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Movie producers and inbound marketers aren’t that different when it comes to creating and editing video content.

We’re both telling a story, and whether that story is about a protagonist or a product, we’re both trying to captive our audiences and make them believe in the story we tell.

What happens at the end of the story is a little different, though.

Most marketers wear a lot of hats and let’s just say, out of all the hats worn, the videographer one isn’t always their favorite. That’s because creating videos can be intimidating, especially if you’re new to it.

And if you’re more of a copywriter than a videographer, as I am, you might overlook how important the planning stage of video production is — the part where you really solidify your video concept, goals, and script.

That’s what we’re going to tackle in this blog post: how to write an effective video script to ensure the best possible product emerges from your editing software, and lives wherever you’re publishing.

1. Start with a brief.

Although this step might seem trivial, it’s extremely necessary to the final script.

Starting with a brief allows you and your team to document the answers to the most important project questions so everyone involved in creating the video can get on the same page. When you’re three-quarters of the way through the editing process, and your boss or colleague wants to completely redo that whole shot where you demonstrate how your product solves a problem, that’sa huge problem — for you.

When pesky predicaments like this one stand in the way of progress, you can just refer back to the brief that documents the goals and project plan your team mapped out together, and say, “Actually, that’s not what we agreed to.”

Then, you can move forward.

Focus on your goals, topic, and takeaways when developing your brief.

A brief doesn’t have to be fancy, nor does it have to follow a specific formula, but there are several key questions it should include to craft an effective video script.

• What’s the goal of this video? Why are we making the video in the first place?
• Who is the audience of this video?
• What’s our video topic? (The more specific, the better. For example, if you’re in the house painting business, you might choose a topic like, “buying the right paint brush”).
• What are the key takeaways of the video? What should viewers learn from watching it?
• What’s our call-to-action? What do we want viewers to do after they’ve finished watching the video?

You can easily create a brief in Google Docs to serve as a living, breathing template that you revise over time — and that your team can collaborate on.

2. Use your brief to write an outline.

Once you’ve picked a topic and written a brief, it’s time to start constructing your video script. We recommend starting with an outline before diving into the full script — this way, you can break your video into subtopics and determine how your dialogue (or monologue) will progress.

Contrary to what I previously thought, you can’t just rewrite a blog post and call it a day — there’s a specific way to write a script so that it shapes an effective video. Are you basing your video script on a blog post? Alicia Collins can teach you a bit more in the video below (and yes, we wrote a script for it!).

Like Alicia says in the video above, a video script shouldn’t simply regurgitate the blog post word-for-word. Although blog posts are ideally written to be conversational, there are pauses and verbal explanations you need to incorporate into your speech patterns that you wouldn’t have on paper.

But, using the blog post’s subsections is a helpful starting point when figuring out how your script will progress from one section to the next. If you’re not basing your video script on a blog post, you can still create a well-structured outline. Consider the individual best practices of the subject you’re planning to cover in your video. Where do the natural transitions occur when explaining this subject to your audience?

For example, if the topic of your video is How to Start a Business, you might outline your script by the individual tasks an aspiring entrepreneur needs to tackle when launching a company, such as:

• Perform market research.
• Draft a budget for research and development.
• Meet with potential investors.
• Develop a marketing strategy.
• Develop a sales strategy.
• Identify your office space.

3. Introduce yourself and/or the topic at the beginning of your script.

Even though videos are the channel of choice for many people who want to learn something new, they need to hook their audience in the first few seconds — just like written content. After all, you have just as much competition on YouTube as you do in the blogosphere, and your viewers can bounce from your video just as quickly as they would from an article if they don’t feel engaged with it.

To help hook your audience in a video script, use the very first few lines to introduce the narrator (the person on screen) and what the audience is going to learn by the end of the video.

For example, if you’re teaching viewers how to optimize their blog for SEO, your introduction might be:

“Hi there! I’m [narrator’s name] from [company], and in the next [length of video] minutes, I’m gonna teach you how to get your blog ranking on Google.”

4. Start writing your script, section by section.

Just like the brief, the video script doesn’t have to be fancy. You’re not trying to submit this script for any awards — its purpose is strictly functional. A good script makes it easy for the people on camera to get their messages across while sounding and acting naturally.

Write conversationally.

Writing a script is not the same as writing a college paper or marketing research report. You want to write the script how you want the video subject to speak. Saying, “I’m gonna create a video after reading this blog post” on camera will read much better than, “I am going to create a video after reading this blog post.” Keep sentences short and crisp — I recommend avoiding compound sentences, if possible.

Make it thorough.

A script doesn’t just include dialogue. If your video will require multiple shots, characters, or scenes, include these details. Be sure to include any necessary information about the set or stage actions, such as a wardrobe change.

Basically, you want the script to be thorough enough that you could hand it off to someone else to shoot, and they’d understand it.

Write for the audience and the platform.

Is your audience made up of young teens, middle-aged professionals, or older retirees? Will your video live on Instagram, YouTube, or your website? Make sure you’re keeping it conversational for the people you’re trying to connect with — and infuse humor, tone, and inflection accordingly. Furthermore, if you’re writing a short-form video for Facebook, you might want to consider keeping your script choppier with sentence fragments — but if you’re producing a long-form explainer video for your website, make sure you’re as thorough as possible.

Script every single word.

It’s understandable to think you can just jot down the main bullet points for a script, and then just wing it on camera, especially if you know your subject matter. This approach makes it tough to communicate a message as clearly and concisely as possible (which you should aim to do in every video you create), and it usually results in a lot of re-dos.

So, we suggest scripting every last word. Trust me — doing this will keep you organized during filming and save you loads of time later.

5. Support any B-roll with the proper callouts in your main narrative.

If your video will transition from a person speaking in front of a camera, to a close-up shot of your product or a demonstration, you’ll want to write these cues into in your script so anyone who reads it knows to introduce these things for the viewer. These secondary shots are often referred to as B-roll, which take place while the person continues to speak off-screen. It’s one of the main differences between a blog post and a video script.

For example, if a blog post reads, “take a look at the graph below,” it’s clearly referring to a graph embedded below that sentence. This phrasing won’t work on camera. Instead, your video script might read, “in the graph you see here” — while the graph is shown on-screen instead of the narrator.

These written exceptions can also help cue the narrator to take certain unspoken actions while reciting the script. For example, take a look at how the folks over at Wistia did that in the video script for Wistia’s scripting tips below. Text overlay is called out with a big, bold “TEXT,” audio is called out in all caps (REWIND SOUND), and B-roll or additional details are called out in italics (with glasses on). (Note: It might help to watch the video first for the excerpt of this script to make sense).

Source: Wistia

6. Be as concise as you can.

When it comes to marketing, shorter videos tend to be more compelling than longer videos. In fact, 68% of people said they’d rather learn about new products and services through a “short video,” according to a survey by Wyzowl.

To make short videos, you need a short script. Don’t write a script any longer than two pages. If you can keep it to one page, even better. It’s also worth doing two to three rounds of edits solely focused on cutting all unnecessary fat in your writing. Reading it out loud to listen for opportunities to make the language more conversational, or sentences shorter, can also help.

The result is a video that’s succinct, engaging, and allows for a simple editing process.

7. Use this video script template.

Writing a script from scratch is way harder than starting with an example. To give you a head start, download this Word Doc video script template we used to create this video with Wistia:

The script we used to make the video above? It’s below. Click it to download a copy and see how we’ve applied each of the script elements described throughout this blog post.

As a refresher, those script elements are:

• An introduction.
• Subsections and natural transitions.
• Thorough descriptions.
• Conversational tone.
• Supporting callouts for B-roll and unspoken actions by the narrator.

Have your script ready? Awesome. Now it’s time to review your work with a quick run-through.

8. Do a verbal run-through off-camera.

Now that you know how to write a script, it’s time for a table read — the part where you practice bringing that script to life on camera.

Why practice? Because some words look great on paper, but once you read them aloud, they just don’t sound right. The table read is where you really get to fine-tune the tone and nix anything that sounds too proper, improper, robotic, or otherwise inappropriate for the message you aim to convey.

Check out the video below on how to do a table read:

Oh, and one last tip …

When it’s time to shoot, use a laptop and a chair as a teleprompter.

Since you don’t need a fancy script, you don’t need a fancy teleprompter to remember your lines. But you do need help remembering your lines. You can actually just use two things you already have — a chair and a laptop — to keep your lines handy as you’re shooting.

For more tips for using the tools at your disposal to make a killer marketing video, check out our video guide to shooting videos with an iPhone.

When content marketing was gaining steam, there were really only a few techniques you could leverage. On a typical day, you’d write a blog post, hope it ranked on Google, send it to your email subscribers, and post it to your social media profiles. That was pretty much it.

This is still the main strategy most marketers use nowadays, but since content marketing has exploded in popularity since its early adoption, it has developed into a much more nuanced and complex type of marketing with many techniques for reaching and resonating with an audience. So, to help you learn about the most effective marketing techniques around today, we’ve rounded up the ten best marketing techniques for 2019. Read on to add some tools to your content marketing arsenal. 

1. Shows

In the neuroscience field, researchers have proven that storytelling is the best way to capture people’s attention, bake information into their memories, and resonate emotionally with them. The human brain is programmed to crave, seek out, and respond to well-crafted narrative — that’ll never change.

So just like your favorite Netflix show, crafting shows can entice your viewers to watch entire seasons of your series, subscribe to your updates, and get more excited for your show’s newest season than they currently are for the third season of Stranger Things.

Before you green light another slew of listicles, how-to posts, and ultimate guides, remember how powerful storytelling is and consider crafting a show chock-full of conflict, surprise, and emotion that also ties to a unique angle and is told in an episodic fashion.

2. The Pillar-Cluster Model

Since people heavily rely on Google to provide accurate and relevant answers for most of their questions today, Google needs to understand the intent and context behind every single search. To do this, Google has evolved to recognize topical connections across users’ queries, look back at similar queries that users have searched for in the past, and surface the content that best answers them. As a result, Google will deliver content that they deem the most authoritative on the topic.

To help Google recognize your content as a trusted authority on marketing, sales, and customer service topics, consider implementing the pillar-cluster model on your blog.

By creating a single pillar page that provides a high-level overview of a topic and hyperlinks to cluster pages that delve into the topic’s subtopics, you can signal to Google that your pillar page is an authority on the topic.

Hyperlinking all of the cluster pages to the pillar page also spreads domain authority across the cluster, so your cluster pages get an organic boost if your pillar page ranks higher, and your cluster pages can even help your pillar page rank higher if they start ranking for the specific keywords they’re targeting. 

3. Email Subscriptions

As of now, subscribing to your favorite online publications through email is the best way to keep up with their latest stories and news. And since it takes an average of six to eight touch points to generate a qualified sales lead, persuading people to subscribe to your emails and, in turn, constantly consume your content will generate more leads and revenue for your business.

Growing an engaged, loyal subscriber base also speaks volumes about the quality of your content and its emotional resonance. Even though hoards of content saturate the internet and most people’s inboxes today, people are still actively engaging with your content, which is a clear sign that they actually value it.

4. Historical Optimization

In 2015, HubSpot made a revolutionary discovery about their organic monthly blog traffic — the overwhelming majority of it came from posts published prior to that month. In fact, 76% of their monthly blog views came from these old posts.

Today, their groundbreaking revelation rings louder than ever — 89% of their monthly blog views currently come from posts that were published at least six months prior, and they’ve developed an entire strategy dedicated to refreshing and republishing these historical pieces of content.

These types of blog posts are called “updates”, and they comprise 35-40% of HubSpot’s editorial calendar. And by refreshing them with new information and SEO optimization and then effectively republishing them as new blog posts, HubSpot can build upon their existing organic value that these posts have accumulated through backlinks and user engagement and double or even triple their traffic. This process also helps HubSpot optimize their blog for efficiency, decreasing the amount of new content they have to create while increasing their organic traffic and conversions.

5. Podcasting

According to a content format study conducted by Edison Research and Triton Digital, people age 12 and older are listening to online audio content at unprecedented levels. On average, people spend 17 hours per week tuning into their favorite podcasts, online radio shows, and audiobooks. There are also 14 million more weekly podcast listeners this year compared to last year, which is more than Guinea’s entire population.

The demand for audio content has exploded, but that doesn’t mean people will listen to your branded podcast just because it’s a podcast. In reality, they’ll only listen to it if it can hold their attention and, ultimately, entertain them. Otherwise, producing yet another interview-an-expert podcast like everyone else will only add to the noise flooding the internet.

6. Link Building

Earning high-quality inbound links from websites and pages with high authority scores is crucial for boosting your domain authority. But, unfortunately, “If you write it, they will link to it,” is not a viable SEO tactic.

An effective method for earning high-quality links is by asking other websites that have the same or higher domain or page authority score than you to link to your top content. You should also make sure your content is relevant to the referring website’s content.

Another way you can earn quality backlinks is by using Backlinko’s skyscraper method. The skyscraper method is an SEO strategy where you find content that ranks well for keywords you want to rank for and then create content that’s better than the top ranking posts. Then, you use SEO tools to find all the sites that have linked to your competitor’s content and ask the most relevant sites to replace your competitor’s link with a link to your improved content.

7. Social Media-based Public Relations

Today, over 30% of time spent online is dedicated to social media. Needless to say, people spend more time on social media than ever before. And public relations professionals are pivoting their strategy from solely focusing on placing their stories in news outlets’ publications to concentrating on driving traffic to their social media profiles too.

In order to successfully pitch your stories to journalists and news outlets nowadays, you need to account for the content that performs well on their social media profiles and their publication. So before you pitch your story, make sure it’s relevant and interesting to the news outlet’s social audience.

8. Audience Segmentation

In a world overflowing with digital noise, creating irrelevant or unwarranted content won’t catch anyone’s attention. To create personalized marketing campaigns for each slice of your target market, consider leveraging audience segmentation, which separates your target market into specific, accessible groups of people based on personal attributes like their demographics, psychographics, and behavioral information.

9. Brand Extensions

Big companies often extend their brand to develop new products in industries that they don’t have any market share in. These initiatives are called brand extensions, and they allow companies to leverage their brand awareness and equity to create more revenue streams.

Historically, the most successful brand extensions are the ones that closely tie to the company’s flagship product or core brand, like Gerber’s baby clothes and Dole’s frozen fruit bars. So by entering tangential markets that can preserve their brand’s unique associations and perceived quality, companies can develop new products that consumers intuitively understand the benefits of, even though they’ve never seen them on a shelf.

On the flip side, a company can also exploit their brand, and, in turn, damage it. If they develop a product in a market that isn’t closely tied to their flagship product or core brand, like Zippo’s perfume for women, companies can attach undesirable associations to their brand, weaken its existing associations, and hurt its established products’ perceived quality.

10. 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.

With A/B testing, you can run an experiment between two variables, like a red and blue CTA, to identify which one produces better results. A/B testing shouldn’t be confused with multivariate testing, though, which allows you to simultaneously test many variables.

In the MLB, or Major League Baseball, players who have used performance enhancing drugs have also tainted their careers. Even if they slugged the most home runs in the history of the game, like Barry Bonds did, or won the most Cy Young Awards ever, like Roger Clemens did, their accusations of steroid abuse will most likely block their path to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

For years, many baseball players abused steroids, and it sparked an aggressive campaign to eliminate performance enhancing drugs from the game.

In 2006, the MLB set up a drug policy that suspends first time drug violators for half a season, second time drug violators for an entire season, and third time drug violators for their entire lives — three strikes and you’re literally out.

In the email marketing industry, sending spam is a lot like using performance enhancing drugs in the MLB. Any organization who is a known spammer has tainted their brand. And mailbox providers will suspend brands from sending emails to their account holders if they consistently send spam.

These suspended brands are on lists called email blacklists, and they can tarnish your sender reputation in the eyes of mailbox providers worse than steroid use can taint a once-presumed Hall-of-Famer’s career in the eyes of the Baseball Hall of Fame voters.

However, not all blacklists are created equal. Some blacklists, like Spamhaus, are credible and widely trusted, so if a brand is on one of these blacklists, it’ll heavily impact their sender reputation. Other blacklists, like Lashback, NoSolicitado, and Spam Cannibal are less credible and trusted, so if a brand is on one of these blacklists, it won’t affect their sender reputation nearly as much.

In other words, when referencing blacklists to determine a brand’s deliverability, mailbox providers weigh their influence by credibility — and not just if they’re listed on them.

How to Avoid an Email Blacklist

A wise email deliverability consultant at HubSpot named Jess Swazey once told me, “The easiest way to get off an email blacklist is to never get on it in the first place.” In light of this Yoda-esque wisdom, here are four best practices for avoiding email blacklists.

1. Only email contacts who have subscribed to your email program — and never email contacts scraped from websites, third-party sources, or purchased contact lists.

It seems obvious, but the easiest and most crucial step you can take to avoid email blacklists and getting a Scarlet “S” slapped on your brand’s breast pocket is emailing people who actually subscribed to your emails. Because in a world where only 4% of the public believes marketers practice integrity, the best way to build a contact database is the hard and honest way — collecting email addresses organically.

Plus, if you decide to scrape contacts from old, expired, or abandoned websites, third-party sources, or purchased contact lists, most blacklist operators have already placed pristine spam traps, which are email addresses created solely to catch spammers red-handed, in all three of these locations. So collecting and emailing contacts who never subscribed to your email program in the first place is a one-way ticket to getting blacklisted.

2. Clean your email lists on a regular basis.

Building a hefty email list might make you feel accomplished and proud, but if it’s filled with dead weight, or unengaged contacts, it’s better to trim the fat than to stick with your pride.

Most mailbox providers consider subscriber engagement the most influential determinant of your email program’s quality. So to decide if you’re actually a reputable sender and deserving of a high deliverability score, most mailbox providers convert their inactive email accounts into recycled spam traps after a year of disengagement and ding any IP address or domain that sends emails to them. In your database, any contact that hasn’t engaged with your email program or received one of your emails in a year could possibly be a recycled spam trap.

To avoid sending emails to recycled spam traps and getting blacklisted, run one-off reengagement campaigns with your inactive contacts. It’s up to you to decide how long a contact’s disengagement with your email program deems them an inactive contact, but if they don’t open your reengagement email, it’s probably a sign to scrub them off your list.

3. Never manually enter email addresses into your database or mass email these types of contacts.

Sometimes, salespeople and recruiters will collect business cards from prospects or candidates at industry events, manually plug each contact’s email address into their database, and send them a mass email.

This can also be a one way ticket to getting blacklisted.

These people might expect an email from one of your company’s salespeople or recruiters, but they never opted into receiving emails from your email program, so they’re likely to never open your emails or, even worse, flag them as spam, which will lower your deliverability and heighten your risk of getting blacklisted.

There’s also a chance you’ll make a typo while manually entering email addresses into your database and, in turn, send emails to addresses that don’t exist. This will increase your email bounce rate, which will also lower your deliverability and heighten your risk of getting blacklisted.

4. Validate your new subscribers’ email addresses.

Sometimes, people will try to subscribe to your email program but make a typo when entering their contact information in your form. Other times, if your business model requires people to manually enter their email address into a device, they can make typos too.

Unfortunately, mailbox providers will bounce any email sent to addresses that don’t exist. So even if the people who own similarly spelled email addresses actually want to receive your emails, emailing these addresses will still lower your deliverability and heighten your risk of getting blacklisted.

To avoid this subtle yet potent blacklisting trigger, use email address verification tools like Kickbox to validate each email address you collect from your subscription forms.

How to Check If You’re On an Email Blacklist

Sometimes, a pristine or recycled spam trap can slip through the cracks and get you blacklisted. Fortunately, your email service provider will usually notify you when this happens, but if you want to be absolutely sure that your IP address or domain isn’t on a blacklist, use blacklist checking tools, like Sender Score or MX Toolbox.

How to Get Off an Email Blacklist

If you send emails through one of your email service provider’s shared IP addresses and it gets blacklisted, it’s your email service provider’s job to delist the shared IP address. However, one domain that sends spam from a shared IP address can blacklist the entire shared IP address, so if your actions blacklist your shared IP address, your email service provider has the right to cancel your subscription.

On the other hand, if your dedicated IP address or domain ends up on one or multiple email blacklists, it’s your job to get it off them. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet for getting your domain delisted — you need to follow a different protocol for each blacklist you’re on in order to get off of it. However, there are two general best practices for delisting that are great starting points for any email program.

To get off most blacklists, you need to work directly with the blacklist operators and prove to them that you’re actually a trustworthy sender. You can do this by following email best practices for a certain period of time, which is kind of like entering a spam rehab program.

Another way to delist your domain is running permission pass campaigns. When you get blacklisted, your email service provider will pinpoint the campaign that triggered it, allowing you to identify the email list in your database that has spam traps. Once you find this list, you can run a permission pass campaign, where you send a one-off reengagement email to the list’s contacts who haven’t interacted with your emails in a long time.

These contacts are most likely the spam traps that triggered your blacklisting, so make sure you weed out all the accounts that don’t engage with your permission pass campaign. Otherwise, an emotional attachment to a large yet unengaged email list might never let you delist. 

Undoubtedly, your online local presence can have a big impact on your company’s bottom line — in fact, 78% of local-mobile searches result in offline purchases.

But local SEO is nothing new. Businesses have been using Google My Business for years. Yelp’s been around since 2004. And now, you can even use Facebook to find local businesses, like when I search “Mexican restaurants nearby”:

If you have a presence on each of these big players, you might be thinking you’re all set for local SEO. However, there just might be another major opportunity coming your way — Instagram.

Here, we’re going to tell you everything we know about Instagram’s local business pages. Instagram hasn’t formally announced or rolled out local business pages across the app yet, but we want to make sure you’re prepared for when it is.

To consider how Instagram’s local business profiles will work, let’s take a look at Google’s Local Knowledge panels, which are incredibly similar in nature:

As you can see, when you search for a local business on Google, you might find a Local Knowledge panel, which is essentially a box of information regarding the business, including images, location, hours of operation, and website.

Now, let’s take a look at Instagram’s version of local business profiles:

Images courtesy of Raj Nijjer

Pretty eerily similar, right?

Instagram’s local business profiles will include your business’s address, hours of operation, website, phone number, and a “View Profile” link to your business’s Instagram account — all within the app.

With over 500 million daily active users, Instagram provides you with a ton of potential reach. Ideally, these local business profiles will help your business get found even more easily.

Allegedly, users can claim an Instagram business profile if they also have access to that business’s Facebook page. Since Facebook owns Instagram, it makes sense that the two networks would be linked.

For the time being, Instagram hasn’t made an official statement on local business profiles, and the feature isn’t rolled-out globally. It’s still being tested, which is likely why only select users (like Raj Nijjer) are able to see these local business profiles.

However, to prepare for your business to have a local business profile, it’s critical you ensure your Facebook’s business page is up-to-date, since at this point we’re assuming your business’ basic information will be taken from Facebook business pages.

Additionally, it seems that Instagram’s local business profiles will pull your most recent three consecutive images, as it did for The New York EDITION:

Once Instagram’s local business profiles is fully launched, you’ll want to pay attention to your current images to ensure you feel the content rightfully represents your brand. In a complete Instagram feed, you might feel like one image isn’t a big deal — but for a new visitor spotting an image in a business profile, it’s critical the content convinces them to click-through.

Finally, note the “Claim” button in the top right. If you “Claim” the page, you’ll be able to edit the associated business information. This should put you at ease — it means you’ll have control over your local business profile, once the feature is launched.

Right now, Instagram’s local business profiles is still in beta testing. However, to prepare your business for a local business profile, make sure you have an Instagram business account, as well as a Facebook business account.

Additionally, while unverified, it stands to reason posting local content, using local geotags, and reposting other local business’s content could help Instagram more quickly determine your business’s location when they roll out local business profiles globally.

Learn how to set up an Instagram business account in The Ultimate Guide to Instagram for Business.

If you could do one thing to dramatically improve your marketing ROI today, would it be to use landing pages on your website?

If you’re trying to generate leads for your business, and you don’t have at least a few landing pages on your website, you’re missing out on a key opportunity to turn website visitors into something more.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a page on your website where you can offer a resource from your business in exchange for a visitor’s contact information. Marketers can capture this contact information using a lead-capture form, where visitors can enter details like their name, email address, and job title.

A good landing page is focused on a particular stream of traffic — say, from an email campaign that’s promoting an ebook. Because the landing page is targeting just people who are (presumably) interested in this ebook, and because this ebook has exclusive information that elaborates on a topic your audience cares about, you can convert a higher percentage of your website visitors into leads whom you can then follow up with.

Landing pages have one chief purpose: to generate leads for your business. However, you can define those leads in a number of ways and offer more than one type of content or experience through this landing page.

Here are some of the ways you can use a landing page to start a relationship with your future customers:

Ebooks and Whitepapers

If you wrote a blog post that introduces a topic relevant to your audience, you can satisfy deeper interests in that topic by elaborating on the subject in an ebook or whitepaper. Using a landing page, you can “gate” this resource behind a lead-capture form for people to download.

Email Newsletter Subscription

Let’s say you write a lot of blog content on a similar topic. Sure, you can develop an ebook or whitepaper that elaborates on specific details, but you can also offer your readers an email newsletter they can subscribe to for the latest content around your industry. On various blog posts, use a call-to-action (CTA) to invite readers to subscribe to your blog. This CTA can link to a separate landing page where they enter their contact information for addition to your email list.

Online Course Enrollment

Whether you’re in the education industry or you offer various skill-based certifications to your audience, online courses should have their own landing pages, too. Using these pages, you can invite new students to sign up for a class you offer and capture information on them that can lead to a customer relationship that goes beyond the courses they take with you.

Event Registration

Similar to online courses, industry events require you to collect information on your audience so they can receive updates prior to the event. An event, as well as its various sessions and keynotes, can have their own individual landing pages to turn event goers into event attendees and business leads.

Free Trial of a Product

Offering people a free demo of your product? Your demo offering could use its own landing page. Bring users to a page where they can sign up for a free trial of your software using their name, email address, job title, and any other information you deem necessary to give them the best customer experience.

Community Membership

If your business thrives on conversation among your audience — perhaps you have a website dedicated to dialogue between users — there’s no harm in making it invitation-only. In fact, it’s a great way to generate leads through the people who want to become members of your community. Create a landing page that lets website visitors sign up to become a bigger part of your business.

App Download

Developing a mobile app for your product doesn’t just improve your customer experience — it also gives you another avenue to capture leads from your audience. A lead-optimized landing page that invites users to download an app is quite common in the app-maker community.

Why are landing pages so critical?

Too many companies send their advertising, email, or social media traffic to their homepage. This is a huge missed opportunity. When you know a stream of targeted traffic will be coming to your website, you can increase the likelihood of converting that traffic into leads by using a targeted landing page.

For example, imagine you have a Google AdWords PPC ad running for one of your best keywords. Even if you advertise how great your company is (an off-putting brag in the eyes of your customer) and someone still clicks through on that ad, do you want to send them to your homepage? When they land on your homepage, what are they supposed to do? What do you want them to do?

Once you figure out what action you want a visitor to take, make it easier for them to do just that. Send them to a landing page that prompts them to complete that action. You’ll see the effectiveness of your online marketing improve dramatically.

What makes a landing page most effective?

Ready to create your first landing page, or improve on a landing page you already have? Here are some of the most important elements to make sure your landing page is working hard for you:

Limit Navigation

You’ve brought your targeted traffic to a page where they can take your desired action. Don’t distract them! Limit the number of exits from your landing page so that your visitors are focused on filling out your form. A key part of this is to remove the website navigation elements on landing pages. This helps put the focus back on the content you’re offering.

See how the landing page below does this — aside from the HubSpot logo, there are no navigation buttons to confuse or distract visitors.

Enable Sharing

Tap into a huge community of your best (and free) marketers: your audience. Add share links to your landing page to encourage your website visitors to share your content with their audiences.

Deliver Value

First and foremost, if you have a valuable offer, your visitors will give up their contact information in exchange for your offer. Ask yourself if your offer is compelling to your audience and make sure your landing page demonstrates that value. One way to ensure your landing page adds value is to show your audience the content they’re going to receive — directly on the page. See how this can look in the example landing page below.

Keep it Short

The longer your landing page and form, the more friction you add to the lead-generation process. Keeping your lead form short and straightforward will increase your conversion rate.

Here’s a tip: Put as many contact fields as you can on the same line. Shortening the height of your lead-capture form helps you limit the more trivial fields you might be tempted to include, and prevents your landing page visitors from getting spooked by a form that’s asking too much of them. As shown below, sometimes all you need is a first and last name, followed by an email address.

Test, Test, Test

As many best practices as you may read about online, your landing page can always use more testing and improvement. Make sure you have a landing page creation tool that allows you to create and test many different landing pages to see what works best for your business.

Are you a landing page guru? Check out some of our advanced tips and data around landing page best practices on effective calls to action and the best/worst button text (hint: don’t use “Submit”). Do you need to make any of these 10 Quick Fixes to Build Killer Landing Pages?

If you’re working hard to drive traffic to your website, don’t make the mistake of not capturing that traffic as leads.

We’ve all been through it. You know, the moment you’re about to dig into the best darn pile of spaghetti and meatballs you’ve ever seen.

Just as you twist your fork in the pasta, spear a mouth-watering meatball, and go in for the first savory bite … the phone rings. “May I speak to Lindsay Kow-low-witch?” asks the telemarketer on the other end. “This is an important message regarding your oven preferences.”

This frustrating interruption is exactly why we’re here to discuss inbound lead generation. What is inbound lead generation? It’s a solution that can save your business or organization from being that annoying, disruptive cold caller who is ruining spaghetti nights for pasta lovers all over the world.

Let’s start with defining a lead, and then we’ll cover what online lead generation is, why you need lead generation, how you qualify someone as a lead, how you generate leads, and why inbound lead generation is much more effective than simply buying leads.

What Is a Lead?

A lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form.

As a lead, you’d hear from a business or organization with which you’ve already opened communication … instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased your contact information.

For example, maybe you took an online survey to learn more about how to take care of your car. If you got an email from the auto company that hosted the survey on their website about how they could help you take care of your car, it’d be far less intrusive and irrelevant than if they’d just called you out of the blue with no knowledge of whether you even care about car maintenance, right?

And from a business perspective, the information the auto company collected about you from your survey responses helps them personalize that opening communication to address your existing problems.

Whenever someone outside the marketing world asks me what I do, I can’t simply say, “I create content for lead generation.” It’d be totally lost on them, and I’d get some really confused looks.

So instead, I say, “I work on finding unique ways to attract people to my business. I want to provide them with enough goodies to get them naturally interested in my company so they eventually warm up to the brand enough to want to hear from us!”

That usually resonates better, and that’s exactly what lead generation is: It’s a way of warming up potential customers to your business and getting them on the path to eventually buying.

Why Do You Need Lead Generation?

When a stranger initiates a relationship with you by showing an organic interest in your business, the transition from stranger to customer is much more natural.

Lead generation falls within the second stage of the inbound marketing methodology. It occurs after you’ve attracted an audience and are ready to convert those visitors into leads for your sales team (namely sales-qualified leads). As you can see in the diagram below, generating leads is a fundamental point in an individual’s journey to becoming a delighted customer.

How to Generate Leads

Now that we understand how lead generation fits into the whole inbound marketing methodology, let’s walk through the steps of the lead generation process.

First, a visitor discovers your business through one of your marketing channels, such as your website, blog, or social media page.

That visitor then clicks on your call-to-action (CTA) — an image, button, or message that encourages website visitors to take some sort of action.

The CTA takes your visitor to a landing page, which is a web page that is designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer.

An offer is the content or something of value that’s being “offered” on the landing page, like an ebook, a course, or a template. The offer must have enough perceived value to a visitor to merit providing their personal information in exchange for access to it.

The form on your landing page consists of a series of fields (like in our example above) that collect information in exchange for the offer. Forms are typically hosted on landing pages, although they can technically be embedded anywhere on your site. Once a visitor fills this out — voila! — you have a new lead! (That is, as long as you’re following lead-capture form best practices.)

See how everything fits together?

To sum it up: Visitor clicks a CTA that takes them to a landing page where they fill out a form to get an offer, at which point they become a lead.

By the way, you should check out our free lead generation tool. It helps you create lead capture forms directly on your website. Plus, it’s really easy to set up.

Lead Generation Marketing

Once you put all of these elements together, you can use your various promotional channels to drive traffic to your landing page to start generating leads.

But what channels should you use to promote your landing page? Let’s talk about the front-end of lead generation — lead gen marketing.

If you’re a visual learner, this chart shows the flow from promotional marketing channels to a generated lead.

There are even more channels you can use to get visitors to become leads. Let’s go into depth on these and talk about a few others.

Content

Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content — inline, bottom-of-post, in the hero, or even on the side panel. The more delighted a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your call-to-action and move onto your landing page.

Featured Resource

• HubSpot Ebook Templates

Email

Email is a great place to reach the people who already know your brand and product or service. It’s much easier to ask them to take an action since they’ve previously subscribed to your list. Emails tend to be a bit cluttered, so use CTAs that have compelling copy and an eye-catching design to grab your subscriber’s attention.  

Featured Resource

• The Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing

Ads and Retargeting

The sole purpose of an ad is to get people to take an action. Otherwise, why spend the money? If you want people to convert, be sure that your landing page and offer match exactly what is promised in the ad, and that the action you want users to take is crystal clear.

Blog

The great thing about using your blog posts to promote an offer is that you can tailor the entire piece to the end goal. So, if your offer is an instructional video on setting up Google Search Console, then you can write a blog post about how to select your marketing metrics … which would make your CTA highly relevant and easy to click.

Featured Resource

• 6 Free Blog Post Templates

Social Media

Social media platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action, from the swipe up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links to bitly URLs on Twitter. You can also promote your offerings on your social posts and include a call-to-action in your caption. Learn more about social media campaigns in this post.

Product Trials

You can break down a lot of barriers to a sale by offering trials of your product or service. Once a prospect is using your product, you can entice them with additional offers or resources to encourage them to buy. Another good practice is to include your branding in your free versions so you can capture other potential customers, too.

Referral Marketing

Referral, or word-of-mouth, marketing is useful for lead generation in a different way. That is, it gets your brand in front of more people, which, in turn, increases your chances of generating more leads.

Whatever channel you use to generate leads, you’ll want to guide users to your landing page. As long as you’ve built a landing page that converts, the rest will handle itself.

Why Not Just Buy Leads?

Marketers and salespeople alike want to fill their sales funnel — and they want to fill it quickly. Enter: The temptation to buy leads.

Buying leads, as opposed to organically generating them, is much easier and takes far less time and effort, despite being more expensive. But, you might be paying for advertising anyway … so, why not just buy leads?

First and foremost, any leads you’ve purchased don’t actually know you. Typically, they’ve “opted in” at some other site when signing up for something, and didn’t actually opt in to receiving anything from your company.

The messages you send them are therefore unwanted messages, and sending unwanted messages is intrusive. (Remember that disruptive call I got when I was trying to eat my spaghetti? That’s how people feel when they receive emails and other messages from people they didn’t ask to hear from.)

If the prospect has never been to your website and indicated an interest in your, products or services, then you’re interrupting them … plain and simple.

If they never opted in to receive messages specifically from you, then there’s a high chance they could flag your messages as spam, which is quite dangerous for you. Not only does this train to filter out emails from you, but it also indicates to their email provider which emails to filter out.

Once enough people flag your messages as spam, you go on a “blacklist,” which is then shared with other email providers. Once you get on the blacklist, it’s really, really hard to get back off of it. In addition, your email deliverability and IP reputation will likely be harmed.

It’s always, always, always better to generate leads organically rather than buy them. Read this blog post to learn how to grow an opt-in email list instead of buying one.

How to Qualify a Lead

As we covered in the first section, a lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. Now, let’s talk about the ways in which someone can actually show that interest.

Essentially, a sales lead is generated through information collection. That information collection could come as the result of a job seeker showing interest in a position by completing an application, a shopper sharing contact information in exchange for a coupon, or a person filling out a form to download an educational piece of content.

Gauging a Lead’s Level of Interest

Below are just a few of the many ways in which you could qualify someone as a lead. Each of these examples shows that the amount of collected information used to qualify a lead, as well as the that lead level of interest, can vary. Let’s assess each scenario:

• Job Application: An individual that fills out an application form is willing to share a lot of personal information because he/she wants to be considered for a position. Filling out that application shows their true interest in the job, therefore qualifying the person as a lead for the company’s recruiting team — not marketing or sales teams.
• Coupon: Unlike the job application, you probably know very little about someone who has stumbled upon one of your online coupons. But if they find the coupon valuable enough, they may be willing to provide their name and email address in exchange for it. Although it’s not a lot of information, it’s enough for a business to know that someone has interest in their company.
• Content: While the download of a coupon shows an individual has a direct interest in your product or service, content (like an educational ebook or webinar) does not. Therefore, to truly understand the nature of the person’s interest in your business, you’ll probably need to collect more information to determine whether the person is interested in your product or service and whether they’re a good fit.

These three general examples highlight how lead generation differs from company to company, and from person to person. You’ll need to collect enough information to gauge whether someone has a true, valid interest in your product or service — how much information is enough information will vary depending on your business.

Let’s look at Episerver, for example. They use web content reports for lead generation, collecting six pieces of information from prospective leads.

Episerver provides a great example for what to ask for in a lead gen form:

• Full Name: The most fundamental information needed to personalize your communication with each lead.
• Email: This serves as a unique identifier and is how you will contact your lead.
• Company: This will give you the ability to research your lead’s industry and company and how the lead might benefit from your product or service (mainly for B2B).
• Role: Understanding an individual’s role will help you understand how to communicate with them. Every brand stakeholder will have a different take and perspective on your offering (mainly for B2B).
• Country: Location information can help you segment your contact by region and time zone, and help you qualify the lead depending on your service.
• State: The more detailed information you can obtain without sacrificing conversions, the better. Knowing your leads state can help you further qualify them.

If you’d like to learn more intermediate-level tips on information collection and what you should ask for on your lead gen forms, read our post about it here.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a way to qualify leads quantitatively. Using this technique, leads are assigned a numerical value (or score) to determine where they fall on the scale from “interested” to “ready for a sale”. The criteria for these actions is completely up to you, but it must be uniform across your marketing and sales department so that everyone is working on the same scale.

A lead’s score can be based on actions they’ve taken, information they’ve provided, their level of engagement with your brand, or other criteria that your sales team determines. For instance, you may score someone higher if they regularly engage with you on social media or if their demographic information matches your target audience.

Borrowing from the examples above, you might give a lead a higher score if they used one of your coupons — an action that would signify this person is interested in your product.

The higher a lead’s score, the closer they are to becoming a sales-qualified lead (SQL), which is only a step away from becoming a customer. The score and criteria is something you may need to tweak along the way until you find the formula that works, but once you do, you’ll transform your lead generation into customer generation.

Lead Generation Trends & Benchmarks

So … you’re getting web traffic and generating leads. But how are you doing compared to other companies in your industry? How many leads should you really be generating?

It’s tough to figure out if your lead generation strategy is working if you aren’t looking at industry data. That’s why we partnered with Qualtrics to survey more than 900 marketers from all different industries in North America and Europe to create a demand generation report with data on website visitors, leads, opportunities, customers, and revenue.

Did you know that 74% of companies that weren’t exceeding revenue goals didn’t know their visitor, lead, MQL, or sales opportunities numbers? How about that over 70% of companies not achieving their revenue goals generate fewer than 100 leads per month, and only 5% generate more than 2,500 leads per month? These are just a few examples of what you’ll find in the report.

For in-depth reports, download our Demand Generation Benchmarks Report. Below are some useful highlights.

Cost per Lead, by Industry

The media and publishing industries report the lowest cost per lead at $11 to $25. Software, information technology and services, marketing agencies, and financial services companies all report the highest average cost per lead at $51 to $100.

Leads Generated per Month, by Annual Revenue

Unsurprisingly, the more revenue a company has, the more leads they generate. The differences are most drastic at the highest and lowest end of the spectrum: 82% of companies with $250,000 or less in annual revenue report generating less than 100 leads per month, whereas only 8% of companies generating $1 billion in annual revenue report less than 100 leads per month.

Leads per Month

We found that 58% of companies generated 500 leads per month or fewer, and 71% generated 1,000 or fewer. However, as we saw previously, the companies having the most success are also the ones generating the most leads.

Here’s how the data broke down by company size:

Lead Generation Software

We found that the most successful teams use a formal system to organize and store leads: 46% use Google Docs, 41% use marketing automation software, and 37% use CRM software. (Hint for HubSpot customers: Google Drive integrates with both HubSpot Marketing Hub and HubSpot CRM.)

Lead Generation Strategies

Online lead generation encompasses a wide range of tactics, campaigns, and strategies depending on the platform on which you wish to capture leads. We talked about lead capture best practices once you have a visitor on your site … but how can you get them there in the first place?

Let’s dive into lead generation strategies for a few popular platforms.

Facebook Lead Generation

Facebook has been a method for lead generation since its inception. Originally, companies could use outbound links in their posts and information in their bios to attract strangers to their websites. However, when Facebook Ads was launched in 2007, and its algorithm began to favor accounts that used paid advertising, there was a major shift in how businesses used the platform to capture leads. Facebook created Lead Ads for this purpose. Facebook also has a feature that lets you put a simple call-to-action button at the top of your Facebook Page, helping you send Facebook followers directly to your website.

Get some lead generation tips for Facebook.

Featured Resource

• 50 Facebook Ad Examples We Actually Clicked

Twitter Lead Generation

Twitter has Twitter Lead Gen Cards, which let you generate leads directly within a tweet without having to leave the site. A user’s name, email address, and Twitter username are automatically pulled into the card, and all they have to do is click “Submit” to become a lead. (Hint for HubSpot users: You can connect Twitter Lead Gen Cards to your HubSpot Forms. Learn how to do that here).

Learn some lead generation tips for Twitter.

Featured Resource

• How to Use Twitter for Business (+ Follower Tracking Template)

LinkedIn Lead Generation

LinkedIn has been increasing its stake in the advertising space since its early days. When it comes to lead generation, LinkedIn created Lead Gen Forms, which auto populate with a users profile data when they click a CTA, making it easy to capture information.

Get tips from our experience using LinkedIn ads.

PPC Lead Generation

When we say pay-per-click (PPC), we’re referring to ads on search engine result pages (SERPs). Google gets 3.5 billion searches a day, making it prime real estate for any ad campaign, especially lead gen. The effectiveness of your PPC campaign relies heavily on a seamless user flow, as well as your budget, target keywords, and a few other factors.

Learn more about how to setup successful PPC ads.

B2B Lead Generation

B2B is a particular business model that requires a particular approach to lead generation. HubSpot found that SEO is the top resource for capturing business leads, followed closely by email marketing and social media. Not to mention, effectiveness varies by channel.

Learn the B2B lead gen techniques for every channel.

Tips for Lead Generation Campaigns

In any given lead generation campaign, there can be a lot of moving parts. It can be difficult to tell which parts of your campaign are working and which need some fine-tuning. What exactly goes into a best-in-class lead generation engine? Here are a few tips when building lead gen campaigns.

Use the right lead generation tools.

As you saw in our data, the most successful marketing teams use a formal system to organize and store their leads. That’s where lead generation tools and lead generation software come into play.

How much do you know about the people visiting your website? Do you know their names or their email addresses? How about which pages they visited, how they’re navigating around, and what they do before and after filling out a lead conversion form?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, chances are you’re having a hard time connecting with the people who are visiting your site. These are questions you should be able to answer — and you can with the right lead generation tools.

There are a few different tools and templates out there that’ll help you create different lead gen assets to use on your site:

• CTA Templates: 50+ free, customizable call-to-action (CTA) templates in PowerPoint that you can use to create clickable CTA buttons to use on your blog, landing pages, and elsewhere on your site.
• Lead Generation Software Tools: This free tool from HubSpot includes lead capture and contact insights features, which will scrape any pre-existing forms you have on your website and add those contacts to your existing contact database. It also lets you create pop-ups, hello bars, or slide-ins — called “lead flows” — that’ll help you turn website visitors into leads immediately.

Example of a slide-in lead flow.

• Visitor Tracking: Hotjar has a heatmap tool — a virtual tool which creates a color-coded representation of how a user navigates your site — that helps you understand what users want, care about, and do on your site. It records visitors and tells you where they spend the most time on your site. You can use it to gather information on your lead generation forms, feedback forms and surveys, and more.
• Form-Scraping Tool: A form scraping tool that collects submissions on your website’s existing forms helps you automatically consolidate all your leads into your contact database, regardless of which form visitors submitted on your website. HubSpot customers can create and embed forms using HubSpot, which automatically populate into your CMS. Non-HubSpot customers can use a form creation tool like Contact Form 7, JetPack, or Google Forms, and then use HubSpot’s free collected forms feature to automatically capture form submissions and input them to a contact database.

Create amazing offers for all different stages of the buying cycle.

Not all of your site visitors are ready to talk to your sales team or see a demo of your product. Someone at the beginning of the buyer’s journey might be interested in an informational piece like an ebook or a guide, whereas someone who’s more familiar with your company and near the bottom of the journey might be more interested in a free trial or demo.

Make sure you’re creating offers for each phase and offering CTAs for these offers throughout your site.

Yes, it takes time to create valuable content that teaches and nurtures your leads down the funnel, but if you don’t offer anything for visitors who aren’t ready to buy, then they may never come back to your website. From checklists to templates to free tools, here are 23 ideas for lead generation content to get you started.

If you want to take personalization a step further — which will help boost your conversion rate — try using smart CTAs. Smart CTAs detect where a person is in the buyer’s journey, whether they’re a new visitor, a lead, or a customer, and display CTAs accordingly. Personalized CTAs convert a whopping 42% more visitors than basic calls-to-action.

Keep your messaging consistent and deliver on your promise.

The highest-converting lead gen campaigns are the ones that deliver on what they promise and create a seamless transition from ad copy and design to the deliverable itself. Make sure that you’re presenting a consistent message throughout the process and providing value to everyone that engages with your lead capture.

The aspects of your lead gen campaign should mirror everything else on your website, on your blog, and within the product that you will eventually try to sell. If not, you’ll have a difficult time getting your lead to the next lifecycle stage. Your campaign should be about more than just obtaining an email address — it should be about developing a new customer.

Link your CTA to a dedicated landing page.

This may seem obvious to you, but you’d be surprised how many marketers don’t create dedicated landing pages for their offers. CTAs are meant to send visitors to a landing page where they can receive a specific offer.

Don’t use CTAs to drive people to your homepage, for instance. Even if your CTA is about your brand or product (and perhaps not an offer like a download), you should still be sending them to a targeted landing page that’s relevant to what they are looking for and includes an opt-in form. If you have the opportunity to use a CTA, send them to a page that will convert them into a lead.

If you want to learn more about how to build and promote high-converting landing pages, then download our ebook on optimizing landing pages for conversions.

Get your sales team involved.

Remember when we talked about lead scoring? Well, it isn’t exactly doable without your sales team’s input. How will you know what qualifies a lead for sales without knowing if your defined SQLs are successfully sold? Your marketing and sales teams need to be aligned on the definitions and the process of moving a lead from MQL to SQL to opportunity before you even begin to capture leads.

Also, be open to evolving your relationship with sales and how you guide leads along your funnel. Your definitions will likely need to be refined over time; just make sure to keep everyone involved up-to-date.

Use social media strategically.

While marketers typically think of social media as best for top-of-the-funnel marketing, it can still be a helpful and low-cost source for lead generation as shared in the lead gen strategies above. The key is using social media strategically for lead generation.

Start by adding links directly to the landing pages of high-performing offers within your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media posts. Tell visitors that you’re sending them to a landing page. That way, you’re setting expectations. Here’s an example from one of our Facebook posts:

You can also do a lead generation analysis of your blog to figure out which posts generate the most leads, and then make a point of regularly linking social media posts to them.

Another way to generate leads from social media is to run a contest. Contests are fun and engaging for your followers, and they can also teach you a ton about your audience. It’s a win-win. Read our step-by-step guide for growing your email list using social media contests, which covers everything from choosing a platform, to picking a winner, all the way to analyzing your results.

Remain flexible and constantly iterate.

Your lead generation strategy needs to be as dynamic as the people you’re targeting. Trends change, behaviors shift, opinions morph … so should your lead gen marketing. Use A/B split testing to see what CTAs perform best, which landing pages convert better, and which copy captures your target audience. Experiment with layout changes, design, UX, content, and advertising channels until you find what works.

Conclusion

There you have it, folks. Now that you know more about how to generate leads for your business, we recommend you try HubSpot’s free lead generation tool. Use it to add simple conversion assets to your site (or scrape your existing forms) to help you learn more about your site visitors and what content prompts them to convert.

The basics we’ve gone over in this blog post are just the beginning. Keep creating great offers, CTAs, landing pages, and forms — and promote them in multi-channel environments. Be in close touch with your sales team to make sure you’re handing off high-quality leads on a regular basis. Last but not least, never stop testing. The more you tweak and test every step of your inbound lead generation process, the more you’ll improve lead quality and increase revenue.

In today’s highly digital and connected society, it’s funny to think people can still feel disconnected from others. With so many people who communicate online, behind screens, this connected world can actually feel rather lonely at times. This goes for personal relationships as well as business relationships — specifically between brands and their customers as well as brands and their employees.

So, what is it that has people feeling a disconnect to others and the companies they do business with?

A lack of community.

A community provides people with a feeling of belonging and a network of other people they can connect with based on their shared interests and/ or characteristics. And that’s why so many brands today are beginning to invest in the creation of communities for their customers, employees, and fans — as part of a process called community management.

Businesses build communities — or implement community management tactics at their companies — to build authentic relationships among their external audience (their customers, fans, and followers) and their internal audience (employees, vendors, partners, and team members). When businesses invest in community management, they transition from an everyday brand to a human brand — one that cares deeply about the people who support them, work for them, and interact with them.

What is the purpose of community management?

Community management has become increasingly popular and recognized by all types of businesses — however, it’s still largely undefined. So, what makes it so special? Why should your business adopt it? To answer those questions, let’s cover some of the main reasons why community management is critical to your success as a brand today.

“Brands need to hire community managers because they’re the tone, voice, and human element behind your brand.” -Krystal Wu, Social Media Community Manager, HubSpot

Community management allows your business to:

• Obtain feedback and gather ideas from your customers and audience members through real conversations.
• Provide support for audience members, fans, and customers when they need it.
• Increase brand and product awareness among your target audience.
• Learn about your customers and what they want, expect, and need in terms of content, products, services, and support.
• Build one-on-one and one-to-many relationships between audience members and your brand.
• Boost customer interactions, conversions, and sales.
• Provide value to your customers beyond a product or service.

It’s important to note community management is a broad industry — these are just some of the things community management allows your business to do.

Additionally, community management is an umbrella term, meaning there are many forms of community management that live beneath it. Let’s review those types of community management to help you determine which one(s) you’d like to focus on at your company.

Types of Community Management

There are six main types of community management — some of these happen behind a screen and require no face-to-face interaction, and some involve members of your community to interact with you and your team in person. The easiest way to review these types of community management is through the SPACE Model.

Community Management SPACE Model

The SPACE Model represents different types of community management — this way, you can get a better understanding of which options will work for your needs. Let’s take a look.

Important note: This section is an overview of just six of the many types of community management. We’ve also provided a couple examples of each.

S: Customer Support/ Success

The first type of community management is customer support and success. There are a few simple ways to think about customer support and success in terms of community management — a forum, FAQ document, and community website.

A forum is a question and answer, community-based discussion board focused on customer service and support. It’s a great way to connect your community. With a forum, your customers can chat with each other, ask each other questions, provide you with feedback, or strike up a discussion regarding a new product or service.

On the forum, you might provide your community members with access to your FAQ document so they can self-help and get quick answers to commonly-asked questions. You’ll also be able to see who’s writing what so you can intervene and provide assistance if needed. This keeps things straightforward for your community members and also prevents your team from having to take the time to answer the same questions over and over again.

With a customer success platform or software, you can create a branded website or landing page for your community members that’s focused on supporting your customers. Here, your customers can help themselves (and each other), communicate with members of your team, locate any resources they need (such as your knowledge base), and review your FAQ document.

A great way to create and manage your company’s community forum, your FAQ document, site, or page is with the help of software like Vanilla Forms. You can customize the entire site to match your branding, write and manage your forum and FAQ documents, and even ask for your customers to provide you with ideas and ways to innovate your products and services to better meet their needs.

This type of community management is ideal for companies that have an in-depth product line — like a software company — so users can communicate with each other about tips, tricks, and issues they may run into during use.

One of HubSpot’s customer support communities is our Developer Forum for those looking to build on the software. This keeps developers connected to the company, others in the same position, and resources they can use while working on the platform.

P: Product Ideation, Innovation, and Feedback

Product ideation, innovation, and feedback is both a proactive and reactive type of community management. It requires you to create a safe space where your customers and target audience can share their feedback and thoughts about the ways you can innovate and improve your products and services.

You can ask your community members to complete surveys or participate in in-person feedback discussions you lead. There are also many other types of user testing that your audience and customers can take part in if you choose to organize them. For example, you might host a focus group with ten real customers at your office to learn about the ways they believe you can enhance your product or service after they use and/ or experience it.

This type of community management is ideal for most companies — asking for feedback from real customers and members of their target audience on how they can innovate their products  is a critical part of the success of virtually every business.

A: Acquisition and Advocacy

Acquisition and advocacy is another type of community management. This form of community management allows you to directly with the people who are most excited about your business including your leads, customers, brand ambassadors, and brand advocates.

These community members help you build brand awareness and promote your business, products, and services through various methods such as word-of-mouth, affiliate programs, and social media. A common way to create a community for these (very important) people is through an acquisition and advocacy program such as a brand ambassador initiative. Let’s look at an example.

The Skimm has a brand ambassador program for any user who gets ten people to sign up for the media company’s content. Once they’ve done so, they become a “Skimm’bassador.” These brand ambassadors and advocates help The Skimm acquire new consumers and readers. They also become members of the Skimm’bassador community in which they receive swag and gain access to internal events, company headquarters, and parties. Additionally, they’re able to connect and communicate with the community of Skimm employees and other Skimm’bassadors and provide The Skimm with feedback on how they can continue to grow and improve.

This type of community management is great if you want to delight your best customers by keeping them at the center of your flywheel, promote brand loyalty, increase brand awareness, and build long-lasting relationships with your biggest supporters.

C: Content and Programming

Another type of community management involves the creation of content and programming for your members — such as your customers, fans, followers, or employees. Your content and programming might include marketplaces, crowdfunding, user groups, and user-generated content.

This is a great option for companies with contributed content at the core of their products, business model, and other assets. For example, for companies like GoFundMe and Airbnb, their value is created by the people who join their sites and use their platforms to share fundraisers or rental properties.

These types of companies typically have community teams who work to ensure all community-generated content is appropriate, follows company guidelines, and meets the requirements of the site.

E: External Engagement

External engagement is a type of community management that provides your customers and supporters with a sense of belonging that leads to a stronger connection to your brand through a space that exists outside of your business. One of the most common types of external engagement community management is social media management.

For example, look at HubSpot’s Instagram page — it’s a highly interactive and engaging space that promotes brand awareness all while creating a community of followers with a similar interest (HubSpot). HubSpot’s social media community managers ensure every single person who interacts with a post is noticed and treated like a human — not just a number. Followers are able to engage with HubSpot, the branded content that’s shared on the page, and their fellow followers.

This type of external engagement is great for companies looking to improve brand awareness while creating one-on-one and one-to-many relationships with fans, customers, and followers of all kinds. Virtually any company has the ability to create an external engagement community management with the help of social media.

(I): Internal Engagement

Lastly, there’s internal engagement community management. Companies today are learning the value of creating strong communities internally — among their employees, partners, vendors, and suppliers. Strengthening these internal relationships creates a sense of belonging and allows people to find others to identify with, which, in turn, boosts company morale and overall happiness.

For example, many companies, including HubSpot, use platforms like Slack, which has features, like channels, to improve internal engagement and communication. This feature also helps build a sense of community through groups of employees (remote and in office) with common interests and positions at the company.

This type of community management brings your internal contributors together, connects them with like-minded individuals, and creates a sense of belonging, support, camaraderie, and inclusion in the workplace. This helps them better serve your company by boosting their knowledge of your products and services and improves their happiness and retention rates.

Almost every business can take part in this type of community management as it only requires community building within the office space and may include software you already have (like Slack) or the formation of interest groups among your fellow employees.

So, you’ve reviewed the main types of community management and how they can add value to your business. Now, let’s cover the ways you can actually get started building a community management strategy so you can start reaping its benefits.

How to Build a Community Management Strategy

As you can see, there are several types of community management and ways to go about implementing them at your company. For the sake of this piece, we’re going to review how to create just one community management strategy — an external engagement strategy (which we defined earlier), specifically through social media.

1.  Choose a social media channel.

The first thing you’ll want to do is choose the social media channel on which you’ll manage your community. Think about your target audience’s demographics to determine the best option for your company — for example, you might choose to focus your efforts on Snapchat if you have a young target audience, Instagram if you’re going for a broad target audience, or LinkedIn if you’re targeting a more professional crowd.

Other examples of platforms you might consider building and managing your community on include Facebook, Youtube, and Pinterest.

Learn everything you need to maximize engagement with a social media checklist.

2. Identify your audience.

Once you’ve chosen a social media channel, identify your audience on that platform. By doing this, you’ll be able to see the type of content your target audience interacts with on the specific platform, what they like and expect from the brands similar to yours they already follow, and who they currently engage with.

This research and information will allow you to begin thinking about how you’re going to tailor the content your business creates to your target audience and your chosen platform.

3. Ask your audience what type of content they want to see.

In addition to identifying your audience, you should also ask your audience what they want to see to ensure you’re creating and pushing out content that’s relevant to them.

This will ensure you’re going to be able to reach your audience with social media content they want and are interested in. Asking for this feedback and being open to suggestions also shows your audience you care deeply about their opinions and what they have to say — this will help you enhance your brand loyalty and advocacy, and create valuable interaction within your community (versus a one-way platform).

4. Determine how you’ll identify your success.

Now it’s time to determine how you’ll identify your success. There’s no right or wrong answer here — this is completely based on what matters to you and your company. Ask yourself, “what’s ideal for my brand?”

Here are some examples of success identifiers you might choose to focus on:

• Boost in audience members/ increase in followers
• Number of conversation participants in a live chat or discussion
• Amount of content shared or liked by your followers
• Overall engagement (likes, shares, mentions, hashtags, messages, comments)
• Increase in brand awareness
• Increase in customer satisfaction and retention
• Traffic that’s directed to your website
• Boost in your sales and conversions

(We’ll review how you can measure your community management success identifiers and metrics shortly.)

5. Set goals.

Like most things in business, setting attainable goals, as well as stretch goals, is crucial when working to achieve your various objectives and measure your success. However, if you’re developing a completely new strategy or if you’ve never set goals like the ones you need to make for your social media community management strategy, this task might seem like a difficult one. To get started, try running an experiment or two after you’ve determined how you plan on measuring your success.

For example, if you’ve decided that you’re going to measure your success through your overall engagement on the social media platform, you can run an engagement experiment. Try keeping track of all engagement related to the content you produce and share on the social platform for a specific amount of time you’ve chosen (maybe 4-8 weeks to start).

When the experiment has come to an end, average out your overall engagement (likes, shares, comments, mentions, hashtags, messages, etc.) and then use that number to create an attainable goal — and stretch goal if you choose — for your engagement over the next 4-8 weeks, and so on. You can always update these numbers as time goes on and as you begin collecting more data.

(Throughout your experiment, you can also A/B test different content to see what your followers like the best and choose to interact with most.)

6. Post regularly and engage with your audience.

Success on social media requires consistency in terms of your frequency of posts and engagement. You should determine how often you’re going to post on social media and stick to that plan so your audience members know you’re reliable and start to expect to see your content — you’ll train them to look for your latest posts.

Social media is a great way to develop close bonds and relationships among your brand and audience. Show your customers and followers they aren’t just a number and they’re heard by your company and employees. “Like” their comments and respond to all questions, comments or concerns (even the positive comments that warrant a “Thank you!” or “Yay! We’re so happy you’re enjoying our free CRM!”).

You can even follow back your biggest brand advocates — if you deem it as appropriate — or interact with the content your followers share (whether or not it has a direct tie to your company) to show your support.

No matter how you choose to interact and engage with your followers, remember to be authentic and address each person as an individual. Social media isn’t a forum, so there shouldn’t be any canned responses you use for your social followers. By maintaining an authentic voice and presence on social media, your brand will have a unique, human element behind it that feels trustworthy and personal to customers and community members.  

7. Measure your results.

Now it’s time to measure your results. Remember, when it comes to measuring your success on social, you shouldn’t always get hung up on the quantitative data — numbers don’t always reflect all of your efforts accurately, or the sense of belonging you’re creating for your community members. Additionally, you rarely see immediate results when it comes to your social media efforts — identifying your target audience, building a following, and learning how to reach your customers on a specific platform takes time.

To measure your results, decide on the method that works best for your needs, goals, and company. Here are a few ways to do this.

Social listening: Social listening is the process of monitoring your social media accounts to look for and keep track of all mentions, customer feedback, keywords, and discussions related to your brand, products, services, and customers (even your competitors, too). You then take a deeper look at all of these things to analyze them and gain insight into what’s working for your customers and followers, and what should be modified.

Platform analytics: Depending on the social platform you chose for your community management strategy, there might be a built-in analytics tool for you to measure your success in terms of variables specific to that platform. Examples include Twitter Analytics, Instagram Insights, and Facebook Analytics.

Analytics tools: If your platform of choice doesn’t have an analytics tool included, or if you’re looking for deeper analysis, you might choose to incorporate another tool or platform to help you measure your success. Examples include Google Analytics, Sprout Social, and HubSpot.

We’ve covered how to develop your community management strategy, so now, let’s review seven best practices you can incorporate as well.

1. Set community rules and guidelines.

When it comes to anything related to your business, it’s probably fair to assume you want it to represent you well and serve as an accurate portrayal of your brand. Your community is no exception. Therefore, you’re going to want to set community rules and guidelines for all members and contributors (including your team members who are managing the community).

Depending on your type of community, how you go about setting your community rules and guidelines may differ. However, here are some examples of ways to create these guidelines to help you get started.

• Create a written document with your expectations for the way all members are expected to communicate, behave, and contribute. Then, share that document with your team and community members when they join.
• If you have a forum, FAQ document, or community website, you can also make this document available at all times to members there. If your community meets in person, review these details face-to-face and consider handing out a printed copy to set expectations.
• Have a method for your team members to escalate any major issue within your community to the right person at your company so they can manage it appropriately.
• Be sure to update your rules and guidelines as necessary (as your community grows, changes, etc.).

2. Check on your community regularly.

No matter what type of community you manage, check on its members, the content being shared by your customers as well as your team. Whether it’s related to your brand ambassador program, forum, Facebook account, or community website, it’s your job to ensure everything is running smoothly —  that people are receiving the support they need, their questions are being answered, and they feel a sense of community.

3. Be authentic.

You need to be authentic while managing any type of community. When your customers, fans, followers, and leads come to your community, they should immediately know it’s yours based off of different factors like your branding and voice. And no matter the type of interaction, being genuine and human is crucial whether or not you’re behind a screen or face-to-face. After all, one of the main reasons you’re creating a community is to make sure your members feel valued.

4. Listen.

Since community management requires so much thoughtful interaction with members, listening is crucial. Whether it’s social listening, reviewing your forum and FAQ pages regularly, or responding to in-person and online feedback, listening is how you’ll improve your community to the best of your ability. It also shows your audience and members you value their opinions, hear what they have to say, and care about their experiences within your community.

5. Show appreciation.

A large part of managing a successful community is showing appreciation for your members. This will help you build brand loyalty and trust between you and your members. It also shows your members how much you value their time and commitment to your brand — remember, some of your community members are most likely also some of your most invested, supportive, and loyal fans, followers, and customers already.

To ensure you’re showing appreciation when necessary, you can try the following tactics depending on the type of community you have.

• Interact with all new community members as soon as they join — say, “Thank you and welcome!” and ask them what you can do to make their experience a great one.
• Pay attention to who your biggest community contributors are (keep a document with their names, emails, etc.). This way you can send them swag or give them a shout out for simply being awesome.
• Invite your ambassadors and brand advocates to your office to meet your team and give them a behind the scenes look at your operation.
• Keep an eye out for mentions, keywords, and hashtags, on your forum, social media platforms, community website, and more so you’re able to engage with those people to show your appreciation and the human element behind your community.

6. Maintain your brand voice at all times.

Similar to what we reviewed about the importance of authenticity, maintaining your brand’s voice at all times is critical when it comes to community management. This is a large part of what makes your community unique as well as ensures your community is identifiable to your members and audience.

No matter how many people are working on your community, make sure they understand your brand voice so they can help you maintain it throughout all interactions, engagement, and content. One way to make this a simpler process is by tying your community back to your company’s marketing goals and/ or collaborate with your marketing department. It’ll keep your messaging and interactions focused as well as push you to maintain your brand voice.

7. Explore new ways to engage your community.

You always want to be engaging your community — but what happens if there are changes in your industry, your company’s products or services are drastically updated, or your members request new types of content?

To keep your community up to date, always explore new ways to engage your members, whether that’s online or in person (depending on your type of community). You can also engage members as soon as they join to continue learning about your audience, what they want from you, and what made them join your community — this will also help you learn about new ways to interact with them.

At this point, you may be wondering how to get all of this work started — where to begin with your community management strategy efforts at your company if you haven’t done any work related to the field before.

A common first step businesses take when spearheading their community management plan and strategy is to determine whether or not they want to hire a community manager.

Community Managers: How They Can Help Your Business Grow

If your business has the resources, you might want to consider hiring a community manager (or even a team of managers) to help you kickstart your efforts and community.

What is a community manager?

Community managers run your community management efforts. Depending on the type of community management you chose to incorporate at your company, you might require the assistance of several community managers with entirely different focuses.

However, there are some universal traits shared by almost every community manager, no matter their role in the field. Generally speaking, a community manager:

• Has the ability to lead your community development and growth efforts.
• Is highly customer-focused.
• Can empathize with their members on forums, during in-person meetings, on social channels, on community platforms, and more.
• Knows how and when to show empathy.
• Is an authentic and detail-oriented person.
• Can analyze and measure community management efforts and results.
• Understands who you are as a brand and carries that image and voice — along with your marketing efforts — over to your community management strategy.

To bring us back to our previous example of external engagement community strategy, let’s review the specific in-depth tasks of a social media manager.

A social media community manager:

• Maintains the voice of the brand in all posts and interactions.
• Ensures all content being shared has a purpose and meets the expectations and needs of followers and the target audience.
• Schedules, posts, and engages on all social content.
• Creates, manages, and follows up with all contests, giveaways, and promotions on social.
• Ensures community rules and guidelines are being followed by all community members.
• Measures results of all content and work on social (and makes modifications when necessary).
• Keeps up with industry trends and updates made to the platform at hand.
• Knows what audience members want and need out of the shared social content.
• Is authentic and knows when to say, “Thank you”, “We’re sorry”, and “We support you”.
• Creates a safe space for followers and members to ask questions, get help, feel supported, share ideas, provide feedback, and solve problems.

Whew! That was a lot of information — but, you should now have a better understanding of why community management is so important, how it can help your business grow, and how you can get started on your business’s strategy.

Start Building Your Community

Community management is a new, yet powerful, industry. By implementing a community management strategy at your company, you’ll be able to create a safe place for your customers, fans, employees, and followers to collaborate, provide you with feedback, bond, and learn.

This will help you build brand loyalty, increase conversions and sales, and show the people who matter most to your success a human side to your brand that they can relate to. So, get started by reviewing your options for types of community management to incorporate at your company, developing a strategy, and determining whether a community manager is the next hire you need to make.

Like many of the people who work in the industry, digital marketing was born in the 1990s. Back then, email was the age of most college graduates, AT&T launched the first banner ad, and the CRM industry was just starting to thrive.

Needless to say, marketing has evolved at breakneck speed since then, sprouting many more types of marketing. Some are definitely more effective and relevant than others, so read on to learn about the top types of marketing around today.

The Ultimate List of Types of Marketing

1. Account-based Marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a hyper focused marketing strategy where teams treat an individual prospect or customer like its very own market. Marketing teams create content, host events, and launch entire campaigns dedicated to the people associated with that account, rather than the industry as a whole.

2. Acquisition Marketing

Acquisition marketing is attracting new visitors and leads to your website through search engine optimization, freemium products, education hubs, paid advertising, copywriting, conversion rate optimization, lead generation campaigns, and lead optimization.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when an online retailer rewards a website with a commission for each customer they refer through their promotion of one of the online retailers’ products. The website, often called an affiliate, will only get paid when their promotion generates a sale.

4. Brand Marketing

Brand marketing is shaping your brand’s public perception and forging an emotional connection with your target audience through storytelling, creativity, humor, and inspiration.

5. Buzz Marketing

Buzz marketing is a viral marketing strategy that leverages refreshingly creative content, interactive events, and community influencers to generate word-of-mouth marketing and anticipation for the product or service the brand is about to launch.

6. Campus Marketing

Campus marketing is hiring college students to become campus ambassadors for your brand. They usually market your products or services to other students by setting up booths around campus or hosting giveaways.

7. Cause Marketing

Cause marketing is a type of corporate social responsibility that aims to simultaneously improve society and boost a brand’s awareness by promoting and supporting a charitable cause.

8. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a creating, publishing, and distributing content to your target audience. The most common components of a content marketing program are social media networks, blogs, visual content, and premium content assets, like tools, ebooks, or webinars.

9. Contextual Marketing

Contextual marketing is targeting online users with different ads on websites and social media networks based on their online browsing behavior.

10. Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is the ability to have 1:1 personal conversations across multiple channels, meeting customers how, when, and where they want. It is more than just live chat, extending to phone calls, texts, Facebook Messenger, email, Slack, and more.

11. Controversial Marketing

Controversial marketing doesn’t aim to polarize an audience. It’s an attention-grabbing technique for stating an opinion, and brands use it to spark productive conversations about certain moral values. In recent years, any stance taken on sensitive social issues can be considered controversial marketing.

12. Customer Marketing

Customer marketing is focusing on retaining your existing customers, delighting them with your product or service and customer service, and turning them into advocates for your brand who can spread the word about your brand.

13. Digital Marketing

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers.

14. Email Marketing

Email marketing is sending educational or entertaining content and promotional messages to people who willingly subscribe to your email newsletter. You can also use email marketing to nurture leads with content that moves them along the buyer’s journey.

15. Event Marketing

Event marketing is planning, organizing, and executing an event for the purpose of promoting a brand, product, or service. Events can take place in-person or online, and companies can either host an event, attend as an exhibitor, or participate as a sponsor.

16. Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing are in-person events, experiences, and interactions that forge lasting emotional connections between a brand and their target audience.

17. Field Marketing

Field marketing is creating sales enablement content like case studies, product overviews, competitor comparisons, and more to help sales close their prospects into customers during the last stage of the buyer’s journey.

18. Global Marketing

Global marketing is focusing on the needs of potential buyers in other countries. Typically, a global marketing strategy requires a business to do new market research, identify countries where the business’s product might be successful, and then localize the brand to reflect the needs of those communities.

19. Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing is placing bold, clever brand activations in high-traffic physical locations to reach audiences in a creative and cost-effective way, grow brand awareness, and spread the word about your brand.

20. Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is creating valuable experiences that have a positive impact on people and your business by attracting prospects and customers to your website through relevant and helpful content. Once they arrive, you engage with them using conversational tools like email and chat and by promising continued value. Finally, you delight them by continuing to act as an empathetic advisor and expert.

Unlike outbound marketing, with inbound marketing, you don’t need to fight for your potential customers’ attention. By creating content designed to address the problems and needs of your ideal customers, you attract qualified prospects and build trust and credibility for your business.

21. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is designed to tap into an existing community of engaged followers on social media. Influencers are considered experts in their niches. These individuals have a large influence over an audience you might be trying to reach, and can be helpful marketing to those buyers.

22. Informative Marketing

Informative marketing focuses more on the facts and less on emotions. This marketing tactic highlights how your product’s features and benefits solve your customers’ problems and can even compare your product to your competitors’ product. Although this type of marketing relies on facts and figures to trigger a desired action, it’s usually framed in a compelling way.

23. Interactive Marketing

Interactive marketing is an innovative type of marketing where your audience can interact with engaging visuals or videos within your content. This new form of marketing unleashes your creativity and, in turn, allows you to tell more gripping stories, crowning it as one of the best ways to capture your audience’s attention.

24. Multicultural Marketing

Multicultural marketing is devising and executing a marketing campaign that targets people of different ethnicities and cultures within a brand’s overarching audience. Not only does it help you relate to and resonate with minority groups, but it also recognizes their ethnicities and cultures and helps majority groups realize that most countries are melting pots and not dominated by one main ethnicity or culture.

25. Native Marketing

Native marketing is when brands pay reputable publishers to collaborate in the creative process of crafting a sponsored article or video that covers one of the publisher’s main topics and looks like a regular piece of content on their website. They also pay these publishers to distribute this sponsored content to their massive audience through social media and their website. In sum, when brands pay for a publisher’s native advertising services, they can leverage their editorial expertise and reach to help their brand tell captivating stories to a bigger and better viewership.

26. Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing blends neuroscience and marketing to help brands gauge the emotional resonance of their current and future marketing campaigns. To do this, companies like Immersion Neuroscience and Spark Neuro have developed technology that can gauge certain neurochemical and physiological responses, which both signal emotional engagement while consuming marketing content.

27. Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is a traditional method of marketing that includes intrusive activities such as print ads, TV ads, cold calling, and email blasts.

28. Partner Marketing

Partner marketing is attracting new partners to sell your product or service to another pool of customers. At HubSpot, we have an agency partner program where inbound marketing agencies sell our product to their clients and we give our partners a cut of the revenue.

29. Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing is leveraging technology and data analysis to distribute personalized marketing messages to your prospects.

30. Persuasive Marketing

Persuasive marketing focuses more on the emotions and less on the facts. It aims to make an audience feel something, associate those emotions with a brand, and trigger a desired action.

31. Product Marketing

Product marketing is bringing a product to market and driving demand for it. This includes deciding the products positioning and messaging, launching the product, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand its benefits and features.

32. Proximity Marketing

Proximity marketing is when brands use Beacons, which are Bluetooth devices that send alerts to people’s smartphones based on their proximity to one of their stores, to promote discounts to any customer who walks by one of their stores and has their app. Beacons can also pinpoint people’s location in a store and send them deals on the products and brands that are the same section as them.

33. Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on cultivating deeper, more meaningful relationships with customers to ensure long-term brand loyalty. Relationship marketing is not focused on short-term wins or sales transactions. Instead, it’s focused on delighting an audience and your customers for the long-haul.

34. Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is optimizing content for search engines or using paid advertising to ensure that your business’s products or services are visible on search engine results pages (SERPs). When a user types in a certain keyword, SEM enables your business to appear as a top result for that search query.

35. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is creating content to promote your brand and products on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Your unique content should be tailored to the specific platform you share it on to help you boost your post’s reach.

36. Stealth Marketing

Stealth marketing is when a brand hires actors or celebrities or uses pseudonyms to promote their product or service without consumers realizing they’re being marketed to. Some examples of stealth marketing are hiring actors to subtly promote products to the public, sockpuppeting, paying influencers to post about a product or service without disclosing that it’s actually an ad, creating fake viral videos, and product placement in movies.

37. User-generated Marketing

User-generated marketing is when businesses ask the public for ideas, information, and opinions on social media or run contests to help them craft better marketing material, like a logo, jingle, or commercial.

38. Video Marketing

Video marketing is creating videos and uploading them to your website, YouTube, and social media to boost brand awareness, generate conversions, and close deals.

39. Voice Marketing

Voice marketing is leveraging smart speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Home to educate people and answer questions about their topics of interest.

40. Word of Mouth Marketing

Word of mouth marketing is customers’ recommendations of a brand, which is the most trusted form of marketing today. To create as much word of mouth marketing as possible, you need to stay laser-focused on developing the best product or service possible and providing top-notch customer service. In other words, you need to serve your customers needs before your own. Only then will your customers turn into a loyal, passionate tribe that will recommend your brand to their friends and family.

Implementing a successful content marketing strategy for your business is a critical component for sustained growth — and yet, 32% of B2B businesses rate their content creation workflow as fair or poor.

Nowadays, with marketing pertaining to everything from SEO to social media to PPC, you can’t do it alone. Fortunately, there are plenty of impressive online marketing tools you can use to help create a more effective solution.

If you work for a small business, it’s particularly imperative you find tools to help you manage the wide scope of your marketing demands.

Here’s the problem, though — the landscape of online marketing tools available now is huge, and it’s only growing.

For instance, just look at the latest Marketing Technology Landscape:

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7,040 tools … I’m willing to bet you don’t have time to sift through that pile of technology.

To help you find the best online marketing tool for your business’ needs, I’ve compiled a list of the 18 I use and love. Keep reading to learn about tools that will help you attract, engage, and delight both new and existing customers.

Online Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

1. HubSpot

Price: Free, or up to $3,200 per month for enterprise, depending on your plan

HubSpot is a full-stack growth software that includes marketing, sales, and customer service tools to improve all facets of your business. With HubSpot, you’ll have everything you need to grow your business and increase conversion rates.

Several of HubSpot’s products start out free. You can set up lead capture forms, send kickback emails, and get basic analytics reports for free. Additionally, you can track emails, schedule sales meetings, and live chat with visitors. You can even set up a help desk and ticketing system on the freemium plan, and then pipe everything into the free CRM to get a full view of your customer.

Of course, things get more sophisticated from there with Starter, Professional, and Enterprise tiers. And if you work with other marketing technology products (such as others in this list), it’s highly likely you’ll be able to integrate and use them with HubSpot.

2. BuzzSumo

Price: Paid plans start at $79 per month

BuzzSumo connects influencers with companies looking the partner with them. This tool is great for companies who are unsure of how to reach their target demographic. The user can search the database of top influencers in their field of expertise, and then reach out to form affiliations.

BuzzSumo also gives you the ability to view past trending topics and mentions. The analytics feature can give you a peek at what you should be monitoring, as well as areas you can improve.

Finally, you can use the tool to analyze the content most shared and referenced. Who is linking to it and sharing it, what do their follower counts look like, and how can you get on their radar? BuzzSumo helps you answer this.

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3. Proof

Price: Tiered pricing based on the volume of your website traffic, starting at $24 per month

Proof is designed to help you display your social proof on your website in the most effective and convincing way possible. It’s very easy to download — all you have to do is copy and paste their pixel onto your site page.

Once you paste the pixel, it will integrate with your site (or CRM) and show your targeted customers:

• Social media posts
• Reviews
• Video testimonials
• Hot streak notifications
• Live Visitor counts

Additionally, you can get a look at your customer’s demographics by looking at their Visitor ID information.

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4. Survey Anyplace

Price: Tiered pricing, starts free and goes to $42+ per month for enterprise

Survey Anyplace has streamlined the survey creation experience by allowing you to build your own surveys and tailor them to your brand’s unique needs.

Far from the classic survey creator, they have streamlined for mobile and optimized the survey experience so that it’s quick and simple, with a heavy visual emphasis if desired.

The more accurate data you get from your users, the better your insights can be — ultimately, surveys are one step in the direction of increasing your conversions.

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5. Trello

Price: Tiered pricing, starts free and goes to $42+ per month for enterprise

Trello is a content brainstorming and calendar service that allows you to collaboratively create and share ideas across multiple individuals and teams.

It operates more as a content planner than content scheduler — you can create notecards for article topics, marketing campaigns, or other subjects your team may focus on. On each card, users can take notes, record instructions, update the project status, and assign cards to certain people.

Trello is a comprehensive tool for content strategists looking to really plan out their editorial calendar.

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6. Google Analytics

Price: Free for the standard version, $150,000 for Google Analytics 360

Analytics is a free service offered by Google that allows you to track and analyze customer data. It’s the most ubiquitous analytics tool on the web, and for good reason — it’s simple to use, but it’s also powerful and highly customizable.

While all it takes to get started is a simple javascript snippet (best implemented via Google Tag Manager), what you can do with the tool is really only limited by your imagination (and possibly your developer’s time). I don’t know many marketers who don’t have at least a very basic understanding of Google Analytics traffic reports.

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7. MailChimp

Price: Tiered pricing, free to $199

MailChimp is a popular email marketing tool and offers several key features:

• Website traffic tracking
• Email templates
• Drip campaign design
• Widespread software integrations
• It’s free for small companies

MailChimp automates your emails and makes campaign design a breeze. It’s a simple tool to use, although some of their marketing automation features are a bit limited. If you want something more robust, you might want to consider a tool such as Autopilot or HubSpot. But if you’re just starting out, MailChimp is great.

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8. Canva

Price: Plans start free, $12.95 per month for teams, or custom pricing for enterprise

Canva is a subscription service for people who need web design to be easy and might not have the budget for a full-time graphic designer. Optimized for mobile, Canva makes design easy for amateurs with its visually appealing drag-and-drop features.

You can create shapes, logos, charts, graphs, and your own presentations with custom fonts using the design tools available in Canva. If you’re an employer, you can also check on the status of projects assigned to your employees on a deadline.

It has millions of images in its library and access to them is right at your fingertips.

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9. Screaming Frog

Price: Two plans are available — one is free, and the advanced plan is $194.33 (USD)

This service is a website crawler that is designed to help identify your SEO issues in URLs and web pages. It will flag site issues like:

• Broken links
• Duplicate content
• Redirects
• Page titles
• Metadata

This is one of the stronger SEO tools on the market and is a great way to analyze the technical components of your website to make sure you’re well-optimized for search engines. Even in a simple use case, it’s awesome for finding broken links and website architecture.

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10. Crazy Egg

Price: Tiered pricing, plans range from $24 per month to $249 per month

Crazy Egg is a data collection tool for you to gain insights into your customers through testing. The service offers customers a range of tools, including:

• Click reports
• Heat maps
• User session recordings
• A/B testing tools
• Scroll maps

All of these tools will help you gain insight into how your customers use your site, what they look at and for how long, and areas of friction that prevent conversion. This can improve the usability of your site, and will likely increase conversions as a result.

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11. HotJar

Price: Starts free and moves up from there based on traffic and data collection needs

HotJar is a world-class customer experience analytics platform. They offer several features to help you understand your website visitors’ behavior better, including:

• Heatmaps
• Session replays
• Form analytics
• On-site polls
• Surveys

I like the product because it’s simple to install — all you need is a simple script to set up all the features across your site. Plus, it’s incredibly affordable, and might even be free, depending on your needs.

If you’re doing any sort of conversion optimization, it’s a powerful research tool.

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12. Hootsuite

Price: Tiered pricing starting at $29 per month and goes up to $599+ per month for enterprise

Hootsuite is a social media scheduling tool in the vein of MeetEdgar and Buffer that allows you to plan and pre-schedule your social media posts. This enables you to post whenever you want on a 24/7 cycle to reach international audiences.

All of the social engagement functions operate within the system dashboard, so you can stay in Hootsuite without switch back-and-forth between services. You can also identify key influencers and hashtags.

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13. Buffer

Price: Starts free and goes up to $199 per month

Buffer is my favorite social media tool, and it’s incredibly simple to use.

It works for large companies, but I find it’s perfect for start-up or small business marketing teams who want to start automating and optimizing their social strategy. They make several different products that help with this, including their social media share widgets for websites, and their social post scheduler.

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14. Slack

Price: Tiered pricing, plans range from free to $12.50 per month

Slack is a collaborative messaging tool ideal for small teams. It runs “#channels”, which can be separated by topic so that important conversations on business topics aren’t interrupted by discussions on team bonding activities.

Themed slack groups are great for networking and sharing your new content with relevant, powerful players in your industry.

Slack is another online marketing tool that is simple to use, but ultimately offers some advanced features. For instance, since Slack’s developer network is so strong, you can likely find a Slack app for anything you want to accomplish.

It’s also not too difficult to build your own Slack apps — if you want to notify your teams of transactions, anomaly detection, or results from online experiments, building a Slack app might be a good solution for you.

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15. Followerwonk

Price: Tiered pricing, from free to $79 per month

Followerwonk is designed to mine your Twitter Analytics, so if Twitter is one of your strongest platforms, this is likely a worthwhile investment.

You can find relevant Twitter accounts that you want to target, develop a content and posting strategy, and figure out your followers’ demographics to make sure you’re delivering quality content.

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16. Optimizely

Price: Custom pricing

Optimizely is, at this point, the gold standard in online experimentation. If you’re doing conversion rate optimization (which you should be), this is the tool to consider.

Optimizely allows you to continuously run A/B tests and multivariate tests on your site to lift conversion rates and revenues. They’ve also expanded their feature set and run under the banner of “experiment everywhere”, empowering server-side product experiments and deep personalization capabilities.

Finally, with their acquisition of Experiment Engine, they have a powerful workflow and knowledge management solution to enable insight sharing and documentation.

It’s a pricey solution, so it’s best left for enterprise programs or those who are very serious about conversion optimization — but it’s a good one if you can afford it.

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17. Convert.com

If you’re looking for an experimentation platform that is a bit more affordable, Convert.com is the way to go.

For most use cases, they’ve got feature parity with Optimizely. The vast majority of marketers will never reach the outer bounds of Convert’s feature-set, and it’s a more affordable option than Optimizely.

It’s also a joy to use. The user experience is great, and the performance is top-notch.

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18. Sniply

Price: Tiered pricing, plans range from $29 per month to $299 per month

Sniply generates unique links to your content, so you can better track and analyze traffic sources. These links lead directly to your content and include a call-to-action on any page you need it.

Sniply also provides analytics so you can track visitors, bounce rate, conversions, or any other relevant data you might need.

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Ultimately, these are my favorite online marketing tools essential for small businesses. From lead capture to SEO research to analytics, these tools are capable of helping you create a fully integrated and successful long-term marketing strategy. If you’re looking to get up and running with a simple but effective stack, these tools will help you get there.

When setting up a paid Facebook ad, there are a lot of boxes to be checked.

Are you targeting the right people? Are your image dimensions to scale? Are you running the right type of ad? If we’re being honest, it can get a little confusing.

With more than 2.3 billion people using Facebook every month, and nearly 1.6 billion users every day, Facebook offers up a unique opportunity for marketers to augment their organic efforts. The trouble is, with both an investment of time and money on the line, there’s not much room for oversight.

To help, we’ve put together a checklist to help you keep all of your campaign details straight. Or watch this short video on how to increase the effectiveness of your ads and budget. These will help ensure that you’re tapping into the right audience with the right ad at the right time.

How to Run Facebook Ads

Facebook offers a variety of paid ad options and placements, but all ads can be broken down into three elements:

1. Campaigns. The campaign houses all of your assets.
2. Ad sets. If you’re targeting separate audiences with different characteristics, you’ll need an individual ad set for each.
3. Ads. Your actual ads live within your ad sets. Each ad set can hold a variety of ads that vary in color, copy, images, etc.

With that terminology out of the way, let’s dive in to creating an ad.

Start creating an ad through Facebook’s Ads Manager.

You can create a paid ad on Facebook using Facebook’s Ads Manager.

Once you log into this page, you’ll see a performance dashboard where all of your campaigns, ad sets, and ads will be listed including the results they’ve driven for your Facebook page. Unless you’ve already created an ad for your Facebook page, this dashboard will be empty.

To create a new campaign, ad set, or ad through the Facebook Ad Manager, tab over to the type of ad you want to create and click the green “Create” button to far left of these ad types, as shown below. You can see from this screenshot that we’re currently set to create a new campaign.

Choose an objective.

Facebook’s Ads Manager, like many social media advertising networks, is designed with your campaign objective in mind. Before getting started, Ads Manager will prompt you to choose an objective for your campaign:

There are 11 different objectives to choose from. The list includes everything from general brand awareness, to getting installs of your app, to increasing traffic to your online store.

By choosing one of these objectives, you’re giving Facebook a better idea of what you’d like to do so they can present you with the best-suited ad options. As shown in the screenshot above, Facebook’s ad options include:

• Brand awareness
• Reach
• Website traffic
• Engagement
• App installs
• Video views
• Lead generation
• Messages
• Conversions
• Catalog sales
• Store traffic

Let’s say, for sake of this blog post, you’re looking to drive more traffic to your website. When you select this option, Facebook will prompt you to enter the URL you’re looking to promote. If you’re using marketing automation software, be sure to create a unique tracking URL with UTM parameters for this to ensure that you’ll be able to keep track of traffic and conversions from this ad. For HubSpot customers, this can be done using the Tracking URL Builder.

Once selected, Facebook will then display the ad option that makes the most sense in terms of achieving this objective.

Choose your audience.

Your next step is to configure your target audience — you can do this for each ad set that belongs to the same campaign. If you’re just starting out with paid advertising on Facebook, it’s likely that you’ll have to experiment with several different targeting options until you reach an audience that fits just right.

To help you narrow your focus, Facebook’s targeting criteria are accompanied by an audience definition gauge. This tool — located to the right of the audience targeting fields — takes all of your selected properties into consideration in order to come up with a potential reach number.

If you’re wavering between choosing a specific audience over a broad one, consider your objective. If you’re looking to drive traffic, you’ll probably want to focus on the type of people you know will be interested in your offering. However, if you’re looking to build brand awareness or promote a widely appealing offer, feel free to focus on a more general audience.

Facebook’s built-in targeting is vast, including options such as:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Relationship
• Education
• Work
• Financial
• Home
• Ethnic Affinity
• Generation
• Parents
• Politics (U.S. only)
• Life Events
• Interests
• Behaviors
• Connections

You also have the option to select a Custom Audience — this allows you to target people on Facebook who are in your company’s contact database, visited a page on your website that has a tracking pixel, or use your app or game. To learn more about how to set up an Custom Audience on Facebook, check out these instructions. (And for more on the specifics of these criteria, visit this Facebook targeting resource.)

Once you find a group that responds well to your ads, Facebook allows you to save these audiences to be used again later — so you may not need to dive into this step once you’ve been running Facebook ads for a while.

Set your budget.

Facebook allows you to set either a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Here’s how they differ from each other:

• Daily budget. If you want your ad set to run continuously throughout the day, this is the option you’ll want to go for. Using a daily budget means that Facebook will pace your spending per day. Keep in mind that the minimum daily budget for an ad set is $1.00 USD and must be at least 2X your CPC.
• Lifetime budget. If you’re looking to run your ad for a specified length of time, select lifetime budget. This means Facebook will pace your spend over the time period you set for the ad to run.

To further specify your budgeting, turn to the advanced options — this option is linked at the bottom of the screenshot shown above. This section allows you to specify a few things:

Schedule

Choose whether or not your want your campaign to run immediately and continuously or if you want to customize the start and end dates. You can also set parameters so that your ads only run during specific hours and days of the week.

Optimization & Pricing

Choose whether or not you want to bid for your objective, clicks, or impressions. (This will alter how your ad is displayed and paid for.) By doing so, you’ll pay for your ad to be shown to people within your target audience that are more likely to complete your desired action, but Facebook will control what your maximum bid is.

If you don’t want Facebook to set optimal bids for you, you’ll want to opt for manual bidding. This option awards you full control over how much you’re willing to pay per action completed. However, Facebook will provide a suggested bid based on other advertisers’ behavior to give you a sense of what you should shoot for.

Delivery

Delivery type falls under two categories: standard and accelerated. Standard delivery will show your ads throughout the day, while accelerated delivery helps you reach an audience quickly for time-sensitive ads (Note: this option requires manual bid pricing).

Create your ad.

What do you want your ad to look like? It all depends on your original objective.

If you’re looking to increase the number of clicks to your website, Facebook’s Ad Manager will suggest the Clicks to Website ad options. Makes sense, right?

This ad option is broken down into two formats: Links and Carousels. Essentially, this means that you can either display a single image ad (Links) or a multi-image ad (Carousel) with three to five scrolling images at no additional cost.

A Links ad will be displayed like this:

A Carousel ad will be displayed like this:

Once you decide between the two, you’ll need to upload your creative assets. It’s important to note that for each type of ad, Facebook requires users to adhere to certain design criteria.

For single image ads, Facebook asks that users adhere to the following design recommendations:

• Text: 125 characters
• Ad Headline: 25 characters
• Image ratio: 1.91:1
• Image resolution (including CTA): 1080 x 1080 pixels

For multi-image ads — also known as Carousel Ads — Facebook provides the following design recommendations:

• Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Image ratio: 1:1
• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 40 characters
• Link description: 20 characters

Keep in mind that these are the ad options for the “Traffic” objective.

If you selected “boost your posts,” you’d be presented with different ad options like the Page Post Engagement: Photo ad. This ad has a unique set of design recommendations. To explore all of the ad options and their design specifics, refer to this resource.

Once you select an ad type, the Ads Manager will prompt you to identify how you’d like to display your ad. The options they provide are as follows: Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed, and Desktop Right Column.

Here’s how each ad would appear:

Desktop News Feed

Mobile News Feed

Desktop Right Column

Be aware if your ad isn’t associated with a Facebook page, you’ll only be able to run Desktop Right Column ads. To leverage all three display locations, you can learn how to create a Facebook Page here.

Report on your ads’ performance.

Once your ads are running, you’ll want to keep an eye on how they’re doing. To see their results, you’ll want to look in two places: the Facebook Ad Manager and your marketing software.

Facebook’s Ad Manager

Facebook’s Ad Manager is a sophisticated dashboard that provides users with an overview of all their campaigns.

Upfront, the dashboard highlights an estimate of how much you’re spending each day. The dashboard is organized by columns, which makes it easy to filter through your ads so you can create a custom view of your results. Key numbers like reach, frequency, and cost are readily available, making reporting on performance a no brainer.

According to Facebook, here are some of the key metrics to look for (and their definitions):

• Performance. Can be customized further to include metrics like results, reach, frequency and impressions
• Engagement. Can be customized further to include metrics like Page likes, Page engagement and post engagement
• Videos. Can be customized further to include metrics like video views and avg. % of video viewed
• Website. Can be customized further to include metrics like website actions (all), checkouts, payment details, purchases and adds to cart
• Apps. Can be further customized to include metrics like app installs, app engagement, credit spends, mobile app actions and cost per app engagement
• Events. Can be further customized to include metrics like event responses and cost per event response
• Clicks. Can be further customized to include metrics like clicks, unique clicks, CTR (click-through rate) and CPC (cost per click)
• Settings. Can be further customized to include metrics like start date, end date, ad set name, ad ID, delivery, bid and objective

Your Marketing Software

While there are certainly a lot of details to keep straight when planning a paid Facebook ad, it’s important that you don’t lose sight of the big picture. Reporting on clicks and conversions from Facebook is important, however, if you’re using URLs with specific UTM codes, you have an opportunity to measure your ads’ full-funnel effectiveness using your marketing software.

Tracking URLs will help your marketing software keep track of how many leads, or better yet, how many customers you’ve gained from your advertising efforts. This information is useful in determining the ROI of this source, and can also be used to inform your overall Facebook marketing strategy.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can create unique tracking codes for your Facebook campaign by navigating to the Tracking URL Builder on the Reports Home page. All you’ll need to do is plug in the URL, attach a campaign, and choose the source you want the URL to be attributed to in your Sources Report. Once your ad launches and you start getting traffic and conversions on your website, you’ll be able to easily track how many visits, contacts, and customers you’re generating.

“Do what you love, and the rest will follow” always sounds good in theory, doesn’t it?

But what happens when you’re doing what you love and it leads to great things, like a successful, profitable business that serves many high-profile clients … but eventually brings you to the brink of a nervous breakdown?

That makes me think of another old adage — “Victim of your own success.”

Not too long ago, that was me. My company was designing amazing digital experiences for brands and their customers worldwide, which was all I’d ever dreamt of doing. But one day I woke up only to realize I was no longer happy — in fact, I was miserable. I couldn’t even remember why I was doing what I was doing anymore.

Cue The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony“.

I was so busy designing my life around what I thought others wanted or expected from me that I managed to earn myself a dreaded spot on the lonely, exhausting hamster wheel of endless emails and tasks.

Perhaps you can relate?

My unhappiness was obvious to everyone around me, both at work and at home. Fortunately, my brother intervened by giving me Nightline anchor Dan Harris’ book, 10% Happier. Harris is a guy, like me, who realized that the very habits that paved the way to his success were also habits that led to anxiety. Mindfulness was his lifesaver, and it’s worked for me, too.

Don’t panic — I promise I’m not going to get all New Age-y on you here. But I will say this opened me up to explore other existential practices and philosophies to find a more authentic and upbeat life.

To be completely honest, this was actually the perfect challenge for me. After all, I’m in the business of designing human experiences for complex systems, and what’s more complex or human than me — and you?

To find newfound joy in my work, I ultimately turned to Okinawa, Japan — a town that boasts the largest population of people who live to 100 or older. Known as “the land of the immortals“, the people of Okinawa have cultivated design thinking that can help you learn how to “do what you love” without inevitable burn-out.

Here, I’m going to tell you how.

Ancient Japanese Wisdom for Modern Times

There’s a term for this Okinawan secret sauce — Ikigai. While there’s no direct word-to-word translation in English, it’s essentially your reason for living, and the thing that makes you jump out of bed in the morning.

Needing something more than a strong cup of coffee to take on the day is not a new concept. In fact, according to a research paper cited in a BBC article on Ikigai, the term dates back to the Heian period (794 to 1185). Even from early times, the Japanese were driven to find value in work.

Ikigai ultimately integrates all aspects of daily life that provides people with a sense of purpose.

In other words, to get to the deeper meaning of your life beyond the superficial — which includes money, fame, and status — you have to engage in a multifaceted exploration of what drives you.

However, it’s not all hearts and rainbows. Psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya, author of a classic book on ikigai published in 1966, points out that the concept provides a more nuanced version of happiness. Ikigai is what helps you set your sights on a brighter future.

The Ikigai Framework

Now that we’ve explored the history of Ikigai, let’s try a fun yet complex mapping exercise where you can apply the concept of Ikigai to your own life. It combines the aspirational with the practical, and grounds the spiritual in reality. So, the “do what you love” bit (your passion) is only one small piece of the puzzle.

There are other things you have to look at, such as:

• What your mission is (how you can serve the world’s needs)
• What you’re good at (your talent/vocation)
• What you can get paid for (your profession)

From this framework, it’s easy to see how passion is just one petal on the flower that is Ikigai. You need all the other aspects to create the critical piece that allows the buds to bloom — you need to find the intersection of it all.

Change Your Frame and Watch Your Game Change

Ikigai is undoubtedly human-centered design at its finest — it considers your needs and desires within the context of a wider humanity.

It’s all about connection. It’s not this or that, it’s this and that. That’s where you find the juice necessary to become more adaptable, take more risks, and increase your productivity.

Plus, you can minimize the stress and anxiety you currently feel in the workplace.

Ultimately, Ikigai helps you construct the best version of yourself.

How to Find Your Ikigai — And Your “&”

To start, all you need to do is come up with a few honest lists:

• What you value
• What you like to do
• What you’re good at

It can be as simple as typing them up or putting pen to paper, but I’d recommend doing it on whiteboard, so you can go nuts with the Post-it notes.

For example, here’s a short overview of my lists:

• Value: Innovating technologically-driven solutions to make things better for others, honoring diversity, embracing creativity, and creating opportunities.
• Passion: Problem-solving, designing, coding, hacking, and finding strength and inspiration in the intersection of science fiction, technology, and culture.
• Good at: Ideation, design, development, collaboration, and having the heart of a growth-hacker (scrappy).

Which brings me to my Ikigai:

What I care about, what I like, and what I’m good at is all about design, technology, and problem-solving.

What the world needs, in my opinion, is forward motion — evolution through innovative solutions.

This leads me to my mission: To be a force for positive change in people’s lives.

Then, there’s profession, which a couple of years ago was the wilted petal that was destroying the whole arrangement. I was so immersed in doing what I thought was necessary to build my business that I stepped away from the work that brings me true bliss.

Bliss, by the way, isn’t some kind of frivolous hysteria. Instead, it’s a state of being completely content with where you’re at.

Getting in touch with my Ikigai reminded me that in order to align my profession with the overarching goal of making a difference in people’s lives, I had to get back to my roots.

Today, I can clearly and easily assert my profession as technologist, designer, developer, and business leader.

As you might imagine, it’s not static, nor is it merely one thing. The beauty of Ikigai is that it’s an ever-expanding spectrum. You can express it in ways both large and small. It’s all happening in the here and now, reaffirming the other age-old Eastern adage: “There is no path to happiness; happiness is the path.”

For the record, the Japanese don’t have a word for retirement. Work is the sum total of our days, so the point is to be sure it all adds up to meaning and purpose.

So … what’s your Ikigai?

Picture this: You’re an email marketer for Run Central, a mid-sized athletic company selling running sneakers, clothes, and gear. You love your company, team, and customers.

As an email marketer, you’re responsible for creating the content that goes out to all your customers, prospects, and leads. You write copy, segments lists, think about conversion opportunities, and report on monthly metrics. It’s a big job — and it keeps you very busy. You can spend hours crafting the perfect email.

In fact, you spend so much time planning and executing on the email strategy, you hardly ever connect with the other marketers on your team who manage the company’s blog and content, social and chat, website, video strategy, events, PR, and more. And this isn’t unusual.

Traditionally, marketers focus on the details — they sweat the small stuff and divide to conquer. One marketer may be in charge of improving conversion metrics, while another focuses on SEO and someone else optimizes product pages. You might even have an intern creating some Instagram stories.

But when marketers complete these tasks in isolation, prospects and customers are left with a disconnected experience.

Marketing is about more than single, solitary interactions — it’s about building a
complete customer experience.

If you want your business to succeed, you need to take a step back and see the bigger picture. How do all your marketing activities connect? What do your customers really experience? And how can you keep your team working towards the same goal? Let’s find out.

Your Customer Journey Isn’t As Linear As You Think

It’s easy to imagine that the customer journey is like a well-traveled, east-to-west road trip, following a single, straight highway from awareness to consideration to purchase.

Buyers start with an ad, check out a blog post, visit a website, sign up for emails, talk to a rep, and end with a purchase. Mission accomplished.

And sure, sometimes prospects take the most direct route on the buyer’s journey highway, but most of the time, they take a few detours.

By trying to force the customer journey into a linear, step-by-step mold, you risk losing prospects that don’t fit your design. Consumers want information before they buy, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all method for getting it.

The truth is, the customer journey is messy and can be difficult to predict — everyone’s is a little different. Some customers may look for information about your brand through search, while others may click on an ad, an email, or seek out reviews from friends.

And the journey doesn’t stop there. Marketers shouldn’t stop interacting with customers as soon as they click “buy” — if you want to maintain and nurture unique relationships, you need to continue to interact with customers after you make a sale. That’s why it’s important to connect the dots between your marketing efforts to build one cohesive brand experience.

How to Connect the Dots

I know what you’re thinking. Easier said than done, right? But there’s a pretty simple solution, or at least there are some tools that can help. Let me explain.

As a marketer, you’re probably used to using multiple tools and point solutions to connect with prospects and customers. Not only is this method inconvenient, but if all your marketing efforts aren’t connected by a customer management solution, or CRM, it also creates a disjointed experience for customers. Marketers need to take a step back and see the bigger picture. If you want to build a complete customer experience, focus on connecting your marketing software with the tool that should be at the core of your marketing efforts: your company’s trusty CRM.

CRMs are traditionally considered a tool for sales teams to track leads, prospects, and customers. With them, reps can see every interaction a contact has had with a brand. Everything from calls with a sales rep to website visits are tracked and logged in a contact record.

While you may be familiar with a CRM, you probably aren’t using it to its full potential. Masters of email marketing, live chat, ads, and social media tools they may be, marketers rarely use a CRM for anything other than creating email lists, if at all. Think about it. You probably stress over the last-minute details of a campaign and track its success, but I’m guessing you rarely check to see how your campaigns are influencing individual contacts, or who’s consistently engaging with your marketing efforts.

Your CRM is your single source of truth — it connects all of your customer information and allows you to take strategic action.

By putting it at the center of your marketing strategy, you can truly personalize your messaging. You can use any data point or marketing engagement metric to segment contacts beyond lifecycle stages. This allows you to create more targeted, meaningful content and ads and expedite the sales process, helping your entire company grow better. Without a CRM, your personalization efforts are smoke and mirrors at best, and insufficient at worst.

How Your CRM Works With Other Tools

Of course, your CRM is only as strong as your other marketing tools. When paired correctly, it helps eliminate friction and save time so that you can focus on building a complete customer experience.

CRM and Email

How many times a week do you email your customers? How many of those emails do your customers actually read? With email and your CRM, you can go beyond first name email personalization — segment your contacts into different lists based on any CRM data point like location, page interactions, and more. And it doesn’t stop there.

Combining a CRM with your email tool allows you to use personalization so that each email recipient receives updates and information that are relevant to them. Not only can you personalize text, but you can also switch up CTAs to send a contact to a different landing page based on CRM data you’ve collected. By sending relevant, personal emails, you can build trust and provide value to customers and prospects.

A CRM can also help you and your team save time. Avoid exporting and importing lists of contacts into your email service provider (ESP) — when your email is connected to your CRM, all of your contacts live within one system. This keeps all of your contact information up to date, helping your team stay compliant with CAN-SPAM laws, send segmented emails easily, and effortlessly report on email deliverability.

Exporting and importing contact lists from your CRM into an email tool may not seem like a hassle, but it really impacts your ability to send the best and most relevant emails to your prospects, customers, and fans. For example, if you export a segmented list from your CRM on Monday and three of your contacts opt out of emails on Tuesday, they’re probably going to be pretty annoyed if they see your name in their inbox on Wednesday. Similarly, if a contact visits your pricing page or shows interest in purchasing after you’ve already exported a list from your CRM, you’re missing out on a big opportunity to convert. Exporting and importing lists excludes the level of detail required to build a complete customer experience unless you have a unified database.

That’s why it’s so important to connect your CRM and marketing efforts. With a fully integrated system, you can skillfully market to the right contacts with minimal effort. You can establish rules that automatically sort a prospect or customer into the appropriate list when they move into a different stage of the customer journey, allowing you to send targeted emails based on their previous brand interactions.

Many of our customers are using HubSpot CRM and Marketing Hub to create better experiences for their own customers. Thomas Berry of Picmonic says, “As a startup, we’re always looking for new tools that will help us make an impact on a smaller budget. We often end up signing up for lots of disjointed tools, which can make it tough to get a full view of the customer journey. With HubSpot’s email tool, we’re able to combine those automation tools with the insights we gather in the CRM. We always aim to put our customers first and with these powerful tools, we can provide them with an even better experience.”

Best of all, when your CRM connects your entire company, you can see how your email strategies are impacting your customers in the context of all your other marketing, sales, and service efforts, helping your team to set clear goals, maintain alignment, and adjust your strategy in real time.

CRM and Ads

Using a CRM with an ads management tool is the best way to leverage your customer data and create high-performing audiences at scale. While third-party data helps you reach a broad persona, the first-party data you get from your CRM lets you target a hyper-specific group of people. It allows you to create relevant ads for any audience, no matter what stage they’re at in the buyer’s journey.

For example, you can create a custom audience of all the contacts in your CRM who viewed a certain product. Based on this audience, you can then create an extremely specific ad that provides information about that product to propel them along their buyer’s journey. You can then see exactly which contacts in your custom audience interacted with your ads, not just an aggregate number, helping you create even more relevant content.

This make a big impact on your customers. Seriously. Think about how many ads they see in a day. How many of those do you think are actually relevant? By promoting highly targeted ads, your customers won’t be surprised or frustrated when they see one in their feed. The ad won’t feel promotional or gimmicky — it will be familiar and helpful because they’ve interacted with similar content in your emails, on your website, or in other marketing efforts.  

Jamie Hall and the team at My Arsenal Strength have the right idea. They’re using HubSpot’s ads tool to fill their CRM with leads, and understand exactly how their contacts are interacting with their ads. “Adding the HubSpot Ads Tool has been a very valuable tool for our company,” says Hall. “We are able to analyze various details, such as seeing where our contacts interacted with our ads, which helps us determine next steps with various ad campaigns. It’s also helpful as we utilize social media outlets to have those leads generated automatically into our HubSpot CRM.”

Connecting your CRM and ads tool also allows you to attach deals to your ads attribution and report on the true ROI of your ad spend, helping you set and allocate budget for future ad buys.

CRM and Your CMS

Finally, if your customers interact with your email, ads, and social, they’re going to expect that you recognize them once they get to your website. For example, if a customer has read an email about a specific product and liked an ad about the same product, they’re going to be pretty frustrated if they can’t easily find that product when they visit your website. Similarly, if a customer purchased a product from your site in the past, they won’t want to re-enter all of their shipping data when they make their next purchase. 

Your website shouldn’t be flat and impersonal — it should be dynamic and conversational. That’s where your CRM comes into play. 

By connecting your content management system, or CMS, to your CRM, you can become the architect of your company’s flywheel — and create personalized site experiences. Conversations with prospects begin on your company’s website. You can manage those conversations, at scale, by using contextual data to share relevant content, create streamlined interactions and sign-ups, and route questions and inquiries to the appropriate department. 

Integrating your CMS and CRM also allows you to access the data you need for a complete view of your visitors’ interactions with your site. Based on that and other general information from your CRM, you can adapt your site to each visitor by optimizing website content, forms, and more.

What Success Looks Like

CRMs serve as the foundation for all your marketing efforts. It is the one place where everyone across your entire organization can view metrics, track progress, and optimize strategies for success.

When used appropriately, it allows you to connect the dots so you can create the complete customer experience your customers crave.

Combining your marketing efforts with a powerful CRM helps you eliminate friction and build your brand — and because it spans so many business functions, it provides the transparency your team needs to stay on top of their goals. Imagine not having to worry about disjointed or competing marketing efforts, conflicting goals, and wasted time — with a CRM, your contacts can view a blog article, an Instagram post, a product page, or any other piece of marketing at any time and know that it’s coming from a single trustworthy company. That’s the power of a CRM.

When marketers leverage their customers’ data for good, they can craft remarkable customer experiences. Learn how you can improve your customer journey with the HubSpot CRM and Marketing Hub.

Throughout the buyer’s journey, content obviously plays a huge role during the beginning and middle stages. At the last stage of the buyer’s journey, though, it can be somewhat overlooked.

A lot of marketing teams are focused on creating the beginning- and middle-stage content that brings in the views and leads most sales teams are focused on closing during the final stage of the buyer’s journey. So, in a nutshell, marketing teams don’t create enough content for this stage and sales teams don’t leverage them enough during it.

However, one of the most important pieces of content any organization can create and leverage really only gets used during the final stage of the buyer’s journey — the business proposal. By outlining your organization’s value proposition, highlighting how your product or service can solve your prospect’s specific problem, and listing your pricing, your business proposal communicates crucial information your prospects need to know before they even think about doing business with you.

Fortunately, to help you create an engaging and convincing business proposal, we’ve rounded up the best business proposal examples we could find on the Internet. Read on to learn how to start writing business proposals that will win you contracts and grow your organization.

5 Professional Business Proposal Examples to Inspire Your Own

1. “How to Write a Business Proposal [Tips & Examples]” | HubSpot

In her thorough blog post about writing a business proposal, Meredith Hart, a Junior Staff Writer for HubSpot’s Sales Blog, fleshes out the fundamental elements included in most business proposals and even created a business proposal example in Canva to give you even more insight on how to craft a compelling one.

After reading her informative blog post, you’ll learn about the fundamental elements you should include in your business proposal, their purpose, how to write each element, overarching tips for creating a top-notch business proposal, and some business proposal examples for web design, SEO, and sales.

2. “How to Write a Business Proposal (The Modern Way)

One of the most robust business proposal examples on this list, PandaDoc’s guide on writing a modern business proposal will help you chip away at this daunting task one step at a time.

In their guide, they cover the structure most business proposals follow, the ten sections to include in your own, what information to include in each section, an example of each section, some quick tips for improving your business proposal, and what you should do after you send your business proposal to a prospect to help you anticipate any follow up questions they might have and, in turn, boost the odds that you close them as a customer.

3. “Business Proposal For PDF & Word” | HubSpot

In HubSpot’s flagship business proposal example offer, they provide you with a fully customizable sample template that gives you detailed instructions on what sections to include in your business proposal, the information to include in each section, and how you can write each section in a convincing fashion.

Since their business proposal template is completely customizable, you can also replace their instructions with your own information, add additional information and sections, and add your own branding and logo. Additionally, you can download your finished business proposal as a Word or PDF file, print it, and email it to your prospects.

4. “How to Write a Business Proposal in 6 Steps” | Fit Small Business

Fit Small Business’ business proposal example is the most fleshed out example on this list. Not only do they cover what exactly a business proposal is, the steps to writing a successful one, and provide an example of one, but they also describe the best methods and tools for sending a business proposal, how to follow up, and what to do after you win a contract.

Additionally, Fit Small Business provides you with some design tips for your business proposal, the best business proposal formats to use (with examples), and answers to frequently asked questions about creating effective business proposals.

5. “HubSpot Partner Agency Proposal Examples” | HubSpot

To help marketing agencies write better business proposals, HubSpot teamed up with four of their agency partners to create four downloadable proposal examples for each of the agency’s specializations.

After downloading it, you’ll have access to proposals created by agencies that specialize in inbound marketing, growth content strategy, industrial manufacturing marketing, and digital solutions and consulting marketing. Since your organization operates in its own specific situation, you can sift through each example to see which one best meets your needs.