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When you hear the word advertising, what comes to mind?

Do you think of banner ads on your favorite website? Super Bowl commercials? How about the billboards along the highway or posters in the subway stations?

While most of us have a pretty good idea of what advertising looks like, it’s a little harder to nail down exactly what it means — and how to do it well.

From the printing press to pop-up ads, advertising has certainly changed with the times. Despite this, though, the need for advertising hasn’t changed, and neither have the techniques and best practices that make for quality advertising. That’s what we’ll cover in this guide.

Whether on a billboard or the back of a restaurant menu, advertising can go to work for your company in a variety of ways. Here’s how:

• To raise awareness for your brand
• To drive potential customers to your business
• To promote sales for both new and existing products
• To introduce a new product or service to the market
• To differentiate your product from your competitors’

Advertising can also be executed in various ways. Radio commercials, billboards, branded t-shirts, and social media endorsements all count as advertising. Here are the different formats and channels that advertisers have been using for years:

• Print advertising and posters
• Newspapers and magazines
• Outdoor ads and billboards
• Public transit ads
• Sponsorship of TV shows and events
• Radio
• Sponsored web content
• TV commercials
• Online pop-ups and search engines ads
• Social media ads

Advertising can look like many different things. Below, we’ll cover how to advertise on these mediums.

Marketing includes a number of different channels, such as social media, email marketing, public relations, SEO, and paid advertising.

Alternatively, advertising is just one part of marketing.

A company’s overarching marketing strategy will typically include an advertising plan. The advertising zooms in on the specific process of creating and publishing the persuasive messages to get customers to take action.

A Brief History of Advertising

Advertising is one of the oldest segments of business, save for currency and trade. Once products and services arose, so did the need to make them known.

The oldest confirmed piece of advertising dates back to 3,000 B.C. Technically, it was a print ad from ancient Egypt promoting the capture and return of an escaped slave. Incidentally, the ad also mentioned the slave owner’s shop — a rug business — which inherently advertised his storefront, too. The slave was never caught, but the rug owner did discover a brand new method of bringing in traffic: advertising.

Let’s fast-forward about 4,000 years. Here’s a brief look at the past five centuries of advertising:

1472: The first poster advertisement is placed on church doors in London.

1650: The first newspaper ad — a reward for 12 stolen horses — is published. (What’s with the reward-based advertisements?)

1704: The Boston News-Letter prompts its readers to place ads in its paper.

1870: The Powers style of ad copy is born. This style packed a punch — it was short, to-the-point, truthful, and convincing. Powers said the focus should be on why the consumer should buy your product or service — a message that still resonates for good reason today.

1880: Postcards become one of the hottest new ways to reach customers.

1893: Retailer Sears, Roebuck, & Co. joins the mail-order bandwagon by issuing their own catalog. 

1902: Unilever creates the “longest client-agency relationship in advertising history” when it hires J. Walter Thompson Company to advertise its Lifebuoy Soap.

1902: Mellins Food advertises its brand on 25 airship flights, becoming the first brand to take this approach.

1904: The Campbell’s Kids are created, piloting the change in advertisement focus from a single ad to an entire campaign.

1922: Radio ads are born, and businesses purchase 10 mins for $100. Two years later brands would increase their investment by sponsoring an entire radio show, a concept that would eventually become known as “sponsored content.”

1925: Advertisers start to appeal to emotions, focusing on what pleasure customers would receive from their product or service. This old Ford ad exemplifies this perfectly.

1975: VCRs are introduced, and consumers begin to record shows and, therefore, skip advertisements.

1990: Computers become more popular and accessible at home, with over 5 million homes connected to the internet.

1994: The first email spam campaign launches. Banner ads are also introduced.

1995: Search engines like Yahoo! and Alta Vista are born. Ask Jeeves and Google would follow in 1997 and 1998, respectively.

2005: YouTube and Facebook (for college students only) launch.

2008: Brands start to realize the importance of having an online presence for their potential customers. Procter and Gamble pilot the concept of the content hub with BeingGirl.com.

2012: Online videos reach 169.3 million viewers.

2013: Sites like Pinterest and Instagram join the social network scene.

History teaches us that advertising is an ever-changing concept, just like shopping habits and how and where consumers spend their time. Whereas almost 140 years ago, postcards were the newest form of advertising, brands today are building chatbots for Facebook Messenger and integrating artificial intelligence into their marketing and sales platforms.

Things in the advertising world move fast.

The Modern Era: How to Advertise Online

As of today, there are almost 4 billion people using the internet. This number is up 300% from 2005. Point being, internet usage is skyrocketing, and it’s not stopping.

If you’re not advertising online, you’re behind the curve, my friend. Not only does the internet offer you direct access to more than half the global population — including more than half of your target audience — but it also provides so many different channels on which to advertise.

Marketers now have the flexibility to reach their target audiences on multiple fronts, in multiple ways, for multiple budgets. Their are also a number of tools (many of which are free) that can help you execute your advertising strategy.

Here are the most common ways to advertise online:

Paid Search Advertising

Whether Google, Yahoo, or Bing, all search engines have their own paid advertising. This is referred to as pay-per-click, or PPC, and involves bidding on keywords and placing ads at the top or sides of search results.

When someone performs a query using one of those search engines, advertisers have the ability to display ads above organic search results. That’s what makes PPC so powerful — it gives your advertisements prime real estate in front of people already searching for relevant topics.

Featured Resource

• The Ultimate Google AdWords and PPC Kit
• 34 Digital Advertising Myths

Here’s an example on Google:

The top four listings in the red box are advertisements. The lower portion, in the blue box, are organic search results that come up as a result of search engine optimization.

Check out our guide to PPC for more information. 

Social Media Advertising

Social media platforms know how valuable their content is, and that’s why they offer the option to sponsor or boost posts. Social ads put your message in front of your target audience and encourages them to engage, click-through, and buy. More and more, social media sites are prioritizing ad space over organic content because, well, it brings in more revenue.

If you’re a budding business or new brand, consider running some social media advertisements. These will not only advertise your products and services but also promote your social media pages and grow your following.

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter each have their own version of ads like these.

Here’s how they appear on their respective feeds:

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

Twitter

Featured Resources

• The Essential Guide to Social Media Advertising
• The Future of Facebook Advertising
• How to Advertise on Instagram
• How to Run Successful LinkedIn Ads

Native Ads and Sponsored Content

Sponsored content has been around since 1922, when brands would sponsor entire radio shows. Today, sponsored content refers more to native ads and blog or article content subsidized by brands.

Have you ever read a Buzzfeed article that heavily referenced or recommended a certain product or service? It was likely sponsored by a certain brand.

Check out this article, 10 Reasons To Put Away Your Phone On Your Next Trip, promoted by agoda, a hotel or destination booking site. Does it blatantly promote agoda’s services? No. It’s primary purpose is to entertain and inform, although agoda is referenced a few times throughout the content.

At the top, the byline reflects agoda’s sponsorship, just before the content starts. And, as you scroll down the page, another ad sits within the content.

Sponsored content is a great way to promote your brand in content your audience is already familiar with.

Banner and Display Ads

Banner and display ads are an extension of search ads and follow a similar PPC model. But instead of a text-based ad, consumers see a more visual advertisement.

Banner ads are typically the horizontal boxes on top of a web page, whereas display ads are smaller in nature and shown on the side (like in the screenshot above).

Read our 10-step guide to creating banner ads for more information.

Whether you opt for traditional print ads in magazines or subway stations or choose online promotion on social media or search engines, there are a few rules that make for great advertising. Below are some advertising best practices to apply to all your ads.

Advertising Best Practices

There are a lot of best practices, tips, and tricks when it comes to advertising. It’s an art that’s been perfected over the years, and with the rise of modern advertising and new media, best practices continue to manifest.

In this section, though, we’re going to cover five famous advertising concepts that still work today — regardless of what advertising method or medium you’re using.

When used correctly, these advertising techniques will do wonders for your brand and products.

Appeal to Emotions

While you may not consider the ASPCA a business, their unforgettable Sarah McLachlan commercial is the perfect example of using emotional appeal to entice people to take action.

For most of us, the images in that commercial are hard to watch — we may even turn away. But since it tugs at our heartstrings, we’re more likely to donate to animals in need after seeing the horrors they’re going through.

Studies show that people rely on emotions, rather than information, to make brand decisions. Emotional responses to ads influence a person’s intent to buy more than the actual ad content.

Whether you try to evoke happiness, sadness, fear, or anger, appealing to emotions can help your target audience feel your message — not simply read or hear it.

Create Positive Associations

When consumers associate your product with a feeling of happiness, state of achievement, or accomplished goal, they’re more likely to take notice, remember your product or service, and make a purchase.

Actually, you’ve probably been on the receiving end of this before without even realizing it. Have you ever seen your favorite celebrity or Instagram influencer posing with a product or brand and found that you wanted to be, do, or look the same? Companies create this subconscious connection in advertising hoping that you associate your positive feelings with the product or service they’re promoting.

Catchy songs like “Nationwide is on your side” is an example of helping people associate friendliness with the Nationwide brand. Coca-Cola has a brand advertising campaign that associates their product with friends, family, and fun. When you consider what refreshments to serve at a party or bring on a picnic, Coca-Cola wants you to think of them.

As you create your advertisements, consider what feelings, desires, or goals with which you want your brand to be associated. Weave these feelings or goals into your advertisements through stories or videos. Look for influencers who align with your brand’s core values and demeanor and include them to promote positive association.

Establish a Bandwagon Effect

People want to fit in. It’s human nature. Neither you nor I are immune to it.

And it’s this base human desire that makes the bandwagon effect so effective. People don’t want to be left out. They find value in their peers’ opinions, and they certainly don’t want to be the only ones not using the latest and greatest product.

Brands like Maybelline understand this concept well and use it to their advertising advantage. One tube of their top-selling mascara is purchased every two seconds, a statistic that establishes social proof and further supports their claim of “America’s Favorite Mascara.”

Use customer testimonials, survey data, or shareable content to advertise your brand as one worth following or buying into. Take another approach by promoting a discount for sharing your brand with a friend or family member — so your audience will do the selling for you. Either way, use your advertising to create an inclusive environment people will want to join.

Focus on Benefits Over Features

Features and benefits are two very different things. Features are the details of the product or service you’re selling, such as the measurements of a couch or the ingredients of a protein bar. Benefits, on the other hand, explain why a person should buy a couch or protein bar from you and how their life would, well, benefit from such a purchase.

Advertising should focus on the benefit your product or service brings, not explain what you’re physically selling.

Consider how Southwest Airlines advertises. Instead of explaining, line by line, what a Business Select ticket offers, Southwest paints a picture of what life would be like if you made a purchase. In this advertisement, they focus on the benefits.

Rather than wasting precious ad space on your product specifications or service details, talk about the ways a purchase might positively impact your customers. If you do it right, your creative, benefit-packed advertisement would then inspire them to research the features on their own.

Use Storytelling

Not unlike our desire to fit in is our penchant for a good story. Storytelling helps paint a bigger picture of a brand or company, not simply promote a single product or service. Also, when stories resonate with someone, it’s far easier to motivate him or her to take action.

Storytelling is the one technique you should try to infuse in all your advertising. In fact, if you haven’t started crafting your brand’s overall story, you should definitely do so. Research shows that stories that illustrate a brand as “necessary, believable, and integral” are the most effective for engaging and influencing consumers.

Dove employs storytelling in its campaign partnership with Operation Homefront. The videos feature real stories of military men and their families being reunited. The advertisements don’t directly promote Dove products but instead tell the Dove brand story (and pull on a few heartstrings, too).

Determining your brand story will help you learn how to best discuss your brand in all marketing efforts, not just advertising.

Next, let’s take a look at some of the most memorable ad campaigns, a few of which put these best practices in action.

Five Memorable Ad Campaigns

The best advertisements are the best teachers. Whether it’s the copywriting, design, medium, or target audience, well-executed campaigns can always teach you something new about advertising or positioning. (Consider Westinghouse Electric’s “We Can Do It” ad…)

Here are five campaigns that left a noticeable mark on advertising history:

Nike: Just Do It

In the late 1980s, Nike launched their “Just Do It” campaign.

At the time, Reebok was outselling Nike, and Nike needed to act fast to compete against the sneaker conglomerate.

But it wasn’t just the three-word phrase that earned global attention. Their new ad campaign also focused on real people wearing and working out in their products, as opposed to simply featuring clothes and sneakers themselves.

This powerful combination of people plus product helped Nike go from $800 million in 1988 to $9.2 billion just 10 years later.

The Absolut Vodka Bottle

Did you know Absolut’s “Bottles in the Wild” ad series is the longest uninterrupted campaign in history? The campaign was Absolut’s attempt to grow their name internationally, especially throughout the United States. It featured the Absolut bottle in different cities and countries worldwide.

It launched in 1985 and ran until 2000 — lasting an impressive 25 years.

Absolut’s campaign helped grow the company from a tiny slice of the vodka market share (2.5%) to over half the U.S. imported market share.

To this day, the Absolut brand is the fourth largest spirit company, thanks to their focus on the overall story, not just the product itself.

Miller Lite

The folks at Miller Lite used differentiation to reach their goal: to get “real men” to willingly drink light beers. With their “Great Taste, Less Filling” campaign, they maintained a leading position in the light beer market for several decades after this first campaign aired.

Volkswagen

Though Volkswagen has officially discontinued its production of Beetles, its iconic “Think Small” campaign will be forever ingrained in advertising history.

Doyle Dane & Bernbach (DDB) advertising agency knew it had to change the mind of consumers if it wanted to compete with industry leaders. So, VW admitted that though the Beetle was, in fact, tiny, it was still a force to be reckoned with and worth a purchase.

Authenticity and honesty went a long way in this seemingly small campaign.

Dos Equis

With its edgy, cool, and sophisticated aesthetic, it’s no surprise “The Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign put Dos Equis on the map.

This campaign created a positive association between the Dos Equis beer and the feeling of sophistication and poise. Sales quickly jumped by 22% after the campaign launched.

Even more impressive was how Dos Equis found success in a time when craft beers grabbed a foothold in the market and imported beer took a 4% hit. This campaign was major component of that success.

To learn how to grab the attention of your audience, learn from the professionals. These campaigns are a great example of how brands have used real stories, real people, and real talk to grow their businesses.

Advertising Helps You Grow Better

Equipped with a dense, dynamic history, advertising is an incredible tool to add to your marketing tool box.

Between print ads, radio sponsorship, TV commercials, and social media promotion, the opportunities to advertise and promote your brand are endless.

To best connect and engage with your audience, speak your customer’s language, appeal to their emotions, and tap into their desire to be a part of a community, create a clear and authentic brand story to illustrate how your brand aligns with their values.

By applying these tried and true practices to your advertising, you’ll build a magnetic brand that attracts customers, establishes a following, and generates revenue.

Do this and your brand will grow into a household name that stands the test of time — just like advertising itself.

Are you looking to expand your business’s reach? Would you like to expose your brand to new people who’d likely be interested in your product or service?

Welcome to the world of public relations.

Public relations defines how a company communicates with people — customers, partners, journalists, philanthropists, politicians, and the general public. All businesses need public relations, regardless of their size or industry.

Why? Because, nowadays, customers want to trust the brands they do business with — and nothing builds and fosters trust like public relations.

What is public relations?

Public relations (PR) is the practice of leveraging media channels to promote your organization and cultivate a positive public perception. PR is also the process of managing your organization’s brand and communications — especially in times of crisis.

PR is how brands manage the spread of their information, so it’s similar to branding. The main difference is that PR is focused on communication and reputation, whereas branding relies on visual elements like logos, websites, and marketing materials.

Brands manage their PR — or communication and reputation — through various media channels.

Media: Owned vs. Paid vs. Earned

The types of public relations, which we’ll review shortly, can be organized into three main categories: owned, paid, and earned media. Each type works towards the same goal of building a positive brand reputation, but they use different strategies to get there.

Your PR strategies should include all three, as they all provide different ways of reaching, engaging, and building trust with your audience.

Owned media

Owned media is defined as any content that your business controls. It’s often the go-to strategy for businesses looking to build a PR campaign.

Rightly so, as it’s arguably the most important type of PR-related media that you should be focusing on. This is because you have total control — unlike the other two media tactics.

Owned media includes:

• Social media posts
• Blog content
• Website copy
• Email newsletters

Owned media acts as a “home base” for your PR activity. When people write about your brand or products, they’ll likely reference (i.e. link to) your owned media in their coverage.

Paid media

It’s not uncommon to pay to promote your content in the marketing world … and it’s no different when it comes to PR.

Paid media refers to paying to make your content visible. It’s standard practice to promote owned media.

Paid media includes:

• Social media advertising
• Influencer marketing
• Pay-per-click (PPC)

Putting some funds toward boosting PR content is becoming increasingly popular. Since the majority of social platforms are reducing organic reach for business accounts, paid media is a fantastic way to make sure your content gets in front of the people you want to see it.

Earned media

Earned media is the tactic used to boost conversation around your brand. It’s essentially word-of-mouth and is arguably the best PR tactic to build your reputation.

Earned media is the hardest type of PR media to obtain. It takes a lot of effort, consistency, and hard work to establish it — hence why it’s “earned”.

Earned media includes:

• Mentions in industry news and reviews
• Praise from customers on social media
• High rankings on search engines

All of these media avenues provide ways to use PR to build brand awareness, generate leads, and convert those leads into paying customers — similar to your marketing. Now, let’s discuss the difference.

Unlike marketing, PR doesn’t always have an impact on sales. It typically indirectly promotes your products or services through activities like press release distribution and speaking at industry events. Alternatively, instead of improving the perception of your business, marketing campaigns focus on driving revenue and boosting profits.

People don’t buy products, they buy brands. For this reason, using PR and marketing in tandem drives the best results: typically, someone connects with your brand as a result of your PR efforts and converts into a customer as a result of your marketing tactics.

Studies show that brand consistency can result in a revenue boost of over 20%. You could be seeing similar results by combining your PR and marketing strategies.

Now, let’s discuss the types of PR you may leverage as you promote your organization and build and manage your reputation.

Business Events

Business events are opportunities to market your products or services and gain exposure for your brand. Whether hosted or attended by your company, events are also important sales opportunities. Events give you a chance to meet prospective customers and delight current ones face-to-face.

Speaking engagements at events are also helpful for boosting brand awareness and sharing unique thought leadership or data-driven information that can help elevate your brand.

Community Relations

Community relations refers to building positive relationships with the local community around your business. This could include charity work, donations, special discounts, or anything that builds a strong relationship with the community and strengthens customer loyalty.

Corporate and Social Responsibility

Corporate and social responsibility is similar to community relations, but it places a greater emphasis on ethical business practices, environmental responsibility, and philanthropy — locally, regionally, and globally. This is a critical area of PR as it directly affects public perception of your brand.

Crisis Management

Crisis management is the practice of acknowledging, managing, and working to reverse negative communication and perception surrounding a business crisis. Anything that could jeopardize or ruin your brand’s reputation should be handled through PR.

Manage, plan for, and communicate during your corporate crises with this free crisis management communication kit.

Crisis management is an important function of PR and should be handled quickly, consistently, and strategically. With certain PR tools, crises can be averted through monitoring online chatter and quality-checking any marketing or promotional material that may be misunderstood or misconstrued.

Employee Relations

Employee relations, also known as internal PR, is the practice of communicating with and cultivating a positive employee perception of your company. This process may include dedicated employee newsletters or communications, employee perks and benefits, free training and skill-boosting opportunities, employee appreciation events, and working with unions or employee groups.

Employee relations not only keeps your employees motivated, hard-working, and loyal, but it also encourages them to advocate for your business — which can bring in both customers and more high-quality employees.

Media Relations

Media relations refers to building positive relationships with journalists, publications, and other news outlets. This process typically includes writing press releases, organizing press releases, and scheduling interviews. Not only does this gain exposure for your business and products but it also encourages the media to market your brand for free.

Download our free Inbound Press Release Kit to access step-by-step templates to build press releases and a promotion plan.

Social Media

Social media is considered both an earned and paid PR tactic. For most companies, social media can be a helpful PR (and marketing) tool —it’s an effective way to amass followers, convert customers, share your content, and resolve crises.

Whether you’re sharing a post with your audience or interacting with a single customer, your social media activity is open to the public. That’s why it’s critical to have a social media strategy that keeps your communications consistent, positive, and accurate.

Now, let’s talk about the who’s responsible for these different types of PR: your PR manager.

What does a PR manager do?

PR managers are responsible for building, executing, and monitoring your PR strategies and tactics. They typically handle crisis communications, write press releases, and lead a team of other PR professionals who manage your brand’s public presence.

Let’s discuss the skills and tasks your PR manager(s) will master.

PR Manager Skills

Successful PR managers have a particular set of skills — below, I will cover a few important ones.

Great communication

One primary focus of public relations is building your business’s reputation. To do this, PR managers spend a lot of their time speaking about your company at public functions, press conferences, and other events. For this reason, excellent communication is a key skill for PR managers.

Writing skills

PR managers should also be able to communicate well in written form.

Since PR managers are responsible for writing press releases and company-related news, strong writing skills will help convey the appropriate message to promote your company. This is especially useful for online PR where you’ll need to create blog posts, website content, and press releases to gain coverage.

Creativity

Similar to marketing, creativity goes a long way in the public relations world. Great PR managers are creative and know how to create a strategy that stands out from the crowd, which is important because a unique story or perspective will drive PR coverage.

Strong research skills

Public relations is a social industry, and people might be talking about your brand without directly mentioning it. Good research skills will help PR managers find and leverage these opportunities.

PR managers will also need to do lots of research when planning your PR strategy. Because they might need additional information, statistics, and data points to boost the power of their owned media, strong research skills are essential.

PR Manager Tasks

The day-to-day tasks of your PR manager can vary depending on your industry, active PR campaigns, PR team size, and other factors. However, here’s what they often include:

• Writing press releases to announce company-related news
• Creating fact sheets and media kits about the company to send to media teams for brand-building
• Giving media training to both in-house and external teams
• Attending and speaking at industry events and representing the brand at trade shows, recruiting events, etc.
• Finding and analyzing media coverage and promoting that content through owned and paid media channels

Public relations managers are also responsible for tracking and measuring their PR efforts. The following key performance indicators (KPIs) can help your public relations manager(s) analyze and improve your PR strategies.

Measuring your PR performance and impact can be tough. These KPIs will help you track your PR efforts and determine the effectiveness of your PR strategy.

1. Backlinks

Backlinks help you find where and in what context your brand has been mentioned. With backlinks, sites who’ve mentioned your brand have linked to your website, making it easy for readers to click-through and visit your website (and easy for you to track).

But, it’s not just new traffic you’ll benefit from when collecting backlinks — you could see a rise in your SEO rankings, too.

2. Brand Mentions

Brand mentions occur when someone mentions your brand. This metric is important because it helps you measure awareness of your brand.

You might see brand mentions in traditional news coverage, on other business or personal blogs, in reviews, or on social media. Some mentions may be tagged or hyperlinked, and some may not link back to your brand or website — which means you have to go looking for them. Check out the PR tools section for some helpful software tools.

Note: It’s important to read brand mentions for context. Remember, you want people to be saying good things about your brand, and it’s not always easy to understand the value of coverage until you read the entire piece. (I talk about measuring sentiment below.)

3. Conversions

While the volume of new customers coming directly from your PR activity isn’t the easiest to measure, it is definitely worth investigating.

You can discover where your customers came from by either surveying customers after they purchase and asking how they heard of you or by using a tool like Google Analytics to learn about your customers’ conversion paths (a.k.a. their route to purchase).

Note: While this is an exciting metric to track, don’t feel disheartened if you don’t see an influx of conversion-ready site traffic. Remember, the goal of PR is to raise brand awareness, spread the ideas of your internal thought leaders, and communicate the ideas of your brand — those new site visitors could always return and make a purchase in the future (now that they know about your brand because of your PR).

4. Domain Authority

Domain authority refers to your website’s SEO ranking and how it performs in search results.

It’s ranked from 1 to 100 (with 100 being the highest) and is a valuable measure of how your website compares to your competitors’. The higher your domain authority is, the better your website will rank in search results.

Domain authority is made up of three main factors: links to your site (backlinks), links from your site to other, well-ranked websites, and the age of your site. While you can’t magically make your website older, you can leverage PR to attract backlinks and place links in your content.

Moz offers a free tool to check your domain authority, page rank, and other important website measures.

5. Sentiment

Sentiment, which is a synonym “viewpoint,” “opinion,” or “attitude,” measures how your brand is mentioned. While brand mentions and backlinks typically improve your brand awareness and SEO, sentiment is what sets apart the positive mentions from the negative one.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” While I can’t agree or disagree, I’d say that it’s at least good practice to be aware of negative press. Tracking sentiment can help you understand what your audience is saying about your brand and whether or not you need to address any problems or concerns. Check out the PR tools section for some helpful tools.

6. Site Traffic

Site traffic is a sign of successful PR efforts. If people are hearing about your brand through earned media and heading to your site, your PR efforts are reaching your audience.

As you run PR campaigns, track your site traffic once press releases and other efforts go live. Use your site analytics to check your visitors’ referral sources (how they made their way to your website) and aim to replicate this in the future.

7. Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement encompasses a few types of activity: views, impressions, likes, shares, and comments.

This information shows the level of brand awareness and engagement among your audience members. It also tells you when your audience is most active, i.e. when should be posting and interacting with your followers.

8. Social Shares

Social shares are different than social media engagement. Social shares refer to when your audience shares something from your website or blog on their social media.

This is a critical metric because it tells you that your audience enjoys your content enough to vouch for it on their social channels. It’s a very clear measure of your brand reputation among your audience.

When looking at social shares, pay attention to which type of content is frequently being shared. This will give you an idea of what your audience enjoys the most and what kind of content to create more of.

Now, let’s review a handful of PR SaaS tools that can help you implement your PR strategies and track the PR KPIs I’ve mentioned above.

Public Relations Tools

We’ve rounded up a handful of helpful PR tools to help you execute your PR campaigns and measure your impact and performance.

Agility PR Solutions

Agility PR Solutions is a paid tool that provides powerful yet easy-to-use solutions for your media database, monitoring, and analytics. These solutions help identify and connect with influencers, capture coverage, and measure impact.

ANewsTip

ANewsTip is a media search, monitoring, and relationship management tool. You can use it to search media mentions by keyword or handle, reach out to journalists and influencers all over the world, and create a media database of important PR campaign contacts. It offers both paid and free plan options.

CoverageBook

CoverageBook is a paid tool that helps you find and collect any coverage of your PR content. It’s a great tool for PR agencies who are building coverage reports for their clients.

Flaunter

Flaunter is a paid tool that gives you media access to brand content and PR samples. As a business, it’s a place to publish high-quality brand and product imagery so journalists, influencers, and bloggers can share it.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is an easy-to-use, free tool that allows you to set up email alerts for certain keyword mentions. When a name, keyword, or link is mentioned online, Google sends you a digest email alerting you of the mention.

Mention

Mention helps you track who’s mentioned your brand in media and on social media. You can also use this tool to publish on your social media and manage crisis communications. It offers both free and paid plan options.

Monitor Backlinks

Monitor Backlinks is a free tool that helps you track who’s mentioned your brand in coverage and included a backlink to your site. It’s also valuable for monitoring and disavowing bad backlinks and keeping your website’s SEO and domain authority at its peak.

Muck Rack

Muck Rack is a paid tool that allows you to discover and contact members of the media who might be interested in covering your PR story.

PR Fire

PR Fire is a paid tool helps you distribute your press release to journalists and receive a report of their performance and reach. It’s ideal for in-house teams who’re doing their own PR.

SharedCount

SharedCount shows you engagement data for any social media, blog, or website URL. Once you input a URL, the tool will tally its likes, shares, comments, and other engagement measures. It offers both free and paid plan options.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a free tool (created by Twitter) that monitors Twitter activity. You can set up Twitter streams that track certain keywords, accounts, trends, or other filters.

Start Building Your Public Relations Strategy

With all these tactics, tools, and strategy-building tips, are you ready to start turning the wheels on your new PR strategy? I hope so! I can’t wait to read about your brand in the news.

However, there’s one thing you should keep in mind: PR is an ongoing, iterative strategy — not a one-off task. (In fact, the best PR involves multiple tasks, tactics, and strategies.) Just like marketing, it can take a while to see results.

But with a solid strategy and a commitment to spreading the word about your company, you’ll soon see more mentions, backlinks, and general buzz. And that’s a great way to build a memorable brand.

Doesn’t it feel like most people are falling a little too much in love with automation just because it’s faster and easier? When you’re running multiple social media accounts on platforms like Instagram, the possibility of automating all your regular tasks can be even more tempting. 

But what is Instagram automation. and is it legit?

Sure, automation can save you time and mitigate the grind associated with repetitive tasks. But does it produce better results? Can a bot truly be effective at replacing human interaction?

The answer — according to Instagram — is no. In fact, it’s against Instagram’s policy to have a bot-based account. Since 2018, they’ve killed a large number of bot accounts. So, obviously, we advise you not to do it.

If you really wanted to use a bot and are devastated by this news, don’t be. You’re better off without one.

Before this policy came to be — we ran a pretty interesting bot experiment of our own. We wanted to see the best way to build an engaged audience on Instagram, so we decided to test outbound automation against human engagement — and see which one got better results.

In this post, we’ll highlight how we set up the experiment and what the results revealed. 

Spoiler: The humans won!

What do we Mean by Engaged Audience?

An engaged audience contains people who actually care about what you post. What’s the point in running up a large follower count if the people on that list don’t engage with your content?

It’s easy to artificially inflate your follower numbers, which is impressive at a superficial glance — but it doesn’t indicate that your content actually has any impact.

An engaged audience contains followers who like your posts, comment when you add something, and respond to your comments. It’s about creating a loyal following that opens up conversation and opportunity for all parties involved.

How do Instagram bots work?

If you were to build an Instagram bot, you’d usually work with some type of company that provides bot-related AI software. If you have AI engineers or people who’ve worked with machine learning in the past, they could potentially build this for you. 

To work properly, the bot would need to use machine learning and deep learning algorithms. While machine learning algorithms allow the bot to recognize text patterns, like captions and direct messages, deep learning — a form of machine learning — would allow it to analyze objects in photos and videos. This could allow the bot to comment appropriately on photos, or surf the web for photos that it could post. 

To determine whether this advanced technology would actually work or not on the platform, I teamed up with Fouad Tolaib, Founder of Jolted, to develop the framework for a bot experiment.

We had two initial hypotheses:

1. The automated account will have more followers. A bot’s ability to reach more people would be more seamless than a human’s.
2. Automation currently isn’t sophisticated enough to be as effective at connecting with an audience peer-to-peer.

The Profiles

The experiment featured two identical profiles where I branded myself as a digital nomad. The first account, @liveworksee, had Instagram interactions come from a person:

The second account, @work_live_see, was automated.

Rules for the Instagram Experiment

After setting up two Instagram profiles, we set the following parameters around the experiment:

1. Each account contained the same profile description.
2. We posted the same content at the same time on both profiles each day, for one month.
3. Every post contained the same hashtags to drive inbound engagement.

All of the results over 30 days were tracked by Minter.io.

The Human Profile (@liveworksee)

All outbound engagement was done by a human. We defined “human” by using organic engagement — that means a real person commented on and liked other Instagram posts from this account.

The Automated Profile (@work_live_see)

All outbound engagement was controlled by Gramista’s automation software. We allowed it to log in on our behalf, set specific hashtags to target, applied restrictive filters, set the algorithm on ‘auto like,’ and gave permission for the bot to leave a certain amount of generic comments.

The Results

Thirty days later, we found some surprising results.

The average post engagement rate — which we calculated by taking the sum of likes and comments, divided by the number of posts on a profile, then divided by followers — on our organic engagement profile was nearly 3X higher.

That meant one thing:

The Loser: Bots. The Winner: Humans!

In addition to a significantly higher engagement, the organic engagement profile had over 2,000 more likes, and the number of comments was 41% higher.

Follower Demographics

The demographics of followers also skewed significantly. Female followers of the automated account were just 35.8%, compared to 47.8% on the organic engagement profile. At last check, Instagram users overall are predominantly female.

The number of private users that followed the organic engagement profile was also close to 3X more.

The top country of origin for followers on the automated profile was India (28%), followed by the United States (13%). For the human-run account, U.S. was first (22%), and Italy second (8%). On the organic profile, India was sixth, comprising 4% of followers.

Reaching Influencers

We then looked at the number of popular, or influencer profiles. Minter.io defines “popular” or “influencer” according to a user’s  follower-to-following ratio. The more followers that user has, compared to the number of users they follow, the more influential they are per this metric.

Popular and influencer profiles comprised 30.95% of the organic engagement profile’s followers, compared to 15.41% on the automated profile.

Photo Engagement

Interestingly, despite posting uniform content on each profile, the most engaged-with photos on each account were also different.

The most engaging photos on the human-run profile were:

• A small harbor in Colombia.
• A shot of Macchu Picchu.
• A little boy and woman walking in Viacha, Bolivia.

And on the automated profile:

• A shot of the moon hanging over a mountain range in La Paz, Bolivia.
• A man in sunglasses posing next to a bunch of flags left at the top of a mountain.
• An archaeological site in western Bolivia.

The best performing hashtags on the human-operated profile were #ilovetravel, #neverstopexploring, and #travelgoals, while the automated profile’s top three were #neverstopexploring, #digitalnomads, and #ilovetravel.

The only two hashtags to crack the organic profile’s top ten that didn’t make it on the automated results were #instatravel (just over 1,500 interactions) and #backpack (1,450).

Alternatively, #nomadlife (900 interactions) and #travellife (910 interactions) made the automated profile’s top ten hashtags, but not the human-run profile’s.

The key point here: Automated software may not necessarily detect all hashtags generating a high number of interactions.

Scheduling Future Posts

Minter.io also determined, based on the organic profile’s data, that the best time of the week to post for engagement was Monday night and Tuesday evening.

An aggregate report from CoSchedule confirms that the best time to post is typically Monday mornings and evenings.

However, on the automated account, the greatest time for engagement was on Saturday afternoons.

Lessons Learned

1. Automation Leads to Less Engagement.

The end number of followers on the automated profile was 799, compared to 621 for the personally managed account. Automated tools will run up the follower count faster and get you off to a quicker start, but organic engagement creates a more engaged audience.

Generic comments and rapid liking does not create the same kind of human connection that followers actually crave. The organic profile generated a significantly larger amount of engagement with the average rate being nearly three times more.

2. Organic Engagement Has A Higher Content Reach Potential

For the organic profile, the potential reach of content (regramming, future partnerships, etc.) was also higher as we looked at the number of followers who were influencers or popular. Responding to each comment with a personal touch made for more engagement with private Instagram users as well.

3. Automation Connects More With Bots Than Humans.

We found the automated profile had more automated followers. Yes: bots following bots. In other words, these followers were either scheduling a large amount posts of posts, or leaving very generic messages.

That’s likely due to a bot’s inability to recognize the difference between generic comments and real responses. However, humans will naturally connect more with a thoughtful response and ignore a meaningless “awesome!” comment.

So, how do you build an engaged audience?

Have someone (yes, a real person) spend two-to-three hours per day per day on your Instagram profile completing tasks including:

• Replying to all comments
• Liking other posts
• Adding insightful comments to other posts
• Asking followers questions to connect with them
• Researching emerging content trends and hashtags
• Reaching out to influencers

From our observations, we believe tailoring your content to your target audience, engaging naturally and consistently with both followers and non-followers, and using targeted tags (up to 30) in your post’s first comment all contribute to an increased rate of post engagement.

Automation can supplement the speed of your growth, particularly in regards to follower count, but it should not be relied on as the only strategy for Instagram.

If you’re tight on time, a combination of automated and manual outbound engagement might work best.

However, when it comes to commenting on other people’s content, there’s no better alternative than a human responding with something specific. This has proved to be true in our case study and resulted in a higher conversion (non-follower to follower) ratio.

After all, this is social media – it’s about human connection and social sharing.

If we all just have bots running our profiles and interacting with each other, what’s the point of doing it at all?

For more engagement tips, check out our Ultimate Guide to Instagram Marketing. You can also click here for a guide to using hashtags.

Since 2010, Instagram has garnered more than 500 million users, 4.2 billion daily likes, and more than 95 million photos and videos posted per day. Brands who take advantage of this unique social media platform often find that the level of exposure that Instagram gives them is unprecedented.

But creating a successful, branded Instagram account requires more than just pretty images. To succeed, you’ll need to establish a distinct brand aesthetic, a well-curated feed, and an effective community management strategy — all stemming from your own unique brand identity.

With millions of active accounts, we managed to uncover five main tips and ten inspiring brands that’ll help you understand how to establish a more cohesive Instagram aesthetic.

Instagram Aesthetic Ideas

Once you establish your brand identity and define your target market, you can curate your Instagram content to meet that criteria. Instagram is the platform for captivating content, and brands can capitalize on this with consistent and creative posts. 

When people talk about an Instagram “aesthetic”, they mean a cohesive type, mood, and general impression of a user’s posts. By presenting a seamless aesthetic that is consistent with your core brand values, you are aligning your brand with your target audience and are, therefore, building awareness. In this sense, your Instagram aesthetic is just as important as your website.

First impressions are everything on Instagram, so here are a few ideas for building your aesthetic:

1. Know exactly what your brand identity is.

A great part of your aesthetic will derive from your brand identity. What’s your brand personality and tone? What are its values? Is your brand playful? Adventurous? Bold and daring?

Having an Instagram feed that reflects the image and purpose of your brand is extremely important because it creates uniformity. Posting content that is random creates disconnect and confusion. When this happens, it’s hard to commit hitting that follow button. See how Taco Bell and fashion illustrator Megan Hess incorporate this into their Instagram feed.

2. Determine your target market and cater to them without compromising your brand identity.

Your Instagram feed is primarily meant to attract existing and future customers, so it’s important to create content that pulls them in and engages them. To do this, start by getting to know what’s important to your target market — what they love about your brand, products, and services. Then, reflect that back to them in your Instagram feed.

Need inspiration? Check out how brands like GoPro and Squarespace are doing it.

3. Create a story with each photo displayed on the post.

The more compelling your story, the less it would feel to your customers that you’re just selling them something. Narratives tied with your brand identity create the emotional connection your audience needs, giving meaning to your content and making it more relatable.

The story you tell plays a great part in creating brand loyalty from your customers. Instagram is a great avenue for telling this story just as Nike and Red Bull have been doing.

4. Choose a color palette, “feel,” or filter and use it consistently.

Using a color palette, filter, or even texture in your Instagram posts can give you that much sought-after level of consistency in your feeds. To tie all your posts together and enhance your feed’s look, try using the same two to four filers on your posts. You can choose a vintage look, a light and bright lens, or whatever is most aligned with your brand’s personality. Try desaturating your photos or stick to bright white backgrounds with pops of color. Or, create your own brand color palette by playing around with three to four color combinations to repeat in your posts.

Check out how Tough Mudder repeats orange and brown in their posts and how Pantone plays around with their featured colors.

5. Post content that reflects your brand’s core value.

Don’t be afraid to use Instagram marketing to show off your products or service at work — just get creative. Take detailed shots and create eye-catching flat lays that show off your products in new and interesting ways.

These shots can even encourage and inspire your followers to create their own posts featuring your products to share with their followers. Not only will you increase your brand’s interaction, but you’ll also have user-generated content that’s authentic and organic.

Check out how the Office Depot and Fabletics use products shots to engage their followers and creative a consistent, memorable aesthetic. 

You can also post user-generated content (UGC) — posts sourced from customers and followers — to build brand trust and awareness. Oftentimes, users will tag your brand in their own posts — you can then screenshot and post the content, or use a reposting app. UGC can only mean good things: prospects are likely to evaluate customer reviews when looking to buy, and it makes your brand look trustworthy and beloved. 

6. Plan ahead!

Most well-organized Instagram aesthetics are organized and planned ahead. Some accounts plan posts on a chronological basis — like seasonal, monthly, or quarterly timelines — but others plan in terms of content. For instance, they might try to post consistently about a certain product or event, or create a repeated series of posts per row surrounding a specific topic like quotes or food.

7. Create a branded hashtag.

We all know hashtags are helpful for reaching new audiences. A branded hashtag, however, is unique to a company, product, or event that is used to help promote whatever it represents. For example, the #ShareACoke campaign was one of the best-performing marketing campaigns in Coca-Cola’s history. It appeals to their target audience, was effectively shared across all media channels, and reflects Coca-Cola’s core brand values.

Instagram Aesthetic Examples

Taco Bell (@tacobell): 1.3M Followers

When you think Taco Bell, you think tacos and “LiVE MÀS!” This means that social media accounts will reflect a lot of tacos, bold colors, and a lifestyle that includes living fast and “on the go” like their individual posts on Instagram.

Since Taco Bell’s main audience has been increasingly attributed to millennials, they have focused on inserting fun and authenticity into their aesthetic, which makes it easier for them to drum up engagement.

Vitruvi (@vitruvi): 67.7K Followers

Vitruvi, an essential oil company, has a soothing and aspirational Instagram feed. They make good use of one or two filters, post simple images, and show women living their best lives. They are associating their products with clean, happy, and healthy lifestyles.

Megan Hess (@meganhess_official): 377K Followers

Megan Hess is an illustrator known for her very beautiful, feminine, and fashion-related artwork. She has built an empire on fashion illustrations that are coveted and aesthetically pleasing. Instagram has become her main outlet for her fans to follow her work and get a glimpse of what happens behind-the-scenes.

As an illustrator, she’s big on personal brand recognition, so she frequently uses one of her most important brand assets in her posts: her logo. Simple, black, and uniquely hers, the logo perfectly matches her aesthetic and illustrations which makes it easy for her to include it with any Instagram post.

Having a distinctive logo is critical to building your brand, so it’s important to create one that’s easily recognizable and matches your brand identity. If your own needs a spruce or you’re looking to create a file that’s easily adaptable for your social posts, try using Canva’s free logo maker.

GoPro (@gopro): 15.9M Followers

GoPro’s Instagram photos perfectly represent what it means to capture a lifestyle full of adventure and action through the lens of their product.

Their feed focuses on showcasing a variety of unique moments designed to drive you to want to go out and document your own adventures.

Old Navy (@oldnavy): 2M Followers

If you’re trying to sell consumer clothing, you need to meet their seasonal needs. Old Navy is a retail company that knows how to sell for seasonality, and their Instagram reflects this. For summer, Old Navy brought out bright yellows, light sundresses, and generally tried to create backgrounds to reflect a summertime mood. 

They also have a unique color strategy — for instance, they might gradually transition from yellow to blue in a series of posts.

Squarespace (@squarespace): 193K Followers

If we’re talking about well-curated content tailored for an audience, we have to talk about Squarespace’s Instagram. Promising the simplest way to create a beautiful website, the brand echoes its tagline through a beautifully-curated feed.

Squarespace intrigues followers by using impressive images reflecting the brand’s minimalist aesthetic. Best of all, it features images from clients, showcasing success stories and the wide range of possibilities on how the Squarespace service can be used, which helps to engage followers and inspire potential clients.

ColourPop Cosmetics (@colourpopcosmetics): 8.1M Followers

ColourPop is a cosmetics brand based in Los Angeles that understands what users want from makeup posts on Instagram, and delivers it. They maintain a bright collection of tutorial videos, product posts, swatches, images of influencers, and pop culture. Each image is glorious and eye-catching.

Nike (@nike): 90.9M Followers

With one of the largest followings on Instagram, Nike’s feed goes beyond just great athletic sportswear and footwear. They have created a distinctive “Just Do It” mentality and systematically developed a social media presence to reflect that inspirational brand image.

As seen in the post above, along with the rest of the recent videos uploaded on their Instagram feed, Nike has done an incredible job of featuring inspiring athletes to promote propel their vision. If you want to perform at the highest level like these athletes, you wear Nike.

Doug the Pug (@itsdougthepug): 3.8M Followers

Who doesn’t love dog pics?It seems like everyone has an Instagram for their beloved pets these days, but Doug the Pug is the most famous dogstagram account in the world. This verified pup has almost four million followers and is best known for his many costumes and floppy tongue. Doug (and his owner) have cultivated a brand that brings audiences’ joy and keeps them coming back for more.

Red Bull (@redbull): 11.6M Followers

When you think of Red Bull, you think high energy. That’s why Red Bull’s Instagram feed includes so many “epic” videos and pictures — each one more thrilling than the other.

Red Bull associates their brand with a lifestyle that is exhilarating and pushes boundaries when it comes to extreme sports and weekend getaways. Another way they create a narrative is through the cohesive feel of their posts. Notice below how majority of their posts are set in the outdoors. It helps create the image that when you drink Red Bull, you live on the edge.

Tough Mudder (@tough_mudder): 935K Followers

Tough Mudder has built an image on conquering a military-inspired obstacle that requires teamwork, tenacity, and a whole lot of feeling like a total “badass.” Tough Mudder’s Instagram feed is brimming with pictures that highlight muddy participants sporting the color orange, which helps to signify the brightness and sense of camaraderie that exists in a otherwise challenging situation.

The beauty of Tough Mudder’s Instagram feed is their ability to capture moments of participants’ emotions throughout the completion of the course. They have mastered the art of evoking feelings of strength and the desire to accomplish a difficult task that only a select group of people has achieved.

The pictures of training hard and being part of a program that pushes you to your limits is exciting as it is rewarding. Tough Mudder showcases a curated Instagram feed that addresses perseverance and toughness, just as its brand name indicates.

Pantone (@pantone): 2M Followers

Striking visuals are everything on Instagram, and Pantone’s instagram looks like a color wheel. The color consulting firm uses high resolution images, and each post captures a particular color in a unique way. Additionally, Pantone takes advantage of the space on their Instagram homepage — every 3-6 photos highlights a different color through clothing, architectures, or paint color samples.

Office Depot (@officedepot): 15K Followers

Through some well-thought planning, the Office Depot is able to showcase its sheer amount of products in fun and interesting combinations. Their “Gear Up for Great” campaign is a great example of featuring products inventively while staying true to its business.

Office Depot is also great at curating content that’s relevant. They do this by working with themes and seasons like “Gearing up for School”, as well as holidays like Teacher’s Day or Cinco de Mayo.

Fabletics (@fabletics): 341K Followers

Fabletics — one of the first companies to introduce the subscription model for athletic wear for women — knows a thing or two about performance, quality, and style.

In a generation where selfies and gym posts are very much a norm, Fabletics makes sure that it sticks to its image of ensuring its customers look good while working out.

Ready to refresh your Instagram?

With these 10 brands that are rocking Instagram as references, get started refreshing your brand’s Instagram feed and take it to the next level. Happy posting!

What tips do you have for creating a cohesive Instagram aesthetic? Share them below.

Apple is not just a tech company — it’s one of the leading technology innovators in the world. On top of that, it’s a great place to work. Apple is ranked as one of Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work not only in 2019, but every year since 2009. Their employees have the opportunity to work with some of the most cutting-edge, innovative technologies today, while enjoying first-class wages and benefits — from employee discounts to comprehensive health insurance.

So what does it take to score a job at this iconic company? We’ve got input from real employees and interviewees at the company on how they got an interview at the company, what the process entailed, and what it’s like to be an employee for the leading technology firm.

How to Interview at Apple

“The interview process was what you’d expect from a company like this. I have about three phone screens (all of them were technical and the last one included a code snippet), followed by an all day on-site interview. The on-site consisted of one-hour interviews every hour (11-5), and were all very technical. I was asked to solve various problems (your typical algorithm and data structure subjects), as well as explain the various projects I worked on in my most recent position. The questions involved a lot of thinking, but I was able to find my way to the solutions after some time. All in all, I’d say it wasn’t too bad as I had prepared by practicing algorithms (searching, sorting, etc.), and brushing up on some objective-c (I had to teach myself it in the two weeks leading up to the on-site). A good topcoder browse is a good resource for preparing to interview with this company.” — Software Engineer Interview

“The whole process was very polished and professional. The HR reps were prompt and sharp. Interviewing potential supervisors was somewhat nerve-wracking, because they seemed to have keen ‘b.s. sensing’ attributes. Questions were difficult, mostly about describing exactly how you performed in the past. Follow-on questions tested the validity of your answers. Strong emphasis in work ethic, how you perform under pressure, ability to travel frequently, and maturity. From recruitment to offer, 2-month time span.” — Global Supply Manager Interview

“Asked a lot of troubleshooting questions and how much you know about Apple products. Role-play scenario about someone having issues with their iPhone. How would you troubleshoot an external monitor?” — Apple At Home Advisor Interview

“Super quick and painless. On campus interview and two phone screens, and that was it. I had an offer relatively quickly. They really didn’t waste any time at all. I’ve heard that they usually give on-sites for full time. This was for a co-op.” — Product Design Engineer Interview

What Apple Employees Say

“Working at Apple means that the things you work on get into the hands of hundreds of millions of people, literally. It’s a lot of pressure to get things right and drives one to do the best work of their lives. 2+ years later I’m still blown away by the talent and creativity of people I work with.” — Current Software Engineer

“The position is at home. The company is AMAZING. There are limitless advancement opportunities. You work with some very cool people and the leadership cares about your development. You may get coaching but you never get battered or belittled. The pay is decent and the benefits include, 401(k) match, stock purchase options, product discounts and discounts on services across many different areas, education assistance, child care assistance, paid vacation, sick time and other time off options, health club reimbursement or bike cost set off. You get 1.5 time for OT and it’s pretty much unlimited as long as you don’t exceed 12 hours in a day or 59 total in a week.” — Current Apple At Home Advisor

“Great team of creative thinkers. Open to feedback (culture of receiving and offering positive and negative feedback). Offers special food days during busy seasons. Diversity (of thought, feeling, being) is truly honored and respected at Apple. YOU WILL LEARN SO MUCH! Great working environment with opportunities to be promoted into a new role.” — Current Product Specialist

“Supportive manager, interesting problems, competitive salary, and about everyone is dedicated to the product. Truly first class coworkers and the culture within my org was supportive. I could really focus on the work in a way I couldn’t at other larger companies and I knew that my contribution was amounting to an important impact for users. The skills I learned here have translated forward to other jobs I have had afterwards and I am certain I am a better engineer for having spent time here.” — Former Software Engineer

Apple Job Search Tips

1. Practice for the interview – really practice.

Apple is one of the leading technology companies in the world. Any technical role you apply for will not only require you to talk about your past work experience and your fit for the current role, but also to pass certain technical tests that show your aptitude for the job. Depending on the job you’re applying for, you can search the different types of questions that people interviewing for specific jobs at Apple are asked for using Glassdoor — from software engineers to technical specialists to Apple at-home advisors.

2. Network.

Getting a job at Apple doesn’t always come through an impersonal online application process. In fact, of the thousands of Glassdoor users who interviewed at Apple, only 55 percent applied online, while the rest scored interviews there through employee referrals, recruiters, on-campus recruiting, and in person. This means that doing networking during your job hunt at Apple can seriously pay off.

This means reaching out to recruiters, talking to current or past employees, and probing your network to see if anyone you know has friends or professional connections at Apple. Current employees have an incentive to refer you, too, because Apple has been known to offer cash bonuses to the employees who refer successful hires. So go out and start talking to people!

3. Polish and proofread your resume.

Your resume is the foundation stone upon which you build your job application. Make sure your resume is polished, proofread, and coherent. Don’t be shy to hand your resume over to friends, family members, and colleagues, who can help catch errors. With a ready-to-go resume, you’ll be prepared to apply to jobs as soon as they’re posted.

4. Set job alerts.

Apple currently has over 6,000 jobs posted on Glassdoor, and more are added every month. You can make finding a specific job easier for yourself by setting a job alert, so when new jobs are posted at Apple, Glassdoor will send you an email about it. You can also set job alerts for related positions at other companies, from software engineering to UX design.

What To Know About Apple

Before applying to a job at Apple, it’s important to do your research. At such a large company (according to industry resources, the company employs more than 132,000 full-time workers as of 2018) there are many career opportunities within the organization, from working as a software engineer in Santa Clara, California to working as an Apple At-Home advisor from your bedroom in Kansas. Check out the job requirements as well as the average salary and typical interview questions for these positions on Glassdoor.

Since Apple is always unveiling new products, it’s important to stay up-to-date on what products they’ve just launched, and which ones are currently in the works. It’s also important to look at their news about the quarterly reports — for example, Apple just released its Q2 report for 2019 financials, which showed a decline in iPhone sales but an uptick in iPad and wearable sales.

You can also choose to set a news alert using Google or other tools, so that every time big news related to Apple is published, you can see it right away.

Now get, set, apply!

This article was originally published on Glassdoor, one of the world’s largest job and recruiting sites. Glassdoor combines all the jobs with valuable data to make it easy for people to find a job that fits their life, while also helping employers hire quality talent at scale. Are you hiring? Post jobs for free with a 7-day trial.

As a video marketer, editing might be the most important part of post-production. If you can’t seamlessly weave your shots together or get your cut to hit the right frame, your video will seem unpolished and disengage your viewers.

That said, if you’re operating on a shoestring budget, you might not be able to afford video editing software. So what’s a video marketer to do without editing software? Fortunately, YouTube offers a web-based video editor that is completely free and accessible through its platform.

YouTube’s video editor is an extremely basic editing tool, but it can still let you trim clips out of any part of your video, so read on to learn how to chop up your videos right in the video platform.

How to Use YouTube’s Video Editor

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio

2. On the left side bar, click “Videos”

3. In “Uploads”, click the thumbnail of the video you want to edit.

4. In the left sidebar, click “Editor”.

5. Trim the beginning or end of your video.

If you want to trim the beginning or end of your video, select “Trim”, which is right next to your video’s timer and right above your timeline panel.

Next, you’ll see a blue and white line on the sides of your timeline panel. Drag them to chop off parts of the beginning or end of your rough cut that you don’t want to include in your final version. Click “Preview” to view your edited video, and if it looks good, press “Save”.

6. Trim clips out of the middle of your video.

If you want to trim a certain clip out of the middle of your video, select “Trim”. Next, in your timeline panel, click the beginning of the clip that you’d like to trim out and press “Split”

Then, in your timeline panel, click the end of the clip that you’d like to trim out  and press “Split” again.

Finally, click on the blue line at either the beginning or end of your clip and drag it to the other side to trim it out of your video. Click “Preview” to view your edited video, and if it looks good, press “Save”.

7. Add an End Screen to your video.

If you want to give your viewers the option to watch a related video, playlist, or subscribe to your channel at the end of your video, click “ADD AN END SCREEN” in your timeline panel.

You can either create an End Screen from scratch or choose from five End Screen templates.

If you’d like to use a more robust video editing software when editing your YouTube videos, check out our post on 
five of the best YouTube video editor alternatives.  

Although Facebook is one of the older social media networks, it’s still a thriving platform for businesses who want to boost brand awareness.

With over 2.38 billion monthly active users, you can use the platform to spread the word about your business in a number of different ways — from photos or videos to paid advertisements.

Because there are so many marketing options and opportunities on Facebook, It can be hard to tell which strategy is actually best for your brand.

If you’re not sure where to start, you can read case studies to learn about strategies that marketing pros and similar businesses have tried in the past.

A case study will often go over a brand’s marketing challenge, goals, a campaign’s key details, and its results. This gives you a real-life glimpse at what led a marketing team to reach success on Facebook. Case studies also can help you avoid or navigate common challenges that other companies faced when implementing a new Facebook strategy.

To help you in choosing your next Facebook strategy, we’ve compiled a list of 11 great case studies that show how a number of different companies have succeeded on the platform.

Even if your company has a lower budget or sells a different product, we hope these case studies will inspire you and give you creative ideas for your own scalable Facebook strategy.

Facebook Brand Awareness Case Studies:

Pandora

During the 2017 holiday season, the jewelry company Pandora wanted to boost brand awareness in the German market. They also wanted to see if video ads could have the same success as their other Facebook ad formats.

They began this experiment by working with Facebook to adapt a successful TV commercial for the platform. Here’s a look at the original commercial:

The ad was cut down to a 15-second clip which shows a woman receiving a Pandora necklace from her partner. It was also cropped into a square size for mobile users. Pandora then ran the ad targeting German audiences between the ages of 18-50. It appeared in newsfeeds and as an in-stream video ad.

Results: According to the case study, the video campaign lifted brand sentiment during the holiday season, with a 10-point lift in favorability. While Pandora or the case study didn’t disclose how they measured their favorability score, they note that the lift means that more consumers favored Pandora over other jewelers because of the ad.

Financially, the campaign also provided ROI with a 61% lift in purchases and a 42% increase in new buyers.

Takeaways

Video can be memorable, emotional, and persuasive. While the case study notes that Pandora always had success with ads and purchases, the jeweler saw that a video format could boost brand awareness even further.

In just 15 seconds, Pandora was able to tell a short story that their target audience could identify with while also showing off their product. The increase in favorability shows that audiences who saw the ad connected with it and preferred the jeweler over other companies because of the marketing technique.

Part of Pandora’s success might also be due to the video’s platform adaptation. Although they didn’t create a specific video for the Facebook platform, they picked a commercial that had already resonated with TV audiences and tweaked it to grab attention of fast-paced Facebook users. This is a good example of how a company can be resourceful with the content it already has while still catering to their online audiences.

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a HubSpot customer, wanted to boost brand awareness and get more ticket purchases to their museum. Since they’d mainly used traditional customer outreach strategies in the past, they wanted to experiment with more ways of reaching audiences on social media.

Because the museum’s social media team recognized how often they personally used Facebook Messenger, they decided to implement a messaging strategy on the Hall of Fame’s official business page.

From the business page, users can click the Get Started button and open a chat with the Hall of Fame. Through the chat, social media managers were able to quickly reply to questions or comments from fans, followers, and prospective visitors. The reps would also send helpful links detailing venue pricing, events, other promotions, and activities in the surrounding area.

Since the Messenger launch, they claim to have raised their audience size by 81% and sales from prospects by 12%. The company claims that this feature was so successful that they even received 54 messages on an Easter Sunday.

Takeaway

Being available to connect with your audiences through Messenger can be beneficial to your business and your brand. While the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame boosted purchases, they also got to interact with their audiences on a personal level. Their availability might have made them look like a more trustworthy, friendly brand that was actually interested in their fanbase rather than just sales.

Facebook Reach Case Study:

Buffer

In early 2016, Buffer started to see a decline in their brand reach and engagement on Facebook due to algorithm changes that favored individuals rather than brands. In an effort to prevent their engagement and reach numbers from dropping even further.

The brand decided to cut their posting frequency by 50%. With less time focused on many posts, they could focus more time on creating fewer, better-quality posts that purely aimed at gaining engagement. For example, instead of posting standard links and quick captions, they began to experiment with different formats such as posts with multi-paragraph captions and videos. After starting the strategy in 2016, they continued it through 2018.

Here’s an example of one an interview that was produced and shared exclusively on Facebook.

The Results: By 2018, Buffer claimed that the average weekly reach nearly tripled from 44,000 at the beginning of the experiment to 120,000. The page’s average daily engagements also doubled from roughly 500 per day to around 1,000.

In 2018, Buffer claimed that their posts reached between 5,000 to 20,000 people, while posts from before the experiment reached less than 2,000.

Although Buffer began the experiment before major Facebook algorithm changes, they updated this case study in 2018 claiming that this strategy has endured platform shifts and is still providing them with high reach and engagement.

Takeaways

It can be easy to overpost on a social network and just hope it works. But constant posts that get no reach or engagement could be wasted your time and money. They might even make your page look desperate.

What Buffer found was that less is more. Rather than spending your time posting whatever you can, you should take time to brainstorm and schedule out interesting posts that speak directly to your customer.

Facebook Video Views Case Studies:

Tomcat

Gearing up for Halloween in 2016, Tomcat, a rodent extermination company, wanted to experiment with a puppet-filled, horror-themed, live video event. The narrative, which was created in part by their marketing agency, told the story of a few oblivious teenage mice that were vacationing in a haunted cabin in the woods. At peak points of the story, audiences were asked to use the comments to choose which mouse puppet would die next or how they would die.

Prior to the video event, Tomcat also rolled out movie posters with the event date, an image of the scared mouse puppets, and a headline saying, “Spoiler: They all die!”

Results: It turns out that a lot of people enjoy killing rodents. The live video got over 2.3 million unique views, and 21% of them actively participated. As an added bonus, the video also boosted Tomcat’s Facebook fanbase by 58% and earned them a Cyber Lion at the 2017 Cannes Lions awards.

Here’s a hilarious sizzle reel that shows a few clips from the video and a few key stats:

Takeaways

This example shows how creative content marketing can help even the most logistical businesses gain engagement. While pest control can be a dry topic for a video, the brand highlighted it in a creative and funny way.

This study also highlights how interactivity can provide huge bonuses when it comes to views and engagement. Even though many of the viewers knew all the rats would die, many still participated just because it was fun.

Not only might this peak brand interest from people who hadn’t thought that deeply about pest control, but interactivity can also help a video algorithmically. As more people comment, share, and react to a live video, there’s more likelihood that it will get prioritized and displayed in the feeds of others.

HubSpot

In 2017, HubSpot’s social media team embarked on an experiment where they pivoted their video goals from lead generation to audience engagement. Prior to this shift, HubSpot had regularly posted Facebook videos that were created to generate leads. As part of the new strategy, the team brainstormed a list of headlines and topics that they thought their social media audience would actually like, rather than just topics that would generate sales.

Along with this pivot, they also experimented with other video elements including video design, formatting, and size.

Results: After they started to launch the audience-friendly videos, they saw monthly video views jump from 50,000 to 1 million in mid-2017.

Takeaways

Creating content that caters to your fanbase’s interests and the social platform it’s posted on can be much more effective than content that seeks out leads.

While videos with the pure goal of selling a product can fall flat with views and engagement, creative videos that intrigue and inform your audiences about a topic they relate to can be a much more effective way to gain and keep your audience. Once the audience trusts you and consumes your content regularly, they might even trust and gain interest in your products.

Facebook App Installs Case Study:

FoxNext Games

FoxNext Games, a video game company owned by 20th Century Fox, wanted to improve the level of app installs for one of its newest releases, Marvel Strike Force. While FoxNext had previously advertised other games with Facebook video ads, they wanted to test out the swipe-able photo carousel post format. Each photo, designed like a playing card, highlighted a different element of the game.

The add offered a call-to-action button that said “Install Now” and lead to the app store where it could be downloaded. FoxNext launched it on both Facebook and Instagram. To see if the carousel was more efficient than video campaigns, they compared two ads that advertised the same game with each format.

Results: According to Facebook, the photo ads delivered a 6% higher return on ad spend, 14% more revenue, 61% more installs, and 33% lower cost per app install.

Takeaways
If your product is visual, a carousel can be a great way to show off different elements of it. This case study also shows how designing ads around your audience’s interest can help each post stand out to them. In this scenario, FoxNext needed to advertise a game about superheroes. They knew that their fanbase was interested in gaming, adventure, and comic books, so they created carousels that felt more like playing cards to expand on the game’s visual narrative.

Facebook Lead Gen Case Study:

Major Impact Media

In 2019, Major Impact Media released a case study about a real-estate client that wanted to generate more leads. Prior to working with Major Impact, the Minneapolis, Minnesota brokerage hired another firm to build out an online lead generation funnel that had garnered them no leads in the two months it was active. They turned to Major Impact looking for a process where they could regularly be generating online leads.

As part of the lead generation process, the marketing and brokerage firms made a series of Facebook ads with the lead generation objective set. Major Impact also helped the company build a CRM that could capture these leads as they came in.

Results: Within a day, they received eight leads for $2.45 each. In the next 90 days, the marketing firm claimed the ads generated over 370 local leads at the average cost of $6.77 each. Each lead gave the company their name, email, and phone number.

Although these results sound like a promising improvement, readers of this case study should keep in mind that no number of qualified leads or ROI was disclosed. While the study states that leads were gained, it’s unclear which of them lead to actual sales — if any.

Takeaways

This shows how Facebook ad targeting can be helpful when you’re seeking out leads from a specific audience in a local area. The Minneapolis brokerage’s original marketing and social media strategies weren’t succeeding because they were looking for a very specific audience of prospective buyers in the immediate area.

Ad targeting allowed their posts to be placed on the news feeds of people in the area who might be searching for real estate or have interests related to buying a home. This, in turn, might have caused them more success in gaining leads.

Facebook Engagement Case Study:

Hawkers

When the eyewear brand Hawkers partnered up with Spanish clothing brand El Ganso for a joint line of sunglasses, Hawkers’ marketing team wanted to see which Facebook ad format would garner the most engagement. Between March and April of 2017, they launched a combination of standard ads and collection ads on Facebook.

While their standard ads had a photo, a caption and a call-to-action linking to their site, the collection ads offered a header image or video, followed by smaller images of sunglasses from the line underneath.

Image from Digital Training Academy

To A/B test ad effectiveness of the different ad types, Hawkers showed half of its audience standard photo ads while the other half were presented with the collection format. The company also used Facebook’s Audience Lookalike feature to target the ads their audiences and similar users in Spain.

Results: The collection ad boosted engagement by 86%. The collection ads also saw a 51% higher rate of return than the other ads.

Takeaways

This study shows how an ad that shows off different elements of your product or service could be more engaging to your audience. With collection ads, audiences can see a bunch of products as well as a main image or video about the sunglass line. With a standard single photo or video, the number of products you show might be limited. While some users might not respond well to one image or video, they might engage if they see a number of different products or styles they like.

Facebook Conversion Case Study:

Femibion from Merck

Femibion, a German family-planning brand owned by Merck Consumer Health, wanted to generate leads by offering audiences a free baby planning book called “Femibion BabyPlanung.” The company worked with Facebook to launch a multistage campaign with a combination of traditional image and link ads with carousel ads.

The campaign began with a cheeky series of carousel ads that featured tasteful pictures of “baby-making places,” or locations where women might conceive a child. The later ads were a more standard format that displayed an image of the book and a call-to-action.

When the first ads launched in December 2016, they were targeted to female audiences in Germany. In 2017, during the later stages of the campaign, the standard ads were retargeted to women who had previously interacted with the carousel ads. With this strategy, people who already showed interest would see more ads for the free product offer. This could cause them to remember the offer or click when they saw it a second time.

Results: By the time the promotion ended in April 2017, ads saw a 35% increase in conversion rate. The company had also generated 10,000 leads and decreased their sample distribution cost by two times.

Takeaways

This case study shows how a company successfully brought leads through the funnel. By targeting women in Germany for their first series of creative “baby-making” ads, they gained attention from a broad audience. Then, by focusing their next round of ads on women who’d already shown some type of interest in their product, they reminded those audiences of the offer which may have enabled those people to convert to leads.

Facebook Product Sales Case Study

Samsung

In an effort to boost sales from its Latin American audiences, Samsung promoted the 2015 Argentina launch of the Galaxy S6 smartphone with a one-month Facebook campaign.

The campaign featured three videos that highlighted the phone’s design, camera, and long battery life respectively.

One video was released each week and all of them were targeted to men and women in Argentina. In the fourth week of the campaign, Samsung launched more traditional video and photo ads about the product. These ads were specifically targeted to people who’d engaged with the videos and their lookalike audiences.

Results: Samsung received 500% ROI from the month-long campaign and a 7% increase in new customers.

Takeaways

Like Femibion, Samsung tested a multiple ad strategy where the targeting got more specific as the promotions continued. They too saw the benefit of targeting ads to users who already showed interest in the first rounds of advertisements. This strategy definitely seems like one that could be effective when trying to gain more qualified leads.

Facebook Store Visits Case Study:

Church’s Chicken

The world’s third-largest chicken restaurant, Church’s Chicken, wanted to see if they could use Facebook to increase in-restaurant traffic. From February to October of 2017, the chain ran a series of ads with the “Store Traffic” ad objectives. Rather than giving customers a link to a purchasing or order page, these ads offer users a call-to-action that says “Get Directions.” The dynamic store-traffic ad also gives users the store information for the restaurant closest to them.

Image from Facebook

The ads ran on desktop and mobile newsfeeds and were targeted at people living near a Church’s Chicken who were also interested in “quick-serve restaurants.” The study also noted that third-party data was used to target customers who were “big spenders” at these types of restaurants.

To measure the results, the team compared data from Facebook’s store-reporting feature with data from all of its locations.

Results: The ads resulted in over 592,000 store visits with an 800% ROI. Each visit cost the company an average of $1.14. The ROI of the campaign was four times the team’s return goal.

Takeaways

If you don’t have an ecommerce business, Facebook ads can still be helpful for you if they’re strategized properly. In this example, Church’s ads targeted locals who like quick-serve restaurants and served them a dynamic ad with text that notified them of a restaurant in their direct area. This type of targeting and ad strategy could be helpful to small businesses or hyperlocal businesses that want to gain foot traffic or awareness from the prospective customers closest to them.

Navigating Case Studies

If you’re a marketer that wants to execute proven Facebook strategies, case studies will be incredibly helpful for you. If the case studies on the list above didn’t answer one of your burning Facebook questions, there are plenty of other resources and success stories online.

As you look for a great case study to model your next campaign strategy, look for stories that seem credible and don’t feel too vague. The best case studies will clearly go over a company’s mission, challenge or mission, process, and results.

Because many of the case studies you’ll find are from big businesses, you might also want to look at strategies that you can implement on a smaller scale. For example, while you may not be able to create a full commercial at the production quality of Pandora, you might still be able to make a lower-budget video that still conveys a strong message to your audience.

If you’re interested in starting a paid campaign, check out this helpful how-to post. If you just want to take advantage of free options, we also have some great information on Facebook Live and Facebook for Business.

“Really? We’re talking about QR codes?”

Fair reaction. For several years now, QR codes have been at the center of the popular “___ is dead” trope we marketers love to argue when talking technology. We’ve even debated it ourselves on this blog.

But if there’s one thing the QR code debate shows you, it’s that there sure isn’t a consensus — the efficacy of QR codes still hotly contested.

Nonetheless, there’s no denying the popularity and convenience of the QR code. Keep reading to learn how to create your own QR code, and how you can encourage your customers to scan them when they come across your content.

What Is a QR Code?

QR codes, short for “quick response” codes, are square-shaped black-and-white symbols that people can scan using a smartphone to learn more about a product.

These encrypted squares can hold links, coupons, event details, and other information that users might want to take with them for referring to later.

QR codes usually look something like this:

Although not every QR code is shaped like a perfect square, they’re most often found looking like the image above — with varying patterns displayed inside. You’ll often find them on direct mail, signage, billboards, and even commercials where you can quickly scan the code on the screen using your phone.

QR Codes vs. Barcodes

Does the rise of QR codes mean traditional barcodes are a thing of the past? Of course not. Traditional barcodes are still a common way for businesses to identify consumer packaged goods (CPGs) and manage their product inventory. 

Images via Wikimedia Commons | Wikimedia Commons

However, there are a number of differences between barcodes and QR codes — both in their uses and their characteristics. Here are three important differences:

QR Codes Are Shaped Differently

Barcodes are typically rectangular in shape, requiring scanning devices to read the barcode’s data horizontally. QR codes are often square-shaped, displaying their data vertically or horizontally. 

QR Codes Hold More Data

Due to a QR code’s square shape, it can hold much more data than a barcode. In fact, QR codes can hold hundreds of times more encrypted characters than a barcode.

QR Codes Hold Different Data

QR codes are often used differently than barcodes. Barcodes hold key product information at the point of sale, such as the price and name of the manufacturer. QR codes offer more passive and intangible information, such as location data and URLs to promotions and product landing pages.

How Do QR Codes Work?

Originally designed in Japan for the automotive industry, marketers adopted the barcodes because of their large storage capacity and ability to translate additional information to consumers beyond what creative and/or packaging could convey.

If a consumer sees a QR code somewhere, they can take out their mobile device, download a free QR code scanning app, and “scan” the barcode to gain access to additional information, like so:

So if you wanted to create, say, a bus stop advertisement promoting your podcast, you could display a QR code on that printed ad that brings people right to your iTunes page when they scan it with their phones. Pretty simple, right?

How to Make a QR Code

The QR code creation process is pretty straightforward. Here’s how to get started.

Step 1: Select a QR code generator.

There are tons of QR code generators out there. The best ones give you many options for using your QR code, and compatibility with most mobile QR code reader apps.

Other things to look for when choosing a QR code generator are whether you can track and analyze performance, and if it allows you to design a code that’s unique to your brand.

Some QR codes, for example, display logos and other icons within the code that immediately tell people what information they’ll get from scanning it.

Step 2: Choose the type of content you’re promoting.

Let’s select one of the QR code generators above and do a walk-through together. I’ll select qr-code-generator.com, one of the eight preferred QR code generators above.

First, select what type of content you want your QR code to show the person after they scan it. You can choose from one of 10 types, as shown in the screenshot below. For our purposes, we’ll promote a URL that directs users to our podcast.

Step 3: Enter your data in the form that appears.

Once you select the type of content you’re promoting with this QR code, a field or form will appear where you can enter the information that corresponds with your campaign.

If you want your QR code to save contact information, for example, you’ll see a set of fields where you can enter your email address, subject line, and associated message.

To save a link to our podcast, we’ll simply enter the URL in the field that appears, like so:

Step 4: Consider downloading a dynamic QR code.

See the option below for “dynamic”? One significant pitfall to making a QR code is that you can’t edit the data it contains once you print it. But with dynamic QR codes, you can edit this data. 

With a free membership to QR code generators like qr-code-generator.com, you can print a dynamic QR code, scan it, and pull up an editable form where you can modify the data your visitors will receive when they scan the QR code themselves.

Step 5. Customize it.

The fun part of creating QR codes is customizing the design of the codes to your brand. Want your code to look like your logo? Go for it. Want it to reflect your website’s design scheme? No problem.

Using qr-code-generator.com, we can customize our QR code by clicking the button to the top-right, as shown in the screenshot below. Keep in mind not every QR code maker offers this design option — depending on the QR code you’re looking to generate, you might find some tools limited in their functionality.

Of course, you can customize your QR code further — adjusting the colors, adding a logo, creating social options, and more. 

Keep in mind, however, that some customizations can make it more difficult for QR code scanning apps to properly read the code. It’s a good idea to generate two versions of your QR code — one plain version and another with your preferred design.

Step 6: Test the QR code to make sure it scans.

Because a customized QR code can make it difficult for some mobile apps to “read,” don’t forget to check to see if the QR code reads correctly, and be sure to try more than just one reader. A good place to start is the free tool Google Goggles, which takes a picture and then tells you what link or item it “reads to.”

Another great free tool is QR Code Reader, which automatically takes you to whatever it “reads.” Apple’s Passbook also offers a built-in QR code reader on iOS 7, so you should test to make sure your code is readable there, as well.

Step 7: Share and distribute the QR code.

A QR code won’t be able to do its job unless its seen. So make sure you come up with a distribution plan for sharing the code. This could include displaying it on social media, in print ads, on clothing, or in physical locations where people will pick up there phones to scan it. 

Along with sharing the code, you might also want to include text instructions in your various promotions that show less tech-savvy people how to scan it. This way there’s no friction if people want to scan the code but don’t know how to. 

Scroll down for more tips on properly displaying a QR code.

Step 8: Track and analyze performance.

Just like any marketing campaign, you should follow up on any collateral or campaigns using QR codes to see whether they’re actually working. How much traffic comes from each specific code? Are people scanning your code but not redeeming their offer once they get to the landing page? Or are they not even compelled enough to scan your QR code?

Knowing this will help you troubleshoot and adjust your poorly performing QR codes to more closely mirror those that work well. I recommend you include a UTM tracking code on your URL so you can better measure performance — this is particularly important if you use closed-loop marketing analytics, and are used to more in-depth reporting on your campaigns.

How to Use QR Codes (And How Not to)

Now that you see how simple the QR code creation process can be, let’s talk about some best practices that’ll help increase the likelihood your QR code actually gets used.

Display your QR code where it’s convenient for people to scan.

Put QR codes in places where scanning is easy, and there’s enough time for the consumer to actually scan the code. While you may often see QR codes on billboards and TV commercials, they’re not exactly the most user-friendly locations. Think of places and mediums where consumers have the time to scan the code, and, ideally, a Wi-Fi connection as well.

Optimize the QR’s destination page for mobile devices.

Mobile-optimize the page to which you’re sending people. Consumers will be on their phone when scanning the QR code, so they should be brought to a page with a positive mobile experience.

Include a CTA that prompts people to scan your QR code.

Offer a call-to-action (CTA) with the code — that is to say, tell people what they’re supposed to do when they see the code, and what they’ll receive if they do it. Not everyone knows exactly what a QR code is, and those that do won’t be motivated to scan it unless they’re sure there’s something worthwhile on the other side. 

Don’t limit your QR code to one mobile scanner.

Don’t require a special QR code scanner. Your QR code should be app-agnostic so anyone can scan your code with any reader. A lower barrier to entry makes success more likely for you and the user. 

Use your QR code to make someone’s life easier.

Don’t use a QR code just for the sake of using one. For instance, it’s common for marketers to think, “How can I bridge the offline experience with the online experience? Uhhh … QR code!” That’s not wrong … but it’s not always right, either.

If you have content that makes sense to deliver to a mobile user, and you have an appropriate channel to do it (see use #1 at the beginning of this section), it’s more likely your QR code will drive results. For example, in South Korea, grocery store chain Tesco drove tremendous national business growth by using QR codes in subway stations (I guess they have mobile service in their subway stations) to let riders order their groceries while they wait. It’s a great example of using QR codes for the right end-goal, at the right place and time. 

This article from Search Engine Journal has some more examples of good times to use QR codes, as well. 

If after reading this you’re not convinced QR codes are the right move — or you just want some additional ways you can connect the offline world to the online world — consider also adding a short, memorable URL people can type in easily on their mobile phones in your creative. 

The future of QR codes could also mean an evolution — augmented reality apps certainly stem from the same concept, after all. Consider the AR News App, which lets readers augment a newspaper story into a child-friendly article by downloading an app and hovering over stories with a special marker (sounds pretty close to a QR scanner, doesn’t it?).

It may be that QR codes aren’t quite dead, but just the first step in a long evolution.

If you’re using Instagram as part of your social media strategy, you’ve definitely come across the concept of impressions. But what exactly are impressions? How accurately do they indicate success? And how do they differ from reach, another very similar Instagram metric?

First things first: to understand what Instagram impressions are, you need to know how they relate to Instagram’s reach metric.

Here’s an easy way to distinguish impressions from reach.

Impressions measure the number of times your post or ad appears to users. This metric doesn’t take into account unique users — so, if your post or ad is shown 100 times to the same person, it would technically count as 100 impressions.

In contrast, reach measures the number of unique users who view your post or ad. So, if your post is shown 100 times to the same person, your impressions would be 100, but your reach would be one.

So, when should you prioritize impressions as a key performance indicator in your Instagram campaigns?

When you want to increase awareness among your target audience. Many marketers getting started with Instagram focus on reaching the most people possible — but in reality, it doesn’t matter if you reach 10,000 new people if none of those people are interested in what you’re selling. In some cases, it’s more valuable to your business to focus on cultivating deeper brand awareness among the audience you already have. Instagram Impressions can be a valuable KPI when you want to focus on increasing awareness among your target audience.

Consider your own Instagram scrolling habits: if you see an ad or a post just once, it likely isn’t going to have a big impact on you. But, if you start to notice more posts or ads from the same company, your familiarity of their brand is bound to increase. Even if you aren’t in the market for what they’re selling right now, your awareness of the brand might lead you to make a purchase down the line.

Since impressions on their own don’t take unique users into account, it isn’t the best stand-alone metric to use when you run an Instagram campaign focused on reaching the most people possible. But, it can be monitored alongside impressions to track how many times users are seeing posts or ads from you.

For a deeper dive on how to set up and start tracking impressions (and other metrics) in Instagram Analytics, check out this article we wrote.

In the marketing industry, we treat experts like they’re village elders, soaking up every tip and trick they have to offer so we can implement them into our own work, desperately hoping for similar results.

But, when you really think about it, marketing is always changing and experts often don’t have visibility into your unique context.

This naturally begs the questions — what should you do when you can’t find a solution to one of your problems on the internet? To find the answers to your unique problem, consider channeling your inner Sherlock Holmes and become an investigator. Investigators forage for information that’ll lead them to the answers of their own specific questions. And, as a marketer, one of the best investigative tools at your disposal is A/B testing.

Every company has a different set of customers, so there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for designing the most optimal website, crafting the most compelling copy, or building the most effective product. To figure out which website design, line of copy, or product feature will produce the best results for your company, you must discover what your unique set of customers prefer.

To help you do this, we’ve curated eight of the best A/B testing tools for 2019 that’ll help you optimize your website design, copy, product, and, most importantly, help you find the answers to your own specific situation.

1. HubSpot & Kissmetrics’ A/B Testing Kit [Featured Tool]

Download a free kit with everything you need to run A/B testing – an A/B test tracking template, a how-to guide for instruction and inspiration, and a statistical significance calculator to see if your tests were wins, losses, or inconclusive. 

This tool is ideal for businesses just getting started with A/B testing, or for businesses that need a way to track their existing tests. Download the kit for free to get started with A/B testing in your business. 

2. VWO

Image Credit: VWO

G2Crowd Rating: 4.2/5.0 (130 reviews)

Trusted by over 4,500 enterprise brands including eBay, Target, and Virgin Holidays, VWO is an A/B testing and conversion rate optimization platform tailored specifically for enterprise brands. In their suite, you can build A/B tests, Split URL tests, and multivariate tests with a drop-and-drop editor.

To gauge the performance of your tests, VWO offers a robust reporting dashboard. VWO also offers a SmartStats feature that leverages Bayesian statistics to help you run faster tests, give you more control of your tests, and reach more accurate conclusions.

3. Optimizely

G2Crowd Rating: 4.3/5.0 (104 reviews)

With 24 Fortune 100 companies as customers, Optimizely is a digital experimentation platform for enterprise marketing, product, and engineering teams. Using their powerful A/B and multi-page experimentation tool, you can run multiple experiments on one page at the same time, allowing you to test various variables of your web design.

Optimizely also offers testing on dynamic websites, various experiment dimensions like ad campaign, geography, and cookies, and various experiment segmentation parameters like device, browser, and campaign.

4. Omniconvert

G2Crowd Rating: 4.5/5.0 (47 reviews)

Omniconvert is a conversion rate optimization platform that offers an A/B testing tool, as well as survey, personalization, overlay, and segmentation tools. Using their A/B testing tool, you can run A/B tests on desktop, mobile, and tablet. Additionally, you can turn winning versions of an A/B test into the control for a future test and leverage Frequentist or Bayesian statistics to validate your tests.

Omniconvert also blends their segmentation tool with their A/B testing tool to let you test over 40 segmentation parameters, like geolocation, traffic source, and visitor behavior, to improve your website’s user experience, product features, and content’s ability to engage and convert. If you work for a medium-sized business, Omniconvert could be a great A/B testing solution.

5. Crazy Egg

Image Credit: Crazy Egg

G2Crowd Rating: 4.0/5.0 (28 reviews)

Crazy Egg is a website optimization software that offers A/B testing, heat mapping, and usability testing tools. Their A/B testing tool lets you test variations of every single page on your website by adding one snippet of code to the pages you want to experiment on.

Crazy Egg also lets you build A/B tests without any coding experience, sends more traffic to the optimal variant of your test once it recognizes it’s the winner, and offers intuitive conversion tracking and reporting tools. If you work for a small business, Crazy Egg is definitely a tool you should consider.

6. AB Tasty

Image Credit: AB Tasty

G2Crowd: 4.4/5.0 (25 reviews)

Trusted by brands like Sephora, Ugg, and Carrefour, AB Tasty is a conversion rate optimization software that offers A/B and multivariate testing, data insights, marketing, and personalization tools.

Using their experiments tool, you can build and run A/B tests, split tests, multivariate tests, and funnel tests with their visual editor. You can also leverage their advanced targeting to test based off various criteria like URL, geolocation, weather, and more. To help validate your tests, AB tasty offers reports that display your tests and their confidence levels in real time. If you work for a medium-sized business, AB Tasty could be best suited for you.

7. Freshmarketer

G2Crowd Rating: 4.5/5.0 (24 reviews)

Freshmarketer, which is the marketing arm of the business platform Freshworks, is a conversion rate optimization software that offers A/B testing and split URL testing. Their A/B testing tool can test, target, and validate your experiment, integrate with Google Analytics, and even track the amount of revenue your experiments have generated.

Freshmarketer’s Split URL testing tool can help you test multiple variations of URLs, turn winning test variations into real web pages, and grasp the effectiveness of your web design by offering heatmaps of every variation of your split URL test. Freshmarketer could be the A/B testing solution for you if you work for a small business.

8. Convert

Image Credit: Convert

G2Crowd Rating: 4.7/5.0 (21 Reviews)

Trusted by brands like Sony, Unicef, and Jabra, Convert is an A/B testing and web personalization software that offers A/B testing, split testing, multivariate testing, and multipage experiment tools. Convert also offers an advanced segmentation tool that allows you to segment users based off their historical behavior, cookies, and JavaScript events.

Additionally, Convert can gauge the performance of all your tests by reporting on a large mix of metrics, from your variations’ click-through-rate to its return-on-investment. If you want to use Convert in conjunction with your other tools, they offer a ton of integrations with third-party tools, like WordPress, Shopify, and HubSpot. Convert is best suited for small businesses.

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

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

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

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

While I won’t agree or disagree with this theory, I will equip you with the tools you need to distribute the content you create. By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to build a content distribution strategy that gets your content in front of — and consumed by — your audience.

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

Where should I publish my content, you ask? Through the various content distribution channels we discuss next.

Content Distribution Channels

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

Owned Content Distribution

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

Earned Content Distribution

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

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

Paid Content Distribution

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

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

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

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

A content distribution strategy is important for a few reasons:

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

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

1. Research your target audience.

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

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

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

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

2. Audit your content.

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

A thorough content audit is comprised of three main parts:

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

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

3. Choose your content distribution channels.

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

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

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

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

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

4. Decide on your content types.

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

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

Consider these content types — and how you’ll repurpose and distribute them — as you create your blog posts:

• E-books
• Podcasts and interviews
• Videos
• Infographics
• Case studies
• White papers
• Testimonials
• Webinars
• Checklists and listicles
• Datasheets

5. Set your content distribution KPIs and goals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Create your content.

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

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

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

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

8. Distribute and market your content.

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

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

9. Measure and analyze your results.

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

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

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

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

Content Tools

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

Medium

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

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

Price: Free and paid

LinkedIn Pulse

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

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

Read more about publishing on LinkedIn Pulse here.

Price: Free

PR Tools

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

PR Newswire

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

Price: Paid

HARO

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

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

Price: Free and paid

Social Tools

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

HubSpot

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

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

Price: Free and paid

ClickToTweet

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

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

Price: Free

GaggleAMP

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

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

Price: Free and paid

AddThis

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

Price: Free

Analysis Tools

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

Mention

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

Price: Free and paid

SharedCount

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

Price: Free and paid

Additional Tools

Outbrain

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

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

Price: Pay-per-click

WiseStamp

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

Price: Paid

Distribute Your Content to Grow Better

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

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