implemented earlier than expected, leaving many third-party apps out of commission. So, if a social media manager was using one of these apps to, say, check the follower count of a competitor, they wouldn’t be able to.

That said, if you used an app to purchase followers or engagement, they’re now gone. Engagement is now 100% organic, and this data is private to your business profile. Likes are as well.

Instagram API Examples

To replace the public API, Instagram introduced Graph API. This API is much more restrictive than the original API. Graph API is the only way to collect data of mentions and targeted hashtags and requires an Instagram Business Account to access this information.

With the new API, business accounts can track hashtags to see where their posts land on the public pages. Currently, there’s a limit of 30 tracked hashtags over a seven-day period. If you wanted to switch tracking of #VineTrends to #TikTokTrends, for example, you’d have to wait seven days to do so.

Developers who want to build on the new API can find a number of features available to them. If approved by Instagram, they can create apps that allow users to post to Stories and Feeds. Apps can also build APIs with Mentions, Business Discovery, Insights, and Comment Moderation.

Image Source: Hootsuite

This means social media managers can still use third parties to post on behalf of their business account, comment, and analyze valuable performance metrics.

How to Use the Instagram API

With the new API comes a new set of rules. We’re here to break it down.

Before you get started, make sure you have a Facebook Developer Account and that it’s connected to your Instagram Business Account. This is so you can implement Facebook Login into your third-party app for users.

1. Create an account

To do this, visit the Instagram developer page, click on “Register Your Application,” and “Register a New Client.” After filling out the form, go to the Clients manager and click on “Manage” to save your credentials.

Image source: Rapid API

2. Create an access token

To do this, use your Client ID and Client Secret to call the Instagram.getAccessToken.

Sign in to your Facebook Developer Account. Then, open your app to see if Facebook Login opens. If not, your Developer account is probably not set up to perform Tasks on the Facebook profile connected to your Instagram Business Account.

Image source: Facebook

You should be able to grant your app these permissions by clicking “OK,” and the API should return the user access token. Save the token to use later in the setup process. This will be done automatically if you’re using Graph API Explorer.

3. Request data

Once you have your access token and have registered your app, you can begin requesting data from Instagram. Data requests are available through HTTPS and are located on api.instagram.com.

This sample URL, for instance, is how you would access photos that use a tracked hashtag, with the “ACCESS_TOKEN” part being a placeholder from your access token:

https://ift.tt/308wEq8

If you’re not a developer but still would like to use the advantages of Instagram’s APIs, there are approved third-party apps to help out. For a complete guide to marketing on Instagram, check out this post.

A good way to tell if your third-party app is approved by Instagram is if it asks you to connect to your business account. Remember, Instagram API features are only available to business accounts.

Any app you choose should be able to help you access analytics somewhere in the app. Their analytics come straight from integration with Instagram’s API.

Though these changes happened last year, they’ve played a larger part in how Instagram is bettering their security measures and e-commerce options. By the end of this year, there’s sure to be more updates and changes to the platform. To keep up with how some businesses are perfecting their content, catch up on our list of advertising agencies with spectacular content.

In April 2016, Facebook launched Facebook Live, a live video streaming service that lets anyone broadcast from their mobile devices straight to their Facebook News Feed.

Since its launch, live streaming video has exploded in popularity — particularly on Facebook Live, where according to Vimeo, 78% of online audiences are watching video on Facebook Live as of 2018.

It’s no mystery why Facebook Live is so popular: Videos see 3X the engagement of traditional videos shared on Facebook, and millions of users live stream on Facebook around the world.

Why are marketers getting so excited about Facebook Live? Because it’s a fun and fairly simple way for them to use the power of video to communicate their brand stories, and build authentic relationships with fans and followers — in real time.

However, for such a simple concept, Facebook Live has a lot of little nuances that marketers will need to learn if they want to get the most out of the platform. This guide will help you learn the best tricks that can make a big difference in how many people see your live broadcast, how they engage with it, and how it performs.

In this post, we’ll walk through the following:

• How to broadcast on Facebook Live via your mobile device
• How to go live on Facebook from a desktop
• How to analyze your live video’s performance
• Tips and tricks for getting the most out of the platform.

Click here to skip down to our Facebook Live tips.

Facebook Live started as a mobile-only broadcasting feature, but now, Facebook Pages can broadcast from either mobile devices or desktop computers. We’ll go over how to broadcast from mobile and desktop devices in the sections below.

The following instructions will teach you how to go live on Facebook mobile. To get started, get out your mobile device and open up the Facebook app.

1. Tap the camera icon to the left of your search bar.

Open your Facebook mobile app and visit your News Feed. You’ll see a camera icon to the left of your search bar — tap it to open your camera. You’ll have to give Facebook permission to access your mobile device’s camera and microphone in order to go live.

You can also go live on your own Facebook profile. Open up the status bar by tapping the text that reads “What’s on your mind?” Then, select the “Go Live” option from the menu, as shown below.

2. Give Facebook access to your camera and microphone when prompted.

You’ll stop receiving these prompts after the first time you use it.

Once you permit Facebook to use your mobile camera, you’ll be asked to permit use of your phone’s camera content, as shown below. This will trigger your ability to switch from using your rear-facing camera to your front-facing camera — options that will come into play in step 7 of this guide.

3. Switch to “Live” on the bottom of your camera screen.

Once you’ve given Facebook access to your mobile device’s camera and microphone, you’ll be ready to shoot. However, your Facebook camera defaults to non-live photo shooting when you open it.

To switch your Facebook camera to live video, look to the bottom of your screen for the various types of visual content you can create. On the far left, as shown below, you’ll see the setting, “LIVE.” Tap it once. (Don’t worry, you won’t go live right away.)

4. Choose your privacy and posting settings.

In the screenshot below, see how Facebook Live is set to “Only me” and “Post, Story” at the top of the screen? This means only I can see the live video — none of my Facebook friends or followers can — but it’s set to post the video as a regular Facebook post and as a Facebook Story if I want it to. You can change these settings by tapping on them.

If you’re posting for a brand, you’ll probably want to make it public so it can reach everyone in your audience who’s currently on Facebook. If you’re posting as yourself, you might want to reserve your broadcast for friends — and then set where you want to post this video, as shown below.

But if you’re new to Facebook Live and want to test it out first, or want to prepare your shot before going live, switch your video’s privacy setting to “Only Me.” You can find the “Only me” option by clicking “See More” and tapping the last bubble, per the following screenshot.

You might also see options to post your live video only to users in specific networks, such as a college or association you belong to. These options will appear below the “Only me” privacy setting.

5. Write a compelling description.

Give your broadcast a description, which will show up on people’s News Feeds like a status update above the video. To get people to tune in, write an attention-grabbing headline and help them understand what your broadcast is about.

Check out the example below from The White House’s live broadcast. As you can see, your video description appears at the top of the live video when Facebook users view it, much like a Facebook photo caption or status update.

Source: Facebook

6. Tag friends, choose your location, or add an activity.

Tap the icons at the bottom of your screen to tag people who are in the Facebook Live video, add the location from where you’re shooting, or share what you’re doing in the broadcast. These touches can add more personalization to your video, increase discoverability, and make people want to tune in.

7. Set your camera’s orientation.

Before you click “Start Live Video,” be sure your camera is pointing in the direction you want it to point. In other words, do you want to go live with your front-facing camera lens, or your rear-facing camera lens?

The background of your setup screen will show you what your camera sees. If you want to change the camera view to selfie or vice versa, simply click the rotating arrows icon in the upper-righthand corner of your screen, as shown below.

The video will be a square, so it doesn’t matter whether you hold your mobile device vertically or horizontally.

8. Add lenses, filters, or writing and drawing to your video.

Tap the magic wand icon to the left of the blue “Start Live Video” in the center of your screen, and choose if you want to add lenses to your face, change the filter of the camera, or write or draw to make the video more whimsical.

Depending on your version of Facebook mobile, some of your editing and filter options will look like the settings below.

9. Click the blue “Start Live Video” button to start broadcasting.

Once you click it, Facebook will give you a countdown — “3, 2, 1 …” — and then you’ll be live. As soon as you start streaming, your live video will appear in your News Feed — and others’ News Feeds — just like any other post.

Your broadcast can be up to 90 minutes long. Keep in mind that the longer you broadcast, the more people who are scrolling through their News Feeds on Facebook will stumble upon your post.

10. Interact with viewers and commenters.

To keep your viewers engaged, encourage them to interact with your live video (which will help your ranking in others’ News Feeds). You can also interact with them both by speaking directly to them in your video and, if you want, by having someone else respond to comments from a desktop computer elsewhere.

Where can you see these comments? While you’re broadcasting, you’ll see the time elapsed on the top left along with the number of viewers, and comments will show up live on the bottom of your feed. They’ll appear in reverse chronological order, like on Twitter, so keep in mind that the earlier ones may be farther down.

Source: Facebook Newsroom

Note: You can also block viewers during a live broadcast by tapping the profile picture next to a viewer’s comment and then tapping “Block.” You can unblock someone you’ve previously blocked, too.

11. Click “Finish” to end the broadcast.

Once you do this, the video will stay on your Timeline or Page like any other video post.

12. Post your reply and save the video to your camera roll.

Once you finish your broadcast, you’ll be met with a screen similar to the one I’ve screenshot below. If you want to post it, that will enable others to view your video once you’ve stopped broadcasting. Then, tap the download button to save the video to your camera roll so you have a copy of the original for safekeeping.

You can always go back to the post on your Timeline or Page and edit the description, change the privacy settings, or delete the video, just like you would any other post.

How to Go on Facebook Live From Desktop

If you’re an admin or editor of a Facebook Page for your brand, you can also broadcast live from a desktop computer. This isn’t as spontaneous as broadcasting from a mobile device (and, obviously, isn’t as mobile), but this could be a good option for filming more static broadcasts. For example, we recently broadcast a Facebook Live panel in celebration of International Women’s Day. The panelists and interviewer sat in place the entire time, an example of when broadcasting from a steadier device could be more effective.

1. Go to your Page and tap the “Write something” box, as if you’re writing a new post.

Tap the menu option to “See All,” and click on “Start a Live Video.”

2. Write a compelling description of your video that will appear on your Page’s Timeline and in the News Feed.

Choose a descriptive and enticing summary to draw viewers in and make them unmute your Facebook Live to start watching.

Then, click “Next.”

3. Give Facebook permission to use your computer’s camera and microphone.

You won’t be prompted for this again once you do it for the first time.

4. Check to make sure your description and video view are final before starting your broadcast.

From here, you also have the option to share live video from an external device, such as a video camera or other recording device. Tap “click here” to set up that connection.

5. Press “Go Live” to start your broadcast.

Facebook will give you a “3, 2, 1 … ” countdown before going live. Tap “Finish” when you’re ready to end the broadcast.

6. The broadcast will appear in the News Feed and on your Page’s Timeline, where you can edit it by tapping the drop-down arrow in the upper-righthand corner.

From here, you can change the description, change the date of posting, or create a new Facebook post featuring the broadcast. If you want a video to garner more engagement, you can also pin it to the top of your brand’s Page so it’s the first post visitors see when they visit.

Now that you know how to broadcast from all devices, let’s dive into how to analyze Facebook Live videos.

How to Analyze Your Live Video’s Performance

How to Access Video Analytics on a Facebook Business Page

To get started analyzing your Facebook Live broadcasts, head to the “Insights” tab at the top of your brand’s Facebook Page:

Then, head to the “Videos” section of your analytics on the lefthand side of the screen.

From there, scroll down to the “Top Videos” section, and either choose a video from that menu to look into, or tap “Video Library” to look at all of the videos your Page has ever posted.

Now, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty.

The performance analytics available for Facebook Live videos are similar to those of normal videos on Facebook, with some neat additions.

• For Pre-recorded videos: Facebook lets you analyze minutes viewed, unique viewers, video views, 10-second views, average % completion, and a breakdown of reactions, comments, and shares.
• For Facebook Live videos: Facebook lets you analyze all the metrics listed above, plus peak live viewers, total views, average watch time, people reached, and the demographics of who watched your video.

In addition to all of these static numbers, you can click into each metric to see how it changed over time when the video was live. For example, if we click into “Peak Live Viewers,” we’ll see this interactive graph of video viewers over time:

You can even see who your typical viewer was during your broadcast, based on their Facebook profile information:

Now that you’ve got the steps down, let’s get into some tips and tricks.

There are a lot of little things you can do to squeeze the most out of your Facebook Live videos. Below is an example of one of the earliest Facebook Live videos from Refinery29. This was the first video of a five-part live video series called “Chasing Daylight,” showcasing a typical night out for women in five different cities around the world. My colleague, HubSpot Marketing Manager Lindsay Kolowich, tracked this one down, and we refer to it in some of the tips below.

Warning: There is some language in the following video that is not safe for work (NSFW).

1. Test out live video using the “Only me” privacy setting.

If you want to play around with live broadcasting without actually sharing it with anyone else, you can change the privacy setting so you’re the only one who can see it — just like with any other Facebook post.

To switch the privacy setting to “Only Me,” follow steps 1–4 in the instructions above.

2. Space out live videos with other Facebook posts.

Because Facebook ranks Live videos higher than other videos and other types of posts, we recommend spacing out your Facebook Live videos with other Facebook content you post to maximize your organic reach.

3. Keep reintroducing yourself.

When you first start the video, take a minute to introduce yourself and what the video’s about. But keep in mind that when you first start live streaming, you may have zero people watching. Even a few seconds in, you could only have a handful of viewers. As people find your video on their News Feeds, they’ll join in — but that means you’ll want to reintroduce yourself a second, third, and even a fourth time to catch people up.

For example, in the Refinery29 video above, the host Lucie Fink introduces herself three times in the first few minutes, and several more times after that.

One second in:

“Hello, Facebook Live! Hey! Lucie Fink here. I don’t know if we have anyone on the broadcast yet, so I’m going to wait about one minute to see who joins us.”

One minute in:

“Hello to the 309 viewers in here right now. I’m Lucie Fink from Refinery29. Just to recap what’s happening right now, this is Episode One of Refinery29’s new global initiative, ‘Chasing Daylight.'”

A few minutes in:

“Just to give a quick recap on who I am, in case you guys don’t know — I’m Lucie Fink. I work at Refinery 29. Today, I’m doing this whole new series, and this is essentially giving you guys a glimpse into the lives of women all over the world.”

15 minutes in:

“So now that we have 3.5 thousand people in this broadcast, let me just start from the top because some of you might not know what is happening. I’m Lucie Fink from Refinery29, and you might know me from some videos, you might not. Either way, it is nice to meet you. Today, we are starting a new video series on Refinery’s Facebook Live platform. It’s called ‘Chasing Daylight,’ and it’s gonna be on every night this week.”

25 minutes in:

“That’s what I think is so cool about ‘Chasing Daylight.’ For the people who are new and don’t really get why I’m sitting on my toilet, the answer is, I am Lucie Fink, and [this is] Episode One, the New York version of ‘Chasing Daylight,’ which is Refinery29’s new live Facebook series that’s starting right now.”

4. Make the video visually engaging.

You have to be visually engaging — not just at the very beginning of your broadcast (although that’ll be important for when folks view the video later), but throughout the video as more and more people join in.

The more visually engaging you can be, the more you can entice people to stick around. That means keeping the camera moving and not just sitting in one place — something Lucie did really well in that Refinery29 video.

Not only will you get more viewers this way, but you’ll also get your broadcast ranked higher in other people’s News Feeds. Facebook started monitoring signals of video engagement — like turning on the audio, switching to full-screen mode, or enabling high definition — interpreting that as users enjoying the video. As a result, they’ve tweaked the algorithm so videos that are engaged with in these ways will appear higher up on the feed.

5. Make it spontaneous.

What makes a live video special? The spontaneous, interactive nature of it. People love the ability to interact, and they love the novelty of viewing someone in a live moment when anything could happen. In many ways, it’s the new reality TV.

A big part of what makes Refinery29’s live video so great is how much Lucie and her friends embrace the “live,” spontaneous nature of it. For example, at one point, Lucie calls on her friends to reenact a scene from the Broadway show Hamilton. It was scrappy, unrehearsed, and really funny. Her other friends were laughing at her. It reminded me of a fun night with my own friends. “This is literally what we do at the office,” Lucie said about the performance through laughs.

These moments are what make live video special, and they’re exactly what differentiates it from scripted, edited, or otherwise pre-recorded videos. Embrace the platform. Banter is always, always good.

6. Don’t worry about mistakes or stutters.

Spontaneity works — even if your Facebook Live doesn’t go according to plan.

Let’s face it, we’re all human. And when humans and technology mix, there can sometimes be technical difficulties.

If you’re recording a live video, things might go wrong — your equipment could malfunction, you could lose your train of thought, or you could get photobombed by a random passerby. You can’t call “cut” if things happen — you have to roll with them and keep filming and talking.

The good news? These things help keep your broadcast human and real. If you wobble your phone while filming, laugh and call it out. If you forget what you were saying, make a joke. The key is to keep the broadcast like a fun conversation, so if mistakes happen, keep it light and keep the lines of communication open with your viewers.

For example, if you make a mistake during your Facebook Live, ask viewers to write in the comments if they’ve made the same mistake, too.

7. Encourage viewers to Like and share the video.

One of the primary ways Facebook’s algorithm ranks a post is by how many people Like and share it. The more people who Like and share your live broadcast, the more it’ll show up in people’s News Feeds.

But when people are watching a video, they may be more distracted from Liking and sharing it than they would a text or photo post. (That’s something the folks at Facebook noticed about video content early on, which is why they began monitoring other video engagement signals as well, like turning on the volume.)

In Refinery29’s video, you’ll notice Lucie explicitly asks viewers to Like and share the video many times throughout. Here are a few examples:

• “If you like this broadcast and share it right now, you guys will be part of this brand new series that’s starting right now on Refinery29.”
• “If you guys share this broadcast, you’ll be part of history. And what’s better than being part of history?”
• “Thumbs up if you like Hamilton.”
• “Thank you guys for all these Likes. My screen is absurdly blue right now because I’m getting tons of thumbs up.”
• “Share this with your best girlfriend who you think is strong and powerful.”

I like the last example the best because she’s asking viewers to share it with a specific type of person — in this case, a best girlfriend. This might prompt viewers to think, “Hey, she’s right, my friend Stacy might like this” and then share it with that specific friend.

8. Engage with commenters, and mention them by name.

The number of comments on your broadcast is another way to get Facebook to give it a higher relevancy score, making it more likely to show up on people’s News Feeds. So encourage your viewers to comment, and engage with people who are commenting by answering their questions and calling them out by name. Not only will it get more people to comment, but it’s also a fun way to include your viewers in the live experience, which could make them stick around longer.

Plus, your audience will be thrilled to hear you mention their name and answer their questions when you are live.

In the Refinery29 video, Lucie was constantly engaging with viewers and commenters. At one point, for example, she said, “We’re so excited to see you guys! Do you have any questions for someone who lives in New York City?” Then, she read a few of the comments that came in and responded to them — using commenters’ first names.

We do this here at HubSpot with our Facebook Live broadcasts, too. Check out all the chatter in the comments — we used those questions to keep our discussion going.

9. Have someone else watching and responding to comments from a desktop computer.

When you’re the one holding the camera for a Facebook Live video, it’s really hard to see the comments popping up on the mobile screen. If the comments are coming in fast, it’s especially easy to lose sight of them as they disappear below the fold. Plus, you’re probably occupied by recording and entertaining viewers.

Because of this, it’s always a good idea to have an additional person logged into the primary account to monitor the comments on a desktop computer. That way, they can take care of responding so the person recording the video can concentrate on creating a great experience.

10. Subtitle your broadcast in the comments section.

Your viewers may be tuning in and out to watch your video during the work day, or they might simply be watching your video without sound. Either way, periodically subtitling the video in the comments section is a great way to keep people engaged. This also allows people who are tuning in late to catch up on what’s going on.

Take some inspiration from Refinery29 — it captioned the video with some of the most snackable one-liners and quotes from the broadcast in the comments section:

11. Ask viewers to subscribe to Facebook Live notifications.

In addition to asking for Likes, shares, and comments, ask viewers to subscribe to live notifications. To do that, all viewers have to do is click the small, downward-facing arrow in the top-righthand corner of the live video post, and choose “Turn On Notifications.”

You can also ask them to Like your brand on Facebook, which will make it more likely that they’ll be notified of your next live broadcast. Lucie does this in the Refinery29 video.

12. Broadcast for at least 10 minutes.

As soon as you begin recording your live video, you’ll start slowly but surely showing up in people’s News Feeds. The longer you broadcast — especially as Likes, comments, and shares start coming in — the more likely people are to discover your video and share it with their friends.

Because timing is such an important factor for engagement in these live videos, we recommend that you go live for at least 10 minutes, although you can stay live for up to 90 minutes for a given video.

13. Say goodbye before ending your video.

Before you end your live broadcast, be sure to finish with a closing line, like “Thanks for watching” or “I’ll be going live again soon.”

Lucie from Refinery29 checked a few other engagement requests off the list at the end of her broadcast:

“So, we are about to sign off. It’s been such an amazing first episode of ‘Chasing Daylight.’ . . . Don’t forget to share this to your friends right now so you can always find this series and go back to it. . . . We’re so happy that you tuned into our episode in New York. . . . Goodnight from New York City!”

14. Add a link to the description later.

Once you’ve finished the live broadcast, you can always go back and edit the description, change the privacy settings, or delete the video, just like you would any other post.

Here’s where you can add a trackable link to the description in the post, which can direct future viewers to your live video series page, the site of whatever campaign you’re using the video to promote, or somewhere else.

To edit the description of a video: Find the video on your Timeline or Page and click the downward-facing arrow in the top-righthand corner of the post. Choose “Edit Post” from the dropdown menu, and edit the description accordingly.

We hope this has been a helpful guide. We’ll keep you posted with any new developments and tips for connecting with your audience in more cool ways.

I don’t own a car in Chicago, but I do take the train (referred to as the “L” here). On the L, most of my commuting companions pass the time by looking at their phones. But, my motion sickness prevents that, so I typically find myself watching the world — and many, many billboards — go by.

And I must say: Some billboards can be very, very entertaining.

Now, billboard advertising isn’t your typical inbound marketing methodology. So why are we writing about it? Billboard advertising can still be a powerful way to build brand awareness and attract customers.

Plus, if companies like MINI can incorporate inbound marketing elements in their billboard advertising, you can, too!

Billboard Advertising

Billboard advertising is the process of using a large-scale print advertisement (a billboard, or a hoarding to those in the UK) to market a company, brand, product, service, or campaign. Billboards are typically placed in high traffic areas, such as along highways and in cities, so they’re seen by the highest number of drivers and pedestrians.

Billboard advertising is effective for building brand awareness and broadcasting your business (or product or campaign) to as many people as possible. Because they’re in such busy areas, billboards tend to have the highest number of views and impressions when compared to other marketing methods.

Billboard Advertising Cost

The cost of billboard advertising depends on many factors including the location of your billboard, the total traffic in the area, and how many people are estimated to see your advertisement. Billboard advertising costs are typically charged monthly and range anywhere from $250 on a rural highway to upwards of $22,000 in Times Square.

Billboard advertising is categorized as out-of-home (OOH) advertising, which is any advertising that reaches consumers when they’re outside their homes. Each OOH advertising opportunity (e.g. individual billboard) is given an OOH rating, which ultimately determines its value and the subsequent cost to advertisers.

Geopath is a nonprofit organization that uses technology and media research to estimate the weekly impressions of every billboard in the country and give OOH ratings. (OOH advertising companies [e.g. the companies that own the billboard spaces] pay Geopath for this data to share with potential advertisers.)

According to Geopath, there are up to 10 determining factors that make up an OOH rating and, therefore, the cost of each billboard advertising opportunity.

Here are the three main factors:

1. Circulation is the total number of people who pass by the billboard each week. This information is gathered by local transportation authorities.
2. Demographics refer to the age, gender, income level, and other characteristics of the traffic that passes the billboard. This information is gathered from travel surveys and local transportation authorities.
3. Impressions are the number of people who see the billboard. This information is calculated based on the billboard’s circulation, the size of the billboard, how close it is from the road, its visibility, the speed at which traffic is passing by, and more.

The cost of billboard advertising doesn’t stop with “renting” ad space, however. You must also consider the cost of designing the billboard as well as printing and constructing it. Printing and construction can cost upwards of $500, depending on the size and location of your billboard.

If you outsource your billboard design, expect the cost to range from $150 to $1000, depending on what agency or designer you choose, as well as the complexity of your desired design. If you’d like to design your own, however, check out the billboard design tips in the next section.

Billboard Design

If you’re going to invest in an advertisement potentially seen by millions, you want it to do its job. Here are a handful of billboard design tips that’ll ensure your billboard is effective and eye-catching.

Tell a (short) story.

Successful billboards take viewers on a journey … even if that journey is a four-second glimpse over the steering wheel. Most billboard designs tell this story with imagery and possibly some text. In fact, most drivers stop reading after a few words. Use your billboard to convey the essence of an idea or campaign rather than describing it with text.

Take a look at this text-less billboard by Samsonite. It tells a story that Samsonite luggage lasts a long time, even longer than a billboard.

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Make it bold and simple.

Drivers or passersby only have a few seconds to get a glimpse at your billboard advertisement. To reach the highest number of viewers (and potential customers), keep your billboard design simple. After all, some people may be blowing by your billboard at 70 mph. Use big, bold fonts against contrasting background colors and avoid narrow, script fonts.

Also, choose colors that stand out to viewers. If your billboard is in a rural area, avoid greens, blues, and browns. Check out this bright, bold (and funny) billboard by Lamar.

Consider its location.

I’m not originally from Chicago, but I’ve been here long enough to foster a certain sense of pride. So, when I pass by billboards that play on the Cubs or Bears, or make jokes about the wind or traffic, I pay attention.

Well-designed billboards are reflective of their location. They take advantage of sports teams, nicknames, nuances, or inside jokes related to the area. This can make the billboard (and brand) much more impressionable to those who see it. Check out this billboard by SmileDirectClub in downtown Chicago.

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This billboard, advertising the new Grinch movie, is in New York City.

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Make it interactive.

Depending on your billboard’s location, you may be able to design it so it interacts with its surrounding environment. This strategy make your advertisement stick out among the noise and grab the attention of passerby (which we’ll talk about more in the next section).

Take a look at this Panasonic billboard that interacts with the wires around it.

Even if your billboard isn’t in the city, there are ways to leverage the environment around it. This billboard by Koleston Naturals used the sun to “color” the hair in the advertisement.

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Make it memorable.

OOH advertising has to be creative in order to stand out among the hustle and bustle of a regular commute (or the monotony of a long road trip). Your billboard shouldn’t be any different.

Your billboard needs to tell a story and/or share a call-to-action in a way that’s interesting and memorable. Whether you call on humor, anger, empathy, or cleverness, use emotional marketing tactics in your billboard design to make it memorable. Take a look at these examples of eye-catching, creative billboards.

This example, established by the Colorado State Patrol, warns drivers of the effects of tailgating.

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This one, advertising strong tape, is by Penline Stationery.

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Coca-Cola designed this one to encourage people to drink Coke.

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Billboard Advertising Statistics

We’ve looked at some amazingly creative billboards and discussed how to design one of your own. At this point, though, you may be wondering: Do these billboards actually work? Do they reach the members of your target audience?

Let’s talk about some billboard advertising statistics that prove the impact of billboard advertising and to inform your next campaign.

• Americans spend an annual average of 17,600 minutes in their cars. That’s almost 300 hours each year. (Source)
• There are currently 342,306 billboards in the United States. (Source)
• Almost 8,000 of these are digital billboards. (Source)
• 6% of global ad spending is dedicated to OOH advertising. (Source)
• 71% of people consciously look at billboards when driving. (Source)
• Over 50% of people say they’ve been highly engaged by a billboard they’ve seen in the last month. (Source)
• OOH advertising is 382% more effective at driving online activity than TV ads. (Source)
• OOH advertising, when paired with search engine optimization (SEO), boosts its effectiveness by 40%. (Source)

Billboard Advertising: The Marketing You Never Knew You Needed

Billboard advertising might not fall under the hood of inbound marketing methodology, but it can still be a highly effective way of promoting your products and boosting your brand. It can also work to strengthen other inbound marketing efforts you’ve invested in, such as blogging, online lead offers, or SEO.

Follow our billboard design tips above to create an impactful, memorable billboard for your brand. And, who knows? Someone may look out the window during their next commute and see your billboard — and become a new customer

You’ve spent months perfecting the script, storyboarding, finding the right talent, shooting, and editing. The end result? A blockbuster brand or product video.

With all that time invested, you can’t stop at just embedding the video on a homepage or sharing it on social media and hoping someone watches.

While great content is bound to be found, it’s also important to be proactive about gaining the attention of and educating prospects and those unfamiliar with your brand. Running a series of YouTube ads is one way to make sure more of your target audience finds the video content you’ve produced.

And with new formats and tracking capabilities, you can also use this information to report on its ROI.

The thing is, advertising on YouTube is very different from running a PPC or paid social campaign. There are specific creative constraints and a ton of options for this platform, and you need a base knowledge before you even scope out your next video project to make the most of the paid possibilities.

What’s New With YouTube Advertising

In January 2017, Google announced it would make changes to AdWords to allow advertisers to reach more viewers on YouTube — especially across mobile devices, where 50% of YouTube views take place. Among the changes it rolled out, possibly the biggest announcement was that advertisers will soon be able to target viewers based on their Google search history, in addition to their viewing behaviors YouTube was already targeting.

Marketers can now target ads at people who recently searched for a certain product or service to target the video ads they’ll be served on the platform. If the content of a video ad is closely related to a search the viewer has been researching, they might be more likely to watch the entire ad or click through the ad to the website.

Keywords are relatively less expensive to target on YouTube than in traditional Google Search: Views cost an average of $0.06 per click on YouTube, compared to the average Google Search cost per click, which is estimated to be between $1-2. When YouTube targeting includes search history, it may be a more cost-effective way to target your audience with a more engaging form of content — video.

The 3 Types of YouTube Video Ads

There are three key types of video ads in which you can invest on YouTube: TrueView, Preroll, and Bumpers.

1. TrueView Ads

TrueView ads are the standard video ad type on YouTube. Advertisers only pay for TrueView ads when viewers watch or interact with their ad (for example, by clicking on a call-to-action), and videos can be easily customized to share a variety of content.

Advertisers only pay when a user watches the ad for at least 30 seconds or until the end of the video or if the viewer takes an action, such as clicking on a call-to-action. YouTube requires that skippable TrueView ads be between 12 seconds and 6 minutes in length, and that non-skippable TrueView ads be 15-20 seconds in length.

There are two types of TrueView ads with which you can optimize your YouTube channel:

Video Discovery Ads (Previously Named In-Display Ads)

Video discovery YouTube ads show up on the YouTube homepage, search results pages, and as related videos on YouTube video watch pages.

These ads appeared after performing a YouTube search:

This display ad appears as a related video on the right-hand video sidebar:

Once a user clicks on the ad, the destination video page features a spot on the right-hand column where a companion banner display ad will appear.

In-Stream Ads

TrueView in-stream ads play before someone watches the video they’ve selected on YouTube. Viewers sometimes have the option to skip the ad after watching it for five seconds. You can also make them play anywhere in the Google Display Network (GDN) — or sites that purchased Google video ad space.

In-stream ads let marketers customize video ads with different CTAs and overlay text, as highlighted in the skippable in-stream ad example below from Grammarly.

Here’s what another skippable in-stream ad from Wix looks like. In this example, there’s another CTA from Wix on top of the right-hand video menu display:

What TrueView Videos Can Include

TrueView video campaigns can include people, dialogue, and music that was retrieved with permission — or is considered royalty-free. However, it’s best not to run a standard promotional commercial. Because these videos can be skipped, you need to give your audience a reason to keep watching, and product plugs historically don’t get the views you might expect.

Instead, tell a story with the time you have in this video. People love seeing case studies of those who faced a struggle that they can empathize with. It’s a source of entertainment that makes your brand memorable and less tempting to skip.

With TrueView ads, advertisers can gain a ton of information about the performance of their ads for optimization and testing purposes.

Using AdWords, YouTube account managers can collect data on an ad’s completed views, partial views, if the video drives channel subscriptions, clickthrough rates on CTAs, views sourced from a user sharing the content, and views on the brand’s other content that can be attributed to a person initially viewing a video ad.

These actions help advertisers better understand the full value of their video ad spend and where to allocate budget to increase results.

2. Preroll Ads

Some in-stream ads are non-skippable and can play before, mid-roll, or after the main video. These are called Preroll ads, and they can be 15 to 20 seconds in duration.

Here’s an example of a non-skippable video ad before the main content on YouTube:

There are also non-skippable, mid-roll video ads, which appear midway through a YouTube video that’s 10 minutes or longer in length.

Source: PC Daily Tips

What Preroll Videos Can Include

Preroll ads give you just as much freedom as TrueView ads in their allotted content. You can include people, dialogue, audio, and more elements that you find best represent your brand in 15 to 20 seconds.

Because preroll ads can’t be skipped, these videos are best created with a call-to-action (CTA) so you can optimize the attention you do have from the viewer. In other words, encourage viewers to click on your ad and receive something in return. Perhaps you’ve released a new product or promoting a major event this season and are looking for signups — use this preroll ad to get those clicks. 

Keep in mind YouTube sells Preroll video space on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. Make the click worth it.

3. Bumpers

Bumpers are the third and shortest type of YouTube video ad available to you. At just six seconds per bumper, these ad spots play before a viewer’s chosen video. 

Bumper video ads obviously can’t tell a good-enough story in just six seconds, but they make terrific complements to larger video campaigns on a new product launch or event. Just be sure to use this six seconds wisely, and include only the components of your brand you want your audience to remember.

How to Set Up & Launch a YouTube Video Advertising Campaign

Once you’ve created a marketing video you want to advertise on YouTube, it’s time to create your video ad campaign. (If you haven’t made a video yet, here’s how to get started with Animoto or Wistia, along with a few great examples.) Then, upload your video to YouTube.

Now, you’re ready to set up your advertising campaign. First, go to your Google AdWords account to set up your campaign.

Campaign Type

Tap the drop-down menu on the right-hand side of the red “+ Campaign” button on your Google AdWords homepage and select “video.”

Campaign Name

Enter a name for your campaign, and make sure Video has been chosen from the Type drop-down menu.

Video Ad Format

Select “In-stream or video discovery ads” to ensure your video ad will be in TrueView format (in the style of the examples outlined above).

Budget

Set your budget per day. You can also select a delivery method — either the standard delivery, which shows ads evenly during the day, or accelerated delivery, which drives views as quickly as possible. The latter would be useful if you want to capitalize on a trend or news item relevant to your brand’s video.

Networks

Decide where you want your ad to appear.

• YouTube Search: Your video ad will appear in results for searches and will appear on the YouTube home page, channel pages, and video pages.
• YouTube Videos: This runs TrueView ads that can appear in-display ads or in-stream ads. With this option, you can choose for your video ad to appear before or around videos shown across the Google Display Network.

You should create separate campaigns for YouTube Search and YouTube Video as this will help you to better track performance metrics. These ads are served to people performing very different activities and require a different amount of commitment from the viewer, so it’s best to monitor performance separately.

Locations

Define the location of users whom you want the ad to be shown to. You can also exclude certain locations.

Language, Device & Mobile Bidding

AdWords will let you specify the operating system, device, and carrier for more advanced targeting. This is especially useful for mobile app ads, and there’s an option to increase or decrease your bid based on if the video ad is shown to someone on a mobile device.

Advanced Settings

With the advanced settings section, you can set begin and end dates for your campaign, create a custom schedule for when your video ad should be shown, and limit the daily impressions and views for users. This all helps you to get the most return for your ad spend.

Creating the Video Ad Creative

Name your ad group, and then insert the YouTube link for the video you would like to run the ad for. You will then choose whether you want this to run as an in-stream ad or an in-display ad.

For in-display, you’ll need to include a title and short description, which is entered on two separate lines. Note: Titles are limited to 25 characters, and the description lines are limited to 35 characters each.

In-stream ads provide you with the option to overlap a display URL on top of the video. You should use a vanity URL that directs to another final URL to make it more memorable. You can include advanced URL tracking options. In addition, a companion banner made from images from your video will appear on the right side of the video ad.

Bidding

You’ll then determine the max price you will pay for each view, which you can adjust to increase the number of projected views your video may receive.

Targeting

Finally, you can further define the audience you would like the video to be shown — options include gender, age, and parental status. You can also target individuals by their interests, such as beauty mavens, cooking enthusiasts, horror movie fans, etc. Try running multiple campaigns to target different groups of users to discover who is most engaged, rather than including everyone you want to target in one campaign.

Advanced Targeting

You can also target individuals by keywords, topics, or websites where you would like your video ad to appear. Keyword targeting with in-display ads can be a powerful tool for finding individuals who are looking for a visual answer to a question. Be sure to do your research, and try testing out different groups of keywords to see which leads to more views, clicks, or conversions.

Additionally, you can use AdWords video ads to remarket to people who have been in contact with your brand already. This can help you to re-engage those who are already familiar with your brand.

Linking Your Account

You should link your AdWords account to the YouTube channel where the video is hosted if you haven’t already. You can also click “finish” to begin running your video ad campaign.

10 Tips for Optimizing Your AdWords for Video Ads

Launching a video ad campaign is a great step, but there are some things you should set up prior to starting to pay for views to make the most of your budget and to see the highest return for your client.

1. Define your metrics and goals.

When analyzing the results, there are four main categories of metrics you can track for each video. These are located under the “column” drop-down in your campaigns interface.

Views

Under the “views” category, you can better understand what percentage of the ad people viewed and understand how the ad drove earned views or views on your brand’s other videos.

Audience

This category can be used to track likes and shares for each video ad.

Branding

The view rate should signal if the creative and message are interesting or entertaining enough for people to watch the ad. By increasing your view-through rate (VTR), you will lower your cost per view.

Conversions

Conversions will help you better understand if your ad is driving leads and returning a high ROI for your brand.

Depending on the goals for the brand, you should determine a few goals based on these metrics and formalize a plan for optimizing creative and trying different targeting criteria to improve results. Your goals should also determine the type of content you will feature in the ad — some metrics are better for branding goals and others will drive leads and conversions.

2. Track low performing placements.

If you’re running in-display ads that will appear across the Google Display Network, you can review where the ad has appeared in by navigating to Video Targeting > Placements > Where ads were shown > Display network from your Google AdWords Campaigns dashboard. Review this list to see if any particular sites are contributing to poor performance for your desired metrics. Exclude these sites from your ad campaign moving forward to increase your average CPV.

3. Use a custom thumbnail image.

Design or use a high-quality still image from the video to entice a viewer to click on your video. Remember, this image needs to be legible by users on different devices, including mobile. If your image contains a person, make sure he or she is looking into the camera. If you are featuring a product, make sure the background isn’t distracting. 

4. Drive people to buy with cards.

A YouTube card is teased with a small “i” symbol, which the viewer can click to expand. You can time this appearance so only users engaged with the video and content will see the notification.

With cards, you can feature a product related to or featured in the video to drive product purchases. You can also use cards to drive fundraising donations, traffic to a URL, or traffic to other videos as shown in the example below from Refinery29. Each format will allow you to customize the card with text, images, and other options.

5. Create calls-to-actions.

When promoting a video on YouTube, you can include call-to-action overlays that link to a URL. You could link to a landing page, product page, information page, career page … whatever you’d like. You could also send people to a favorable report or interview featuring the brand.

Adobe highlights one of its live videos using a call-to-action overlay:

6. Create a YouTube end slate.

Create an end screen to drive subscribers to your channel, promote your social networks, or increase interest in your brand. If someone has watched a video until the end, it’s a good sign they enjoy your content and might be interested in subscribing to your channel for future updates. The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon‘s end slate uses this screen to drive subscribers and social media fans while also highlighting other interesting topics its host has featured. Once you build the image, you will be able to annotate the end screen in YouTube’s video editor.

7. Use negative remarketing.

If you are running a campaign for a longer period of time and want to only attract new users to a brand, consider creating a list of people who your ad will not be shown to. When viewing your AdWords Campaign screen, select “Shared library” on the lower left sidebar. Then select “Video remarketing” and “+ Remarketing List”. You can stretch your campaign budget and target only unique users by selecting to not show your video ad to someone who has previously viewed the specific video, who has visited your YouTube channel, or shared, liked, or commented on any of your videos on your channel.

8. Use close captioning to cater to viewer’s needs and wants.

This tip applies to all YouTube videos — but it’s a general best practice that’s not followed by many brands. Include a quality video transcription you’ve generated and approved. Only user-uploaded transcriptions are indexed by Google because YouTube’s automatic captioning can be less than reliable. Depending on your target audience, you may also want to include transcriptions in various other languages. You can also offer users the option to download or visit a site page with the full transcription in your video description.

9. Qualify viewers.

Sometimes, your ad will be seen by people who have no interest in your product. Encourage them to skip the ad if the content isn’t relevant so you don’t have to pay for the view and they don’t waste their time watching irrelevant advertising.

10. Consider making your ad longer.

When it comes to TrueView ads, if the ad is under 30 seconds, you pay only if a viewer watches until the end. If the ad is longer than 30 seconds, you pay if the viewer watches it for at least 30 seconds. In both cases, you pay if the viewer interacts with your ad before it’s over. Consider this when you are coming up with ideas for content for the ad. You may want to put messaging at a certain point so uninterested viewers can skip the ad, or you might provide special offers towards the end of the video.

The Future of Video is Bright

We’ve told you before: Video content is a must-have part of your content strategy. This is even truer now that YouTube lets marketers target users based on their search histories. YouTube advertising is more targeted than ever, and it’s less competitive real estate than the world of Google Search because video content is newer to the content scene and less popular than blog posts.

Stay tuned for more from us about how to make great video ads for YouTube and social media, and where we think YouTube marketing is headed next.

Think back to the last thing you Googled. Did the content you discover actually answer the question you were asking? Did you feel engaged in reading the article or watching the video that you found? Were you able to find a helpful next step to learn more?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then the person who created the content probably paid close attention to its structure. And they’re reaping the benefits — you, along with many others, are now aware of their business and potentially interested in engaging with future content related to their brand.

Ultimately, all effective digital content has a blueprint. You may not notice it, but it’s intended to help you and other readers make well-informed, confident decisions — whatever those decisions may be.

I’ve been a content marketer for over a decade. During that time, I’ve worked with thousands of businesses to help them effectively tell their brand’s story while increasing visibility online. Through this process, I’ve learned a thing or two about what works, what doesn’t, and why.

If you’re looking to improve your content marketing skills, it’s helpful to know what goes into creating content that both humans and search engines love. We’ll run through several of my favorite examples of content marketing that I’ve seen in 2019, below. Additionally, I’ll explain why each tactic was successful.

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

1. Switchback Travel’s Image Featured Snippet

First, a reminder — featured snippets are Google’s attempt to answer a search query on the results page itself. Google features these snippets in a box just before the number one organic search listing. They’re important because they take a significant portion of the search traffic from the results below them.

Featured snippets can show up in a variety of formats. However, below are the most common featured snippets Google generates:

• Paragraph featured snippet
• Image featured snippet
• YouTube featured snippet
• List featured snippet (bulleted and numbered)

One good content marketing strategy is to try and optimize your images for Google’s featured snippet. For instance, take a look at Switchback Travel’s image, displayed below as the image result for the search term “best hiking boots”:

As shown in the above example, Google sometimes pulls from more than one site to answer a person’s question. Occasionally, a source might claim both the text and image featured snippet, but that’s not always the case. In the above example, the text is from New York Magazine but the image is from Switchback Travel.

Ultimately, you might consider optimizing your images for search to try and capture the featured snippet result for keywords related to your product or service, like Switchback Travel did. 

2. Toyota Europe’s YouTube Featured Snippet

Google looks at more than just website content when it comes to featured snippets. Google additionally pulls content from YouTube, which is why it’s important to optimize your video content accordingly. Google may choose to recommend a specific clip from the YouTube video, as well.

For instance, check out Toyota Europe’s YouTube featured snippet, which offers a suggested clip:

By correctly optimizing your YouTube videos for SEO, you have a chance of being featured on search engines, rather than just YouTube. This enables you to reach a larger audience. 

3. Washington Post’s List-based Article

List-based articles are powerful opportunities to win Google’s featured snippet box for an intended search. 

For instance, if you’re unsure of how to plan for a road trip, you’ll likely stumble across this Washington Post listicle when searching “how to plan for a road trip” on Google or another search engine: 

4. RVing Planet’s Bulleted Featured Snippet

Additionally, the bulleted list featured snippet is often used for list-based articles, as well. This could be in the form of ranked or unranked items as well as a best-of list.

For example, let’s say you’re looking for a home on wheels to travel in — this RVing planet blog post could bring value to your search:

There are several ways to optimize your content in a human and helpful way that can lead to Google pulling your content into its featured snippet box.

Here are some quick pro tips for optimizing for Google’s featured snippet box:

• Include a YouTube video near the top of your page and optimize it according to how the page is optimized.
• Similar to your video content, make sure to optimize the alt-text of your images throughout the page.
• Near the top of the page, state what this page is about. This could be a definition or clear introduction to what this person is going to learn.

To learn more about featured snippets, check out the video below.

5. Content Marketing Institute’s Click to Tweet

If you make it easy for people to share something interesting with their network, then they’re much more likely to do so. An effective way to encourage readers to share your content with their social network is to embed a “click to tweet” button that automatically shares an interesting quote or statistic from your article.

For example, this blog post that I wrote for Content Marketing Institute is the most widely shared guest blog post I’ve ever written:

Months after publication, I still get daily Twitter notifications from people tweeting about this article. And the majority of the tweets come from the “click to tweet” option that Content Marketing Institute offers throughout the post.

If you want to start adding “click to tweet” options throughout your website content, check out this free tool.

6. Digital Olympus’s Expert Roundup

No matter what industry you’re in, there are influencers to whom people look for advice.

Partnering with these folks will strengthen your content, and more importantly, they’ll be more likely to promote the content if they’re mentioned in it.

Digital Olympus interviewed over 40 digital marketing experts for one of their blog posts, asking each expert to provide their most effective method for acquiring traffic.

What I most like about this blog post is how Digital Olympus organizes the contributions. At the top of the page, there’s a headshot of each expert next to their name. If you want to read a particular expert’s tip, you simply have to click on their headshot and you’ll jump down to their quote.

There’s also an anchor-linked Table of Contents that allows for topic-based searches. This way, readers can jump to the specific sections that are most applicable to them.

7. Colgate’s Research Page

Creating a resource page made up of helpful links on a given topic is an effective way to create helpful content.

If your business has been producing content for a while, then chances are you have clusters of related content to support the topics around which your business wants to build authority.

For example, oral hygiene company Colgate has over 2,400 pieces of content related to their broad topic “gum disease”:

That’s a lot of content to sift through … which is why Colgate created a resource page made up of specific sections of gum disease-related content, like “gum disease cause” or “gum disease diagnosis”.

Each section offers:

• A paragraph of explainer text
• A bulleted list of details on the sub-topic
• Links to relevant content on their site

8. Moz’s Topic Clusters

The topic cluster framework is a highly effective SEO strategy that demonstrates to Google that the content on your website is organized and relevant to searchers. To learn more about this framework, watch the video below.

Some brands have taken this approach to the next level by creating a multi-page masterclass or guide that links together like-themed pillar pages. A pillar page is a website page that covers a topic in-depth and links to a cluster of related content, also known as a cluster. One of my favorite examples of this is Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing.

Moz creatively puts a chapter list at the end of each page that links out to more specific content marketing-themed pages within the topic cluster.

Additionally, using an anchor-linked chapter list is an effective way to connect the cluster together — it provides value to the reader while passing authority through to each pillar page. This has worked well for Moz, since the majority of their pillar pages included in this guide rank as the first position on Google for their intended key terms:

9. Mailshakes’ Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a combination of software and strategy. With marketing automation, businesses can target prospects and customers with automated messages across multiple online and offline channels including email, text, web, and social media. Each message is sent automatically according to a pre-set list of instructions, called workflows.

Marketing automation can be an effective tool to keep your audience engaged with your brand, but it’s important to make sure you’re sending the right messages to the right people at the right time.

Mailshake, an email outreach tool, implemented marketing automation effectively by creating a Cold Email Masterclass to teach people how to make better connections via email outreach. The masterclass is made up of eight comprehensive lessons (i.e. pillar pages).

Mailshake knows that this is a lot of content for people to consume, and visitors won’t likely read it all in one sitting.

To make it easier for people to learn step-by-step, Mailshake repackaged their masterclass into an eight-part email series. In other words, they automated their education to help their audience.

Mailshake acquired 5,321 email opt-ins for their cold email masterclass workflow in under one year — proof that, if done well, this could be an incredibly effective strategy.

10. Townsend Security’s Content Offer

One tried-and-true way to convert visitors into leads is by offering something of value in exchange for their contact information (i.e. email address). This “something” is referred to as a content offer.

Content offers include, but are not limited to:

• Guides
• Workbooks
• Templates
• Webinars

It can take a lot of time to create a valuable content offer from scratch.

One effective way to create a meaningful content offer is to repurpose and repackage pieces of content found on your website. For example, data security company Townsend Security created a pillar page for one of their topics of expertise — encryption key management.

To help convert visitors into leads, Townsend repurposed and repackaged the content on their page into a guide. This allowed people to take the content with them, as opposed to having to search for the pillar page each time they wanted to read about encryption key management.

In the first year of publishing their encryption key management pillar page, 63% of visitors gave their information in exchange for a packaged PDF of the on-page content.

11. Venngage’s Free Product

Your product should be your best marketing. An effective way to provide real value to your prospects is to create a free tool that aligns with your products and/or services.

If you can get a free user hooked on one of your free tools, then you’re giving yourself (and your sales team) the best chance at demonstrating the value of your paid tools, too.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re a writer who needs help with creating visuals for the web content you create. You might consider using Venngage, a company that helps businesses create compelling visuals. In the free version of their platform, users get access to a wide variety of templates for infographics, presentations, brochures, checklists, and so on.

In the future, when your marketing team is considering paid products for design, you’ll have Venngage top-of-mind.

And there you have it — 11 content marketing examples to help get your creative juices flowing. Consider how you can apply one (or several) of these examples to your business to strengthen your content marketing efforts.

We live in a fast-paced digital world. In the time you read this blog post, a new channel, a new tactic, or a new competitor has emerged. The best chance you have at telling your business’s story and growing a pool of engaged prospects and customers is by learning the art of content marketing — and starting to apply it to your business, today.

If you’ve been a marketer for, say, more than five minutes, you know SEO is important. In fact, 97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else. And since Google owns 90% of all searches, it’s easy for marketers to spend hours optimizing every day. This makes saving time where possible key to a busy marketer’s workflow.

Thankfully, when it comes to improving SEO and maximizing your time, there’s a Google Chrome extension for that. In fact, there are many of them, and most can be used right in your browser.

To help you navigate the crowded world of Chrome extensions, we’ve come up with 20 of our favorites for SEO. Most are compatible with Firefox and Safari as well, and each of them keeps track of most of the analytics for you. Because less time fussing over SEO means more time for finding the perfect dog GIF to share with your team.

Chrome extensions are helpful when looking for ideas to improve SEO strategy and seeing the analytics of competitors instantly. Some even have the ability to make colorful graphs and charts for us visual folks to make presentations and comparisons a breeze.

The 20 Best SEO Extensions for Google Chrome

1. MozBar

• Price: Free; MozBar Premium, free 30-day trial, then paid plans from $99/mo
• Chrome extension

MozBar allows its users to check SEO within their browser using just one click. MozBar provides metrics while viewing any webpage, and allows users to export SERPs into a CRV file and access analytics. Upgrading to MozBar Premium offers functions like analyzing keyword difficulty, page optimization, and digger SERP metrics.

2. Keywords Everywhere

• Price: Free
• Chrome extension

Keywords Everywhere is a tool that shows three different information types for keywords on Google: monthly search volume, cost per click, and Google Adwords competition. By having this extension installed, going back and forth from Google Keywords to your open browser page is a thing of the past, as it’s an in-browser extension.

3. SimilarWeb

• Price: Free
• Chrome Extension

Offering traffic and key metrics for any website, SimilarWeb is a popular extension that allows users to see statistics and strategy for any website while searching the internet with one click. This extension is helpful for those looking for new and effective SEO strategies, as well as those interested in analyzing different trends across the market.

4. Redirect Path

• Price: Free
• Chrome extension

Microsoft Word’s infamous red squiggly line that alerts their user of improper grammar has an SEO doppelganger: Redirect Path. This extension flags 301, 302, 404, 500 HTTP Status Codes, Meta, and Javascript redirects catching potential issues immediately. It also shows other HTTP headers and server IP addresses.

5. SEO Meta in 1 Click

• Price: Free
• Chrome extension

SEO Meta in 1 Click displays all meta tags and main SEO information for a web page with just a single click. This includes the lengths of titles and descriptions, URL, headers in order of appearance, and the number of images without alt text.

6. BuzzSumo

• Price: Free
• Chrome extension

Need SEO tracking for social? BuzzSumo’s got you covered. This extension allows you to easily track shares and top-performing content on social media pages. Using BuzzSumo can help aid in future SEO decisions and check the backlinks you provide on your pages.

7. Hunter

• Price: Free Basic plan, then paid plans start at $49/mo.
• Chrome extension

Hunter makes it easy to find contact information instantly in your browser. This process, named “Domain Search,” is accessible by an icon in Chrome. Hunter finds all the email addresses related to a website.

8. Mangools

• Price: Free 10-day trial, then the basic plan starts at at $29/month
• Chrome extension

Check the SEO strength of websites with Mangools, which offers you the top SEO metrics of websites using Moz and Majestic. Access premium features such as the self-described “Google SERP on steroids” function, aiding with keywords, backlinks, and profile analysis.

9. Google Trends

• Price: Free
• Chrome extension

Trends is part of Google Webmaster Tools, a set of extension tools for building websites and integrating them with Google. Trends presents analytics, using graphs, on the top searches in Google (from Taylor Swift to Kim Kardashian) from across several countries. Trends can help you identify the SEO performance on your website.

10. SEMrush

• Price: $99/mo.
• Chrome extension

SEMrush presents itself as a dashboard, reporting on domain performance, as well as that of individual pages. One of its prime features is its SEO toolkit, which allows its users to analyze backlinks and watch keyword rank. It also provides on-page SEO suggestions, fitting itself into an SEO strategy nicely.

11. Serpstat

• Price: Free Lite data, then $69 for the basic paid plan
• Chrome extension

By using Serpstat, you can instantly check the SEO of your website as well as competitors’. After clicking the in-browser icon, you’ll be able to receive a full SEO audit of a domain. Serpstat has three sections: On-page SEO parameters, page analysis, and domain analysis.

12. Ahrefs

• Price: $99/mo for Ahrefs Lite
• Chrome extension

With their SEO toolbar in Chrome, Ahrefs examines website properties and produces keywords, links, and ranking profiles that offer SEO improvements on your website. To receive a detailed report on an SEO metric, just click on it.

13. Check My Links

• Price: Free
• Chrome extension

Aptly named, Check My Links does just that with one click, scanning through webpages for broken links. A huge time saver when designing link-heavy web pages, the extension makes sure the links are working properly, notating when links are broken.

14. NinjaOutreach Lite

• Price: Free
• Chrome extension

The free extension from NinjaOutreach makes browsers capable of advanced data mining. It offers various SEO functions such as webpage URL, title, links, meta descriptions, follower counts on social media, and monetization techniques.

15. PageSpeed Insights by Google

• Price: Free
• Chrome extension

Part of Google Webmaster Tools, PageSpeed Insights is an SEO tool that provides information on desktop and mobile sites. After running an analysis, PageSpeed Insights gives a score on the site and provides suggestions on how to make the web pages run faster.

16. Woorank

• Price: Free 14-day trial, $49/mo for a Wookrank Pro plan or $149/mo for a Woorank Premium
• Chrome extension

Woorank is a site analysis tool similar to PageSpeed Insights, allowing users to see suggestions for improvement on their web pages. It provides an in-depth report on online visibility, social media, and usability, allowing you to keep track of ways to improve different metrics.

17. NoFollow

• Price: Free
• Chrome extension

With NoFollow, marketers can see an outline of web pages that are coded with the nofollow metatag. Because Nofollow links don’t add to SEO metrics, users can identify any external web pages that are backlinking to their websites with indexed links. For pages you don’t want to be indexed — like a landing page — NoFollow checks to see if those pages are coded correctly and highlights any links that aren’t working correctly.

18. Impactana

• Price: Free
• Chrome extension

This toolbar gives a set of metrics, available right in Chrome. The metrics are divided into two categories; “Buzz,” which analyzes social media content that best fits your audience, and “Impact,” which analyzes user engagement. The latter includes data on clicks, comments, views, and more.

19. BuzzStream

• Price: Free 14-day trial; paid plans begin at $24/mo.
• Chrome extension

BuzzStream allows marketers to organize and perform outreach that’s specialized to your business. The extension, BuzzMarker, connects with BuzzStream to assist in building links, promoting content, and pitching influencers.

20. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

• Price: Free for Screaming Frog Lite; the paid plan is $160/year
• Chrome extension

Search marketing stressing you out? This tool is here to help. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider enables you to crawl website URLs and add key elements to analyze SEO and fix detected issues, making an excruciatingly long process simplified. Some elements include finding broken links, discovering duplicate pages, and site visualizations.

Using these extensions will lessen your SEO stress. And many provide useful information on how to refine skills like backlink building and keyword accuracy. You’ll be acing this section of Marketing 101 in no time.

Happy browsing!

With how accessible the internet is today, would you believe me if I told you the number of people who go online every day is still increasing?

It is. In fact, “constant” internet usage among adults increased by 5% in just the last three years, according to Pew Research. And although we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed along with it — meaning offline marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.

Enter digital marketing — in other words, any form of marketing that exists online.

At HubSpot, we talk a lot about inbound marketing as a really effective way to attract, engage, and delight customers online. But we still get a lot of questions from people all around the world about digital marketing. So, we decided to answer them. Click the links below to jump to each question, or keep reading to see how digital marketing is carries out today.

• What is digital marketing?
• Why digital marketing?
• Digital Marketing Examples
• What does a digital marketer do?
• Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which is it?
• Does digital marketing work for all businesses?
• What is the role of digital marketing to a company?
• What types of digital content should I create?
• How long will it take to see results from my content?
• Do I need a big budget for digital marketing?
• How does mobile marketing fit into my digital marketing strategy?
• I’m ready to try digital marketing. Now what?

So, how do you define digital marketing today?

A seasoned inbound marketer might say inbound marketing and digital marketing are virtually the same thing, but there are some minor differences. And conversations with marketers and business owners in the U.S., U.K., Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, I’ve learned a lot about how those small differences are being observed across the world.

Because digital marketing has so many options and strategies associated with it, you can get creative and experiment with a variety of marketing tactics on a budget. With digital marketing, you can also use tools like analytics dashboards to monitor the success and ROI of your campaigns more than you could with a traditional promotional content — such as a billboard or print ad.

How does a business define digital marketing?

Digital marketing is defined by the use of numerous digital tactics and channels to connect with customers where they spend much of their time: online. From the website itself to a business’s online branding assets — digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, and beyond — there’s a spectrum of tactics that fall under the umbrella of “digital marketing.”

The best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each digital marketing campaign supports their overarching goals. And depending on the goals of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a larger campaign through the free and paid channels at their disposal.

A content marketer, for example, can create a series of blog posts that serve to generate leads from a new ebook the business recently created. The company’s social media marketer might then help promote these blog posts through paid and organic posts on the business’s social media accounts. Perhaps the email marketer creates an email campaign to send those who download the ebook more information on the company. We’ll talk more about these specific digital marketers in a minute.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most common digital marketing tactics and the channels involved in each one.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is the process of optimizing your website to “rank” higher in search engine results pages, thereby increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic your website receives. The channels that benefit from SEO include websites, blogs, and infographics.

There are a number of ways to approach SEO in order to generate qualified traffic to your website. These include:

• On page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the content that exists “on the page” when looking at a website. By researching keywords for their search volume and intent (or meaning), you can answer questions for readers and rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) those questions produce.
• Off page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the activity that takes place “off the page” when looking to optimize your website. “What activity not on my own website could affect my ranking?” You might ask. The answer is inbound links, also known as backlinks. The number of publishers that link to you, and the relative “authority” of those publishers, affect how highly you rank for the keywords you care about. By networking with other publishers, writing guest posts on these websites (and linking back to your website), and generating external attention, you can earn the backlinks you need to move your website up on all the right SERPs.
• Technical SEO: This type of SEO focuses on the backend of your website, and how your pages are coded. Image compression, structured data, and CSS file optimization are all forms of technical SEO that can increase your website’s loading speed — an important ranking factor in the eyes of search engines like Google.

Content Marketing

This term denotes the creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers. The channels that can play a part in your content marketing strategy include:

• Blog posts: Writing and publishing articles on a company blog helps you demonstrate your industry expertise and generates organic search traffic for your business. This ultimately gives you more opportunities to convert website visitors into leads for your sales team.
• Ebooks and whitepapers: Ebooks, whitepapers, and similar long-form content helps further educate website visitors. It also allows you to exchange content for a reader’s contact information, generating leads for your company and moving people through the buyer’s journey.
• Infographics: Sometimes, readers want you to show, not tell. Infographics are a form of visual content that helps website visitors visualize a concept you want to help them learn.

Want to learn and apply content marketing to your business? Check out HubSpot Academy’s free content marketing training resource page.

Social Media Marketing

This practice promotes your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business. The channels you can use in social media marketing include:

• Facebook.
• Twitter.
• LinkedIn.
• Instagram.
• Snapchat.
• Pinterest.

If you’re new to social platforms, you can use tools like HubSpot to connect channels like LinkedIn and Facebook in one place. This way, you can easily schedule content for multiple channels at once, and monitor analytics from the platform as well.

On top of connecting social accounts for posting purposes, you can also integrate your social media inboxes into HubSpot, so you can get your direct messages in one place. 

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google Ads, which allows you to pay for top slots on Google’s search engine results pages at a price “per click” of the links you place. Other channels where you can use PPC include:

• Paid ads on Facebook: Here, users can pay to customize a video, image post, or slideshow, which Facebook will publish to the newsfeeds of people who match your business’s audience.
• Twitter Ads campaigns: Here, users can pay to place a series of posts or profile badges to the news feeds of a specific audience, all dedicated to accomplish a specific goal for your business. This goal can be website traffic, more Twitter followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads.
• Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: Here, users can pay to send messages directly to specific LinkedIn users based on their industry and background.

Affiliate Marketing

This is a type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website. Affiliate marketing channels include:

• Hosting video ads through the YouTube Partner Program.
• Posting affiliate links from your social media accounts.

Native Advertising

Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. BuzzFeed-sponsored posts are a good example, but many people also consider social media advertising to be “native” — Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising, for example.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to the software that serves to automate your basic marketing operations. Many marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks they would otherwise do manually, such as:

• Email newsletters: Email automation doesn’t just allow you to automatically send emails to your subscribers. It can also help you shrink and expand your contact list as needed so your newsletters are only going to the people who want to see them in their inboxes.
• Social media post scheduling: If you want to grow your organization’s presence on a social network, you need to post frequently. This makes manual posting a bit of an unruly process. Social media scheduling tools push your content to your social media channels for you, so you can spend more time focusing on content strategy.
• Lead-nurturing workflows: Generating leads, and converting those leads into customers, can be a long process. You can automate that process by sending leads specific emails and content once they fit certain criteria, such as when they download and open an ebook.
• Campaign tracking and reporting: Marketing campaigns can include a ton of different people, emails, content, webpages, phone calls, and more. Marketing automation can help you sort everything you work on by the campaign it’s serving, and then track the performance of that campaign based on the progress all of these components make over time.

Email Marketing

Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people toward the business’s website. The types of emails you might send in an email marketing campaign include:

• Blog subscription newsletters.
• Follow-up emails to website visitors who downloaded something.
• Customer welcome emails.
• Holiday promotions to loyalty program members.
• Tips or similar series emails for customer nurturing.

Online PR

Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It’s much like traditional PR, but in the online space. The channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:

• Reporter outreach via social media: Talking to journalists on Twitter, for example, is a great way to develop a relationship with the press that produces earned media opportunities for your company.
• Engaging online reviews of your company: When someone reviews your company online, whether that review is good or bad, your instinct might be not to touch it. On the contrary, engaging company reviews helps you humanize your brand and deliver powerful messaging that protects your reputation.
• Engaging comments on your personal website or blog: Similar to the way you’d respond to reviews of your company, responding to the people who are reading your content is the best way to generate productive conversation around your industry.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing refers to a marketing methodology wherein you attract, engage, and delight customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. You can use every digital marketing tactic listed above, throughout an inbound marketing strategy, to create a customer experience that works with the customer, not against them. Here are some classic examples of inbound marketing versus traditional marketing: 

• Blogging vs. pop-up ads
• Video marketing vs. commercial advertising
• Email contact lists vs. email spam

What does a digital marketer do?

Digital marketers are in charge of driving brand awareness and lead generation through all the digital channels — both free and paid — that are at a company’s disposal. These channels include social media, the company’s own website, search engine rankings, email, display advertising, and the company’s blog.

The digital marketer usually focuses on a different key performance indicator (KPI) for each channel so they can properly measure the company’s performance across each one. A digital marketer who’s in charge of SEO, for example, measures their website’s “organic traffic” — of that traffic coming from website visitors who found a page of the business’s website via a Google search.

Digital marketing is carried out across many marketing roles today. In small companies, one generalist might own many of the digital marketing tactics described above at the same time. In larger companies, these tactics have multiple specialists that each focus on just one or two of the brand’s digital channels.

Here are some examples of these specialists:

SEO Manager

Main KPIs: Organic traffic

In short, SEO managers get the business to rank on Google. Using a variety of approaches to search engine optimization, this person might work directly with content creators to ensure the content they produce performs well on Google — even if the company also posts this content on social media.

Content Marketing Specialist

Main KPIs: Time on page, overall blog traffic, YouTube channel subscribers

Content marketing specialists are the digital content creators. They frequently keep track of the company’s blogging calendar, and come up with a content strategy that includes video as well. These professionals often work with people in other departments to ensure the products and campaigns the business launches are supported with promotional content on each digital channel.

Social Media Manager

Main KPIs: Follows, Impressions, Shares

The role of a social media manager is easy to infer from the title, but which social networks they manage for the company depends on the industry. Above all, social media managers establish a posting schedule for the company’s written and visual content. This employee might also work with the content marketing specialist to develop a strategy for which content to post on which social network.

(Note: Per the KPIs above, “impressions” refers to the number of times a business’s posts appear on the newsfeed of a user.)

Marketing Automation Coordinator

Main KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through rate, lead-generation (conversion) rate

The marketing automation coordinator helps choose and manage the software that allows the whole marketing team to understand their customers’ behavior and measure the growth of their business. Because many of the marketing operations described above might be executed separately from one another, it’s important for there to be someone who can group these digital activities into individual campaigns and track each campaign’s performance.

Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which Is It?

On the surface, the two seem similar: Both occur primarily online, and both focus on creating digital content for people to consume. So what’s the difference?

The term “digital marketing” doesn’t differentiate between push and pull marketing tactics (or what we might now refer to as ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ methods). Both can still fall under the umbrella of digital marketing.

Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many people as possible in the online space — regardless of whether it’s relevant or welcomed. For example, the garish banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren’t necessarily ready to receive it.

On the other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their target customers onto their websites by providing assets that are helpful to them. One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for.

Ultimately, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, engage, and delight customers online. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply an umbrella term to describe online marketing tactics of any kind, regardless of whether they’re considered inbound or outbound.

Does digital marketing work for all businesses?

Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. Regardless of what your company sells, digital marketing still involves building out buyer personas to identify your audience’s needs, and creating valuable online content. However, that’s not to say all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way.

B2B Digital Marketing

If your company is business-to-business (B2B), your digital marketing efforts are likely to be centered around online lead generation, with the end goal being for someone to speak to a salesperson. For that reason, the role of your marketing strategy is to attract and convert the highest quality leads for your salespeople via your website and supporting digital channels.

Beyond your website, you’ll probably choose to focus your efforts on business-focused channels like LinkedIn where your demographic is spending their time online.

B2C Digital Marketing

If your company is business-to-consumer (B2C), depending on the price point of your products, it’s likely that the goal of your digital marketing efforts is to attract people to your website and have them become customers without ever needing to speak to a salesperson.

For that reason, you’re probably less likely to focus on ‘leads’ in their traditional sense, and more likely to focus on building an accelerated buyer’s journey, from the moment someone lands on your website, to the moment that they make a purchase. This will often mean your product features in your content higher up in the marketing funnel than it might for a B2B business, and you might need to use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).

For B2C companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can often be more valuable than business-focused platforms LinkedIn.

What is the role of digital marketing to a company?

Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you’ve ever put an advert in a newspaper, you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There’s no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.

On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.

Here are some examples:

Website Traffic

With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your website’s homepage in real time by using digital analytics software, available in marketing platforms like HubSpot.

You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.

This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage.

With offline marketing, it’s very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people’s behavior before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.

Content Performance and Lead Generation

Imagine you’ve created a product brochure and posted it through people’s letterboxes — that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash.

Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it’s hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you’re also generating qualified leads when people download it.

Attribution Modeling

An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all of your sales back to a customer’s first digital touchpoint with your business.

We call this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to make more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention, and what parts of your sales cycle need refining.

Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important — according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer’s’ journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it’s likely to reflect positively on your business’s bottom line.

What types of digital content should I create?

The kind of content you create depends on your audience’s needs at different stages in the buyer’s journey. You should start by creating buyer personas (use these free templates, or try makemypersona.com) to identify what your audience’s goals and challenges are in relation to your business. On a basic level, your online content should aim to help them meet these goals, and overcome their challenges.

Then, you’ll need to think about when they’re most likely to be ready to consume this content in relation to what stage they’re at in their buyer’s journey. We call this content mapping.

With content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:

1. The characteristics of the person who will be consuming it (that’s where buyer personas come in).
2. How close that person is to making a purchase (i.e., their lifecycle stage).

In terms of the format of your content, there are a lot of different things to try. Here are some options we’d recommend using at each stage of the buyer’s journey:

Awareness Stage

• Blog posts. Great for increasing your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy.
• Infographics. Very shareable, meaning they increase your chances of being found via social media when others share your content. (Check out these free infographic templates to get you started.)
• Short videos. Again, these are very shareable and can help your brand get found by new audiences by hosting them on platforms like YouTube.

Consideration Stage

• Ebooks. Great for lead generation as they’re generally more comprehensive than a blog post or infographic, meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact information to receive it.
• Research reports. Again, this is a high value content piece which is great for lead generation. Research reports and new data for your industry can also work for the awareness stage though, as they’re often picked-up by the media or industry press.
• Webinars. As they’re a more detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or short video.

Decision Stage

• Case studies. Having detailed case studies on your website can be an effective form of content for those who are ready to make a purchasing decision, as it helps you positively influence their decision.
• Testimonials. If case studies aren’t a good fit for your business, having short testimonials around your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think of testimonials a little more loosely. If you’re a clothing brand, these might take the form of photos of how other people styled a shirt or dress, pulled from a branded hashtag where people can contribute.

How long will it take to see results from my content?

With digital marketing, it can often feel like you’re able to see results much faster than you might with offline marketing due to the fact it’s easier to measure ROI. However, it ultimately depends on the scale and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.

If you spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to identify the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, then you’re likely to see strong results within the first six months.

If paid advertising is part of your digital strategy, then the results come even quicker — but it’s recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free’) reach using content, SEO, and social media for long-term, sustainable success.

Do I need a big budget for digital marketing?

As with anything, it really depends on what elements of digital marketing you’re looking to add to your strategy.

If you’re focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation for a preexisting website, the good news is you don’t need very much budget at all. With inbound marketing, the main focus is on creating high quality content that your audience will want to consume, which unless you’re planning to outsource the work, the only investment you’ll need is your time.

You can get started by hosting a website and creating content using HubSpot’s CMS. For those on a tight budget, you can get started using WordPress hosted on WP Engine and using a simple them from StudioPress.

With outbound techniques like online advertising and purchasing email lists, there is undoubtedly some expense. What it costs comes down to what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the advertising.

For example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you’ll bid against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google’s search results for keywords associated with your business. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely expensive, which is why it’s a good idea to focus building your organic reach, too.

How does mobile marketing fit into my digital marketing strategy?

Another key component of digital marketing is mobile marketing. In fact, smartphone usage as a whole accounts for 69% of time spent consuming digital media in the U.S., while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up less than half — and the U.S. still isn’t mobile’s biggest fan compared to other countries.

This means it’s essential to optimize your digital ads, web pages, social media images, and other digital assets for mobile devices. If your company has a mobile app that enables users to engage with your brand or shop your products, your app falls under the digital marketing umbrella, too.

Those engaging with your company online via mobile devices need to have the same positive experience as they would on desktop. This means implementing a mobile-friendly or responsive website design to make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices. It might also mean reducing the length of your lead generation forms to create a hassle-free experience for people downloading your content on-the-go. As for your social media images, it’s important to always have a mobile user in mind when creating them as image dimensions are smaller on mobile devices, meaning text can be cut-off.

There are lots of ways you can optimize your digital marketing assets for mobile users, and when implementing any digital marketing strategy, it’s hugely important to consider how the experience will translate on mobile devices. By ensuring this is always front-of-mind, you’ll be creating digital experiences that work for your audience, and consequently achieve the results you’re hoping for.

I’m ready to try digital marketing. Now what?

If you’re already doing digital marketing, it’s likely that you’re at least reaching some segments of your audience online. No doubt you can think of some areas of your strategy that could use a little improvement, though.

That’s why we created Why Digital Marketing? The Essential Guide to Marketing Your Brand Online — a step-by-step guide to help you build a digital marketing strategy that’s truly effective, whether you’re a complete beginner or have a little more experience. You can download it for free here.

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

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

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

What is email design?

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

Why is email design important?

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

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

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

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

1. Craft a strong subject line.

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

Your subject line should do three main things:

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

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

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

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

2. Write an attention-grabbing preheader.

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

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

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

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

3. Be concise.

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

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

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

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

4. Keep your email on-brand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Personalize every email.

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

7. Incorporate unique visual content.

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

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

8. Don’t be afraid to use emojis. 🧡

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

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

9. Use a responsive design.

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

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

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

11. Add an “unsubscribe” button.

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

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

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

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

12. A/B test your design.

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

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

Email Design Software

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

HubSpot Email Design Software

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

BEEPro Email Design Software

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

MailChimp Email Design Software

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

Stripo.email Email Design Software

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

Chamaileon Email Design Software

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

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

Email Design Inspiration

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

1. Starbucks Rewards Email Design

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

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

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

2. Vital Proteins Email Design

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

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

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

3. HubSpot Marketing Blog Email Design

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

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

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

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

Grow Better With Great Email Design

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

Cliché: A picture is worth a thousand words.

Fact: HubSpot’s pictures are worth 120 thousand clicks.

Last year, my colleague Karla Cook gave our readers a 3,000-word peek behind the curtain into a new SEO strategy we implemented at the beginning of 2018. That strategy, which was designed to fix a traffic plateau across the blog, increased our organic traffic by 25% year over year — to eight million organic pageviews per month. This is about three million new organic views we didn’t have at the beginning of 2018.

Where that traffic is coming from is equally exciting.

As I said, our new SEO strategy launched our organic blog traffic to heights it had never been to before. But that strategy had another, somewhat unintended consequence for us.

While we increased our total organic traffic by 25% from last year, we increased our image search traffic by … wait for it … 779%. This refers to traffic that comes from people who conduct a search in Google, or a similar search engine, and click on an image result that leads to the HubSpot Blog.

“Pics or it didn’t happen, Braden.” As you wish:

Source: Google Search Console

Take a look at the royal blue tile in the chart above. Between April 2018 and April 2019, HubSpot literally increased its organic traffic from 14,100 organic views per month to 124,000 organic views per month — a nearly 8X lift.

Our image traffic accounts for just under 2% of our blog’s total monthly organic traffic, which, in the scheme of things, is not all that significant. But even though the vast majority of our organic traffic still comes from web search (the written blogs themselves), our image traffic’s rate of increase (779%) is vastly disproportionate to that of our total blog traffic (25%).

And let’s be honest, 2% of 8 million is nothing to sneeze at.

But what made the difference, if not just our new blog-aligned SEO strategy?

Image SEO Best Practices That We Learned

As it turns out, we had a few other tricks up our sleeve along the way that gave our images some extra juice on the search engine results pages (SERPs), all of which are just good best practices in commercial content creation.

1. Optimized Alt Text

In the HubSpot COS, we’ve almost always filled in image alt text fields with text that (tries to) describe the image it’s associated with. Last year, though, we started taking alt text way more seriously.

Rather than automatically fill image alt text with the image file name — something the HubSpot COS conveniently does for you so this field isn’t left blank — we now optimize each image we embed with the keyword the blog post is targeting. Then, we add language that puts this keyword into context that reflects the image it’s describing.

For example, if we’re embedding the image below into a blog post about “college courses about SEO,” our alt text might look something like this:

“Marketing professor showing college student SEO on her computer screen”

Now, let’s modestly estimate that one in three HubSpot blog posts (33%) have at least one image embedded on them, not including the article’s featured image. HubSpot publishes (or republishes) approximately 260 blog posts every three months. If we were to extrapolate this alt text process for 33% of these blog posts, that’s at least 87 images that can potentially capture new organic traffic for us every quarter.

And if the average blog post targets a keyword that receives 3,500 searches per month — a rough estimate based on the HubSpot Marketing Blog’s editorial calendar — that’s a landscape of 304,500 searches per month to which we’re adding more HubSpot content (87 images x 3,500 searches per month). In other words, we’re putting ourselves inside hundreds of thousands of Google Image galleries we weren’t ranking in before.

Read more about our team’s approach to alt text in this blog post.

2. Branded Images & Templates

At HubSpot, we create a ton of valuable resources for our readers to download, ultimately making them a qualifiable lead for the business. However, there are still a ton more resources our readers want for which we necessarily don’t have a lead generation strategy but still garner valuable organic traffic. And these resources appear in image form on many SERPs that are important to us.

These resources include inspiring business quotes, resume templates, sample emails, and even image thumbnails that appear in Google’s featured snippets.

To identify these images, the SEO team analyzed where HubSpot was getting most of its image traffic already, and categorized these sources into image types. Then, we worked with HubSpot UX designer Amanda Chong and the rest of our creative team to develop original HubSpot image templates for each image type.

These new image templates allowed the blog team to effectively “brand” various images they might not otherwise embed into a blog post and add alt text for each image using the style described above to expose it on the right SERPs. Here are a couple examples of these branded images now live on HubSpot content:

 

 

3. The Search Insights Report

HubSpot’s “Search Insights Report” is a quarterly manifestation of our SEO strategy, delivered directly to the blog team every three months. These reports consist of more than 200 blog post topics, all rooted in searches for which we want to appear on a SERP, that our writers take up and publish over the course of 90 days.

And although we have obviously made deliberate moves to capture more image traffic over the last year, the radiative effect these reports have on our website traffic can’t be overstated.

For one, as we create these search insights reports every quarter, we’re tapping into topics that are increasingly being found in image form. There’s even data to support this — here’s a five-year trend line showing an increase in Google Image search for all queries related to “marketing”:

Source: Google Trends

Here’s one for all searches related to “sales”:

And, finally, for “customer service”:

Conveniently, these three topics reflect the target markets of three of our blog properties: the Marketing Blog, the Sales Blog, and the Service Blog. But image traffic has gone up across the board, which means more traffic from image searches has become a byproduct of our new SEO strategy — one that has continued to grow as we capture more space on SERPs we didn’t have before.

Plus, having a document that distills all of our potential content topics, and aligning the content team with this document, has earned us ranking on some of the most competitive search engine real estate we’ve ever seen. It stands to reason we’d see a little (alright, a lot) more image traffic as a result.

It’s easy for marketers to attribute website traffic increases to good SEO, but these results ultimately aren’t possible without the time, creativity, and good judgment put into the content itself.

Nowadays, Facebook is one of the top platforms for digital advertising — in fact, 93% of social media advertisers use Facebook ads on a regular basis.

Additionally, since Facebook offers a wide range of options for effective and measurable advertising, it’s a good opportunity to reach an audience regardless of your budget.

If you haven’t explored Facebook advertising yet, now’s a good time — at the end of 2018, ad costs on Facebook dropped by 2%, while ad impressions skyrocketed by 34%, making it more appealing for marketers than ever before.

Among the various offerings in the Facebook ad family is the Instant Experience. Formerly known as Canvas Ads, Instant Experiences are mobile-friendly, lightning fast, and deeply immersive. They offer rich, visual experiences for your viewers — keeping them engaged as you highlight your brand and products or services.

To help you find success with Facebook Instant Experiences, we’ve created this guide. Keep reading to learn what Facebook Instant EXperiences are, and how you can increase both brand awareness and revenue through the new tool — for cheap.

What are Facebook Canvas Ads (i.e. Instant Experiences)?

Facebook Canvas Ads, now known as Instant Experiences, let you create full-screen, mobile-only pieces of content within the Facebook app.

You might think of them as a mini landing pages for your business, keeping customers engaged with your campaigns without requiring users to exit the Facebook app at all. These Instant Experiences are particularly effective for segments of your audience who regularly check Facebook and enjoy consuming content within the social media platform.

Viewers can interact with Instant Experiences on both iOS and Android. Once a person clicks on your ad, the Instant Experience loads instantly (15 times faster than a website page) and opens to a full-screen format. From there, users can interact with multiple forms of content.

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Instant Experiences transports viewers into your world. You can engage and inspire them with images, videos, swipe-through carousels, slideshows, and more — all within a single ad.

Visuals and video do the heavy-lifting here, which lets you tell compelling stories to capture your audience’s attention while simultaneously collecting data that will help you convert those prospects into customers.

Building Your Brand with Instant Experience

Instant Experience ads are great for both direct response and branding campaigns. No matter which stage of the marketing funnel you’re working on, you can create an immersive experience that mirrors your website without taking users away from their Facebook browsing.

Facebook tests revealed that 53% of users watched at least half of every Instant Experience ad they were served. Best of all, many of those ads were over a minute long — that’s some serious screen time your company could be getting.

Additionally, the average phone user spends 90% of their browsing time in-app, as opposed to standalone websites — so if you’re doing mobile-first marketing, it makes sense to build your campaigns in the places your audience spends the most time.

How to Use Instant Experience Ads

Most advertisers use Instant Experience ads in their branding campaigns because of the unique full-screen nature of the ad. However, there has been a huge amount of success with direct response campaigns, otherwise known as demand generation campaigns, as well.

When Canvas Ads became Instant Experiences, it was more than a simple renaming exercise. Facebook also added extra features, including:

• Analytics functions
• Ability to embed Facebook pixels
• Ability to add third-party pixels for A/B testing
• More design template options
• Re-engagement capabilities

To use Instant Experiences, follow these three steps:

1. Start with a design template.

If you don’t have the luxury of a design team, Facebook has you covered. Pre-made templates can help you get your Instant Experience campaigns created and published — fast.

• Instant Storefront helps you sell your products in a grid format.
• Instant Lookbook lets you showcase your products in the context of a lifestyle magazine.
• Instant Customer Acquisition helps you motivate customers by displaying your offers and including a clear call-to-action.
• Instant Storytelling uses images and video to create a highly visual experience and give potential customers a better feel for your brand.

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2. Double down on lead generation.

An amazing new feature for Instant Experience ads is a lead generation add-on called Instant Forms. This add-on allows you to collect emails, phone numbers, and any other information you might need from within the Instant Experience ad, enabling your sales and marketing teams to create more customizable and engaging content for your prospects.

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In the past, lead generation campaigns on Facebook had difficulty capturing high-quality leads, mainly because there was such a low amount of friction between clicking an ad, and signing up for the campaign. As a result, users tended to get a little too click-happy.

Typically, these leads only had a vague interest and weren’t highly-qualified leads, resulting in both poor data and wasted budgets.

Capturing lead generation data from an Instant Experience ad solves this issue by ensuring that users must go through a “landing page” experience before giving out their information. This can help advertisers find the qualified leads they’re looking for on Facebook, while enjoying the low cost that typically comes with Facebook lead generation campaigns.

3. Link to your campaigns.

All of your Instant Experience campaigns can now be linked together. This enables your visitors to navigate through two or more of your Instant Experiences — creating a seamless journey similar to a mobile website, without requiring users to venture away from the Facebook app.

Ultimately, it’s critical your ad experience is as frictionless as possible. Facebook’s Instant Experiences ensure you’re meeting a segment of your audience on an app they already enjoy, without requiring them to leave Facebook to experience your brand’s content. 

How to Create an Instant Experience Ad

Creating ads can often feel like a daunting undertaking.

For Instant Experiences in particular, the emphasis is on beautiful, striking imagery and design aesthetics that will intrigue your viewers while effectively delivering your message — it’s definitely a little more pressure to perform than your average text-based ad!

Fortunately, to make it easy, Facebook offers multiple templates that can be used to help showcase your products in the Instant Experience format.

Whether you choose to use one of the pre-made templates or create a one-of-a-kind campaign from scratch, it’s easy to get started — here’s how.

1. Head to your Facebook Ads Manager and create a new campaign.

2. Choose a marketing objective that’s supported by Instant Experience, such as traffic, brand awareness, or conversions.

Like any other ad, you need to keep the end goal of your campaign in mind when you’re working on building and launching your Instant Experience. Scroll down and give your new campaign a name, then click “Continue”.

3. Work your way through the audience, budget, and scheduling selections for your ad, then select the format for your ad (e.g. carousel, video, single image, etc).

Note: If you choose “Collection” your Instant Experience will automatically be set for full-screen.

4. Mark the checkbox for “Add an Instant Experience”.

It’s here that you can select a pre-made template to start building your creative, or make your own custom ad.

5. If you want full control over the design and layout to showcase your brand, it’s recommended that you build a custom Instant Experience.

We’re going to select this option.

Give your Instant Experience a name, select the components you want to add, and choose how you’d like to fit them onto a mobile screen. Once you’re done, click “Save”.

Note: To name each creative component, hover over its name (e.g. “photo”) and click. Renaming each component makes it easier to identify later on if you need to change it.

6. To see what your live Instant Experience will look like, or let someone else preview it before it goes live, click “Mobile Preview” and select the Facebook or Instagram preview, or click “Share”.

If everything looks good to roll out, click “Finish”.

And that’s it! You can now publish and run your Instant Experience campaign for the world to see.

Best Practices for Creating Instant Experience Ads

When designing your Instant Experience ads, it’s important to be crystal-clear on the goal of your campaign, and have polished, eye-catching visuals ready to go.

Ads created in this format need to be visually striking to entice viewers into watching your experience.

Additionally, when it comes to your ad text, it’s vital you ensure your creatives can be read from the top-down. Even if you have carousels, it’s important that the ad experience is readable, especially if the user doesn’t swipe through your carousels.

1. Try Collection, the highest-performing format.

When you’re creating Instant Experiences, keep in mind that the best ad vehicle here is the “Collection” format. This requires that you use at least five images in your ad — and every image counts.

Collection ads consist of a large header with four smaller images underneath. When done correctly, collection ads tell a great story and showcase your products in a unique way.

Ultimately, collection ads can result in higher click-through rates and better overall performance for your campaigns. Collection ads in Instant Experience tend to be thumb-stoppers!

2. Keep your design in mind.

With a high level of customization comes an equally high risk of design error. Low resolution images or too much copy can damage your campaigns.

If you don’t have designers on-board to help with your advertising creatives, make sure you read through Facebook’s help guidelines to ensure that you’re creating an ad with the design specs that will drive results for your business.

You don’t need a Nike-sized budget to get the most out of your Instant Experience campaigns, but seeing how leading brands are using these ads can help get your creative juices flowing.

Here are a few success stories.

1. New Balance

The New Balance campaign for the relaunch of one of their products included Instant Experience as part of their advertising funnel. This helped nurture their potential customers from the awareness stage to purchase.

As a result, New Balance saw a measurable lift in consumer engagement and sales from both new and existing customers.

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2. Dollar Shave Club

As you’d expect, Dollar Shave Club isn’t afraid to be innovative with its campaigns. With its “cutting edge” business model, the company was looking for ads that were cost-effective and easy to run.

Using Instant Experience and the collection ad format, they were able to create an immersive user experience that increased their subscription rate by 1.5X while also reducing their cost-per-subscription by 30% (compared to traditional link ads).

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3. Airbnb

This campaign required creatives that were designed specifically for advertising on the Facebook platform.

Instant Experience was the perfect choice to run the ads on, as it enabled Airbnb to showcase its dedication to storytelling and the user experience. The high-quality video and visuals helped them reach 125 million people, and increase subscribers across their target locations.

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4. Cirque du Soleil

To promote its new show, Cirque du Soleil chose to use Instant Experience to capture the incredible costumes and performance artists that have made it a much-loved global sensation.

The goal was to drive awareness and encourage people to buy tickets to their latest show. The highly visual campaign paid off, with an impressive 8.8X return on their ad spend, plus further returns from re-marketing.

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Final Thoughts on Facebook Canvas Ads

If you’re looking for a cost-effective strategy to convey your brand message and showcase your products, it’s worthwhile to consider using Instant Experiences.

With rich, immersive imagery delivered to your customers in a full-screen, fast-loading page, your brand comes to life and has the opportunity to reach a new audience.

As an advertising format, Instant Experiences provides a valuable combination of storytelling and performance, enabling greater engagement with lower acquisition costs — a win, win.