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The business world is chock-full of unnecessary and silly acronyms that describe meaningless ideas, like TED (tell, explain, and describe to me). But for retailers, SKU is actually an incredibly useful acronym — it represents one of the most important concepts that allow stores to operate as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

Besides helping retailers account for all their inventory, SKUs can also help salespeople run stores more efficiently, and help retailers manage their inventory better.

For instance, salespeople can use portable scanners to scan a floor sample’s SKU to see how much of that specific product is left in stock instead of going to the back and manually checking how much inventory is available.

SKUs also help retailers track how fast certain products sell out, which shows them what their most and least popular products are. And when retailers can predict how fast their most popular products will sell out, they’ll always be able to buy more inventory when stock gets low, ensuring they’ll never run out of their most popular products.

Additionally, SKUs can help retailers determine their business’ anticipated demand and sales forecasts, allowing them to contact their vendors and verify that they can fulfill their minimum orders.

Picture Credit: FitSmallBusiness

A UPC Explained in More Detail

A UPC, or universal product code, consists of a 12-digit numeric code and a barcode that you scan when you go through a store’s self check-out. The American branch of GS1, an organization that develops and maintains global business communication standards, assigns a permanent UPC to a product for its entire shelf life. So even if multiple retailers sell the product, it’ll still have the same UPC at each store. For example, every box of a certain brand’s blackberries will have the same UPC at every store they’re sold at.

Asking “How is everyone?” at the beginning of every meeting isn’t always the best way to encourage connection and team bonding. Sometimes, you need to take it a step further with an ice breaker.

The best ice breakers have the power to strengthen coworker bonds, stimulate better brainstorming sessions, and create an atmosphere of inclusivity. But it’s easier said than done, and the wrong ice breaker questions can lead to awkwardness or even increased tension.

To get the most value out of your team bonding moments, we’ve compiled a list of the best ice breaker games for the workplace. Next time you get together with your team, use one of these games instead of asking “How is everyone”, and you’re sure to hear some better, more insightful responses than “I’m good”.

1. Fun Questions

Asking fun questions is an easy and effective ice breaker game. To play, simply go around the room and have each person provide an answer to a fun question. The questions are up to you, but if you’re stuck, here are a few ideas:

• If you’re stranded on a desert island and have the option of bringing three items with you, what three items would they be?
• If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?
• What was the first concert you ever went to?
• If you could have any celebrity over for dinner, who would it be and why?

These questions serve two purposes — first, they allow your coworkers to get into a sillier, more creative mindset. Second, they encourage conversation on topics typically reserved for outside the office, which enables members of your team to get to know one another on a deeper level.

2. Personality Quiz

This ice breaker can promote team bonding, and it’s one of the easier options in the list. Simply choose a brief personality quiz on your phone or computer (if you’re stuck, here’s a list), and pull it up on a projector or send the link to everyone.

Once everyone has completed the personality assessment, have each colleague mention one thing they agree or disagree with in their results. This game allows your team members to gain a new perspective on their peers, and it’s also a fun and easy way to get an interesting conversation started.

3. Marshmallow Challenge

Tom Wujec, a business visualization expert, initially presented his Marshmallow Challenge at TED. To play, you simply divide your team into groups of four and give each group 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and a marshmallow. Whichever team can build the tallest structure, wins — the trick is, the marshmallow must be on top.

There are a few reasons this game works as both a great ice breaker and a team-building exercise. First, the most successful teams are the groups of people who don’t spend time competing for power. The game forces your colleagues to work collaboratively when brainstorming potential solutions. Second, the Marshmallow Challenge encourages people to think quickly and offer alternative solutions when their initial idea fails.

With the Marshmallow Challenge, you can strengthen your team’s brainstorming and problem-solving skills, and your team can also have some fun. A win, win.

4. Would You Rather

A classic game played at summer camps everywhere, “Would You Rather” is actually an excellent, quick ice breaker for the workplace. Next time you’re settling into a meeting or team bonding outing, take turns going around the table and asking each person a “Would You Rather” question.

Here are a few “Would You Rather” questions to get you started:

• Would you rather only have summer or winter for the rest of your life?
• Would you rather go on a hike or see a movie?
• Would you rather never use social media sites and apps again, or never watch another movie or TV show?
• Would you rather have a horrible short term memory or a horrible long term memory?

5. Scavenger Hunt

At HubSpot, we conduct a scavenger hunt for new hires on the first day of their training. It’s fun and encourages collaboration, but additionally, it can help employees learn their way around the office.

Fortunately, you can conduct a scavenger hunt for your team even if they’ve worked at your office for years. Simply split up your team into groups, and give each group a short list of items to find — if you work in a smaller space, maybe you can hide some funny items around the office ahead of time. You might even provide incentive for the winning team, like a $50 Amazon gift card.

A scavenger hunt is also an exceptional opportunity for cross-department interaction. Consider reaching out to managers’ from other departments, and creating groups of employees who don’t often get to work together.

6. One Word Game

The One Word ice breaker allows you to provide initial context into a meeting’s topic, and get everyone in the right mindset for discussion.

To play, you’ll want to divide meeting participants into smaller groups. Then, tell them to think for a minute or two, and then share with their group one word that describes X.

For instance, let’s say you’re leading a meeting on culture. Tell the groups to describe work culture, or your office culture in particular, in one word. Once they’ve shared with their groups, you can invite them to share their word with the entire room.

This game encourages everyone to think about a certain topic in smaller groups ahead of time, which could increase participation during the meeting.

7. Pop Quiz

To successfully loosen everyone up and get them in the right mindset for a meeting, you might consider putting a short Pop Quiz on the board.

If your goal is simply to encourage team bonding, your quiz can be more fun — like, “Match the lyrics with this 80’s song”. However, you might also use the Pop Quiz as an opportunity to introduce participants’ to the meeting’s theme. If you’re discussing company changes, for instance, maybe you’ll start by quizzing team members on company history facts (i.e. “What year was this company founded?”).

8. 18 & Under

18 & Under is an engaging and unique way to encourage team members to share fun or interesting stories with one another. Before a meeting, simply go around the room, and ask each person to share one accomplishment they had before they turned 18. Undoubtedly you’ll get some of lesser importance, like “I bought a skateboard”, but you never know what hidden skills you might discover in your colleagues.

9. Two Truths and a Lie

One of the more classic ice breakers in the list, Two Truths and a Lie can be used anywhere from family parties to company events. To play, you simply ask each person to brainstorm three “facts” about themselves — two of the facts will be true, and one will be a lie.

For instance, I might say, “I once auditioned for the TV show Zoom. I have three brothers. I ziplined in Switzerland once.” Coworkers can take turns guessing which is the lie. (FYI, I have two brothers, not three, so that’s the lie. Unfortunately, I did audition for Zoom.)

Two Truths and a Lie is a fun and engaging game, and more importantly, it can help your team learn facts about one another, so they can begin forming deeper bonds. 

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the fifth annual Oculus Connect: Facebook’s annual virtual reality (VR) conference.

Facebook acquired Oculus, a maker of VR hardware like headsets, as well as certain programs that pair with it, in 2014. Some have argued that the investment has yet to show any truly measurable return for Facebook, perhaps because of VR’s slow path to going mainstream.

But at Oculus Connect, we’re encouraged to dream big. At last year’s opening keynote, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his goal to have one billion people using VR — by when, however, wasn’t quite as clear.

Goal = 1 billion people in VR. #oculusconnect

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
October 11, 2017

But in order to do that, VR needs to become both more accessible and affordable, the latter of which the company has addressed by way of its less expensive $199 Oculus Go headset. 

What’s next, then, on Facebook’s path to take VR mainstream, and get it into the hands of one billion people?

We have a few ideas. Here are five predictions we have for Oculus Connect.

Note: These are purely predictions that are not based on any information from Facebook or Oculus.

1. Integration With Facebook for Dating

At Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference this year, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would build a native dating app within Facebook.

Earlier this month, that app was unveiled for testing in Colombia. Some of the key features: the ability to see which events your potential matches might be attending or common interests you share, and finding a place to meet as a result. (Of course, there are privacy issues associated with that — but that’s another story.)

One way to create more use cases for VR — Oculus headsets specifically — is to merge them with features already available within Facebook. Dating could be one such use case if it’s integrated with Oculus Venues: an app that allows users to experience live events (like sports games or concerts) in VR, and interact with other users who are tuning it.

Pairing Facebook for dating with Oculus Venues could be one way to help potential matches get to know each other: by creating virtual first dates within Venues to help break the ice and see if they want to meet in-person.

2. More Business Use Cases

Superstore chain Walmart recently remarked that it’s putting Oculus headsets to use for workplace training, to help employees improve skills in areas like new technology, compliance, and emotional intelligence.

At last year’s Oculus Connect, the opening keynote pointed to workplace use cases for VR, such as virtual meetings and offices.

Workplace training, however, didn’t come up quite as much — but there have been other business use cases for VR, such as those from Tobii Pro, which pairs VR with eye-tracking technology to help retailers learn where a shopper pays the most visual attention and plan store layout accordingly.

Walmart, for its part, is slated to ship 17,000 Oculus Go headsets to its stores, to provide every employee with access to the VR training. This year, I’m curious — and believe it could be possible to see more business use cases, in which multiple units of Oculus headsets have been ordered and used by businesses to help with things like workplace training. 

3. More Education Use Cases 

Similar to workplace and B2B use cases, I’m eager to see more ways to leverage VR technology within classrooms. The company does have its Oculus Education division, and in August, it announced that it would be donating Rift and Oculus Go headsets to schools, libraries, and museums — “to better understand how teachers, students, and various institutions can use VR for learning and collaboration.”

 If this strategy sounds familiar, it might be due to similar, earlier plays from other Big Tech companies. Apple also has a history of distributing mass quantities of units, like its computers, to schools. And while the company had a bumpy road to its $1 trillion valuation, some argue that it was the education distribution strategy that helped Apple amplify its brand awareness.

…especially on the large-scale distribution & standardizations side. Remember when Apple gave close to 1 billion computers to schools? https://t.co/TYQoaDwDiV

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
October 18, 2017

It would be interesting to see a similar move from Oculus and hear more about these educational pilot programs during this week’s keynotes — particularly in ways that benefit underserved communities. That could point to a collaboration between Oculus Education and the company’s VR for Good Creators Lab.

4. Integration With Portal, Facebook’s Smart Speaker

Facebook originally planned to unveil its video smart speaker — said to be named Portal — at F8 in May. However, those plans were shelved after weeks of PR crises around privacy concerns.

Now, rumors are swirling that Portal will be formally announced this week, according to a scoop from Cheddar‘s Alex Heath. The timing seems suspect, given that Oculus Connect is also scheduled for this week — perhaps we’ll receive some official word of Portal’s Debut at the VR event.

It seems odd, however, to unveil non-VR hardware at a VR-specific event. So what would make the announcement make sense? The answer to that question could exist in some sort of integration.

So, what would an integration of a video smart speaker with VR technology look like? Well, for one, it could serve as another way to share in VR experiences together. After all, virtual reality isn’t for everyone — headsets have been known to cause nausea among some users (yours truly, included), and some simply don’t want to pay for the hardware.

Heath had made the point of Portal technology being used to communicate with older family members — “grandparents,” he said — which could serve as one VR-smart speaker integrative use case.

Will Portal be able to make calls to other devices, like these relatives’ televisions or mobile phones? And if so, will the technology be equipped to share VR experiences and visuals with them?

We’ll see if we hear about it at this week’s events.

5. Leaning Into Augmented Realty (AR)

Big Tech companies have been known to, in a word, emulate features that one might have “invented” first. Take the idea of Stories, for example — the ephemeral content first introduced by Snapchat that was later adapted by Instagram, Facebook, and — most recently — by Google.

One of those “must-have” technologies is AR: the type of semi-virtual that doesn’t require a headset and create a similarly immersive experience. Instead, it uses something more accessible, like a smartphone, to place virtual objects into your physical environment via a screen.

One pop cultural example of AR is the game Pokémon Go, which allowed users to “catch” virtual creatures within the real world.

Source: Vice

Google, for its part, recently announced an integration of AR features into its own Daydream VR headsets, and Microsoft already makes its HoloLens headset to combine AR with VR (creating what is known as a “mixed reality headset”).

So, is Facebook next? Can we expect the unveiling of an Oculus mixed reality headset?

Possibly. Facebook does have among its staff a “Director of Camera,” Ficus Kirkpatrick, who is scheduled to speak about AR at a TechCrunch event in October. In the event announcement — which alludes to previous remarks from Zuckerberg about Facebook’s work in AR —  Kirkpatrick is credited as the company’s “head of Camera AR Platform.”

Source: Facebook

The question now is: What would an Oculus mixed reality headset be named? Personally, I’m pushing for the “Oculus Almost.”

I’ll be covering Oculus Connect this week — stay tuned.

These days, teams of all shapes and sizes — from NASA to charity: water — are using the real-time messaging app Slack as a tool to better collaborate with their colleagues and better communicate with their customers.

Over the past few years, however, Slack has become robust enough to work directly with the other platforms your business knows and loves — thanks to many fun and useful integrations folks have built on top of it.

From polling your teammates, to tracking bugs, to fielding questions from potential customers, there’s more to Slack than meets the eye.

The Slack App Directory is the best place to find apps and integrations you can connect to Slack. But with so many available, finding the best of the best can seem like a bit of a crapshoot. That’s why we created the list below of 16 of the best apps and integrations on Slack today. Check ’em out, and consider implementing the ones that make sense for your team.

Before we get into the apps and integrations themselves, let’s quickly make sure we all know how to add an app or integration to our Slack teams.

(P.S. We’d love for you to join HubSpot’s open Slack team, #inbounding. Request an invite here.)

How to Add an App or Integration to Slack

You can add an app or integration to Slack either through the Slack App Directory or by clicking on an individual app’s “Add to Slack” button.

To add via the App Directory: Either click here, or open Slack and click your team name at the top left-hand corner, and choose “Apps & integrations.”

To add apps via an “Add to Slack” button: Look for these “Add to Slack” buttons around the web to add your favorite apps in one click. They look like this:

If you’re having trouble adding apps and integrations to your team’s Slack, it may be because you don’t have the proper permissions. Team owners and administrators can limit who can add apps to a Slack team, so talk to one of them if you have questions.

Note: Want to see which apps and integrations your team is currently using? Check out the Slack App Directory and click “Configure” at the top right. You can filter this list by app name, who added it, or the permissions it uses.

1. Simple Poll

Poll people easily right within Slack.

Simple Poll is a polling app that’s super easy to use. It’s easy to create a poll, for your team members to respond, and to figure out which answer got the most votes.

Once you add the app, all it takes to poll your team is a simple slash command. Type /poll “Poll question?” “Option1” “Option2” “Option3” and a poll will be created for you and sent out by a bot, without any specific team member’s name linked to it.

For example, a poll written in Slack like this:

/poll “where should we have lunch?” “chipotle” “2nd street cafe” “that new hummus place”

… Will end up looking like this:

By default, it’ll add the “1,” “2,” and “3” icons to the bottom of the post so folks can easily respond by clicking on the number emoji that corresponds with their preference, instead of having to fish for it in the “Reactions” option.

2. GrowthBot

Ask questions about marketing, sales, and growth.

Here’s a Slack app from the desk of HubSpot Founder & CTO Dharmesh Shah. Slack users who work in marketing, sales, and other growth-focused organizations can ask GrowthBot simple questions about different systems, analytics, and trends.

To ask GrowthBot for help, users can either:

• Start a private message by chatting @growthbot.
• Use Slack’s “slash” command to chat with GrowthBot by typing /growthbot.

Here are some examples of questions GrowthBot can answer:

3. Troops

Manage your sales pipeline in team conversations.

Troops is a task manager specifically for salespeople, allowing every member of a sales team to collaborate, manage, and report on their sales pipeline. The tool’s most unique feature is its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, which notifies the salesperson as tasks approach or need to be changed.

Because the sales process moves so fast, it can be difficult to make sure every tool the sales staff is using is kept updated with new leads, calls, deals, and close dates. Troops’ integration with Slack allows sales staff to manage their pipeline while collaborating with the rest of their team at the same time.

By receiving Troops’ chat-based alerts within Slack — and creating Troops tasks in Slack conversations — salespeople can make sure the whole team is on the same page at all times.

4. Marker

Send annotated screenshots directly to Slack.

If your desktop is anything like mine used to be, it’s flooded with screenshots that you take — which are tedious to look through and move later. But the process of saving screenshots, annotating them, and sharing them with your team doesn’t have to be so manual.

Enter Marker, an incredibly useful Chrome extension for folks who regularly find themselves sharing screenshots with teammates on Slack. (It also integrates with Trello, GitHub, and other apps.) Once you install the extension and the app, you can capture your whole screen or a selection, annotate it, and send it to a person or channel on Slack.

On top of letting you annotate the screenshot with arrows, text, and emojis, the app automatically attaches the URL of the page where the screenshot was taken and sends it along with the picture.

Here’s a video showing how it works:

Although the main use case the folks at Marker talk about is bug-tracking, you can use it for a lot more than that: reporting small typos, capturing parts of interesting articles, sharing ideas for where to go to lunch, and so on.

5. Intro

Pool your team’s connections into a single network.

If you’re looking for ways to leverage your network and soft connections better, here’s one way to do it using Slack. This app lets you set up a private professional network for your Slack team. Mitali Pattnaik — the app’s co-founder — calls it, “the professional network for the messaging/conversation era.”

When you install the app, it’ll give your Slack a full member directory of your team, and it creates a private network for each Slack team by combining team members’ social connections. The members of your team will get a notification to create and edit their profile. For folks who aren’t Intro members, the app will collect data from various public sources like LinkedIn and Twitter, according to Pattnaik.

Then, you can use your new Slack team network to source potential job candidates, find new prospects, and ask for introductions from you coworkers. So if you want to know whether anyone on your team knows someone in Google’s San Francisco office, or whether anyone on your team went to business school in Europe — then you can at least start your search right in Slack.

Image Credit: Intro

To search for people and companies in your team’s network, you can use the slash command /intro with a person’s Slack username, full name, email address, or you can search for people at a company using /intro (company name).

6. Giphy

Add fun, random GIFs to your conversations.

Ever wanted to share an emotion or a reaction that would be better described with images rather than words? Enter Giphy.

In Giphy’s Slack app, all you have to do is type in the slash command /giphy and any phrase — from “awesome” to “bagels for days” to “WHAT IS HAPPENING.” (Yes, they have GIFs for pretty much everything.) Then, the app will use that phrase to call in a random GIF from their gigantic library of GIFs, and it’ll post it along with the command.

Image Credit: Giphy

Use it to express yourself, to lighten things up, and to set a maturity rating for your team.

What’s fun — and sometimes weird — about the Giphy app is that you never quite know what you’re going to get. You could type in /giphy need pizza ten times and get ten different GIFs. So if you’re looking for accuracy, here’s a pro tip: Use the /giphy command a few times in direct messages to Slackbot, then save and share the GIF you like best.

7. Diggbot

Discover great web content curated by Digg.

If you’re looking for a way to discover new content like news and video right in Slack, Diggbot is the best app for it.

Every day, Digg aggregates 10 million RSS feeds from virtually all publishers, and collects 200 million tweets daily — 40 million of which include links. Their algorithms process all of these links in real time (about 7.5 million per day), and then human editors come in and cherry-pick the best stories and videos.

Diggbot sits on top of all this data and gives you the resulting stories and videos right within Slack. They’ve done it in a way that feels natural and conversational. You can use Diggbot to search for the latest news on any topic or from any publisher, get trending news alerts, and get the twice-daily Digg Edition right to your Slack channel.

Image Credit: Gary Liu

Here are a few of the top slash commands from Digg CEO Gary Liu:

• /digg: Gives you a cool, fresh link. Simple.
• /digg (keyword): Lets you search content by keyword.
• /digg (domain): Lets you see top trending stories for a domain (e.g., “/digg nytimes.com”).
• /digg trending: Gives you a list of stories that are trending on the internet.
• /digg fun: Gives you something fun.

8. Tettra

Organize and share important knowledge in an internal wiki right within Slack.

When you have a small team, it’s easy to keep in touch with one another by way of in-person chats, quick one-on-one Slack conversations, and so on. But the larger your team gets, the harder it is to keep everyone in the loop. That’s where having an internal wiki for folks to document updates — everything from new ideas to experiments you ran to important team updates — can be so important to both keeping everyone informed and scaling the culture of your team.

If your team is already on Slack, why not have your internal wiki right within that app? Tetra is an internal wiki for teams that use Slack. It’s a simple team collaboration tool with a great design that can help your team organize and share important knowledge in one place. You can even search the wiki right from Slack if you want to.

For example, let’s say you wanted to update your company’s website. You can use a simple slash command to ask the question right within Slack — and it’ll search Tettra for internal information related to your question. Here’s what that might look like:

9. Humblebot

Get daily messages with ideas for practicing humility.

Success, happiness, and effective collaboration rest upon things like humility, integrity, patience, modesty, and courage. Humblebot is a really simple Slack app that addresses the first of these character ethics.

Here’s how it works: When you install the app, you’ll receive a little message in Slack every morning with a tip or task for how to be a better person. Examples include “Send someone a thank you note today” and “Ask someone for their opinion today.”

Image Credit: Humblebot

These little reminders will help you be more humble on a more regular basis. Being humble shows you have a clear perspective and you’re self-aware, which is a sign of emotional intelligence. And despite the app’s simplicity, it can make a big difference in your day — and your coworkers’.

10. Google Drive

Share Google Drive files in Slack, and find them easily later.

A lot of people use Google Drive to store files securely online, access them from anywhere, and collaborate with others. If you’re one of these people, the Google Drive app is a great way to make sharing files among teammates a lot easier.

First and foremost, the app lets you share Drive files right in Slack. All you have to do is paste the shareable link in a Slack conversation, and it’ll import the files in Slack. Here’s the message you’ll get the first time you share a Google Drive file in Slack:

If you haven’t already connected your Google Drive to Slack, then Slack will guide you through the quick process of letting it “read” the file. (It’ll only read and index files you decide to import.)

Once you have everything set up, you’ll be able to share the document right in Slack. The message will look like this:

The best part about this app is that the files you import are easily searchable. Note, though, that they won’t be actually stored in Slack — they’ll continue to be stored in Google Drive. (Read this blog post for more Google Drive tips.)

11. Google+ Hangouts

Easily start a Google+ Hangout with team members in your Slack channels.

Here’s another great Slack integration for those times when you want to take a conversation face-to-face on a video conference call with a team member who isn’t in your office. To do so, simply type /hangout to launch a Google+ Hangout in a new window:

That command will provide you with a link that you can use to quickly hop on a video call.

12. Statsbot

Get analytics updates for specific metrics on-demand.

If you use analytics tools like Google Analytics, New Relic, or Mixpanel, then Statsbot is a great app to add to Slack. Quite simply, Statsbot integrates with these tools and monitors your metrics. Then, whenever you want an analytics update, all you have to do is ask Statsbot for the number and you’ll get it instantaneously.

This saves you the time of opening up a new browser window, signing in to your analytics application, and searching for that number manually. Plus, you can ask for an unlimited number of data requests, reports, and alerts and the app stays free.

In the example below, you’ll see the user opened up a conversation (either with his or her team, or with Slackbot) and @-mentioned Statsbot. He typed in: @Statsbot: new users this week. Check out the conversation that follows to uncover some of the bot’s capabilities.

Image Credit: Statsbot

13. Tomatobot

Set work and break timers to boost productivity.

Ever heard of the Pomodoro Technique? It’s a productivity technique where you work for 25 minutes, followed by a five-minute break. This is more effective than forcing yourself to commit to long periods of uninterrupted work, which can often have an adverse effect on your productivity.

When you add the Tomatobot app to Slack, you’ll be adding a few useful tools that’ll track your work using the Pomodoro Technique. For example, you can chat the Slackbot and tell it when you start working with the simple slash command /startwork, and you’ll receive a message when it’s time to take a break. Use the command /completed to indicate when you’re done with a task.

You can also record any reminders that might distract you so you can forget about them until your next break by typing in /distraction. (Learn more about the slash commands for this app here.)

Note: Without adding the Tomatobot app, you can set up manual reminders using the native /remind command, kind of like you would with Siri on your iPhone. For example, type in /remind me to take a break in 20 min and you’ll get a message from Slack that says:

Twenty minutes later, you’ll get another message that says:

14. Monkey Test It

Test your website for common bugs.

Here’s a great Slack app for smaller organizations. Monkey Test It offers what they call a “hands-off approach to automated testing,” which tests for common issues like broken links, missing images, and JavaScript issues. It sends out “monkeys” to click every element of your page and look for any common errors that pop up.

Normally, you’d go to their website, plug in the URL of your website, and click “Test now” — but if you use Slack anyway, why not trigger a test using the free integration?

With the Monkey Test It app installed, anyone in your organization can test your website for common bugs using the simple slash command /monkeytest (https://ift.tt/1ZIrtTJ). From there, the results will show up right in your chat window, no code required.

Image Credit: Product Hunt

15. Lunch Train

Plan group lunch outings without spamming your channels.

Use Lunch Train to plan group lunch outings with the help of one simple Slack message. Instead of asking a large channel to lunch, then proceeding to pester them with notifications as people chime in, users can kick off a group outing by typing /lunchtrain. The bot will send one Lunch Train invitation that other users can “board” without the Slack channel itself receiving multiple notifications whenever another user joins the lunch plan:

Lunch Train only sends users notifications when they join a Train and when the Train is leaving the “station” (get ready for funny train puns):

Source: Lunch Train

16. Trello

Work on your team’s collaborative to-do list without changing tabs.

If your team shares to-do lists using Trello, try this Slack bot to easily share and add Trello cards and approve users. You can authorize Trello for Slack by typing /trello help and one-click logging into your Trello account. Here are some examples of how you can use the Trello bot for Slack:

Find a Slack app integrations that would suit your company? Tell your marketing or customer service team. There’s no better time to make your business more accessible to the people trying to reach you.

Back in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Facebook’s Messenger Platform — a new service that enables businesses of all sizes to build custom bots in Messenger.

In the days following the announcement, the tech and marketing space lost its mind. Thousands of articles were penned about the news, each one speculating on what an open Messenger platform could mean for businesses’ customer service teams.

Why all the ardor? For starters, Facebook Messenger already has about 1.3 billion monthly active users worldwide. Not registrants. Not people who got forced to download it when Facebook spun it out of the standard Facebook app. We’re talking about active users who have adopted Messenger as a primary communication channel.

Anytime a company as forward-looking as Facebook opens up a platform as heavily adopted as Messenger it should raise eyebrows. So the early excitement, well, it’s justified. But what comes next is entirely undefined. And as marketers, we have an exciting opportunity to help shape it.

As Zuckerberg put it in his keynote, “No one wants to have to install a new app for every business or service they want to interact with.” And bots are much different than disjointed apps. In other words, building into the already popular Facebook Messenger app could enable businesses to get in front of customers without that added friction.

At least, that’s the potential …

What Is a Bot?

“Bot” is a generalized term used to describe any software that automates a task. Chatbots, which anyone can now build into Facebook Messenger, automate conversation — at least the beginning stages of it.

What’s special about the bots you can build on Facebook Messenger is that they’re created using Facebook’s Wit.ai Bot Engine, which can turn natural language into structured data. You can read more on this here, but in short, this means that not only can bots parse and understand conversational language, but they can also learn from it. In other words, your bot could get “smarter” with each interaction.

You’ve undoubtedly heard of artificial intelligence (AI). And this is a type of AI. Natural language interface is common in most chatbots, but by opening up the Messenger Platform and providing developer tools like the bot engine, Facebook has made building an intelligent bot easier.

How People Find Bots in Facebook Messenger

So, now comes the classic marketer question: If you build it, will they come?

The answer? Maybe.

Users are able to search for companies and bots inside Facebook Messenger by name, so you’ll probably get some users that way. But, as with any new pathway into your company, you’re likely to find that adoption of this communication channel within your customer base won’t happen without some promotion. Facebook is trying to make that easier for businesses and organizations as well.

Here are a few tools and updates they’ve released to help simplify that connection:

Messenger Links

If you’ve created a Page for your business on Facebook, Messenger Links will use your Page’s username to create a short link (m.me/username). When someone clicks that link — regardless of where they are — it will open a conversation with your business in Messenger.

Customer Matching

If you have phone numbers for customers and pre-existing permission to reach out to them, you can find them on Facebook Messenger via customer matching. Conversations initiated through customer matching will include a final opt-in upon the first Facebook Messenger communication.

Image Credit: Facebook

Messenger Codes

Messenger codes are unique images that serve as a visual thumbprint for your business and bot on Messenger. If you are familiar with Snapchat codes, these visual cues act in the same way, redirecting anyone who scans them using Messenger to the corresponding company page or bot.

Image Credit: Facebook

Messenger Buttons

You can embed these buttons, provided by Facebook, into your website to enable anyone who clicks them to start a Messenger conversation with your company.

Image Credit: Facebook

For all of the above, if you haven’t developed a bot, the result will be a standard Messenger-based conversation. So you’ll want to be sure you’re monitoring that channel.

5 Examples of Branded Facebook Messenger Bots

Written definitions of bots are one thing, but sometimes it helps to understand how a bot works in action. Let’s take a look at a few early examples …

1. 1-800-Flowers

The example Mark Zuckerberg lauded in his keynote was the ability to send flowers from 1-800-Flowers without actually having to call the 1-800 number. A user, Danny Sullivan, subsequently tried it by sending flowers to Zuckerberg himself and documented the five-minute process here.

The bot took Sullivan through a few floral options and then confirmed shipping details.

Image Credit: Marketing Land

2. Wall Street Journal

With the Wall Street Journal bot, users can get live stock quotes by typing “$” followed by the ticker symbol. They can also get the top headlines delivered to them inside of Messenger.

3. HP

HP created a bot for Messenger that enables users to print photos, documents, and files from Facebook or Messenger to any connected HP printer.

Image Credit: HP

4. Facebook M

Facebook is releasing its own bot for Messenger, a personal assistant bot named “M.” M can answer a wide range of requests — from restaurant recommendations, to complex trivia, to last-minute hotel rates in the city.

Its flexibility is due to the fact that M is actually a bot-human hybrid. As Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer told Recode: “It’s primarily powered by people, but those people are effectively backed up by AIs.” While the bots act as a first line of defense in fielding questions, the difficult questions are quickly routed to human assistants.

Image Credit: The Next Web

5. Healthtap

Healthtap is an interactive healthcare provider that connects users to advice from medical professionals. On the heels of the platform announcement, Healthtap created a bot that enables users to type a medical question into Facebook Messenger and receive a free response from a doctor or browse articles of similar questions.

You can see here how the conversational interface works. The user in this example is inquiring in natural language about a specific health concern. From the user’s standpoint, this is similar to texting a friend.

Image Credit: mobihealthnews

This set up also helps the company filter inbound requests by solving some patient questions with existing responses first and then surfacing unique queries for live response.

(Intrigued by these examples? Engadget has a longer list of bots that are either released or under development for Facebook Messenger.)

Should You Build a Facebook Messenger Bot for Business?

Ah, see that’s not the sort of question I can answer for you. Building a bot for Facebook Messenger, like any marketing or product endeavor, is going to take resources — mainly staff time and expertise — and may not result in the outcomes you’d like to see.

That said, here’s my best guidance for how you can determine if a Facebook Messenger Bot would benefit your business:

Do you have a clear use case for your bot?

One of the biggest reasons so many companies went astray in building mobile apps for their businesses is that they saw it as just another version of their website. They didn’t take the time to study how being on a mobile device would change the types of interactions their customers would want to have with their company.

Some tasks are just not well-suited for mobile. As a result, many apps sit unused. When you’re thinking about a use case for Facebook Messenger, make sure you’re thinking about it from the standpoint of the customer or user, not from the company’s standpoint.

Here are a few examples of use cases you might consider for a Facebook Messenger bot:

Lead Nurturing

Perhaps you’re having trouble moving leads from one part of your buyer’s journey to another, and need a way to nurture their interest after they first discover your website or content and return to learn more.

Sharing Your Knowledge Base

Traditionally speaking, a knowledge base is a section of your website that organizes all the resources and information a customer would need to properly learn and solve problems related to your product. And sometimes, these knowledge bases can be cumbersome or hard to search through. A Facebook Messenger Bot is one way to better educate customers who have questions about your product.

Diversifying Service Lines

If your customer service team has more incoming requests than they can handle, it might be because they’re only taking them through the phone. Live chat bots can open more request lines, lower call volume, and allow service and support representatives to balance more questions at a time.

Sharing Questions Across the Customer Service Team

If your customer service employees need a better way to share questions with one another as they field them, the right Facebook Messenger bot can loop in more employees more quickly to solve problems.

Retaining Ecommerce Shoppers During Checkout

You suffer from “abandoned shopping carts” on your ecommerce website, and need a way to retain shoppers who might have trouble during the checkout process.

Is your audience on Facebook?

This question is often too quickly dismissed by companies that see Facebook as a purely social platform, rather than one for businesses. Even if your audience doesn’t currently use Facebook for business needs, you need to start by determining whether or not the potential for Facebook marketing is there.

If you have an audience who uses Facebook heavily in their personal lives, they’re likely to adopt Messenger as a communications tool. And how they use Messenger may expand beyond how they use Facebook. Today, usage of messaging apps has actually outpaced that of social networks. And as new use cases arise, behavior evolves with them.

Can you support inbound inquiries from Messenger?

Don’t open a communication channel with your prospective and existing customers if you can’t support it. Even with the automation of a bot, you’ll still need to carve out time to do three important things:

1. Promote your chatbot
2. Monitor any questions your bot can’t answer
3. keep tabs on the overall customer experience you’re creating with it

If you’ve thought through the above three questions and think you’ve got a good foundation for a Facebook Messenger bot then dive in. There’s a benefit to being an early adopter in this space. And as a newly open platform, Facebook Messenger needs thoughtful and strategic companies to shape it.

Live chat technology has been around for a while. And while customers increasingly demand immediate attention, businesses have been relatively slow to adopt a live chat strategy — particularly in the SMB space, where deals are still built on relationships.

Live chat is often solely thought of as a customer support tool and tends to be overlooked from a sales and conversion perspective.

Why Website Engagement Matters

Approximately 82% of customers consider an immediate response as “important” or “very important” when they have a marketing or sales question. A full 90% say that an immediate response is just as important when they have a customer service question.

Image via HubSpot Research

Sure, customers can call an 800 number, send an email or fill out a contact form when they run into hiccups in their decision-making or purchasing process, but for every second that it takes a business to respond, the customer’s likelihood to purchase exponentially decreases.

Live chat fills that void, providing an immediate line of communication to get customers’ questions answered without leaving the page or picking up another device.

9 Websites Using Live Chat for Business

99% of first-time website visitors are not ready to buy. A marketer’s job is to recognize their prospects’ intent, nurture them through their education and evaluation stages and deliver high quality leads to their sales team so they can close the deal.

Depending on your goals, users may or may not flow through your funnel as you’d like. While it does make sense for businesses to build sophisticated conversion paths, launch personalized email/website nurturing campaigns and use A/B testing to refine website copy and calls-to-action, the overwhelming majority of businesses are missing a key step in between – simply talking to their visitors.

Live chat allows you to pull up a virtual stool and talk to your website visitors at their peak point of interest.

So, how do you begin evaluating whether live chat is a good fit for your sales and marketing objectives?

We’ve gathered nine inspiring examples showcasing some creative ways that businesses are leveraging live chat in their environments. Take a look and try to think of how you might mimic or adapt these strategies to enhance your customer experience and drive growth within your organization.

1. Betterment

Chat Service: New Client Onboarding Assistance

Betterment, a leading online investment advisor, uses targeted proactive chat invitations to engage with top-tier clients when they sign up for a new account. Dealing with people’s money demands the utmost credibility and trust.

Rather than solely relying on their established user experience (UX) flow to move clients down Betterment’s investment funnel, proactive chat offers the opportunity for advisors to provide instant, personalized financial services to new clients so they can invest with confidence.

2. SnapEngage

Chat Service: Proactive Chat on 404 Page

There are few things more frustrating than not being able to find what you’re looking for, and arriving at a 404 page often results in visitors exiting a website. Rather than providing a list of suggested links that may or may not be relevant to their visitors’ search, SnapEngage immediately fires an automated proactive chat invitation when website visitors land on their 404 page so they can quickly guide them to the content they’re looking for.

3. Canyon

Chat Service: Multilingual Chat Support

Canyon Bicycles has a popular following around the globe, supporting a diverse set of customers speaking different languages. They use intelligent chat routing rules to immediately connect customers to the most appropriate members of their sales and support teams in their visitors’ preferred language.

4. Petplan

Chat Service: Facebook Fan Page Chat

“With 1.09 billion people logging in daily (a 16% increase year-over-year), [Facebook] is still the most popular social network around. Not to mention, Facebook owns 77% of all social logins.” (Check out How to Use Facebook for Business: 25 Facebook Marketing Tips and Tricks)

Petplan Pet Insurance has a ‘Chat with us’ tab on their Facebook page, allowing fans to communicate with their team in real-time without leaving Facebook, and serving as yet another lead generating channel for their sales and marketing teams.

5. U.S. Patriot Tactical

Chat Service: Text-to-Chat Customer Support

U.S. Patriot Tactical uses SMS-to-Chat services, allowing clients to start a live chat with their support team via a simple text message. They display their ‘Text-to-Chat’ phone number on their website, order receipts and packing slips to quickly facilitate communications around order inquiries, status and returns.

6. Ruffwear

Chat Service: Targeted Proactive Chat Invitations

Ruffwear not only uses creative [dog] agent photos to engage with visitors; they also trigger targeted proactive chat invitations specific to visitors’ needs on particular pages of their website (i.e. Dog Boots Fit Guide). Their helpful messages provide a good balance between self-help resources and the opportunity to receive personalized support with the click of a button.

7. Aid In Recovery

Chat Service: Real-Time Online Counseling

Aid In Recovery uses live chat to offer immediate assistance and assessment for people struggling with addiction. Operating in an environment where every second counts, Aid In Recovery relies on chat to get patients the help they need, the moment they ask.

8. Maids In Black

Chat Service: Simple Pre-Chat Form

Maids In Black uses a simple pre-chat form to gather basic information and offer visitors the opportunity to send an email or connect with a live chat agent. Keeping the form short with only a couple fields eases the path to engagement for visitors while also allowing the Maids In Black team to route chats and emails to the appropriate teams.

9. Mavenlink

Chat Service: Advanced Lead Qualification

Mavenlink relies on live chat to serve as a powerful front-line lead qualification tool for their marketing and sales teams. They pass an extensive list of contact details and custom operator variables (recorded by agents during a chat) to their CRM so they can appropriately assign leads and assign follow-up tasks to their sales team after a chat closes.

Want to learn more about leveraging live chat to turn your website visitors into actionable leads? Download the free ebook by SnapEngage.

For more than 8 million people, Slack has become the tool they open first thing in the morning to get the workday started. And it’s become the leader of the team collaboration industry, simplifying people’s work and boosting their productivity.

But not everyone is completely elated with Slack. While some say Slack costs an arm and a leg to be able to search for more than the 10,000 messages that its freemium version limits users to, others prefer a self-hosted solution — which Slack doesn’t offer — to gain more control over their team’s communication.

Two of the top Slack alternatives, Stride and HipChat are also shutting down soon, so more people are looking for affordable team chat tools that meet their needs.

If you’re in the same boat, take a look at this list of the best Slack alternatives in 2018.

10 of the Best Slack Alternatives for 2018

1. Google Hangouts

Available On: iOS, Android, macOS, and Web

Unlike most Slack alternatives, Google Hangouts isn’t free. But if you happen to have a corporate G-Suite account, — which starts at $5 per user for each month — you’ll have automatic access to Hangouts.

The team chat app doesn’t have public channels like Slack, but you’ll be able to send direct messages or communicate in a group or a room. Rooms are thread-based conversations where you can start a new thread when you get new ideas.

Hangouts also makes audio and video calls available through a built-in integration of Google Meet. Additionally, the team chat app offers more than 40 bots that integrate with third-party apps.

2. Chanty

Available On: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Web

Chanty is a simple team chat tool for small and medium-sized teams that doesn’t limit its searchable message history. Similar to Slack, you can communicate in public and private channels and through one-to-one conversations. Chanty also organizes all your files, links, tasks, and conversations into folders in a feature called Teambook.

In general, Chanty’s built-in task manager and intuitive interface makes the chat tool a solid Slack alternative for the less tech savvy. But that being said, if you’re a techie, you can connect Chanty with a ton of apps through Zapier, making the team chat platform more robust.

Chanty’s free plan is limited to 10 people on a team while its paid plans start at $3 per user for each month.

3. Microsoft Teams

Available On: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Web

Microsoft Teams is a business chat tool mostly targeted towards enterprise companies. But if you happen to subscribe to one of the Microsoft Office 365 plans, which are Business Essentials or Business Premium, you’ll already have access to Microsoft Teams.

If you don’t have one these plans, though, you can start with the freemium version of the tool. It includes all the essential team chat features like instant chats, audio/video calls, and integrations. It also offers integrations across all Office 365 products and more than 180 custom apps. If you have a large remote team, you’ll enjoy Microsoft Teams’ voice and video calls that can host up to 80 people.

The Business Essentials plan starts at $5 per user for each month while the Business Premium plan is $12.50 per seat. It’s also important to note that Microsoft Teams is not the easiest app to deploy, so make sure your team admin is tech-savvy.

4. RocketChat

Available On: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and Web

RocketChat is a free, open-source Slack alternative that lets you tailor its look and feel to your own requirements. One of RocketChat’s best features is that it’s easy to migrate to — all you need to do is export your files from Slack or HipChat and upload them to RocketChat. If you experience issues deploying or maintaining RocketChat, you can request extra tech support, starting at $525 per month.

Even though RocketChat may sound like it’s designed specifically for techies, it’s actually not. The team chat tool offers a cloud solution that has the same functionality as Slack, starting from $50 per team for each month. RocketChat also has useful features like real-time translation, live chat client, and E2E encryption, making it a Slack alternative that’s definitely worth a look.

5. Discord

Available On: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and Web

Discord is actually an industry-leading team communication app for gamers. But thanks to its rich functionality and unlimited message history, many people make good use of it for their teams at work.

When you first start using Discord, the app divides your channels by text and voice. But you can easily implement the concept of Slack’s private and public channels using Discord’s channel settings. It’s also the only app in this list that offers push-to-talk features.

Keep in mind, though, Discord doesn’t offer integrations with apps you might use at work, like most team chat tools on this list. But if you need a free space to communicate via text, voice, or video, Discord could be a good option for you.

6. Mattermost

Available On: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, Web

Mattermost is a private cloud, open-source communication tool, which means you need to deploy it on your own company’s server. But it’s also a highly customizable solution that lets you rewrite its initial code to meet your company’s needs.

Even though Mattermost mostly targets the enterprise sector, it still offers freemium pricing plans for small teams that feature unlimited message history and integrations. Paid plans include more enterprise essentials like better privacy, security, and customization options, starting at $39 per user for each year. Additionally, Mattermost supports more than a dozen languages, making a great fit for global teams

7. Flock

Available On: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and Web

Flock is a workplace chat software that claims to run faster than Slack. In addition to regular communication features like instant chat, audio, and video calls, it also offers built-in polls, reminders, notes, and code snippets.

Flock offers a freemium version that is limited to 10,000 searchable messages. But their free plan lets you connect Flock to more than 50 apps. Paid plans unlock useful features like screen sharing and unlimited message history. Flock’s Pro Plan starts at $6 per user for each month when you pay monthly or $4.50 per user for each month when you pay annually.

8. Ryver

Available On: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Web

Ryver is a team communication tool known for its Trello-like built-in task manager, allowing you to turn messages into tasks and manage them with Kanban boards.

Similar to Slack, Ryver lets you communicate through open forums, private groups, and direct messages. It also makes voice and video calls for up to 400 people available through a native integration with the FreeConference app. And if you have a Zapier account, you can also connect Ryver to your favorite apps.

In terms of price, the team chat tool is free for up to six users. For larger teams, prices start at $49 per month for up to 12 users or $99 per month for unlimited users. Both plans come with a 14-day free trial.

9. Glip

Available On: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Web

Glip is a team collaboration tool developed by RingCentral. While Slack has configurable features, making it a one-size-fits-all team chat app, Glip has built-in features like tasks, calendar and notes.

The team chat app also differs from Slack because you need to download the RingCentral app to make video and audio calls, which is a built-in feature on Slack. But you can connect Glip to other apps through Zapier or one of its more than 20 custom integrations.

Glip’s freemium version is limited to 500 minutes of shared video chat while their universal paid plan — which is $5 per user per month — offers 24/7 priority support and more admin and privacy controls.

10. Flowdock

Available On: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and Web

Flowdock is a Slack alternative that organizes conversation by threads. Their threads are color-coded so you can easily navigate between topics and organize your team’s communication.

Similar to Slack, Flowdock features open, invite only, and one-to-one chats. The app is also free for up to five people on a team. Additionally, video calls, just like in Flock, are available through the appeair.in integration, and you can connect Flowdock to more than 100 of your favorite apps.

If your team has more than five people, the team chat app’s prices start at $3 per user for each month, which includes a 30-day free trial.

Wrapping Up

Luckily, when it comes to choosing the right communication tool for your team, you have a variety of options. I’ve briefly covered the best apps your team might enjoy, but if you need more in-depth information on team chat tools like Slack, check out Chanty’s Slack alternatives review. It shares Chanty’s experience and feedback from testing seven different team chat software during a span of eight weeks.

Oftentimes, marketers focus heavily on Google when vying for traffic.

For instance, I’m willing to bet your SEO meetings revolve largely around the topic of Google, with questions like, “How’s our organic search?” “How can we capture page one on Google?” “How can we write the winning featured snippet?”

During these discussions, I assume none of your coworkers say, “Okay, let’s pivot now. How can we capture Bing traffic?”

Google is undoubtedly the most popular search engine, with over 70% of the search market share. But that popularity makes it the most challenging search engine on which to rank highly. You might be missing critical opportunities for traffic if you neglect the other search engines.

Here, we’re going to explore the top seven search engines of 2018, so you can discuss some other potential traffic sources in your next SEO meeting.

Note: To compile our list, we took a look at worldwide market share of search engines on desktop, from January 2018 to August 2018. 

1. Google

With over 70% of the search market share, Google is undoubtedly the most popular search engine. Additionally, Google captures almost 85% of mobile traffic. The large traffic potential makes Google a viable option when aiming to capture organic or paid search — the downside, of course, is almost everyone is competing for the same traffic.

Plus, recent changes to Google’s algorithm, like featured snippets, aim to fulfill users needs directly on Google, so they don’t need to click any links. These changes, and Google’s popularity, might make it hard for you to capture the website traffic you want.

2. Bing

Bing, Google’s biggest contender, rakes in 33% of U.S. searches and also powers Yahoo, the U.S.’s third biggest search engine. Bing’s search pages look remarkably similar to Google’s, with the same categories and a similar white background, with blue links and green URLs. However, Bing additionally offers “Rewards”, a program that gives you points when you search or shop on the engine, and then allows you to redeem those points for gift cards, nonprofit donations, and more.

3. Baidu

Baidu is China’s largest search engine, capturing over 75% of China’s search market. The search engine looks similar to Google (besides being in Mandarin), with a white background, blue links, and green URLs. Like Google, Baidu aims to incorporate more rich features in the SERPs.

If you have an interest in appealing to the Asian market, Baidu is a good option to consider. However, the search engine censors certain images and blocks pro-democracy websites, so if you’re comparing search results, you’ll find a more comprehensive results list on Google.

4. Yahoo!

Admittedly not the sleekest search engine interface, Yahoo still manages to capture fourth place in our list, with a little over 3% of the worldwide market share. Yahoo is powered by Bing, so search results are incredibly similar between the two search engines. However, it’s still an important search engine in its own right, with over 600 million monthly users on mobile and one billion total users.

5. Yandex

If you’re aiming to capture Russian traffic, Yandex is your best bet, with 65% of total Russian search traffic. Yandex is also popular in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Belarus. The search engine is available in two languages, English and Cyrillic. Plus, it offers a cloud storage service, so users can search for their files from Yandex’s search bar.

6. Ask.com

With .35 of search traffic, Ask.com is certainly a more modest option compared to the likes of Bing and Yahoo!. Nonetheless, Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, is unique due to its question and answer format.

While most of Ask.com’s sponsored search results are powered by Google, Ask has an original algorithm that favors expertise on a topic over popularity. Additionally, Ask.com provides some unique features, like “smart answers”, which use natural language to answer someone’s search query.

7. DuckDuckGo

If you’re uneasy about targeted ads or don’t want your search data stored, you might want to try DuckDuckGo, which touts itself as “The search engine that doesn’t track you”. It doesn’t track, collect, or store any information, so you’re safe to search for shoes without feeling bombarded by subsequent Macy’s Shoes ads. It’s worth noting there are still ads on DuckDuckGo — just not personalized ones.

Additionally, DuckDuckGo has a clean interface and only one search page, making it easier to navigate than other search engines. With an average 26,754,932 daily direct searches as of September 2018, it’s slowly gaining steam in the search market.

Ultimately, it’s important to consider alternative traffic opportunities besides Google when creating an SEO strategy. By diversifying your sources, you’re more likely to capture first-page on SERPs, and you’re in a better position to find a truly ideal target audience. 

If your website is like a house, then your website’s URL is like that house’s address. It defines where your website lives online, similar to how your home address determines where you live in a neighborhood, helping your visitors easily find your site. URLs also help Google understand what your website’s pages are about.

There are technically five elements of a URL, and they’re discreetly important for optimizing your site’s UX and SEO. To help you develop a concrete understanding of every part of a URL, let’s explore each of them in detail.

URL Structure

Scheme

The scheme tells web servers which protocol to use when it accesses a page on your website.

Nowadays, HTTPS, which stands for Hypertest Transfer Protocol Secure, is the most common scheme. It tells your web browser to encrypt any information you enter onto the page, like your passwords or credit card information, so cybercriminals can’t access it. This security protocol protects your website visitors and implementing it will help your site rank better on Google.

Other schemes you might see are mailto://, which can open your computer’s default email service provider to help you draft an email to the email address you entered in the URL, and ftp://, which is a standard protocol for transferring computer files between a client and server on a computer network.

Subdomain

If your website is like a house, your subdomains are like specific rooms in that house. A subdomain in a URL indicates which particular page of your website the web browser should serve up. For instance, subdomains like “blog” or “offers” will provide your website’s blog page or offers page.

Subdomains also bucket your website into its main content categories and shows Google and your visitors that there’s more information on your site than just a homepage.

Top-level Domain

Your top-level domain (TLD) is the name of your website. It helps people know they’re visiting a certain brand’s site. For instance, people who visit “mlb.com” know they’re on Major League Baseball’s website, without needing any more information.

Second-level Domain

The second-level domain (SLD) specifies what type of entity your organization registers as on the internet.

For example, “.com” is intended for commercial entities in the United States, so a lot of American businesses register with a second-level domain of “.com”. Similarly “.edu” is intended for academic institutions in the United States, so a lot of American colleges and universities register with a second-level domain of “.edu”.

Subdirectory

A subdirectory helps people understand which particular section of a webpage they’re on. 

For instance, if you own an online store that sells t-shirts, hats, and mugs, one of your website’s URLs could look like “https://shop.yourstore.com/hats”. With a subdomain of “shop” and a subdirectory of “hats”, this URL would serve up the “Hats” page, which lives under the “Shop” page.

URL Structure: Subtle Yet Essential

Even though URLs might seem simple and frivolous, they’re actually  important for your website’s UX and SEO. And now that you understand the anatomy of a URL, check out the blog posts below to learn more about technical SEO.

There’s nothing quite like an anniversary to shift your perspective on things.

It certain forces us to look at things in retrospect — where we were then, and where we are now, however many years later. And to commemorate its 20th anniversary, that’s what Google did today with an event in San Francisco.

There was a celebration, of course — but it was less passed hors d’oeuvres, and more, “Here’s where we’re going next.” 

Here are some of the most important announcements made today.

1. Changes to Visual Results

A New (Bigger) Home for AMP Stories

You might be familiar with the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Project: Google’s initiative to help and encourage publishers to create pages that both load fast and come with an overall positive user experience. 

Earlier this year, Google introduced the AMP Story: fast-loading content that’s almost completely visual, and very immersive.  

If you’ve never seen AMP stories, that’s okay — Google announced today that they’ll be more discoverable, by way of listing them in both Google Image search results, as well as within Google Discover (formerly Google Feed — more on that later). 

Featured Videos

Google also announced today that it’s using what sounds like machine learning to help users discover the most helpful video content for their search queries.

Using the example of visiting a national park for the first time, the company explains that it now understands a video’s content well enough that it’s able to show you the videos that are the most applicable to your situation — for example, the most important landmarks to see within that park.

Image credit: Google

More Context for Image Search Results

For some of us, a Google Image search is a favorite past time (just saying). Starting this week, the company said at today’s event, Image search results will now have more context — like captions that clearly indicate where the image is published, and more suggested, similar search terms at the top of the page.

Image credit: Google

Some of these changes had already been introduced on mobile — now, they’ll take effect on desktop.

Google Lens for Image Search Results

Google introduced Lens — an artificial-intelligence (AI)-powered technology that helps answer people’s questions about the photos they take, like figuring out the breed of a dog —  in May at its annual I/O developer conference.

Now, Lens will be available in Image search results to help provide even further context. It seems like the most applicable use case here will be for shopping . — for example, if you view an image that has several objects within it, Lens can analyze (and usually identify) each of those objects.

Users can then select one of those given objects, after which Google will float links to places where they can be purchased. 

Image credit: Google

2. Google Feed Is Now Discover

Google first rolled out the Feed feature within its app for the same reason that many other networks and platforms have a feed: To help users see what’s new and discover content.

Google announced today that it’s leaning into that second purpose: discovery. Hence, Google Feed has a new name: Discover.

But it also has a new look, according to the company’s official statement — again, to provide more context. Within Discover, the content featured will have a topic header to let the user know why she’s seeing it. And, if the user wants to explore that topic further, it’ll be a native and seamless process.

Image credit: Google

Discover will also be more personalized. In addition to allowing users more customization options for the content featured in the Discover tab, in multiple languages, it will no longer take the age of the content into account — as long as it’s relevant.

For example, if I’m visiting Honolulu for the first time and want to search for vegan restaurants there, Discover might show me content around that query that isn’t necessarily new, but that I personally have not seen before — and still answers my question.

Image credit: Google

Don’t have the Google app? No problem. Discover will also be rolling out on the Google.com homepage across all mobile browsers. What isn’t quite so clear is whether or not users have to be signed into Google to use Discover properly — but given the emphasis on personalization, it’s likely that they do.

3. Picking Up Where You Left Off With Activity Cards

I’m not sure about you, but when I’m researching a story, I have a very bad habit of finding a helpful resource, reading it, and abandoning it.

That is, until I need to visit that resource again for a follow-up story, leading to an all-to-often futile search for a page I’ve already visited.

Fortunately, Google has introduced activity cards to help forgetful, in-a-rush researchers like me “retrace your steps.” Think of these cards as visual representations of your Search history, except instead of having to go sifting through it, pages you’ve previously visited while researching the same topic will appear in Search results.

Image credit: Google

An additional new feature to help users hang onto helpful resources is Collections, which allows you to add a page from your activity cards to a collection of content pieces on a given topic. 

Image credit: Google

4. The Knowledge Graph’s New Layer

There was an underlying theme throughout all of the announcements today: Understand what the user is looking for. After all, for quite some time now, that’s been Google’s axiom behind algorithm changes and new “smart” features that it’s introduced in other products, like Gmail. 

One way Google will further enhance its understanding of user queries — to add more context to them, make them more relevant, and help the user learn more about a given topic down to the very detail of what she wants to know — is by adding another layer to its Knowledge Graph: the Topic Layer.

The Google Knowledge Graph is essentially the technology used by the company to make these features “smart” — in its own words, to make “connections between people, places, things and facts about them.” That’s how it knows to suggest topics like “restaurants in Los Angeles” if, say, you’re also searching for flights there.

The Topic Layer adds another level of understanding the many nuances of a given topic, in part by “analyzing all the content that exists on the web for a given topic and develops hundreds and thousands of subtopics.”

Of course, what Google doesn’t say in its announcements outright is that much of this analysis done on behalf of a given user is based on that person’s previous Search behavior — what she’s looked for in the past, travel she’s booked, and content or pages she’s repeatedly viewed.

In fact, with the plethora of new options to save content for later, it’s fair to predict that Google will use that archive to help inform its search results.

It’s not a new concept, but in this particular case — it lends itself to the search engine’s giant credo of, in a few words, really figuring us out.

Featured image credit: Google

Customers are more inclined to engage with or purchase from brands they feel the strongest connection with. This isn’t a new development. What is new is the definition of the term “engagement.”

So, what defines a customer’s engagement today? Among other things: interactivity.

For many customers today, an experience is inauthentic if it’s not interactive. In other words, they have to be able to reach out and feel like they’re grabbing the thing you’re selling, which is a far cry from the days when leaving a comment on a blog post counted as a sufficient interaction.

71% of consumers think a brand that uses virtual reality is forward-thinking. And however you feel about the term “forward-thinking,” one thing is for sure: these brands stand out and gain consumer attention.

Despite what you might think about virtual reality (VR), it’s no longer an inaccessible marketing tactic. Creating a content marketing strategy for VR isn’t that different from a written or video-based content marketing strategy — the difference is that it requires you to understand how to engage your customers by interacting with them.

Let’s explore what a sound VR content marketing strategy looks like today.

How to Create VR Content for Your Next Marketing Campaign

Know Which Type of Experience You Want to Create

In general, there are four types of VR experiences you can create, and the one you choose will depend on what you want your viewers or customers to learn (or feel) as a result. Here are those four experiences:

1. Live video: By taking a live-action video in VR, you can allow your viewer to watch the video from the point of view of the video’s recorder, panning around to see the experience as if they were there when it happened.
2. Live photo: Snap a live-action photo that your viewer will be able to pan 360 degrees around and feel as if they’re standing on the scene. Google Earth recently made its Street View viewable in this type of experience.
3. 3D video: Animate a service you offer, creating a 3-dimensional demonstration that your viewers might need to see from a firsthand point of view to properly understand it.
4. 3D model: Design a 3-dimensional model of a product you offer, such that your viewers can examine every angle of the item with their smartphone or VR headset.

In any of the VR experiences above, viewers can interact with your content in 360 degrees by moving their mobile device around or literally looking around their periphery while wearing a VR headset.

Know Which VR Tool You Want to Use

Depending on which type of VR experience you choose above — and how elaborate you want it to be — your smartphone’s camera app won’t suffice (well, it could … keep reading).

Luckily, there are some easy-to-use apps you can download to become a quick VR designer for your business. Here are a few and what they do:

• Android Photo Sphere: This is a native function of most Google and Android mobile devices. Similar to a panoramic setting, it allows you to hold and pan your smartphone camera to capture more imagery — but a full 360 degrees around your standing point.
• Google Cardboard: If you don’t have an Android smartphone, the Google Cardboard app gives you the same functionality as the tool above, as well as video recordings that are immediately viewable in VR through YouTube and the Google Cardboard headset.
• Unity: This app is actually a game-development engine, but has become one of the most popular platforms for creating interactive and animated VR content beyond simple photos and videos.
• InstaVR: This desktop software allows you to edit your own photos and vides into VR experiences in a matter of minutes.
• A-Frame: A-Frame is a web-based VR tool, wherein you use HTML to edit live-action images and design 3D models for the purposes of creating virtual experiences that are viewable in 360 degrees.

Keep Your Existing Audience in Mind

How does your ideal customer consume your content already? Is it through a weekly webinar or Q&A? Or maybe a daily vlog from the CEO’s desk? Whatever content routine you’ve created, you can continue that strategy while incorporating VR technology.

For example, if your primary medium is Facebook video, you can start producing virtual reality content on Facebook Spaces. Although Spaces is still a new tool, it’s poised to become a Facebook standard in the not-so-distant future. There’s no better time than the present to start thinking of ways Facebook Spaces can benefit your brand.

Does your business have an app, either for the company website or an event you host? One emerging trend for app-based businesses is to create VR content for use with a Samsung or iPhone-paired VR headset. Take mega-ticket marketplace StubHub as an example. This company has now added a 360-degree virtual reality view to every ticket purchase, allowing customers to simulate the view they’ll have from their seats on game day.

Screenshot via Recode

These virtual views have been available on StubHub for a while now, but used to be standard (rather than 360-degree) images. Thanks to the incorporation of VR, the brand has enhanced their customer’s existing experience, and helped them better navigate to a purchase.

Just think of how many times you’ve decided against buying tickets because you weren’t sure about the view. StubHub is effectively solving this problem by tweaking their existing content to enable VR capabilities.

Don’t Just Create Content, Create An Experience

The notion of a content marketing strategy combined with virtual reality might be misleading. After all, VR is not about the content — it’s about the user experience. Thus, your content creation strategy should aim to be immersive for the consumer, giving them an in-depth view at your product offerings.

Here are two examples of businesses that have applied VR to their marketing strategy in different ways.

Conduct Store Walk-Throughs

Create a 3D model of your product (the fourth type of VR experience listed above), taking the customers through your store and showing them your best inventory firsthand. Shopify, the e-commerce giant, is about to release its all-new thread studio, which is a VR app that will take consumers into a virtual studio to view t-shirt designs and other apparel.

Image via Shopify

Once Shopify’s viewers have mixed and matched colors and found the design that’s best for their project, they are sent to Shopify’s print-on-demand provider, Printful. From here, they can turn their virtual vision into a real-life, tangible product.

As brick-and-mortar stores continue to shut their doors, they’ll be replaced by these virtual stores that allow consumers to walk through and browse without leaving their house.

Show Consumers What Products Will Look Like (Augmented Reality)

Giving consumers a visual of what furniture and household items will look like is an important way to encourage them to purchase.

Home improvement giant Lowe’s has already added a VR element that mirrors the home customization idea. Known as Holoroom, it takes customers through a model home to provide a look at what the space would look like with their products.

IKEA has been adopting a similar concept for years, in the form of a product catalog developed in augmented reality (AR). The company also recently launched an AR app called IKEA Place.

Augmented reality is very similar to virtual reality, but in AR, artificial content is layered on top of a real background, as shown in IKEA’s app below. A popular, consumer-focused example of AR today is the mobile app Pokémon Go, wherein you can catch Pokémon as they appear in the live-action environment in front of you when seen through your smartphone’s camera lens.

Image via: Architectural Digest

Seek Long Distance Customers (Yes, Really)

Not that you should only seek customers who live far away, but VR will make it easier to craft content to a more widely located buyer pool.

Just think about how VR will transform the home buying process. If you’re a realtor, you’ll be able to take potential buyers through a completely virtual tour of your property. People from around the world can see a home inside and out like they’re visiting in person.

Forbes writes about VR’s influence on buyer reach in its article about VR in real estate, but it adds another possibility to the mix: Using a VR app, realtors will soon be able to allow their clients to simulate custom changes they’d like to make to a potential home. This would makes processes like home-buying much more interactive, giving clients a clearer vision of what it’d be like to live in the property.

Provide an Emotional Journey

Honor Everywhere provides a VR experience to terminally ill military veterans, allowing them to “visit” the war memorials in Washington D.C. Volunteers are bringing VR headsets into assisted-living centers to give to the veterans and let them enjoy the experience.

Image via WTOP.com

Although there’s nothing quite as unique as VR made just for military veterans, you can still find ways to take customers on an emotional journey through your own VR content.

“Emotional” doesn’t have to mean sadness, though. Think in terms of what your audience is most passionate about and produce content that stimulates those passions.

For example, if you’re writing a travel blog that doubles as an affiliate site, your goal is to truly sell the one-of-a-kind experience a customer will feel by purchasing your vacation package. Through the immersion of VR, you can take effectively transport them to the beaches of Rio de Janiero, or atop the Eye of London in a millisecond of time.

You can even take a page out of the always adventurous MythBusters‘ playbook, and give consumers a first-person tour of a wrecked ship that rests in shark-infested waters. Experience it below.

There’s nothing like a swim among sharks to rouse people’s fears … er, rather, emotions.

Embrace Your Location

If the goal is to immerse your virtual audience into a new space, it only makes sense to show them a fun location.

Offer them a virtual tour around your city, show them a famous landmark, or take them to a special event. If a San Diego-based company is creating VR content in mid-July, for example, it might want to show its audience around the floor of Comic Con, which takes place each summer in San Diego.

Use Crowdsourced Content

Perhaps the most underrated — or under talked about — aspect of content marketing is the cultivation of a community of users, many of whom can contribute their own content.

Thanks to tools like Facebook Spaces, Periscope, and now YouTube, your brand can easily integrate user-produced VR videos onto your website.

Reach out to consumers through channels like social media, email marketing campaigns, and calls-to-action on your website.

What to Do as a Content Creator

Should you overhaul your entire content strategy to make room for virtual reality? For most of us, the answer is no.

But now’s the time to acknowledge not just VR’s existence, but its influence, and begin experimenting with it. Don’t know where to start? A/B test with and without virtual reality technology, then gauge the user’s response.

Rather than dedicating your entire site to VR, start with individual posts or pages, then begin building as you see fit.

Even though I love emojis, I’m still a big fan of typed emoticons. They bring me back to simpler times, when my phone still had a physical keyboard and AOL Instant Messenger was my main method of communication. Those were the days.

If you still have an affinity for typed emoticons like me, especially the timeless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoticon, here’s how you can type it in two seconds flat on a Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android.

How to Type the Shrug Emoji ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in 2 Seconds Flat

The shrug emoticon is one of the more intricate emoticons to type, so most people resort to copying and pasting it from a website, like CopyShrug.

But copying and pasting the emoticon is really only a good option if you use it sparingly. If you’re an avid user of the shrug emoticon, you’ll need to keep revisiting the website to copy and paste it, which is a relatively slow and annoying process, especially on your mobile phone.

To type the shrug emoticon as fast as possible, we recommend creating a text replacement shortcut with your device’s autocorrect feature (which might be the first time autocorrect actually comes in handy for you).

Mac

1. Copy “¯\_(ツ)_/¯“

2. Go to System Preferences

3. Click Keyboard

4. Press Text

5. In the Replace box, type “shrug”

6. In the With box, paste “¯\_(ツ)_/¯“

Windows

Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t have an autocorrect feature, but you can download programs like
PhraseExpress to set up text replacement shortcuts and quickly type the shrug emoticon.

iPhone

1. Copy “¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “

2. Go to Settings

3. Press General

4. Tap Keyboard

5. Choose Text Replacement

6. Select the “+” button

7. In the Shortcut field, type “shrug”

8. In the Phrase field, paste “¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “

Android

1. Copy “¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “

2. Go to Settings

3. Press Language & Input

4. Tap For All Languages

5. Select the “+” button

6. In the Shortcut field, type “shrug”

7. In the Type a Word field, paste ” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

In 1923, master copywriter Claude Hopkins published a book called Scientific Advertising.

It went on to sell more than eight million copies.

Today, the book is widely considered the foundation of direct marketing.

“Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times,” wrote renowned ad man, David Ogilvy. “It changed the course of my life. If you read this book, you will never write another bad advertisement.”

Scientific Advertising helped Ogilvy, and it will help you, too. It’ll change the way your research your market. It’ll change the way you write copy. Moreover, it’ll inform the psychological triggers — the words and angles — you use to compel prospects to buy things.

Let me explain.

6 Brain Triggers Copywriters Use to Drive Sales

One of the most important chapters in Scientific Advertising is “Chapter 6: Psychology.”

“The competent advertising man must understand psychology,” writes Hopkins. “The more he knows about it the better. He must learn that certain effects lead to certain actions.”

Throughout the chapter, he highlights a handful of specific effects (i.e., triggers) that compel consumers.

Worried this information is outdated?

Don’t be. Our brains don’t evolve that fast.

“Human nature is perpetual,” writes Hopkins. “In most respects it is the same today as in the time of Caesar. So the principles of psychology are fixed and enduring. You will never need to unlearn what you learn about them.”

That said, feel free to use these triggers across just about any marketing asset, including your next landing page, email sequence, press release, pay-per-click campaign, banner ad, or direct mailer.

These triggers are timeless and versatile. They’re proven after decades of testing countless ads. Now, they’re yours for the taking. Here’s what you need to know:

You can trigger prospects with:

1. The Unknown

Hopkins writes:

“Curiosity is one of the strongest human incentives. We employ it whenever we can.”

People love exploring. It’s in our nature, meaning we’re biologically driven to investigate our world rather than merely respond to it. This drive is the basis of human curiosity, which is baked into us.

Our brains are hardwired to want to satisfy our curiosity. That’s what makes it such an effective buying trigger.

Let’s look at this modern example:

This Facebook ad leverages something called the information gap.

“Information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation,” writes behavioral economist, George Loewenstein. “The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.”

“See the $1.5 million Kickstarter,” reads the copy. The Kickstarter’s success generates curiosity: What could be this good?

Of course, the only way to satisfy that curiosity is to click the “Learn More” button.

Editors at Buzzfeed use this tactic to create compelling headlines. Writers on TV shows use it create cliffhangers that keep audiences coming back episode after episode. Marketers and copywriters use it to create ads that command attention — always have, always will.

2. High Prices

Hopkins writes:

“We learn that cheapness is not a strong appeal. [People] are extravagant. They want bargains but not cheapness. They want to feel that they can afford to eat and have and wear the best. Treat them as if they could not and they resent your attitude.”

How much something costs tells the consumer a story — consciously or otherwise — about that product’s quality. The price of an item can paint a vivid picture.

Imagine a $10,000 watch. What do you see? Is it a luxury timepiece? Is it gold-plated? Is it powered by a mechanical movement that will last a lifetime? Are you picturing a Rolex? Now, image a $100 watch. What do you see? Is it utilitarian? Does it run on a battery? Are you picturing a Timex?

“An item’s price, by itself, delivers useful, and sometimes diagnostic information about the product,” writes Utpal Dholakia, Ph.D. “High prices attract consumers when assessing quality is difficult.”

Let’s look at this classic example:

The consumer has no way to discern the quality of Old Grand-Dad Special Selection, so this ad leans on the product’s high price to demonstrate its value.

“It’s expensive, yes,” reads the copy. “But it’s also exceptional. And isn’t that what matters to somebody who appreciates fine Bourbon most of all?”

3. Their Names, in Print

Hopkins writes:

“When [people] know something belongs to them — something with their name on it — they will make an effort to get it, even though the thing is a trifle.”

When you hear or read your name, your brain activity explodes: Your middle frontal cortex, your middle and superior temporal cortex, and your cuneus all light up with activity.

This chemical reaction signals that what you’re about to read or hear is relevant to you.

“Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

This is why personalized calls-to-action convert 202% better than non-personalized CTAs. It’s why event marketers send out dynamic email invitations to “stop by the booth, [prospect’s name]!”

It’s also why personalized chachkies — like keychains and mugs adorned with popular names — continue to sell around the world.

Let’s look at this modern example:

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign is a fantastic personalization case study because of its profound success:

• It increased Coke consumption from 1.7 to 1.9 billion servings a day.
• It made #shareacoke the #1 global trending topic on social media.
• It helped the brand gain 25 million Facebook followers.

The secret behind this response? The campaign gave people ownership over a ubiquitous product. It made people feel unique.

That’s the power of personalization.

4. “Try before you buy!”

Hopkins writes:

“Many articles are sold under guarantee — so commonly sold that guarantees have ceased to be impressive.”

People get used to things. We get used to our surroundings, to other people, even to our own emotions. Basically, our brains acclimate to anything our senses experience on a consistent basis.

This is called Habituation, or the tendency to have decreased responsiveness to something.

Habituation is especially common in advertising. Words like “Free” and “Sale” and “Guarantee” get used so often that they lose their meaning, their appeal.

Want to garner your prospect’s attention? Be different.

Let’s look at this classic example:

In the 1940s, when this ad was written, every bicycle company offered a “Money-Back Guarantee!” to customers: “Try it for a week. If you don’t like it, then we’ll return your money.”

MEAD’s “Try Before You Buy!” campaign was effectively the same offer: “Try it for a week. If you like it, then pay us.”

The latter was more impressive. Not because it was better, but rather because it was new and novel, different.

5. Persona-Based Exclusivity

Hopkins writes:

“An offer [that] is limited to a certain class of people is far more effective than a general offer. For instance, an offer limited to veterans of the war. Or to members of a lodge or sect. Or to executives.”

Marketers have been using deadlines (e.g., “Order before midnight!”) and scarcity claims (e.g., “Only 10 remaining!”) to sell things for as long as advertising has existed. Exclusivity is an excellent persuasion tool because it makes the consumer feel FOMO.

FOMO, or the Fear Of Missing Out, gives us a taste of the pain we’ll experience if we wait too long.

And while deadlines and scarcity claims target everyone, persona-based exclusivity speaks to an ultra-specific group of people — and that segmentation can make the FOMO even more intense.

Let’s look at this modern example:

Every summer, Apple runs a limited-time “Back to School” promotion: If you’re a college student, a professor, or a faculty member at a K-12 school, buying a Mac will get you a separate Apple product for free.

Year after year, this campaign is successful because it makes students and teachers everywhere feel special, deserving. It sets them apart and elevates their status. This appeal to ego can be very compelling. Plus …

“Those who are entitled to any seeming advantage,” writes Hopkins, “will go a long way not to lose that advantage.”

6. “Try our rivals!”

Hopkins writes:

“Buyers [are] careful to get the brand so conspicuously superior that its make could court a trial of the rest.”

Confidence is charming and engaging, attractive.

Confident brands, like confident people, know where they stand. They’re comfortable with their capacity and competence and, in turn, welcome comparisons to the competition. In fact, they encourage it.

Comparisons are a form of proof, which makes them incredibly persuasive.

Let’s look at this classic example:

This ad is selling a typewriter by selling a feeling.

Notice there’s no messaging around features or benefits. Nothing about warranties or testimonials. It only reads:

Before you buy the new Royal Electric Typewriter, please do yourself, your secretary, and your company this service: try all the makes of electric typewriters. Try them for touch, for printwork, for any feature you wish. Only this way can you really know the worth of the choice you will make.

Did the copywriter really expect people to do this? Probably not.

But she understood that suggesting it, boldly and in print, would convey extreme confidence about the product’s quality — and that made all the difference.

“Certain effects lead to certain actions.”

One well-placed word or turn-of-phrase can explode an ad’s response.

The trick is knowing that word or angle or turn-of-phrase.

Now you know. 

We are taught complementary colors in 6th grade, but often, we don’t recognize the significance of color combinations until we see it done wrong.

Maybe you stumble on a website with an absurd mixture of yellow, pink, and black. Or, perhaps your brother decides to wear green pants with an orange shirt. These instances force you to recognize the importance of combining certain colors — and not combining others.

Color combinations have the power to evoke certain emotions, and can even influence our perceptions. But creating beautiful design is more than just ensuring you’re not combining orange with green — it’s also about using the best colors to convey your brand’s message.

When you’re creating designs for your business, it’s critical you use the best color combinations, but it’s easier said than done. Here, we’ve curated a list of the 23 best color combinations, so you can skip the coworker debates about whether pink and orange work well together, and get straight to the design itself.

1. Coral Red (#F93943) and Viking (#7EB2DD)

2. East Bay (#424874) and Moon Raker (#DCD6F7) and Ghost (#CACFD6)

3. Viking (#7EB2DD) and Karry (#FFE8D4)

4. Tan Hide (#F98866) and Vermilion (#FF420E) and Acapulco (#80BD9E)

5. Botticelli (#C4DFE6) and Nepal (#90AFC5) and Ship Gray (#3E363F)

6. Persian Green (#00A6A6) and Vista Blue (#98DBC6) and Mauvelous (#F18D9E) and Sunflower (#E6D72A)

7. Marigold Yellow (#F6E278) and Ice Cold (#BCF4F5) and Vista Blue (#98DBC6)

8. Spice (#6E352C) and Tuscany (#CF5230) and Jaffa (#F59A44) and Calico (#E3C598) and Yellow Metal (#6E612F)

9. Alto (#D9D9D9) and Mandys Pink (#F5B3B4) and Chestnut Rose (#D15656) and Stiletto (#94353C)

10. Swiss Coffee (#E1DCD9) and Schooner (#8F8681) and Pharlap (#A67F78) and Mine Shaft (#3E3C3C)

11. Tulip Tree (#F2AB39) and Punga (#563C16)

12. Swans Down (#D1EDE1) and Monte Carlo (#7BC5AE) and Observatory (#028C6A)

13. Your Pink (#FFC2C3) and Bittersweet (#FE7773) and Alizarin Crimson (#EA3238)

14. Pampas (#F1EBE9) and Your Pink (#FFC2C3) and Melanie (#E6CBDD)

15. Mountain Meadow (#1B998B) and Magnolia (#F8F1FF)

16. Terracotta (#E07A5F) and Gun Powder (#3D405B) and Moon Raker (#DECDF5) and Acapulco (#81B29A) and Manhattan (#F2CC8F)

17. Bittersweet (#FE7773) and Cosmos (#FFD8D8) and Nile Blue (#194049) and Seagull (#87CEEB)

18. Mischka (#DAD5DC) and Pigeon Post (#A7C4DE) and Mystic (#D7EAEA) and Downy (#76C1D1) and Aqua Island (#ACDBDF)

19. Malibu (#4DD7FF) and Aero Blue (#AEFFF1) and Picton Blue (#32C3EE) and Boston Blue (#3B8FA1)

20. Navajo White (#FFE0AC) and Vivid Tangerine (#FF8C8C)

21. Dove Gray (#666666) and Aero Blue (#B5FFE9)

22. Cedar (#3C1518) and Dark Tan (#69140E) and Fire (#A44200)

23. Milano Red (#BA1200) and Black Pearl (#031927)