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Effective lead management is one of the core principles of any successful business. It means helping the right people become your customers and making it easy for them to buy from you again in the future.

When you get lead management right, you can:

• Convert more prospects into customers
• Streamline operations
• Improve sales experiences

But it’s not always clear how to create an effective lead management process.

Is it about quickly responding to leads, keeping your CRM neat and tidy, or using the right tags and lists?

The short answer is that it’s about all of the above.

There are lots of moving parts, but lead management is ultimately about data management plus relationship building. One of the best ways to view your lead management strategy is through the lens of Data Lifecycle Management (DLM). DLM consists of five stages:

• Data collection
• Data storage
• Data maintenance
• Data usage
• Data cleaning

Every lead passes through the same stages with your business, so it’s important to get each one right for effective lead management.

To help you maximize lead management at every stage, here are some best practices to implement in your business.

Best Practices for Effective Lead Management

Collecting Leads

1. Adjust form fields for accurate data entry.

Lead management starts with adding new leads to your database. It’s a crucial part of the process; after all, how you collect leads determines how organized things will be further down the line.

Do your future self and colleagues a favor by collecting leads in a standardized, organized, and accurate way. This starts with adjusting form fields to collect the best data in the right structure.

2. Remember data protection regulations

One core part of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe is data protection by design. This means building data security and ethical use into the foundations of your business.

Make sure every lead you add to your database has given clear consent for their data to be stored and that you only store it for the time and purpose that you define in your terms and conditions.

Storing Leads

3. Centralize all leads in your CRM.

You can’t manage your leads effectively if they’re scattered between multiple platforms or in an outdated system that’s not designed for contact management (we’re looking at you, Excel sheets).

To stay on top of all leads and not let anything fall through the cracks, choose a CRM system that helps your team to provide the best customer experiences.

4. Create secure backups.

If all of your lead data is centralized on a single platform, it’s important to conduct regular backups. One effective way to do this is with an automated sync to another cloud-based system. This can also make it easier to ensure data protection as well as your contacts’ privacy.

Maintaining Lead Data

5. Make lead management easy for sales.

A lead management process that relies on manual input isn’t efficient. It’s a recipe for human error.

To minimize errors, make lead management as intuitive as possible for your team. You can do this with:

• Automated processes
• Data entry restrictions to ensure the right format is used
• Syncing lead data from your most authoritative app

6. Enrich your data.

High-quality lead data is enriched lead data. What does this mean? It means that your sales reps aren’t just given a name and email address to work with, but rather a comprehensive and high-def view of every prospect.

This can include a lead’s industry, company size, and even goals and pain points based on previous interactions with marketing content and progressive forms. Data enrichment apps are also a handy way to include more insights on every contact record.

7. Segment your leads.

Segmentation is important for every department. It enables marketing to send the most relevant messages and advertising. Salespeople can use it to create a tailor-fit buying process. And, service teams can ensure that customers know about the most valuable features of your product or service.

With tags, labels, groups, and list memberships, you can organize your leads into the most relevant segments for your entire customer journey.

8. Sync leads between apps.

Most businesses use a lot more than one app to manage lead data. Marketers might input and update contact data on a different platform than their sales colleagues, and it’s standard to have several platforms for different purposes within a single department.

You can avoid the headaches of manual updates and contradictory data by creating an automated sync between your apps. With a tool like Operations Hub, you can ensure that everyone is always looking at the latest and most enriched lead data in every app.

9. Use lead scoring.

One of the quickest ways to make your lead management more effective is with lead scoring. This is a common feature of advanced CRMs (although often gated behind higher plans) that instantly assigns positive or negative points to a lead based on the information they give and the interactions they have with your company. This enables your sales team to instantly identify the most sales-ready leads at any moment.

Data Usage

10. Use automation for the fastest outreach.

Much of the heavy lifting of lead management can be alleviated with automation. Some of the best ways to automate lead management include lead scoring, assigning and rotating leads, and syncing lead data between apps.

11. Create insightful reporting dashboards.

By visualizing your lead data, you can understand exactly how your team is performing. For the best insights, create reports that break down performance by funnel stage so you can understand where your team is thriving or where efficiency is breaking down.

12. Nurture your leads.

Effective lead management keeps leads engaged and moving through the funnel. This is where lead nurturing comes in. You can achieve this with timely and relevant email sequences that guide each lead towards a set goal, such as requesting a sales demo or becoming a customer.

13. Automatically assign leads to the best owner.

One other handy way to use automation is with lead routing, which directs each new lead to the right salesperson or support agent based on their location, product requirements, business size, or other attributes.

Cleaning Lead Data

14. Conduct regular cleanups.

Frequent housekeeping is an essential part of managing lead data. It keeps your data fresh and reliable and without it, decaying data can quickly get unmanageable and expensive to fix.

15. Avoid duplicates.

Having duplicate contacts in your database is a real barrier to effective lead management. To avoid duplicates, focus on:

• Preventing duplicate contacts with a two-way contact sync between your apps. This doesn’t delete duplicates, but it enables you to sync the cleanest data to avoid duplicates and it intelligently merges data that might overlap.
• Fixing duplicate contacts with a built-in feature offered by your apps, or with a third-party solution. Here are some of the best tools to eradicate duplicates.

Effective lead management depends on how you collect, store, maintain, use and clean your lead data. With the help of a great CRM, solid processes for nurturing and automation, and regular housekeeping, you should be well on your way to streamlining your funnel.

Customer data is the most valuable asset in your organization. Your sales, marketing, and service teams all rely on the insights you hold about your customers to deliver the right experiences at the right time, all the way from lead generation to long-term customer retention.

Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date customer database is essential for delivering personalized interactions at scale. Without it, there’s no way for your team to remember everything they need to know about thousands of leads and customers.

But which customer data do you actually need to collect for each department, how should you store it, and what’s the correct way to use it?

Here’s our guide to customer data that will walk you through everything you need to know.

Customer Data for Different Departments

Customer Data for Marketing

Marketing is where it all begins for your customer data. You’re creating content and lead magnets that draw attention to your brand, using forms and other lead gen tools — like live chat — to convert those visitors to contacts, and nurturing those contacts to (hopefully) becoming sales-ready leads. Here’s the customer data to collect for your marketing team

1. Name, Email, Business Name

Marketing is usually the department that brings in the highest proportion of new leads, which means the pressure is on to make that information valuable for the rest of the customer lifecycle.

This starts with basic contact data that should be smoothly organized in your CRM as well as synced two ways with other key apps such as your email marketing platform. This keeps all customer information up-to-date everywhere, ready for anyone in any department to locate the latest insights.

2. Website Engagement

At the early stages of a new lead’s time with your business, it’s important to make sure your website analytics enable you to understand how they are interacting with your business and how you can best deliver the experiences they’re looking for.

If you’re an e-commerce business owner, for example, you could use website activity to recommend other similar products each person might like via email or retargeting ads on social media.

3. Segmentation Data

Information that enables you to segment a contact into the right groups and lists is one of the most valuable types of data to collect early on. This can include data such as team size, industry, and role.

Not only can this data enable the most personalized messaging and automation, but it also helps you calculate lead score.

4. Subscription Preferences

In the very first form that a lead fills out on your website, make sure there’s a clear checkbox for them to opt into marketing communications. This is a crucial part of data protection regulations, but it also enables you to send the most relevant content if you offer a range of options to subscribe to.

5. Lead Scoring

Lead qualification data such as lead scoring is one of the most impactful ways for marketers to help out their sales colleagues. With automated lead scoring in place, points are awarded for positive interactions and behavior and deducted for negative indicators. It’s the fastest way to instantly assess how likely a prospect is to buy your product, and ideally starts as soon as a visitor converts to a lead.

Examples of Lead Score Boosters:

• High engagement, such as webinar signups and content downloads
• High amount of time spent on your website
• Visiting high-value pages, such as pricing pages, demo pages, and feature pages
• Identification as decision-maker
• High-value market or industry
• Adequate budget
• Team size matches personas
• Annual revenue matches personas

Examples of Lead Score Deductors:

• Very low engagement with website pages
• Not the decision-maker
• Market or industry you struggle to serve
• Inadequate budget
• Team size doesn’t match personas
• Annual revenue doesn’t match personas

Customer Data for Sales

Salespeople create and strengthen the bridge for interested leads to become happy customers, guiding each prospect to the right product or service. Whether your team works with an account-based approach for high-value deals or a more automated strategy that’s effective at scale, customer data is crucial.

Here’s the data that’s most important for your sales team to collect.

1. Deal Information

For each closed deal, make sure you create a clear record of all information associated with it as soon as possible. This includes data such as billing amount and frequency, which you can easily sync from your CRM with your accounting app. It also helps to make sure there’s an easily accessible copy of the latest version of the contract in your CRM.

2. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Calculating a customer’s lifetime value is a really useful metric to forecast long-term revenue. You can measure this by multiplying their purchase value by purchase frequency over your average customer lifespan. With a CRM that has calculation properties, you can keep this updated automatically for your active customers.

3. Information About Decision-Makers

Your salespeople get an unmatched view of how each client’s company functions. This includes who is involved in the decision-making process.

As this same group of people will likely be involved in future onboarding sessions and upgrading discussions, make sure to store relevant information in your CRM. This helps avoid the awkward scenario of them remembering you while you look anxiously at a blank contact record, or passing the deal to a colleague who has even less background information.

4. Granular, Verified Segmentation Data

As a sales team gets to know a prospect better, it’s a great opportunity to verify their contact record. Check that their industry, company size, and other key metrics are correct, and make sure to instantly sync this data to other apps such as email marketing and automation tools that use segmentation.

5. Closed Won and Closed Lost Data

One of the most important metrics for salespeople to collect is why they successfully close a deal or not. Ask for standardized answers to store in your CRM and use this to optimize your product, messaging and targeting, and sales process.

Customer Data for Customer Service

Customer data collection doesn’t finish when a deal is closed. Throughout a customer’s time with your company, you can optimize and update their contact record to create the most accurate view of how your company can best serve them. Here’s the best customer data to collect for your service team

1. Customer Happiness Metrics

Metrics such as NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) are incredibly useful for any organization to reduce churn and optimize customer experience with a stronger product, strategy, and team. These metrics give you a snapshot of how a customer feels about your company at any point in time, and with repeated surveys at set intervals, you can monitor how that sentiment changes.

Many customer happiness metrics are extremely quick to collect. As one of the most popular examples, NPS simply asks: “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?”

2. Support Ticket Data

An insightful way to gauge both individual and overall customer happiness is with your support ticket data. This includes general metrics such as ticket volume, topic, and time to resolution, but it’s also worth automating data properties for each customer record, such as:

• Last ticket submitted
• Number of tickets submitted

With automation in your service team, you can create instant triggers that let your team know if satisfaction scores drop below a certain threshold or a certain amount of tickets are submitted within a given timeframe. Your team can then reach out to check how the customer is doing and reduce their likelihood of churn.

3. Churn Risk

By combining metrics such as customer satisfaction and support ticket data, you can create a tailored formula for calculating churn risk. With a calculation property in your CRM, you can then automatically measure this and keep an up-to-date and intelligent view of customers that are at the highest risk of churn.

4. Customer Churn Reason

It’s unfortunate, but it happens: you can’t keep every customer forever. If a customer does have to say goodbye, try to understand and record what’s behind it in your CRM. Keep these answers standardized (such as “too expensive” or “problems with the product”) so you can easily create actionable reports instead of sifting through unstructured data.

5. Customer Happiness Reason

On the other hand, if a customer loves your company, learn why! Create a standardized set of satisfaction reasons that you can ask your customers with high NPS scores to choose from.

Collecting, maintaining, and utilizing customer data is a job you’re never finished with. But when you have relevant, accurate, and up-to-date customer data, you make everything else easier and more impactful for sales, marketing, service, and beyond.

To maintain the highest quality data in every app and enable your departments to seamlessly collaborate on insights, two-way contact data synchronization between your apps. From your CRM to your email marketing software and support platform, bring your apps together for the smoothest data-driven operations in your organization.

Some of the most commonly used apps at any business are contact management apps like Google, iCloud, and Outlook. These apps are a valuable way to keep your address book accessible on any device and synced with your email, calendar, and cloud storage.

However, when it comes to making sure they play nicely with your other business apps… it’s not always simple.

Let’s say you collect contacts in Outlook, but want to move subscribed customers into Mailchimp, and send them your weekly newsletter. To solve this in the past, you might have manually exported and imported CSV files between your apps before sending each email.

But that can be a real headache. There’s a much better solution, and it involveszero manual updates and spreadsheets: integrating your contact apps and email marketing tool with a native integration solution.

This is the most effective and straightforward way to keep your email marketing lists and contacts apps connected with your latest data. And it requires no code or advanced tech know-how.

To show you the ropes, let’s outline how to sync your data and put your Google, iCloud, and Outlook contacts to work in your email marketing app.

Search for a complete sync solution.

Some email marketing providers offernative integrations with Google Contacts, iCloud, and Outlook, but be aware of their limitations. Often it’s only a one-way sync, meaning that changes in app A are synced into app B, but not the other way around. Or, you can’t customize the sync to include the exact fields you need to map.

Instead of wrestling with CSVs and native integrations, yourbest bet is to use complete data sync to control the way your data flows between apps. After plugging in your apps, you can choose all the different ways you want them to talk to each other.

For instance, you might use Operations Hub to sync contacts labeled ‘Customers’ in Google Contacts with HubSpot or sync all your address books with your CRM to generate a complete overview for your salespeople.

How to Organize Your Lists and Sequences With Automatic Segmentation

Some people organize their contacts into completely different clouds, especially if they want to keep personal contacts and business separate. That’s totally fine and it can be a great way to keep things simple.

But if your contacts for different purposes overlap, you can also automatically segment them to keep things tidy.

You do this by organizing contacts with labels or tags in your address book, and matching these up with labels, groups, or lists in your email marketing app in your sync.

Let’s look closer at an example. I have a group of contacts in Google Contacts with the label ‘business.’ To make sure that these contacts (and only these) get synced into HubSpot, I can set up the following sync rules:

Now when I go to send a message to that group, all of the right recipients will be there. That means more time actually sending emails and less time worrying about which contacts should receive them.

How to Sync Subscription Status Between Apps

If you’re using multiple apps to contact your email marketing list, knowing who actually wants to hear from you can be a real headache. You don’t want to risk contacting people who have unsubscribed in another app, nor ignore contacts who do want to be contacted.

Your answer to this issubscription management, and it’s made possible when you connect your apps.

As you sync your contact data, you can enable each contact to travel between apps with a ‘subscribed’ or ‘unsubscribed’ tag. When the time comes to send your next email, all of the right people will be in (or out of) the list.

How to Enrich Data in Your Email Marketing App

It’s not just subscription status that you can sync between apps. You might want to sync other fields, too.

Let’s look at syncing contacts from Outlook with HubSpot, which you could use to send marketing emails. To ensure the right info is synced with each contact, you can check the field mapping to make sure everything lines up.

If a field isn’t included in the list by default, custom fields give you more freedom. As an example custom field, you could map the ‘Department’ field in Outlook with a HubSpot property for the same data. For custom fields to map correctly, they need to be compatible across both apps.

Getting the Most From Data Sync

So, that’s how to easily sync your address books in Outlook, iCloud, or Google Contacts with your email marketing app. After setting up your sync, you can rest easy and send top-converting emails knowing that your lists are in tip-top shape.

Once syncing your email marketing app with your contact address books, you can then also decide which other apps to sync — such as your CRM or customer support software. Remember, the best software stack is an integrated one.

We all know how flooded the average email inbox is today. And, while email marketing remains one of the most effective tools in the marketing toolbox, millions of emails go by unnoticed, unopened, and unread every day.

So, how can you avoid such a sad fate for your emails? And, what can you do to increase email engagement and get those coveted clicks on your CTA buttons?

Read on for ten actions that will increase your email engagement and save your emails from ending up in the trash folder.

10 Ways to Improve Email Engagement

1. Always send a welcome email.

The first email you send to a customer is usually a welcome email. The average open rate for a welcome email is 50%, which makes it much more effective than regular newsletters.

If we bear in mind that 76% of people expect a welcome email immediately after subscribing to your list, it’s clear that this email is an important one, so be sure to make the most of it.

Really Good Emails shares a great collection of welcome emails (and every other category you can think of) to inspire your strategy, including this excellent example from Postable. It delivers the discount code subscribers are waiting for, includes a beautiful graphic, and keeps things super simple.

2. Optimize your subject lines.

47% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. So yes, getting the subject line right is crucial.

But what makes a good subject line?

The best way to succeed is to leverage natural human tendencies such as:

• Curiosity
• FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)
• Humor

This is a typical FOMO subject line, where GetResponse is making it clear to its audience that they risk missing out on a whopping 40% off.

3. Don’t neglect the preheader text.

The preheader text, or preview text, is the snippet of text that follows the email subject line when a reader views your email in the inbox. It’s shown beside the subject line and sender name.

These examples from beauty marketplace, Cult Beauty, offer a preview of the brands and discounts it offers to encourage clicks:

This snippet is valuable real estate and it can even make or break your email’s performance. Studies show that brands using the preview text effectively increase their open rates by a margin of up to 30%.

4. Prioritize your CTAs.

The way you write and design your CTAs, or calls to action, has a significant impact on email engagement and click-through rates. Since readers are so used to being prompted to do this and do that, creativity is crucial to avoid being filtered out.

Experiment with everything from copy and design to placement and frequency to discover what kind of CTAs and buttons yield the best results with your particular target audience.

This message from email marketing software, Emma, keeps it short and sweet with a CTA that spurs the reader’s curiosity with the clever and straightforward copy “See how.”

5. Write casual, fun copy.

Write as you talk. Nobody appreciates large, dull, jargon-heavy chunks of texts. Make it easy, fun, and rewarding to read your emails. And, be ultra-clear about what next step you want the reader to take.

Use active, positive language and keep sentences short and concise. And, if appropriate, use humor; people like to smile.

This email copy from Uber is creative, on-brand, and to the point:

6. Leverage your transactional emails.

After welcome emails, transactional emails have among the highest open rates of all email marketing messages. And yet, they rarely contain more information than that of the actual transaction. That means an opportunity for you.

By giving your transactional emails some extra love and attention, you will wow your customers in a way that many companies miss out on.

7. Conduct A/B testing.

If you’re sending emails, you should be doing A/B testing. You can test every element of your emails, from subject lines and preview tests to copy, images, design, and CTAs.

The more you test, the better you will get to know your target audience. And the better you know your audience, the more you will be able to engage them with your emails.

8. Make sure your email is mobile responsive.

Most people open emails on their mobile device. This means that if your emails aren’t mobile responsive, a large portion of them will be going to waste.

Always make sure that your design has as good or better UX on mobile as on desktop.

9. Personalize your emails for each recipient.

Customers get frustrated with brands that fail to create personalized experiences. This is why tailoring your email marketing to the recipient is crucial.

An email that is not personalized risks doing more harm than good. In one marketing study, 82% of marketing specialists witnessed a substantial increase in opening rates when they leveraged the power of personalization.

Eventbrite sends these personalized emails with reports on how successful is users’ events have been during the past year. This type of personalized content can also be a great way to encourage social sharing and engagement within a team, multiplying the effect of your emails.

10. Segment your email marketing.

Segmenting your email list enables you to get the right message to the right buyer persona at the right time in their buyer journey. And, that is crucial for increasing conversions.

To send segmented emails that are more likely to convert, first integrate your email and marketing software with your CRM and other sources of customer data.

This gives you a 360-degree view of your contacts everywhere, including your email marketing platform. It’s then easier than ever to send highly personalized emails based on your contacts’ groups, memberships, and other properties.

Better Data Means Better Email Engagement

Email communication is one of the most effective ways that you can reach out to customers and prospects. But keeping your emailing lists up-to-date and personalizing your content can be challenging.

That’s where integration steps in: sync the contact databases across your app stack, so you’re always working with fully enriched, up-to-date, and relevant data.

With your CRM and email tool in sync, you can automatically send recent subscribers and leads to your email tool. You can also sync extra data for better segmentation of your marketing and nurturing campaigns — plus easily personalized outreach in every email.

At the same time, you can merge marketing qualified leads (MQLs) back to your CRM with updated data for sales to work with — all without overwriting existing data.

Maintaining a contact database with high data integrity is essential for any organization. You need your data to be reliable, accurate, and complete, otherwise, you risk frustrating your customers with the wrong information, being unable to deliver personalized services, and losing faith in your reporting.

One of the biggest threats to data integrity is having duplicate contacts in your database.

In many cases, duplicate contacts are caused by human error. One team member might spell a contact’s name wrong, causing it to be added twice. It can also be caused by a contact filling in a form with a different email address or phone number.

In short: duplicate contacts can be a real pain. No business wants to have to deal with them, but the good news is that you don’t have to. Here’s what you need to know to get rid of duplicate contact data for good.

The Best Apps to Remove Duplicate Contacts

Some apps offer built-in deduplication features to locate and banish pesky duplicates by merging or deleting them.

For instance, HubSpot has a handy deduplication tool that uses AI to finds duplicate contacts and companies in the CRM. Google Contacts and iCloud also have useful built-in dedupe functions. It’s always a good idea to start with your apps’ functionality and clean up your data at the source.

However, many apps don’t have built-in dedupe functions, or they’re limited in quality. For most organizations, it’s valuable to choose a dedicated app for data quality and cleansing that works across multiple apps.

To avoid wasting time, money, and energy trying to fix duplicate contacts and their repercussions across your organization, here are five of the best apps to help you fix and avoid duplicates.

1. Dedupely

For: HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive

Dedupely helps remove duplicates from three of the most popular CRM platforms: HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. It’s a really easy platform to navigate, and offers several filters to flag possible duplicates for first name, last name, email, company, and more. It also finds duplicates by exact, fuzzy, and similar matching to detect issues that other systems would miss.

2. DemandTools from Validity

For: Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce

DemandTools is a CRM data quality suite that helps organizations optimize their data in Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM.

It includes maintenance tools, cleaning tools, and discovery tools for comparing external data against the CRM and bulk email verification.

3. RingLead

For: Salesforce, Pardot, Eloqua, and Marketo

RingLead is a powerful data quality solution to cleanse data, stop dirty data at the source, enrich contact records with fresh information, and route leads to the right person at the right time.

It offers one-click integrations with Salesforce, Pardot, Eloqua, and Marketo.

4. Openrise

For: selected marketing and sales automation apps, collaboration tools, data services and infrastructure platforms

Openrise’s data orchestration platform automates key processes including data cleansing and enrichment, deduplication, lead routing, and attribution to make your campaigns more successful.

It integrates with many popular marketing and sales automation apps plus collaboration tools like G Suite, data services including Cleabit, and infrastructure platforms such as MySQL.

5. Contacts+

For: Google Contacts, iCloud, and Outlook

Struggling to manage different contacts in your Google, iCloud, and Outlook apps? Contacts+ is a helpful app that centralizes and syncs contacts between Google Contacts, iCloud, and Outlook so you always have the latest info on the app and device you’re using.

Not only is it a great way to sync your address books, but it also has sophisticated dedupe algorithms to pick up on duplicate contacts even when they’re not obvious to you or other apps.

Preventing Duplicates When Syncing Data

The tools we talked about here are amazing additions to your tech stack when it comes to managing your contact databases and keeping them organized. But another important step in contact management is syncing your contact data in two ways.

Operations Hub is a two-way contact data syncing tool that also has valuable advantages for preventing and merging duplicate contacts.

When you create a sync between your apps, say Google Contacts and HubSpot, you can choose which app has the authoritative data that should be chosen if there’s a conflict. This creates a “single source of truth” in your data: one of the benchmarks of a healthy database.

Operations Hub also defines contacts by their email address, which is a good way to avoid duplicates. And, for example, if in one app you have a contact called ‘Bill’ and another has a contact named ‘William’ — both of which are attached to the same email address — the tool will merge and enrich both contact records.

From P&G’s “Thank You, Mom” to American Express’s “Small Business Saturday” to Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man in the World,” marketing campaigns have a way of sticking with us long after an impression or purchase.

Why is that? Well, campaigns make companies memorable. They promote a focused effort that guides consumers towards a desired action. They also give brands identity, personality, and emotion.

Marketing campaigns can do the same for your business. That’s why we’ve compiled this guide — to provide a clear, concise approach to your next campaign.

Keep reading to get started or use the links below to jump ahead.

Marketing campaigns don’t include all marketing efforts for a brand. In fact, the word “campaign” is defined as “a connected series of operations designed to bring about a particular result.”

That’s why politicians campaign for a specific election and militaries campaign for a specific battle.

Great marketing campaignsfollow a consistent theme and promote a single or focused idea or goal (as we’ll discuss).

For example, every Nike advertisement you see or hear on the way to work probably isn’t part of a campaign. But, if you see a Nike billboard, scroll past a Nike sponsored Instagram post, and receive a Nike email all promoting the same product … you’ve definitely witnessed a marketing campaign.

You’ve also probably heard the word “campaign” used for both marketing and advertising. What’s the difference?

Marketing Campaigns vs Advertising Campaigns

Advertising is a component of marketing. Marketing is how a company plans to raise awareness of their brand and convince customers to make a purchase, while advertising is the process of creating the persuasive messages around these broad goals.

In terms of campaigns, an advertising campaign might be a facet of a bigger marketing campaign strategy. For example, if Nike were campaigning about the release of a new product, their advertising would be one piece of their broader marketing efforts, which might also encompass email, social media, and paid search.

So, campaigns are focused, acute marketing efforts to reach a singular goal. Despite their simple definition, marketing campaigns can take a lot of work. Keep reading to learn how to create and promote a successful one.

Marketing Campaign Components

Multiple components go into the planning, execution, and benefiting from a stellar marketing campaign.

• Goals & KPIs: Identify what the end goal of your campaign is, quantify it, and explain how you’ll measure this result. For example, your content creation campaign might be measured by organic traffic, with each post goaled on driving 1,000 views per month and 10 new contacts, and metrics being measured in Google Analytics and Looker.
• Channels: Where will your content and messaging be distributed? For example, if you’re running a social media marketing campaign, you might specifically prioritize growing the channels most relevant to your audience and omit those where you’re least likely to grow a loyal following.
• Budget: Not all marketing campaigns require an incremental budget, but many still do. Factor in agency, advertising, and freelance costs, if appropriate, and factor these numbers into any ROI analysis for your campaign.
• Content Format(s): Determine what kind of content you will be creating to fuel the campaign. It’s common for marketers to include multiple content formats in a singular campaign. For example, a branding campaign could include video ads, press releases, and guest blogs.
• Team: Who are the individuals you’re relying on to get the job done? Before kickstarting your campaign, make sure you have a roster of people who can help you with copywriting, website building, design, budget planning, video, or whatever elements you’re employing in the campaign.
• Design:Lastly, a great marketing campaign has a noteworthy design. Whether it’s a sleek website design, a logo at the end of a video commercial, or an interactive infographic, make sure your design is professional and fitting for the purpose of the campaign.

How to Create a Successful Marketing Campaign

Creating an entire campaign might be complex, but it’s a pretty straightforward process — if you do it correctly. Planning your campaign is just as important as designing the fun stuff, such as the creative advertisements and conversion assets.

Before you create what your audience will see, you must consider what you want them to do when they see it … or read it or hear it. (You get the gist.)

I’ve organized this section as a marketing campaign template of sorts. All you need to do is answer the questions — as accurately and in-depth as possible — to ensure a thorough, successful approach to your next marketing campaign.

Also, don’t skip ahead! Your responses to previous questions will guide your ideas and answers as you move along.

Planning Your Marketing Campaign

This step is crucial to the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. The planning stage will determine how you measure success and will guide your team and campaign when things (inevitably) go awry.

Featured Resource

• Free Marketing Plan Generator

1. Set a purpose and goal for your campaign.

Let’s start simple. Why are you running this campaign? What would you like your campaign to accomplish for your business?

If you’re having trouble defining your campaign purpose, start broad. Take a look at the goals below. Which one is most aligned with your own?

• Promote a new product or service
• Increase brand awareness
• Gather customer feedback or content
• Generate revenue
• Boost user engagement
• Advertise an upcoming event

This is hardly a definitive list, but it gives you an idea of some general business goals that a campaign could help reach.

For the sake of demonstration, I’m going to move forward with the third goal: Gather customer feedback or content. We’ll use this example throughout this guide.

Now, let’s take our broad campaign purpose and turn it into a SMART goal. To classify as “SMART”, a goal must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. SMART goals keep you accountable and provide you with a concrete goal for which to aim.

Continuing with our example from above, turning our broad purpose into a SMART goal would look like:

“The goal of my marketing campaign is to gather customer feedback or content.” vs.

“The goal of my marketing campaign is to gather user-generated content from 100 customers via a branded hashtag on Instagram featuring our new product line by December 31, 2020.”

The goal is Specific (user-generated content), Measurable (100 customers), Attainable (via a branded Instagram hashtag), Relevant (featuring the new product line), and Timely (by December 31, 2020).

See how my broad campaign purpose instantly transforms into an actionable, attainable goal? Determining such distinct measures for your campaign is tough — I get it. But making the hard decisions now will make your life — and campaign — much easier in the future.

Featured Resource

• Free SMART Goal-Setting Template

2. Establish how you’ll measure your campaign.

This will look different for everyone. You might measure “email open rates,” “new Facebook Page likes,” “product pre-orders,” or all of the above.

These answers will depend on your overarching campaign goal. Here are a few examples of metrics based on the campaign objectives I mentioned above.

• For promoting a new product or service: Pre-orders, sales, upsells
• For increasing brand awareness: Sentiment, social mentions, press mentions
• For gathering customer feedback or content: Social mentions, engagement
• For generating revenue: Leads, sales, upsells
• For boosting user engagement: Blog shares, social shares, email interactions
• For advertising an upcoming event: Ticket sales, vendor or entertainment bookings, social mentions

If your campaign involves multiple marketing efforts (such as social media, direct mail, and radio ads), it’s wise to define how you’ll measure your campaign on each medium. (Read more about these channel-specific metrics below.)

For example, let’s say I was running my user-generated content (UGC) campaign on social media, email, and on our blog.

First, I’d define my key performance indicators (KPIs) for each medium, which may look like:

• Instagram engagements (likes and comments) and profile tags
• Email open rates and click-through rates
• Blog views, click-throughs, and social shares

Then, I’d define my primary campaign KPI: Instagram branded hashtag mentions.

While the above KPIs indicate how well my campaign is reaching and engaging my audience, my primary KPI tells me how close I am to reaching my SMART goal.

Lastly, let’s think about another question: What does “success” look like for your company? Sure, it’s exciting to reach a predetermined goal, but that’s not always possible. What (outside of your goal) would constitute success for you (or serve as a milestone)? What would make you feel like your campaign is worthwhile if it doesn’t involve meeting your goal?

When determining how you’ll measure your campaign, consider setting up some checkpoints along the way. If your campaign involves boosting brand awareness and your goal is to reach 50 PR mentions by the end of the year, set up some benchmark notifications at 10, 25, and 40 mentions.

Not only will it remind you to keep pushing toward your ultimate goal, but it’ll boost morale within your team and remind you that your time and money investments are paying off.

3. Define your target audience.

Ah, the beloved “target audience” section. This is one of my very favorite things to talk about because your alignment with your audience can make or break the success of anything marketing or sales-related … especially a campaign.

Imagine constructing a bulletproof marketing campaign only to be met with crickets. *chirp* *chirp*

In that case, you might think you chose the wrong marketing medium or that your creative wasn’t witty enough. Regardless of what it might be, all of those decisions come back to one thing: Your audience.

The first step to answering this question is figuring out what stage of the buyer’s journey your campaign is targeting. Are you trying to bring in new customers, or are you attempting to gather feedback from existing clients? Are you marketing your brand to those who recognize it, or are you introducing a new brand identity altogether?

Your marketing message will vary depending on whether your campaign audience is in the Awareness, Consideration, or Decision stage. It’s important to note that a marketing campaign can include collateral for people in various stages of their journey. For example, while your campaign might target current customers, it might also bring brand awareness to new consumers.

Next, identify your audience interests and pain points. Here are some questions to ask yourself and your team to better understand your audience.

• What are my audience’s general interests? What magazines do they read? What TV shows do they watch? How do they spend their free time?
• Where does my audience hang out online? For what purpose do they use Instagram, Facebook, and other networks? Do they engage or merely browse?
• What kind of content gets my audience’s attention? Do they respond to straightforward sales messages, or would they rather consume witty, humorous content? What cultural references would they understand?
• What kind of problems do they have that my product, service, or brand could solve?

Becoming well-acquainted with your campaign audience will help you confidently answer these questions and any others that may arise during the campaign.

Featured Resource

• Buyer Persona Generator

4. Set a concept for your campaign and get in contact with the right team.

It’s time to talk about the campaign itself. At this point, you know why you’re running a campaign, how you’ll measure it, and who it’s targeting. Now, let’s talk about what the campaign will look like … literally.

Marketing campaigns are like their own brand. They require a mission, a vision, and a visual identity. Great campaigns are an offshoot of their parent brand, both visually and creatively — they stay consistent with the business brand but maintain their own identity.

When creating their campaign assets, some businesses use an in-house team while others opt for an agency. Another alternative is hiring a freelancer or contractor to complete a specific portion of the project, such as the copy or design.

Depending on your specific campaign goals, I’d recommend starting with your in-house team and moving forward from there. They are likely the experts on that portion of your business and can speak to what your campaign needs to succeed.

Following the example of my Instagram UGC campaign, I’d start by consulting with my social media team. They’d be the most familiar with what Instagram content performs well and what our Instagram audience likes to see. From there, I could assign the campaign to them, or outsource the creative part to an agency or freelancer.

This step will likely take the longest since you’ll be creating your campaign concept from scratch. Next, we’ll dive into how you’ll distribute your campaign assets and connect with your audience.

Featured Resource

• Market Research Kit

Distributing Your Marketing Campaign

This stage is all about the public-facing part of your campaign, including what your audience will see and when. If you’ve combed through the previous section, you should have all the answers you need to guide you through this step.

5. Choose the channels you’ll run your campaign on.

Let’s think about what type of marketing your campaign will use. This choice depends on your audience preference, budget, and brand engagement levels, among other factors.

Take a look at the current media channels you use to promote your company. Which perform the best? Which allow you to pay for advertisements? Which have the best engagement? Most importantly, where are your customers hanging out?

Also, while using multiple media is highly recommended, it probably wouldn’t be wise to publish your campaign on a brand new medium on which your business has no presence. So, stick to those marketing channels on which you’re already killing it.

Need a few ideas? Take a look at the PESO model, which breaks up distribution channels into Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned.

Image Source

Start by choosing two or three channels for your campaign. For example, I might promote my UGC Instagram campaign via social media (on Instagram, of course), email, and through my blog. I’d then pay to boost my social media campaign posts so they’re viewed by more of my audience.

Depending on your campaign goal, certain channels might not make sense. In terms of my UGC campaign, it wouldn’t make sense to invest in print advertisements or direct mail since the campaign is purely digital and my audience is mostly online. On the other hand, multinational product launch campaigns would probably involve most (if not all) of the media choices above. They’d want to reach the widest audience, both in-person and online.

Remember that you’ll need to alter or expand your marketing assets to fit whichever media channels you choose. Your campaign images, video, and copy might vary between social media, email, print, etc.

Lastly, even if you choose not to actively promote on a certain medium, you can always optimize it to at least mention your campaign. For example, you can update your social media bios, change your email signature, install a website header notification bar, add small calls-to-action (keep reading for more on these) at the bottom of blog posts, and more. These efforts don’t require much extra work or resources but they promote your campaign nonetheless.

6. Set a timeline for your campaign.

This section is all about timing. Establishing a deadline for your campaign (the Timely part of your SMART goal) gives you a much better idea of when, how, and how often you’ll promote it.

First, build a general campaign timeline. On a calendar, mark your campaign start date and deadline. This gives you parameters to work within.

Next, take a look at your marketing assets and chosen promotional marketing channels. Based on your people and financial resources, how often can you afford to post and promote your campaign content? Create a promotional calendar for each marketing channel. Decide on a cadence for each channel and map out your scheduled posts, emails, etc. on your calendar.

Why should you map your campaign visually? It’ll help you evenly disperse your campaign promotions and publish equally on each medium. It’ll also give you an idea of where your time and energy is going so that you can look back when assessing the effectiveness of your campaign.

If your promotional calendar seems very, very full, don’t fret. Social media and email scheduling tools can alleviate the pressure of posting daily. Check out tools like HubSpot, Buffer, and MailChimp to help you schedule and manage your campaign promotions.

The promotional stage is all about getting your campaign in front of your audience. But, how are you supposed to get your audience to follow the purpose of your campaign? Next, we’ll discuss how to optimize your campaign to convert customers.

Converting Customers Through Your Marketing Campaign

So, campaigns are a connected series of operations designed to bring about a particular result. We’ve talked about the “connected” part, and we’ve covered the “operations” part. This stage — the conversion stage — is all about how your campaign can lead to that “particular result.”

7. Ensure your campaign is driving users toward a desired action.

Even if your campaign is effective and drives a ton of traffic, it still needs to complete its desired action. By “the desired action,” I’m talking about that SMART goal you initially defined. Let’s take a moment and reiterate that goal.

For my sample campaign, my SMART goal was “to gather user-generated content from 100 customers via a branded hashtag on Instagram featuring our new product line by December 31, 2018.”

This step is all about calibrating your marketing efforts and channels to lead your customers to complete your desired goal. This is done through conversion assets like calls-to-action, landing pages, and lead forms.

These assets can be used separately or in conjunction with one another, such as featuring a lead form on a landing page, or creating a call-to-action asking your audience to fill out a form.

Calls-to-Action

A call-to-action (CTA) is a direct ask of your audience. It’s an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action, and it’s absolutely crucial to your campaign success.

CTAs cut through the noise of today’s marketing and advertising world and give your audience a clear directive. But, there’s no one-size-fits-all for CTAs, especially in the case of marketing campaigns.

Your campaign CTA can’t simply ask them to complete your goal. You must also consider how your audience would benefit from completing your action and include that in your CTA.

If my UGC campaign CTA was “post a picture of our product with this #hashtag,” my campaign would seem uninspired and a tad bossy. CTAs might be direct, but they’re also meant to encourage, inspire, and convince.

In this case, a better CTA would be “Share a photo featuring our product and this #hashtag, and you might be featured on our Instagram page and next promotional video!”

The same benefit-driven CTA applies to product launches, brand awareness campaigns, upsell efforts, and other types of campaigns. Your audience won’t complete your “desired action” unless they understand how it benefits them, too.

Featured Resource

• 50 Free Call-to-Action Templates

Landing Pages

Landing pages give your campaign a home, a destination. They are a dedicated space for your audience to visit and learn more about what your campaign consists of and why they should participate. It also sets your campaign apart from the rest of your website and content.

Your landing page should be ripe with benefits for your audience, especially the unique value proposition (UVP) of your campaign. Don’t forget to repeat your CTA and make it clear how your audience can engage (i.e. with a download or by filling out a form).

High-converting landing pages also contain social proof and a variety of marketing assets like images, strong copy, and video.

High-converting landing pages also contain social proof and a variety of marketing assets like images, strong copy, and video.

Featured Resources

• 77 Brilliant Examples of Landing Pages, Blogs, and Homepages
• How to Optimize Landing Pages for Lead Generation

Lead Forms

Lead forms are web forms dedicated to capturing information about a visitor. By filling out the form, the visitor then turns into a lead. Lead forms are not necessary for all campaigns (they wouldn’t do much good for my UGC Instagram campaign, for example), but they can be great assets for most others, such as product pre-orders and content offer downloads.

Lead forms transform anonymous website visitors into hard data you can use to make sales and learn more about your audience. They put your landing page to work. Try our Free Online Form Builder to build out your campaign form.

8. Monitor the right metrics.

The campaign effectiveness metrics you’ll monitor will depend on what type of marketing campaign you’re running and what channels you’ve chosen. This section merely serves as a baseline list to give you an idea of what to watch.

Also, it’s tempting to focus on vanity metrics like generated traffic, click-through rate, and impressions. A bump in these is definitely a good thing, but since they don’t necessarily indicate a bump in revenue, they can’t be the only metrics used to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.

Here’s are some metrics to watch per marketing channel.

Email Metrics

• Click-through rate
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate

Social Media (Paid) Metrics

• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate
• Cost per click
• Cost per-conversion

Social Media (Organic) Metrics

• Passive engagements (likes and shares)
• Active engagements (comments)
• Follows
• Click-through rate

Lead Magnet/Content Offer Metrics

• Opt-in rate
• Cost per opt-in
• Follow-up email open rate
• Opt-in conversion rate

Display Ads/Paid Media Metrics

• Cost per thousand impressions
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate
• Cost per conversion

Direct Mail Metrics

• Response rate
• Cost per conversion
• Average revenue per conversion

Content/SEO Metrics

• Click-through rate
• Bounce rate
• Time on page
• Page scroll depth
• Conversion rate

This may seem like a lot of metrics (depending on your campaign), but keeping an eye on these numbers can help you assess your campaign accurately and better understand how to improve.

Assessing Your Marketing Campaign

The post-campaign stage determines your success just as much as the planning stage. Measuring and analyzing your campaign data can provide unique insight into your audience, marketing channels, and budget. It can also tell you exactly how (or how not) to run your next campaign.

9. Establish success numbers and metrics.

Well, it depends on how you define “worked.” The easy answer to this question is whether or not your campaign met your initial SMART goal. If it did, great! If it didn’t, it can still be considered successful.

For example, if your goal was to increase organic blog views by 100K, any bump in views would be considered successful. But there’s a difference in a campaign that works and a campaign that’s worthwhile. A worthwhile campaign gives you an ROI that’s proportionate to the time and energy you put into it.

While it’s okay to celebrate any bump in pre-orders, leads, views, or engagements, don’t assume that’s enough. There’s a reason the very first thing to do is set a campaign goal. Sticking to that goal and calibrating your investment will ensure your campaign is worthwhile.

10. What will you do with the campaign data?

This step helps maximize your campaign’s business impact. When you analyze and apply your data, its value increases tenfold — not only did it help you measure and assess your campaign results, but it’ll also give you direction and clarity on your audience, marketing methods, creative prowess, and more.

Let’s return to my UGC Instagram campaign. Of course, images shared by my customers are helpful because they help me gather user content for my social channels and they promote my product to my audience’s followers. But this “data” also provides insight into who my audience is, when and how often they post on Instagram, what language they use, and how they use my product (assuming it’s the same as in the shared photo).

See how my campaign “data” provides more value than simply reaching my campaign goal? The same can go for your data. Whether you collect lead information, pre-orders, social engagements, or offer downloads, your data can equip you to not only meet your campaign goal but also expand your marketing efforts as a whole.

Lastly, spend time with your team reviewing your campaign. Ask yourselves questions like:

• What could’ve been done differently?
• How could we have saved money?
• For anything that went wrong, why do we think it went wrong?
• What did we learn about our audience or marketing channels?
• What kind of feedback could we gather from participants or customers?

Final Thoughts

So, marketing campaigns involve a lot of information, decision-making, ideas, and observation. But the process of creating and running one isn’t as scary as you thought, was it?

If you’re not sure where to start, take a look at some great campaign examples below. Now that you know what goes into each one, you might have a better idea of how to build one for yourself.

Great Marketing Campaign Examples (and Why They’re So Great)

This wouldn’t be a HubSpot Ultimate Guide if I didn’t show you some examples from the pros. Sometimes it’s helpful to see concepts at work, and that’s why I collected some of the best below.

If you’re looking for more excellent campaign examples, check out these other HubSpot blog posts:

• Best Advertisements & Ad Campaigns of All Time
• Offbeat, Extreme, and Downright Unusual Ways Brands Have Promoted Their Products
• Examples of Experiential Marketing Campaigns That’ll Give You Serious Event Envy
• Converse, Old Spice & More: Famous Brands That Made Inspiring Comebacks

1. Cheerios’s #GoodGoesRound

General Mills ran a non-profit campaign called Good Goes Round via their Cheerios brand, lobbying to raise enough money to fund one million meals. The campaign featured its own landing page, video marketing assets, and hashtag (#GoodGoesRound), separating it from its “parent” brand and making it shareable among its audience. They also paid to promote the Good Goes Round URL on Google.

2. Apple’s “Shot on iPhone”

Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” series highlights the high-quality videography and photography that customers can capture on the iPhone X. It’s a product launch campaign that focused on one specific feature of the new Apple smartphone. This campaign was unique, because it’s similar to a user-generated campaign but was also promoted heavily by the brand itself. Apple launched its own Instagram account to share the #ShotoniPhone content, collaborated with professional photographers and videographers, and ran official TV advertisements.

3. Metro Trains’ “Dumb Ways to Die”

“Dumb Ways to Die” was Australia’s PSA campaign that took the advertising world by storm. Created in Melbourne, the campaign was Metro Trains’ effort to encourage railway safety. The campaign was initially shared on social media in 2012 but went viral soon after.

According to CampaignLive, “The musical video, which shows animated characters dying in amusing circumstances, has already racked up 50m views on YouTube, over 3.2m shares on Facebook, been retweeted over 100,000 times on Twitter and become the third most viral ad of all time. The music track was popular, too, charting on iTunes in 28 countries.”

The campaign also has its own Wikipedia page and live website on which visitors can play games or shop for toys and apparel.

4. Pepsi’s “The Pepsi Challenge”

During the height of the infamous cola wars, Pepsi cemented its place as the only alternative to Coca Cola with The Pepsi Challenge. With a series of commercials pitting these two beverages against one another, Pepsi was able to gain substantial market share in its market – which is why the debate still goes on today.

5. Hess’ “The Hess Truck’s Here”

Is it really the Holiday season if you don’t hear “The Hess Truck’s back, and it’s better than ever!”?

An ongoing Christmas campaign, The Hess Truck commercial hooks viewers in with its familiar jingle before introducing them to the new design and features of each year’s addition. It’s the perfect mix of looking back and ahead – and why we look forward to Hess’ new commercial heading into each December.

6. Paranormal Activity’s “Test Screening”

The promotion for this found footage horror film switched the camera from the audience’s perspective to the audience itself. By highlighting actual reactions from a test screening and promising a terrifying theatrical experience, turning an initial $15,000 budget into a $193 million box office success. It became the most profitable movie ever made.

7. Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke”

Ever gone into a grocery store and looked for a Coca-Cola bottle with your name? That was a marketing campaign — and it’s so effective that looking for a bottle with our name was almost automatic for some of us. It’s one of the best-known campaigns in the world. It has been written about in Wikipedia, dissected by news outlets, and turned into a valuable lesson for marketing students.

8. Airbnb’s “Made Possible by Hosts”

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, travel companies such as Airbnb saw unprecedented losses in profit. Well, how did Airbnb respond? It created a series of videos called “Made Possible by Hosts” that shows appreciation for the hosts who have continued to accept guests on the platform. What’s most curious about the campaign is that it doesn’t put Airbnb customers at the center. Instead, it spotlights the hosts who accept customers in the first place. In doing so, Airbnb focuses on the human aspect of its platform. You’re not renting an Airbnb property; you’re renting someone’s home.

Over to You

Marketing campaigns aren’t easy, but they’re valuable and integral to growing a successful brand and business. Campaigns set apart certain deliverables from general promotional efforts and touch your audience in creative and exciting ways. If you’re not sure where to start, consider what would be valuable to your audience … and go from there. Your audience is, after all, the lifeblood of your campaigns and company.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

When it comes to PowerPoint presentation design, there’s no shortage of avenues you can take.

While all that choice — colors, formats, visuals, fonts — can feel liberating, it’s important that you’re careful in your selection as not all design combinations add up to success. We’re not saying there’s one right way to design your next PowerPoint presentation, but we are saying there are some designs that make more sense than others.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how to create an awesome PowerPoint deck and then see real presentations that nail it in exactly their own way.

What makes a good PowerPoint presentation?

A great PowerPoint presentation gets the point across succinctly while using a design builds upon the point, not detract from it. The following aspects make for a great PowerPoint presentation:

1. Minimal Animations and Transitions

Believe it or not, animations and transitions can take away from your PowerPoint presentation. Why? Well, they distract from the design you worked so hard on — and from your content, too.

A good PowerPoint presentation keeps the focus on your argument by keeping animations and transitions to a minimum. That said, you don’t have to eliminate them all. You can use them tastefully and sparingly to emphasize a point or bring attention to a certain part of an image.

2. Cohesive Color Palette

It’s worth reviewing color theory when creating your next PowerPoint presentation. A cohesive color palette uses complementary and analogous colors to draw the audience’s attention, emphasize certain aspects, and deemphasize bits of information that the audience might not need at a certain point in time.

3. Contextualized Visuals

An image does speak more than words. And it’s been proven that the human brain is wired to process visuals much faster than words. Take advantage of that by including graphs, photos, and illustrations that can help you build upon your point while keeping your audience’s interest.

Make sure you contextualize those visuals by explaining verbally why that image is there. Otherwise, it’ll be distracting to the audience and may potentially cause more questions than answers.

PowerPoint Design Ideas

It’s impossible for us to tell you which design ideas you should go after in your next PowerPoint, because, well, we don’t know what the goal of your presentation is. Luckily, new versions of PowerPoint actually suggest ideas for you based on the content you’re presenting.

In PowerPoint 2016 and later, PowerPoint is filled with interesting boilerplate designs you can start with. To find these suggestions, open PowerPoint and click the “Design” tab in your top navigation bar. Then, on the far right side, you’ll see the following options:

Click the “Design Ideas” option under this Design tab, as shown in the screenshot above. This icon will reveal a vertical list of interesting slide layouts based on what your slides already have on them.

Don’t have any content on your slides yet? You can easily shuffle this vertical list of design ideas by clicking various slides themes inside the color carousel to the far left of the Design Ideas icon, as shown below:

As you browse and select from the themes shown above, the Design Ideas pane to the right will interpret them and come up with layouts. Below, we’ve included some of our favorite ones.

In case you’re curious, we’ve used Avenir as the font in the following PowerPoint design ideas.

Atlas (Theme)

Covering a more creative subject for a younger or more energetic audience? On behalf of PowerPoint, might we suggest the cover slide design above? Its vibrant red background and fun lines will appeal to your audience.

Madison (Theme)

This design doesn’t have the intensity of the first slide on this list, but it maintains a sense of informality that all PowerPoint presentations benefit from.

Parcel (Theme)

The color-blocked look in the design above sets a fun but relaxing tone for the audience.

Crop (Theme)

This PowerPoint design idea uses graphic elements such as lines and bars to give structure, contrast, and modern flair to your slides.

Badge (Theme)

We’re particularly fond of this PowerPoint design style. By using lines and contrasting elements — like a burst, as shown above — you add depth to your slides. This can help your content capture and hold your audience’s attention more easily.

If you’re not fond of the built-in PowerPoint design themes, you can always download a PowerPoint template and input your content onto pre-made slide styles.

Let’s take a look at the best ones you can download below.

Creative PowerPoint (Template)

This template uses bright colors and plenty of white space to convey a modern but fun design. Organic shapes and geometric lines and patterns provide an extra visual element to the slides, achieving depth and personality. Get it here.

Download These Templates for Free

Professional Style PowerPoint (Template)

This PowerPoint style uses more neutral colors and fonts to create a calm and elegant vibe. It also pushes the presentation creator to use quality images to convey their points. Get it here.

Download These Templates for Free

Data PowerPoint (Template)

This template uses a rounded font to draw sharp contrast with the lines and graphs that will populate the presentation. It’s a great choice for providing engaging visuals despite the number-crunching content. Get it here.

Download These Templates for Free

Simple PowerPoint (Template)

By pairing vibrant colors with pale ones, this PowerPoint gives an understated feel, which can draw attention to the content while still being visually engaging. Get it here.

Download These Templates for Free

Instead of a presentation, you can also create an infographic in PowerPoint to effectively capture your audience’s attention.

Good Examples of PowerPoint Presentation Design

To see some examples of the best PowerPoint presentation designs, check out the following decks.

1. “The Search for Meaning in B2B Marketing,” Velocity Partners

We’ve said it once, and we’ll say it again: We love this presentation from Velocity Partner’s Co-Founder Doug Kessler. Not only is the content remarkable, but the design is also quite clever. While each slide employs the same background visual, the copy in the notebook unfolds brilliantly through a series of colorful doodles and bold text. This gives the presentation a personal feel, which aligns with the self-reflective nature of the concept.

2. “You Don’t Suck at PowerPoint,” Jesse Desjardins

If the contrast used throughout this PowerPoint presentation design were a human, we’d marry it. This skillful presentation from Jesse Desjardins employs the perfect color palette: balancing black and white photos with pops of fluorescent pink, yellow, and blue. The cheeky vintage photos work to reinforce the copy on each slide, making the presentation both interesting and visually appealing.

3. “Accelerating Innovation in Energy,” Accenture

Balancing visual backgrounds with text isn’t easy. More often than not, the text is formatted in a way that winds up getting lost in the image. This presentation from Accenture combated this issue by combining shapes and graphics to create contrast between the text and the background. Well done.

4. “Visual Design with Data,” Seth Familian

When you’re tasked with presenting a lot of information in a little bit of time, things can get sort of messy. To simplify this type of presentation, it’s a good idea to use a visual agenda like the one shown above. This index clearly signifies the start and finish of each section to make it easier for the viewer to follow along and keep track of the information. The presenter takes it further by including an additional agenda for each exercise, so that the audience knows what they’re supposed to do.

5. “How to Craft Your Company’s Storytelling Voice,” MarketingProfs

Do you love these hand drawn illustrations … or do you love these hand drawn illustrations? I mean, c’mon, this is amazing. Certainly it would have been easier to generate these designs online, but this approach highlights MarketingProf’s commitment to investing the time and thought it takes to create an out-of-the-box piece of content. And as a result, this presentation stands out in the best way possible.

6. “Blitzscaling: Book Trailer,” Reid Hoffman

If you’re going to go the minimalistic route, take note of this PowerPoint presentation example from Reid Hoffman. This clean design adheres to a simple, consistent color palette with clean graphics peppered throughout to make the slides more visually interesting. Overall there are no frills or unnecessary additions, which allows the informative content to take priority.

7. “Healthcare Napkins,” Dan Roam

This presentation dates back to 2009, but the design is still as good as ever. The colorful, quirky doodles help tell the story while also serving as an interesting way to illustrate data (see slides 20 and 21). For visual learners, this approach is much more inviting than a series of slides riddled with text-heavy bullet points.

8. “One Can Be Diverse: An Essay on Diversity,” With Company

This presentation employs both powerful images and modern typography to illustrate the point. While many of the slides contain long quotes, they are broken up in a way that makes them easily digestible. Not to mention all of the text is crisp, clean, and concise.

9. “10 Things your Audience Hates About your Presentation,” Stinson

his simplistic presentation example employs several different colors and font weights, but instead of coming off as disconnected, the varied colors work with one another to create contrast and call out specific concepts. Also, the big, bold numbers help set the reader’s expectations, as they clearly signify how far along the viewer is in the list of tips.

10. “Pixar’s 22 Rules to Phenomenal Storytelling,” Gavin McMahon

This presentation by Gavin McMahon features color in all the right places. While each of the background images boasts a bright, spotlight-like design, all of the characters are intentionally blacked out. This helps keep the focus on the tips, while still incorporating a visual element. Not to mention, it’s still easy for the viewer to identify each character without the details. (I found you on slide eight, Nemo.)

11. “Facebook Engagement and Activity Report,” We Are Social

Here’s another great example of data visualization in the wild. Rather than displaying numbers and statistics straight up, this presentation calls upon interesting, colorful graphs, and charts to present the information in a way that just makes sense.

12. “The GaryVee Content Model,” Gary Vaynerchuk

This wouldn’t be a true Gary Vaynerchuk presentation if it wasn’t a little loud, am I right? Aside from the fact that we love the eye-catching, bright yellow background, Vaynerchuk does a great job of incorporating screenshots on each slide to create a visual tutorial that coincides with the tips. He also does a great job including a visual table of contents that shows your progress as you go through the presentation (and aligns with the steps of content marketing, too).

13. “20 Tweetable Quotes to Inspire Marketing & Design Creative Genius,” IMPACT Branding & Design

We’ve all seen our fair share of quote-chronicling presentations … but that isn’t to say they were all done well. Often times the background images are poor quality, the text is too small, or there isn’t enough contrast. Well, this PowerPoint presentation from IMPACT Branding & Design suffers from none of said challenges. The colorful filters over each background image create just enough contrast for the quotes to stand out.

14. “The Great State of Design,” Stacy Kvernmo

This presentation offers up a lot of information in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming. The contrasting colors create visual interest and “pop,” and the comic images (slides 6 through 12) are used to make the information seem less buttoned-up. Once the presentation gets to the CSS section, it takes users slowly through the information so that they’re not overwhelmed.

15. “Clickbait: A Guide To Writing Un-Ignorable Headlines,” Ethos3

Not going to lie, it was the title that convinced me to click through to this presentation … but the awesome design kept me there once I arrived. This simple design adheres to a consistent color pattern and leverages bullet points and varied fonts to break up the text nicely.

16. “Digital Transformation in 50 Soundbites,” Julie Dodd

This design highlights a great alternative to the “text-over-image” display we’ve grown used to seeing. By leveraging a split screen approach to each slide, Julie Dodd was able to serve up a clean, legible quote without sacrificing the power of a strong visual.

17. “Fix Your Really Bad PowerPoint,” Slide Comet

When you’re creating a PowerPoint about how everyone’s PowerPoints stink, yours had better be terrific. The one above, based on the ebook by Seth Godin, keeps it simple without boring its audience. Its clever combinations of fonts, together with consistent color across each slide, ensure you’re neither overwhelmed nor unengaged.

18. “How Google Works,” Eric Schmidt

Simple, clever doodles tell the story of Google in a fun and creative way. This presentation reads almost like a storybook, making it easy to move from one slide to the next. This uncluttered approach provides viewers with an easy-to-understand explanation of a complicated topic.

19. “What Really Differentiates the Best Content Marketers From The Rest,” Ross Simmonds

Let’s be honest: These graphics are hard not to love. Rather than employing the same old stock photos we’ve seen time and time again, this unique design serves as a refreshing way to present information that’s both valuable and fun. We especially appreciate the author’s cartoonified self-portrait that closes out the presentation. Well played, Ross Simmonds.

20. “Be A Great Product Leader,” Adam Nash

There are many great reasons for businesses to blog, but one stands out — increasing your keyword rankings and growing your organic search traffic.

The number of terms that a website can rank for is related to the size of the site. That is, more indexed pages mean more opportunities for ranking. For most small and medium-sized businesses, there is a limit to the number of pages that can fit onto the site before it becomes bloated and hard to navigate. Once you’ve reached your limit for services, products, case studies, etc., it’s time to get serious about creating blog content.

More often than not, the difference between a 50-page website and a 500+ page site is a blog. Because of this, blogging is an essential practice for SEO and traffic building.

The biggest objection I typically hear when I bring up the idea of blogging is, “what am I supposed to write about?” The short answer: write about your keywords. Since you’ll be using your blog to write about your industry and niche, it will be a natural place to create content around the long-tail keywords you want to rank for.

In this post, we’ll walk through the steps of how to use a blog to grow your organic traffic.

1. Know your target audience.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “you catch bees with honey.” That’s because bees like honey. Now, imagine trying to sell oranges to a customer on the hunt for apples. Could you probably sell them a few oranges? Yes. Would it be more difficult? Definitely. Understanding the needs of your customer puts you in a great place to make a sale or establish a relationship. If a customer is looking for apples, give them apples. Presenting them apple-based products like juices and pies wouldn’t be a stretch either.

Knowing your audience is key to creating content that they want. The first step is to establish your buyer persona. A buyer persona represents your ideal customer and will shape and guide your strategy as you dive deeper into the process. You can create a buyer persona from a combination of market research and examining data from existing customers. Essentially, you’re identifying your target audience and understanding their wants and needs to better attract them — like bees with honey.

Keep in mind that your target audience can change and will likely evolve over time. Make sure you periodically evaluate your target audience to better cater your content to them.

2. Identify keywords.

Let’s face it. Unless you’re Blogger, Wikipedia, or WordPress, you’re not going to take the top search engine result for the term “blog” anytime soon. And that’s okay. You can still get crafty and take a sizable chunk of traffic by thinking about how people search.

Most experienced Google users understand that using general terms isn’t going to get them where they want to go. Instead, people typically search for keyword phrases, for example, “how to use a blog.” If you were to use a keyword research tool to compare “blog” and “how to use a blog,” you’d find that the difficulty in ranking for the former is more than the latter.

To put it simply, this means that there is a better chance to rank for the keyword phrase “how to use a blog.” Note that your selected keyword might not have a high search volume, but if you can rank for a dozen or more long-tail keyword phrases related to the term “blog,” you’ll end up with a significant amount of traffic.

Long-tail keyword phrases help boost search engine rankings, but how do you identify which ones to use? Keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, and Arel=”noopener” target=”_blank” hrefs Keywords Explorer are well-known tools among bloggers and marketers. These programs take a seed keyword, typically one or two words, and produce a list of relevant long-tail keywords. For example, a Google Keyword Planner search for “blog” provides keyword results that include “starting a blog,” “best blogging platform,” and “blog post ideas.”

When selecting which keywords to use, consider the following: search volume, keyword difficulty, and intent.

Search Volume

For a clear indication of how many people enter your keyword into a search engine, evaluate search volume. Often referred to as Monthly Search Volume (MSV), this metric can help you anticipate how much traffic is available; however, this information is not enough to predict the potential success for your keyword.

Keyword Difficulty

Keyword research tools such as HubSpot’s Keyword Grader tell you keyword difficulty — how hard it is to rank on the first page for a particular keyword search. The higher the assigned difficulty, the harder it is to rank in the search results. Evaluate keyword difficulty with search volume.

As of September 2021, Google’s Keyword Planner shows MSV results for “blog” and “how to use a blog” at 100K-1M searches for the former and 100-1K for the latter. Ahref’s Keyword Difficulty Checker assigns “blog” a keyword difficulty of 98 and “how to use a blog” a difficulty of 84. Both keywords are hard to rank for, but your best bet, as previously mentioned, would be “how to use a blog.” While the search volume for “blog” is significantly higher, the difficulty is equally high. Chances are you’d have a better opportunity of ranking with the long-tail keyword. Although the search volume is lower, the difficulty makes it easier to rank than “blog.”

Intent

Why are people searching for specific keywords? Understanding the reason behind a search helps you decide which keywords to use. With a search as vague as “blog,” it’s impossible to know the true intent behind it. One could assume that the person is looking for a definition or a blogging platform — at least that’s what Google assumes. The difference from “blog” to “how to use a blog” makes the intent behind the search more clear, and gives you a better chance at solving for that intent. The person searching is looking for a solution to a problem they’ve identified and will be more receptive to the information, resources, and tools made available to them.

3. Optimize your post around your keyword.

Once you have your target keyword, you need to optimize your post around it. Your keyword should appear in the following:

• SEO Title Tag
• URL
• Meta Description
• Article Title
• Subheadings
• Image Titles & Alt Text
• Body Content

SEO Title Tag

If and when your content appears on a search engine results page (SERPs), the SEO Title Tag is often the first thing noticed. The title tag appears as the name of the webpage and is clickable to the link destination. There is no limit to its length; however, Google only shows up to 70 characters in its SERPs. If your SEO title tag is longer than 70 characters, rearrange the wording to include the keyword in the beginning.

URL

The URL is not the most critical location for keywords, but it is one of the first places your keyword appears. It is another indicator to Google and your blog visitors of your content subject. Not only does the URL appear at the top of a webpage in the address bar, but it appears beneath the SEO Title Tag on SERPs.

Meta Description

Your selected keyword should appear in the meta description. Also featured on SERPs, the meta description is the text found beneath the URL. It combines using the keyword and enticing your readers with a description worthy of a click.

Article Title

The title of the page after readers click through to your content is the article title. Aim to use your keyword here as naturally as possible. If you’re still coming up with an awkward variation, rephrase your title while keeping as much of the keyword intact.

Subheadings

Before a reader commits to all of the content on a webpage, they’re going to skim through. Using subheadings makes it easier to digest information in a short amount of time. Include keywords in subheadings to help visitors evaluate how relevant your content is to them.

Image Titles & Alt Text

Don’t downplay the importance of optimizing images with keywords. Images are one way that people find your content. When saving images for your blog posts, use your keywords in the title. The second image-related place to use your keyword is in alt text. Alt text describes your image and is used to help make your content accessible for people with disabilities. Yes, your alt text should use your keyword, but it should be descriptive enough in case your image can’t be viewed.

Body Content

Keyword density is the number of times your keyword appears in the content and is often represented by a percentage. There is no target number for this. Instead, create your content with both your reader and keyword in mind. Afterward, revisit your content and see if you can naturally add your keyword without keyword stuffing. For a place to start, aim to include your keyword every 100-200 words.

4. Create new, quality content.

Ranking in search engines is all about competition. You might ask, “how do I rank higher,” but your real question is “how do I rank higher than others?” Appealing to your target audience and optimizing your post based on your keywords need to be done in conjunction with creating quality content to beat out your competition.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of ideas, are recycled on the internet today. The problem isn’t necessarily the idea but the execution. Writing content on “how to use a blog” isn’t a problem, but shaping it to look like every competing blog post is. Search engines prioritize fresh, quality content. Generate a few blog ideas and write something new. If the subject is not new, bring new ideas and perspectives to boost its quality.

5. Boost your content quality and credibility with links.

The proper use of links can boost your content in SERPs and your credibility as a resource. When creating content, pay attention to interlinks and backlinks.

Interlinks

When you create content, think of it as drawing a map. You direct your readers to where they should go next. Direct them with interlinks. Interlinking is when you link to other relevant articles on your site. The most significant benefit of this is keeping visitors on your website longer. It also boosts your content quality by providing readers with extra resources to round out their knowledge.

When setting up interlinks, pay attention to your anchor link text. It appears as clickable text highlighted as a link. Using identical text for a particular inbound link on your site could negatively affect your SEO. Vary your use of words and phrases when interlinking to the same webpage.

Backlinks

Backlinks boost credibility. A backlink is a link from one website to another, and the more backlinks you have, the more credible your website seems — to others and search engines. If your content links to another website, that company has a backlink from you. If another website links to your content, you have a backlink from them.

How do you prime your website for backlinks? Create linkable content. There will always be a need to link to quality content, and this can be a blog post, infographic, video, survey, or more.

6. Publish regularly.

Finally, publish your post. Depending on how frequently Google and other search engines scan your site, it could take a few days or longer for your pages to be indexed and appear in a Google search. A simple tip to get your pages into search engines faster is to publish more often. When Google notices that a site is getting updated daily, it will scan the site more regularly.

Ready to grow?

Blogs don’t experience organic growth overnight. One blog post isn’t going to make you a leader in your industry, but consistency will. The repeated application of the best practices listed above will strengthen your relationship with your target audience, boost your credibility as an online resource, and improve your site’s SEO — factors that will lead to increasing your blog’s organic traffic.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2010 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Gaining inbound links from other websites is one of the best ways to improve your website’s rankings on search engines. However, link building can require a significant investment of time and resources and it may be tempting to take shortcuts.

However, following bad link building practices could land you in Google “jail” and cost you traffic and sales. Most times, you might even have to bear the extra cost of hiring professionals to help you recover your website.

In this post, we’ll cover what bad link building practices are and what to do instead.

1. Buying Links

Several sites and services help you buy text links on other sites that pass SEO credit. However, there is also a black market in link buying that is much less formal, more secretive, and less organized. We wouldn’t recommend either one.

This is probably the most tempting bad link building strategy because you get to control what sites you are getting links from and analyze these sites to ensure you’re not placing links in bad neighborhoods. You can also place links within relevant content and use anchor text for the keywords you are trying to rank for.

But — and it’s a big but —Google explicitly states that exchanging money for links to manipulate PageRank may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

So maybe you’ll get away with it, maybe you won’t. Either way, we don’t advocate buying links.

What to do Instead

Buying links is not only a black hat SEO practice — it’s an expensive one. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on links that could bring you trouble, you could invest the money by hiring a writer to help you create quality content or getting more traffic to existing content through paid ads.

2. Targeting Domain Authority Over Website Relevance

Although Domain Authority (DA) gives a good idea about how likely a website will appear on the search engine result page (SERP), it shouldn’t be your number-one factor to consider when looking for backlinks.

If you focus on DA, you’d only be getting backlinks from a limited number of websites, and this could cause you to have an unnatural link profile.

What to do Instead

Build links with as many relevant websites as possible, irrespective of their domain authority.

You can think of these links as the connections or relationships we build in real life. Some of these connections grow stronger with time. We might outgrow some. We might need some for only a particular chapter of our lives, and so on. The same can be said of inbound links.

Also, a backlink is relevant when it’s from a site that covers subjects similar to yours, not because of its domain authority.

3. Not Personalizing Your Outreach Email

Gone are the days when you could hit up editorial teams with the “I was reading your piece on xxx and loved it so much. We just created an article that talks about xxx. It would be a valuable resource for your audience. Can you link to it?” request, and expect them to reply.

Not only are these templates old-fashioned,  but they also show a lack of effort on your part.

Website managers see these types of emails in their inboxes every day and are more than willing to send them all into the junk folder.

What to do Instead

Personalize your outreach emails so that each one of them is unique. It might take you more time to do this, but it’s usually more rewarding.

Using the recipient’s name in the email isn’t the only way to personalize your outreach email. For example, you could mention something you read in the news about the company you’re pitching, or show how you can be of unique value to their business.

Image Source

4. Not Creating Link-Worthy Content

The simple truth is that if there are no valuable blog posts or pieces of content on your website, it will be hard to get backlinks. This is often the case for websites that prioritize quantity over quality.

What to do Instead

Instead of creating a ton of articles that nobody wants to read, you should focus on creating fewer pieces that are carefully aligned with your business and supported by keyword research.

When creating new pieces of content, you should also think about how to make them different from articles that already rank for your target keywords. A great way is to conduct original research and studies to uncover new stats and findings that your audience would find helpful.

5. Borrowing Links

Most websites today no longer allow people to comment on their posts. Why? Because many people leave a link to their website in the body of their comment.

This practice is known as link borrowing. These link borrowers often resort to inserting their keywords where their name is supposed to go. And many people automate or just cut and paste such comments all over the web.

Image Source

If you allow comments on your website, it’s essential to have a spam filter that catches these comments.

Link borrowing might get you a short-term burst in rankings. But these are not high-quality links and won’t provide long term advantage.

What to do Instead

You could volunteer to become a case study and get a backlink once the study is published. Another option is to create an updated version of an existing guide or report.

6. Using the Wrong Tools

No one sets out on a mission to fell a tree with a pack of razors — well, unless they want to waste their time and effort. The same can be said of your link building efforts. It’s possible to do everything manually, but you’d be wasting a ton of resources.

What to do Instead

You need the right tools to make your link building efforts worthwhile. While some of these tools might be expensive, they’re usually worth it in the end. For starters, you’d need to invest in project management, SEO, and blogger outreach tools.

7. Having Only One Link Building Strategy

Although you might be experiencing a bit of success with a particular method of link building, it’s never the best choice to put all your eggs in one basket. The online world changes every time, and a single link building method can quickly become less effective.

What to do Instead

If you have the resources, it’s better to look for alternative link building strategies that can work for your business. For example, have you been having success with guest blogging? Then, you can complement that strategy by becoming a source for journalists looking for experts to feature in their articles.

8. Begging for Links

Beggars send emails to people they don’t know asking for links.

I recently received a really creative email. The person introduced himself as a big fan of my writing and suggested that “based on reading what I write,” I should check out this new social networking site. First, he wrote about how awesome the site was (without any explanation why). Then, he suggested that I write about it because everyone else who did it received floods of traffic. Finally, he got very offended when I responded that I wasn’t interested and that he should be more upfront about his link begging intentions.

Of course, begging comes in many forms. Not all are as creative as this guy. Most people just send emails to web admin asking them to link to them. While begging is one way to build links, it is ineffective and the fastest way to annoy a web admin.

What to do Instead

Instead of begging for links, create content your target audience would find valuable and share without being asked. And if you ever need to email web admins to ask for a link, ensure your email is personalized and your article is better than the one they already link to.

9. Link Bartering or Trading

I’ll link to you if you link to me. I’ll buy your services if you buy mine. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

How much easier do you think you can make it for Google to detect that you didn’t earn that link? Google’s power is that it detects patterns. This is a pretty easy pattern to catch: “Site B links to Site A. Site A links to Site B.”  

Of course, bartering or trading links gets more creative by saying, “I’ll link to you if you link to him, and I’ll link to this other guy if he links to you, etc.” There are even networks you can join to facilitate this process.

Participating in these link building rings is even riskier than regular bartering. It’s believed that Google labels websites into “neighborhoods,” and there are bad neighborhoods that you don’t want to live in. By interlinking with websites in a bad neighborhood, Google will think you, too, are bad.

What to do Instead

Build meaningful relationships with other web admins in your niche. First, get on their radar by linking out to helpful content and resources that they create. Then, as time passes, they’ll likely return the favor by linking to your website too.

10. Poor Internal Linking

You can’t expect people to link to your content when you don’t link to it yourself. Not only does poor internal linking make it hard to get backlinks, but it also makes it difficult for search engines to rate your web pages.

Poor internal linking also doesn’t let you get the most of your backlinks’ “link juice” across to other relevant web pages on your website.

What to do Instead

Create a proper internal linking strategy. Start by sketching your website to identify your major pages and topics. Next, look at the most common topics you write about and find how to connect them to your website’s major pages. Finally, think of any other page that could link to your ranking page.

11. Bribing

Many companies try to bribe web admins and bloggers for links. Basically, companies offer to send them stuff if they link to the company. Although harder for Google to detect, this isn’t a great practice. In fact, the FTC frowns upon this.  

What to do Instead

Do everything else but bribe web admins or bloggers. Instead, you could build a free tool, become a source to journalists, create new content, and so on.

12. Disregarding Broken Links

Broken links reduce a website’s value. The 404 message can also cause visitors who are excited to read an article to become easily frustrated. Unfortunately, many website owners don’t pay as much attention to broken links on their websites.

Paying attention to broken links, especially on your competitor’s website, can help your link building efforts.

What to do Instead

Reach out to websites with broken outbound links and ask them to replace them with a link from your website. Your content would add value to the webmaster’s website and help fix the broken link error.

Say Goodbye to Bad Link Building Practices

There’s no point in trying to build links if you’re not going to do it the right way. So, if you’ve been engaging in any of the bad link building practices mentioned above, it’s time to stop. Instead, test the alternative strategies and see what tactic works best for you.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2009 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Pageviews, unique pageviews, new visitors, and returning visitors — they all sound similar, but these metrics are not the same. If you don’t know the difference, you could be misinterpreting your website analytics and making some ill-informed decisions. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.

In this guide, we’ll be covering everything you need to know about web analytics, so you can truly understand which data points mean what, interpret your findings correctly, and make data-backed decisions for your website and business.

We’ll be covering the following points below — click on any of the jump links to skip to that section:

• what web analytics is and why it’s important
• web analytics examples
• web analytics best practices
• web analytics tools
• web analytics APIs

 

There are tons of data you can collect to understand how people interact with your website and identify opportunities for improvement. You can track overall traffic, bounce rate, traffic sources, new and returning visitors, time spent on site, and much more.

The amount of data can be overwhelming at first. That’s why it’s important to identify a few key metrics, particularly as you’re getting started. For example, you might start by focusing on the bounce rate for a few key pages on your site. If visitors are quickly bouncing from your homepage, then that indicates they’re not finding the information they’re looking for quickly or easily enough. From there, you can identify possible next steps, like redesigning your website navigation.

Let’s take a closer look at why web analytics is important below.

Importance Of Web Analytics

Web analytics is critical to the success of your business. It enables you to better understand your site visitors and use those insights to improve the experience on your site. For example, if you discover that the majority of users on your site are using a mobile device, then you can focus on making your website more mobile-friendly.

Web analytics can also shape your content and SEO strategy. Looking at your top viewed posts, you can begin to identify what types of content and topics perform best with your audience. If you notice how-to WordPress tutorials make up the majority of your top viewed posts, for example, then you might shift and narrow your focus from definition articles about anything web-related to how-to WordPress tutorials. Or maybe you look at your site’s traffic sources and notice that organic and email traffic are your top drivers and paid channels are your lowest. In that case, you might shift resources to invest more in your organic strategy than paid.

Now that we have an idea of what web analytics is and why it’s important, let’s look at some key metrics you might track to measure progress against — and eventually meet — overarching business objectives, like increasing website traffic, leads, and revenue.

 

Before you read on, it’s important to note that various analytics tools may have slightly different definitions of the following terms. It’s best to consult your particular tool’s documentation to understand exactly how each is calculated.

Pageviews

Pageviews are the total number of times a page was viewed on your site. A pageview (or view) is counted when a page on your site is loaded by a browser. So if a person were to view a page on your site and reload the page in their browser, that would count as two views. If a person viewed one page, viewed a second page on your website, and then returned to the original page, that would count as three views.

Pageviews can give you an idea of how popular a page on your site is, but it’s important to look at this number in context with other metrics — something a traffic analysis tool can help with. A page with a high number of views for a post isn’t necessarily popular since a small group of visitors could be responsible for a lot of those views. A high number may also indicate that a page was confusing and required visitors to return to it multiple times.

Unique Pageviews

Unique pageviews is the total number of times a page was viewed by users in a single session. In other words, a unique pageview aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during a session (which we’ll define below). So if a person viewed the same page twice (or more times) during an individual session, unique pageviews would only count that pageview once.

Since this metric discounts instances in which a user reloads or visits the same page in the same session, unique pageviews help you get a better understanding of how many visitors are viewing pages on your site and how popular individual pages are.

Sessions

A session is a group of interactions — including not only page views, but activities such as CTA clicks and events — that take place on your website within a given time frame.

The timeframe of a session varies by web analytics tool. For example, sessions in Google Analytics and HubSpot’s traffic analytics tools last 30 minutes by default. A session ends and a new session starts for a user when either A) there has been 30 minutes of inactivity and the user becomes active again, B) the clock strikes midnight, or C) a user arrives via one traffic source, leaves, and then comes back via a different source.

That means if a user lands on your site, leaves, and returns within 30 minutes, Google Analytics and HubSpot will count it as one session, not two. On the other hand, if a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more but then clicks on a CTA or takes another action, Google Analytics and HubSpot will count it as two sessions, not one, even if the user never left your site.

New Visitors

New visitors — also termed new users, unique visitors, or new visitor sessions, depending on the web analytics tools — is the number of unique visitors on your website.

As the name implies, a new visitor is an individual who visits your site for the first time. Healthy websites will show a steady flow of new visitors over time to make up for those who lose interest.

These individuals are identified by a unique identifier. For example, when using HubSpot, the HubSpot tracking code is installed on your site. Then, visitors on your site are tracked by the cookie placed in their browser by this tracking code.

Two important notes to keep in mind: First, a single visitor can have multiple sessions and pageviews on your site. Second, unique visitors is not an entirely accurate metric. That’s because most web analytics tools use cookies to track visitors, which doesn’t always distinguish new visitors from returning ones (which we’ll define below). For example, if a person visits your site via their mobile phone and then on their personal computer, they’ll be counted as new visitors on both occasions.

Returning Visitors

Returning visitors (or users) is the number of visitors on your website who have visited before. Not all web analytics tools include this metric, but some — including Google Analytics — do. In Google Analytics’s Audience reports, you can look at behaviors to see the ratio of new to returning users on your site.

Looking at both new and returning visitors metrics are great for getting a sense of how well you’re retaining your visitors, and how effective you are in attracting net new visitors at the top of the funnel.

Your ratio of new to returning visitors will depend on several factors including your industry, how long you’ve been around, and whether you offer incentives to return to your site. But, if you’re an established website that’s seeing returning (or new) visitors top 80% of your traffic, attempt to balance this out by attracting more new visitors or retaining old ones.

Again, keep in mind that this metric won’t be completely accurate if the web analytics tool uses cookies to track visitors.

Traffic Sources

Traffic sources show where your site visitors are coming from. Like visitor information, this metric is usually collected via the tracking code on your site.

The number of traffic sources you can track will vary depending on the web analytics tool. HubSpot’s traffic analytics tools track multiple categories, including:

• Organic Search
• Referrals
• Organic Social
• Email Marketing
• Paid Search
• Paid Social
• Direct traffic

Ideally, you want to increase all sources of traffic. But, your biggest focus should be organic search, which is traffic that comes from non-paid search results in search engines like Google. This source has the potential to drive huge amounts of traffic to your site. Plus, improving this channel often improves other channels, like referrals and social.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your website after viewing a single page. You can look at bounce rate as a site-wide metric or a page-level metric. At the page level, bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that started on the page and did not move to another page on your site.

Generally, a bounce rate of 40% or lower is considered good, 40% to 70% is average, and anything above 70% is considered high.

If your site’s overall bounce rate is high, it might help to identify individual pages with high bounce rates. A high average page bounce rate might indicate there’s a problem with the page’s loading time, or that external links are not opening in a new tab or window, among other reasons.

To learn what actions you can take to reduce bounce rate, check out our 6 Steps to Reduce Your Bounce Rate.

Web Analytics Best Practices

Many aspects of web analytics are specific to your business: what metrics you track, how you build out reports, what tools you use. But there are some best practices to help anyone collect, analyze, and report website data more effectively. Let’s look at a few.

1. Pick metrics that align with your business objectives.

Focusing on only one or two metrics won’t provide enough insight into how visitors are interacting with your site — but tracking every single metric might provide too much information to be actionable.

To make sure you’re focusing on the right metrics, start by plotting your business objectives. Think about what the top priorities are for your website. Do you want to lower your site bounce rate? Are you looking to attract more new visitors, or better retain existing ones?

Once you have one or more objectives in mind, come up with specific strategies you’ll implement to achieve these objectives, such as fixing broken links and images, changing your site’s copy, or better optimizing for your mobile audience, which probably makes up around half of your traffic.

You’re now ready to narrow down what metrics will help you track your progress for achieving your goals and ultimately your business objectives.

2. Use data to drive decision-making.

After collecting your data, determining whether or not you met your goals is only the first step. The next — and arguably more important — step is using that data to test, experiment, and make changes on your site.

For example, say you identified some high-value content, like your Services and Pricing page, through user testing and feedback in your web design process. However, these pages aren’t getting much traffic.

In this case, you might move the navigation links for these pages to a more visible part of your site, or implement SEO measures on these pages to rank higher and capture more organic search traffic.

3. Don’t limit your focus to traffic.

Understanding and reporting traffic data — including pageviews, top traffic sources, and most viewed pages — is important. But it’s just one piece of your website performance. High traffic doesn’t necessarily mean success.

For example, if you’re getting millions of pageviews but no conversions, then you’re probably not meeting all your business objectives. Or, if new visitors consistently make up a high proportion of your traffic, consider why that might be and how you can attract return visitors more effectively.

4. Always pair data with insights.

If you report that your website received 1 million unique pageviews and 400,000 new visitors this month, that doesn’t mean all that much. Reporting only the numbers provides an incomplete picture of your website performance. For all we know, these numbers could indicate:

• an increase from last month.
• a decrease from last month.
• little to no change in pageviews or visitors month-over-month.
• an increase last month, but a major year-over-year decrease.

That’s why you must pair your data with insights. If you instead report that your website got 1 million unique pageviews, which exceeded last month’s unique pageviews by 20% and also showed a significant increase year over year, then the data is much more meaningful and actionable to you and fellow stakeholders.

5. Look at your data in context.

While collecting and analyzing data, think about it in context. What variables or larger forces could be impacting the numbers? For example, algorithm updates, seasonality, and bots can all have a major impact on your traffic and other metrics.

Imagine that a few pages on your site saw major spikes in traffic. These posts weren’t updated recently, so you look where this traffic came from. If the traffic mostly came from one country where you usually don’t see much traffic, this was likely malicious bot traffic, which accounts for a quarter of all internet traffic.

Viewing your data in context can help you better understand, analyze, gain insight, and make informed decisions with your data.

6. Share and ask for feedback from stakeholders.

As an analyst, you want to provide information to stakeholders in a way that is understandable and actionable. You also want to ask for information and ideas from these stakeholders. They can provide valuable feedback on how they use the data, what else they want to see or understand about their users or website, and how they think they can improve the user experience or other issues the data uncovers.

Web Analytics Tools

Measuring organizational success requires more than one metric — and more than one tool. Let’s take a look at three web analytics tools you could use together.

HubSpot Marketing Analytics & Dashboard Software

With HubSpot’s free marketing analytics and dashboard software, you can measure the performance of all your marketing assets — from website and landing pages, to emails, blog posts, social media accounts, calls-to-action, and more — from one dashboard.

You’re able to track your customers’ complete lifecycle, measure traffic overall or on a page-by-page basis, and add multiple reports to your dashboard so you’re tracking your most critical metrics in one easy-to-access place. You can even break down reports by user characteristics for more fine-grained analysis.

HubSpot’s free tool is ideal for anyone looking for built-in analytics, reports, and dashboards so they can make smarter, data-driven decisions.

What we like: Analytics is fully integrated into everything you do in HubSpot, ensuring you always have the right data available when you need it. There’s no more digging through spreadsheets or datastreams — with HubSpot, everything is accessible and actionable, whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned expert.

Google Analytics

Used by over 28 million websites, Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool. With it, you can track pageviews, unique pageviews, bounce rate, traffic channels, user retention, average session duration, sessions by country, sessions by device, and more. You can also build reports about your audience, acquisition channels, engagement, and conversions.

Understanding the value, flexibility, and popularity of Google Analytics, some platforms offer unique integrations with this tool. Analytics Amplifier, for example, is a HubSpot app that allows users to match HubSpot customer behaviors — including “hot leads” and “deal amount” — with real-time Google Analytics data.

If you want to learn more about this tool, check out our Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics. However, the sheer amount of metrics, reports, and integrations that can be tracked or created using Google Analytics might be overwhelming. Users without SEO or technical expertise, like content creators, may find it difficult and prefer a Google Analytics alternative.

What we like: Google Analytics is unmatched in popularity. It gives website owners an all-encompassing view of their site activity, and is relatively easy to set up and link to any live site. Plus, Google Analytics offers many powerful capabilities for free.

Crazy Egg

Used by over 300,000 users, Crazy Egg is a unique web analytics tool that provides heatmaps, scroll maps, and other visual reports to show you exactly how your visitors are interacting with your site. Thanks to Crazy Egg’s tracking code, you’ll be able to watch what visitors are hovering over and clicking on in real-time via heatmaps.

Crazy Egg also offers comprehensive A/B testing so you can test various content variables like color, copy, and content placement, to see how it affects the user experience and conversions. This makes Crazy Egg an ideal alternative or supplement to Google Analytics for users interested in conversion optimization.

What we like: Crazy Egg is a user-friendly tool for conducting heatmap and scroll map testing, A/B testing, and screen recordings of user interactions. These are great means to better understand users in qualitative and quantitative ways, and gain insights to improve the user experience on your site.

 

For example, Google Analytics offers several APIs that you can use to automate complex reporting and configuration tasks. One such API is the Google Analytics Reporting API. With this API, you can build custom dashboards to display your Google Analytics data, automate complex reporting tasks to save time (like getting data in two date ranges with a single request), and integrate your GA data with other business applications.

Another popular example is Chartbeat’s Real-Time API. This API consists of data that is updated every three seconds so you can see how your visitors are interacting with your content in real-time. You can use this data to improve audience engagement, inform editorial decisions, and increase readership, which is why Chartbeat is used by bigwig news organizations including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

To understand what APIs are and how they work, check out The Ultimate Guide to Accessing & Using APIs.

Using Web Analytics to Improve Your Website

Whether you’re a small business, ecommerce site, or enterprise company, web analytics can help you and your company grow. By collecting, reporting, and analyzing data about your website, you can improve the user experience on your site and meet larger business objectives like increasing online sales.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Video adds value to your website, and the right videos can help drive increased traffic and conversion. As noted by Forbes, users retain 95% of the message when they watch videos compared to just 10 percent by text, making video a great starting point to streamline connection with prospective customers.

Your best bet for videos? YouTube. With more than two billion logged-in monthly users, YouTube videos now reach 74% of adults in the United States — so it’s no surprise that the platform is used by almost 90 percent of marketers to drive user interest. Ready to leverage video on your site and capture the growing YouTube marketplace? Here’s a step-by-step guide.

The Benefits of Adding Video to Your Website

Video rules the digital media marketplace, but popularity alone isn’t enough to drive widespread adoption. In practice, YouTube videos come with key benefits for your site, including:

Improved User Engagement

As noted above, visitors to your site retain more information when viewing videos than reading text. This makes it possible to drive improved user engagement by creating compelling content they’ll remember long after they leave your site — and will hopefully bring them back again. YouTube also incorporates features to increase engagement, like sharing options and playlists.

Reduced User Frustration

If users have to scroll through walls of text just to find the basics of your brand or understand your value proposition, chances are they won’t stay long. An embedded YouTube video provides a quick rundown of your site as soon as users arrive.

Simplified Storytelling

What’s your story? What sets you apart from the competition? This is what prospective customers want to know. While well-written text blurbs can give a general idea of what you’re about, they don’t have the same impact as video-driven stories that showcase your purpose and passion.

Increased Brand Connection

Organic marketing is now a critical part of business success. Buyers want to purchase products from brands and people they trust. Videos offer a way to connect with visitors face-to-face and help personalize and humanize your brand from the first moment visitors arrive.

Best Practices for Adding Videos to Your Website

While videos offer advantages in capturing and maintaining user interest, there are several best practices to keep in mind to ensure your videos deliver maximum impact.

Watch your file size.

When it comes to YouTube video viewing on your website, you’ve got two choices: link or embed. Linking to videos means that users must leave your page to view the content, while embedding allows users to watch the video on your site.

Although embedding is better for engagement, it’s worth considering your video’s file size — the larger your video file is, the more bandwidth it requires to display on user devices, which in turn can potentially slow down the user experience. Wherever possible, smaller and shorter is better.

View the whole video.

Whether you’re embedding a YouTube video you’ve made or one from another creator, make sure to watch the entire video before posting it on your site. If it contains information that’s not immediately relevant or actionable, consider linking to it rather than embedding.

Check the length.

Always check the length of your videos. Here’s why: If you embed anything longer than a few minutes on your home page, most users won’t stick around to watch the end. Either trim down the video and then embed it or link out to it with a small description for interested users.

Consider autoplay carefully.

It’s possible to have videos play automatically when visitors arrive on your site. This is a contentious issue — some users are vehemently opposed to autoplay and will immediately leave your site. Others don’t mind videos if they offer immediate and helpful information.

One option here is to create a small and silent autoplay video that provides basic brand information without demanding user attention. Worth noting? Autoplay consumes data without the visitor’s permission, which can be costly for mobile users. Choose carefully.

1. Find your video

First, head to YouTube and find the video you want to embed. In this case, we’re using the Introduction to HubSpot CRM video.

2. Click “Share”.

Next, click Share at the bottom right side of the screen, which will give you this pop-up menu:

Here, you can choose if you want the embedded video code or simply want to share the link on social media networks like Facebook or Twitter.

3. Select “Embed”.

Select the Embed option on the far left-hand side. You’ll be given a snippet of HTML code, which you’ll paste into your website page to embed the YouTube video.

4. Copy the HTML code.

Copy the displayed HTML and return to your website platform. To make things easier, YouTube offers a Copy button that will copy the code directly to your clipboard.

5. Paste the HTML code on your page.

Depending on your website hosting platform, the steps for pasting your HTML embed code will differ. If you’re using WordPress, for example, open the post or page where you want to embed the video and then select Text on the right-hand side.

Then, post your HTML code and select Update. When you navigate to the post or page again, you’ll see the embedded video.

If you’d rather not bother with HTML, you can also simply copy and paste the video’s URL into your visual WordPress editor. This process starts the same way as the HTML approach: Find your video on YouTube and click Share. Then, head to your WordPress page and paste your URL directly into the editor itself. WordPress will automatically convert the link to an embedded video.

Capturing Video Value

YouTube videos can add significant value to your website by making it easier for potential customers to find your content, retain key information, and better understand your brand.

The caveat? It’s not enough to simply post a video — to get the most value for your visual marketing efforts take the time to review and curate your content before posting to deliver maximum impact.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2011 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Content managers build a company’s content strategy, create targeted and relevant content, and distribute marketing communications to audiences online. They are organized, well-versed in fostering a brand voice, and often know their way around a blog post.

You might just be learning about the content management role and want to know the basics. Or, maybe you know this is the job for you, but want to make sure you’re prepared to be successful.

Below, you’ll find everything you need to know about content managers, from what they do to how to become one. Let’s take a look.

What are content managers, and what do they do?

Content managers develop and distribute timely, relevant content for audiences. To do that, they have a deep understanding of their company’s brand voice and use it to communicate with customers.

In addition to creativity, being a content manager usually involves the management of projects and a content team. They also might collaborate across other teams for projects.

This role is not entry-level — content managers are generally expected to lead their team and foster growth, so it’s a job that’s filled by someone with a couple of years of experience in marketing, communications, and project management.

That was just an overview of content managers and the job role. Next, we’re going to talk about some specific duties of a content manager.

The role of a content manager can depend on company structure and size. For instance, a startup’s content manager might be their only marketer, while an enterprise company might have content managers assigned to multiple teams.

You might find a content manager taking the ownership over an editorial calendar, developing content topic strategy, compiling data reports, managing social media accounts, or writing long-form editorial pieces.

Alicia Collins, Global Brand Marketing Manager at HubSpot, says, “Content managers wear many hats. Their job consists of so many moving parts — managing blogs, managing social, managing offers … in some cases, they can be a one-person marketing team.”

Even so, there are common responsibilities that define a content manager. Let’s take a close look.

Content Manager Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a content manager include:

• Audit the existing content on the company’s website for brand voice, relevance, and optimization
• Research competitors to find content gaps and keyword gaps that your company hasn’t yet covered
• Create a new content strategy that can help your company reach its traffic goals
• Promote a consistent brand identity through the company’s social media profiles
• Create a long-term and short-term content publishing calendar and social media calendar
• Write the new content or manage a team of freelancers and writers to create the new content
• Monitor the performance of the content through online tools such as Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console

What sorts of skills do you need to carry out these responsibilities? We’ll dive into more detail up next.

So, you know what a content manager does. What about some of the skills you’ll need to exceed as one?

Content managers are brand advocates and know that the way stories are delivered reflect their company’s brand and audience preferences. We’ve lightly touched on a few of the skills you need to be a content manager, including creativity, writing, data interpretation, and organization.

But it’s also imperative to have working knowledge of a few other things.

1. SEO Copywriting and Blogging

Content managers need to have a general understanding of SEO. That way, you can effectively reach audiences through organic search. In addition, you’ll also have to know how to be a storyteller using the voice of a brand, and how to connect with customers using that brand voice.

Take it from Senior Podcast Producer Matt Brown, who says, “Empathizing with your audience and telling a story worth listening to is always the greatest skill a content manager should have.”

In order to deliver those stories, you’ll need to be familiar with copywriting and editing. Writing skills would be applied to writing marketing communications and blog posts. You’d also use them when editing the work of others.

If you’re worried about the grammar and comprehension front when it comes to writing, check out Hemingway Editor or Grammarly. Hemingway Editor is a free website that checks your writing for technical errors and readability, while Grammarly is software that analyzes your work, spell-checks it, and offers suggestions on how to improve sentence structure.

2. Data Analysis

As a content manager, you’ll spend some time analyzing datasets. Data from past campaigns, SEO research, and audience behavior are all helpful numbers to look at in order to execute job functions, because they inform leadership decisions and collaborative projects.

If you don’t analyze the results from your content performance, you won’t know if your messages are accurately connecting with your customers.

3. Basic Coding

By no means do you need to be a code whiz to become a content manager, but knowing some HTML and CSS can help you jump in when you don’t have a web developer on hand. As a content manager, you’ll be tinkering around with your website’s content management system. That may sometimes necessitate inserting a line or two of HTML and CSS code.

4. Content Management System Proficiency

On that note, you should know your way around popular content management systems such as CMS Hub and WordPress. You’ll be directly editing the content on your company’s website, so you’ll want to know how to use a CMS.

CMS Hub offers a 14-day trial that can help you get acquainted with a top-of-the-line content management system in an intuitive drag-and-drop environment. Once you learn CMS Hub, you can try your hand at a more complicated system such as WordPress.

You’ll also want to know your way around a few other tools. Generally, knowledge of one or two marketing tools for every facet of content production and management will cover your bases. This includes programs to enhance content as well, such as automatic grammar check software or graphic design tools.

It’s also a good idea to know about how social media is used as a business tool, and when that applies to marketing campaigns for your company. To help with social media management, knowing how to use a tool like HubSpot would be beneficial.

5. Strategic Planning

As a content manager, you’ll spend ample time strategizing how to deliver targeted messages to your audience. That means you won’t throw out messaging willy-nilly, but very carefully and strategically craft the messaging’s wording and timing.

Justin Champion, Principal Product Manager at HubSpot, says, “An effective content manager needs to have a vision of what story they’re trying to tell. This will help them create a cross-platform content strategy that will give the best experience possible to their audience.”

6. Time Management and Organization

As a content manager, you’ll be handling various content calendars and juggling a wide variety of responsibilities. That makes organization and time management skills a top quality of the best content managers out there.

Luckily, you don’t have to be innately organized or a strict time-keeper. You can use project management apps to keep everything going along smoothly. Remember, as a content manager, you’ll likely be the leader of a team and the go-to person for status reports. As such, you’ll want to be as organized as possible. That way, you’ll have access to the information you need when you need it.

7. Leadership

A good content manager has some leadership skills under their belt — but this doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be an extrovert speaking at the front of the room. You can be a leader by keeping the content management projects progressing smoothly, sending reports before higher-ups ask for them, and launching new campaigns to keep your company top-of-mind for leads and customers.

In some cases, you may need to manage a team of content coordinators or writers. That’s where more traditional leadership skills come in, such as being a great people manager and adopting a leadership style that helps your team grow. Pay close attention to the wording in any job listing for a content manager. You could be the only person in your team or the leader in your team.

So, you know what it takes to be a content manager. But how do you get there? Time to find out.

How to Become a Content Manager

1. Take a content marketing certification course.

No matter your background or years of experience, if you’re shifting from another career into content management, you’ll want to re-learn the ropes of content marketing to ensure you’re up-to-date. Take a course to help you strengthen your content marketing skills. I recommend starting with our certification course. Upon completion, you’ll get a certificate that verifies your comprehension of content marketing (plus, you can add it to your LinkedIn profile).

2. Get familiar with SEO.

At countless firms, content marketing is synonymous with SEO, so you’ll want to have a firm grasp of the concept as you seek a content manager role. If you don’t know the rules of SEO, you might write content that’s not appropriately targeted or that doesn’t serve a purpose other than filling up your company’s blog.

You’ll need to know how to carry out keyword research and use the appropriate software to find “green space” for your company’s website. Green space refers to keywords with low competition and high potential for serving your audience’s needs.

3. Create a personal website.

There’s no better way to start content management than by building a personal website with content that you uploaded and wrote yourself. This website could be for your own personal brand, for a company idea you’ve had for a while, or simply for fun. Whatever it is that you create, you want to get familiar with creating a website from start to finish, so that when it’s time to manage your future employer’s site, you can do it easily.

You’ll learn a few things through this process, including how to upload content and media, how to manage that content once it’s been uploaded, and how to effectively structure your site. It’ll also teach you how to get around a content management system.

Use your learnings from this process to give thoughtful answers to your interviewers when you’re applying for content management roles.

4. Apply for an entry-level marketing role.

It’s time to search for a role. Unfortunately, content management is a mid-level role, meaning that most content managers have been in the marketing industry for a few years. If you’re just now getting started with marketing, you’ll want to start with an entry-level role first, then move up into content management.

Not all marketing roles are created equal. Look for the following words in the job posting to ensure you’re starting on the right foot:

• SEO
• Blogging
• Writing

If the job posting seems too general or if it seems to concern more traditional marketing methods, such as live event marketing or advertising, you’ll want to avoid it. Content managers work almost exclusively on the digital side of marketing.

5. Take on content management tasks within your role.

In your entry-level role, you’ll want to take on the duties of a content manager without yet being a content manager by name. For instance, if your team is missing a content calendar, could you volunteer to create one (without stepping on anyone’s toes)? What about volunteering to upload the week’s new content onto the CMS?

It’s important to continue expanding your technical and practical content management skill set as you gear up to apply to an actual content manager role.

6. Apply for a content manager role.

Once you have enough experience under your belt, it’s time to move into content management — either by becoming the manager of a content team or taking on more strategic roles within a marketing team.

Remember to use every piece of experience you’ve gathered thus far to show how well you can communicate with an audience and how well you’ve distributed content in the past. Lead with the results of your actions and measure them in numbers. Content reach, organic traffic, and other engagement metrics are just a few data points you can use to show how effective you can be as a content manager.

Start Sharpening Your Content Management Skills Today

If you’re looking to become a content manager, it’s critical to deepen your knowledge of content marketing and SEO. Refining your skill set ensures that you’re staying up-to-date as the industry changes. This is a must for content managers. If you don’t know how the industry is changing, you won’t be able to effectively connect to your audience — and connecting to your audience is what will make you an excellent content manager.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Emerging technologies always encourage scrutiny and critical analysis, and ad tech is no different.

This discipline has been around for a few years, but it’s only recently caught the attention of savvy ad tech agencies. In the era of big data, they’ve recognized having ad tech company relationships makes them more powerful and attractive to clients.

The age of social media has forced agencies to investigate innovative ways to interact with relevant users, rather than relying on typical broadcast or digital media buys. And the advantages for agencies investing in ad tech are plentiful. Global advertising is forecast to recover to 10.4% growth, reflecting a total spend of $634 billion

But there’s still one issue: many young ad agencies are still trying to figure out what exactly ad tech is — and how they can best use it to their advantage.

If you’ve ever scratched your head at the terms “programmatic” or “omnichannel,” you’ve likely already heard a little about what ad tech does (though you may not have even realized it). Programmatic advertising, for instance, buys target audiences instead of time slots: Think about buying ad space that reaches a particular demographic wherever it is instead of buying a prime time TV spot and hoping the right people are watching.

Omnichannel marketing reaches target consumers across all channels — mobile, video, desktop, and more — within the context of how they’ve interacted with a brand (those first seeing an ad will receive a different message from those who have engaged with that brand a number of times). Omnichannel and programmatic aren’t the only two tools within ad tech, but they are two of the most revolutionary.

That said, ad tech is designed to help advertisers make better use of their budgets. Ad tech methodologies deliver the right content at the right time to the right consumers, so there’s less wasteful spending.

Today, ad tech methods supported by influential data allow agencies to make wiser placements that effectively position advertisements when and where they are needed most. This helps reduce wasted efforts and gets ads to users at critical touchpoints, meaning it’s helpful for both brands and consumers.

Instead of the standard sort of placement buys, ad agencies can integrate their ads using high-level data and technology. It’s a logical next step toward seamless integration and high-impact, value-added placements. And it’s redefining how agency planning and strategy teams look at media.

The Benefits of Advertising Technology (AdTech)

Ad tech has plenty of moving parts, which means there are countless opportunities for agencies to set themselves apart. The diversity of ad tech data allows for more granular and relevant targeting and integration. It also necessitates leaning upon trusted ad tech solutions and platforms to get the most out of every ad campaign.

One major effect for agencies and their clients is a noticeable improvement in prospect interactions. Thanks to ad tech, brands can now connect all advertising channels. This means saying goodbye to clunky, unnatural advertising that irritates users and frustrates agencies and their clients. Instead, cross-platform uniformity ensures brands are reaching users consistently and logically.

Ad tech has also allowed retargeting to enjoy growing popularity — so much that it represents about 90% of all advertising costs. In other words, it’s not going away.

The problem is that it can be too intrusive, which leads to reduced effectiveness. By taking advantage of RTB options fueled by ad tech data, agencies can drill down and target only those audiences most likely to convert, without badgering those who aren’t.

Connecting the Dots Between Ad Tech Companies and Agencies

Knowing that they need each other to thrive, agencies and ad tech companies are on a joint mission to figure out how to forge long-lasting relationships. Deeper connections tend to occur naturally through regular communications, realistic expectations, and thoughtful customization.

Communication

Touching base regularly and working transparently between both parties is essential. There can no longer be a “set it and forget it” attitude in the online ad industry.

With new integrations between data, tech, and content, there needs to be consistent party involvement from start to finish. To this end, media publishers are having more discussions with their agency partners about content and other creative efforts than ever before. That makes it imperative for ad tech organizations and agencies to have an “open door” policy.

Expectations

Quick turnarounds are another key factor to keep an eye on in the relationship between agencies and ad tech pros. Everyone wants rapid turnarounds, but sometimes things can get lost when too much is happening at one time, and sometimes quality is compromised.

Do you want something mediocre that’s finished tomorrow or something impressive you have at the end of the week? You likely want the latter. Project management helps smooth out the flow between ad tech and agencies and ensures more successful campaigns.

Customization

Imagine you’re a consumer who just saw a mobile ad that piqued your interest. When you go to browse on your laptop, you see the same ad. Then you see the same next time you’re on YouTube, then again before your next Hulu binge session. Seeing the exact same content becomes annoying, and your interest inevitably lowers.

That said, there can’t be a repurposing of content and strategy across all channels — that’s a dinosaur-era approach destined to backfire. Agencies and brands are realizing that they need to customize creative assets for each channel and integration. It’s no longer acceptable to have a mentality of “matched luggage” when it comes to media. Agencies can work hand-in-hand with an ad tech partner to achieve exceptional outcomes through data interpretation.

Advertising Technology Trends

1. AI AdTech

Programmatic advertising has continued to grow and one of the evolutions of the process is using automated, artificial intelligence. AI can automate the ad purchasing process so advertisers can target more specific demographics.

As advertising technology becomes more complex, the demand for it to be automated will continue to grow. Not only does it make media buying easier, but AI can also make real-time adjustments across all channels.

2. Self-Service AdTech

One of the latest trends in ad tech is the adoption of new technologies that offer self-serve options. For example, with AdVendio users can significantly reduce operational costs and time needed to manage clients by providing a branded platform for end-to-end ad campaign management. This means low-budget advertisers can scale their business efforts.

This gives advertisers more control and makes it simpler for advertisers to set up and manage advertising campaigns.

3. Header Bidding

Header bidding is an automated auction technology, which allows publishers to sell their inventory to advertisers through many Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) while receiving bids from multiple advertisers simultaneously.

With header bidding, publishers can receive bids from multiple advertisers at the same time. We anticipate this becoming a bigger trend because it ensures that advertisers receive a reasonable demand base price for their ad inventory.

AdTech Solutions

Mobile AdTech

When it comes to finding ad tech solutions, you might consider breaking down what type of advertising you’re doing. For example, if you’re only going to be advertising on mobile devices, you can use mobile ad tech solutions.

One mobile ad tech solution is Basis. With this software, you can plan, buy, analyze, and streamline your mobile ad campaigns. This software has robust business intelligence, workflow automation, and is powered by artificial intelligence.

Another example of mobile ad tech is Celtra. With Celtra, marketing teams can design, approve, and deliver digital assets for their mobile advertising campaigns.

Online Advertising Technology

Online advertising technology is a solution that will help you advertise online, regardless of device type. A great example of this is AdRoll. With this ad tech solution, you can find more customers, build profitable relationships, protect your customer data, and improve your advertising results.

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Another example of online advertising technology is the Google Marketing Platform. You can manage all your campaigns, from search engine display advertising, to retargeting, to display and video campaigns.

Video Advertising Technology

When you’re creating your ad campaigns, it’s important to be creative and think beyond display search advertising. You can use video ad tech solutions such as Tik Tok Ads. With this solution, you can tap into unique engagement solutions and immersive formats to creatively and authentically connect with audiences around the world.

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Another example is StackAdapt. StackAdapt is a self-serve advertising platform that specializes in multi-channel solutions including native, display, video, connected TV, and audio ads.

Native Advertising Technology

Native advertising is when paid ads match the look, feel, and function of the media format in which they appear. One ad tech solution for native advertising is Taboola. With Taboola, you can reach new audiences and place your ads in a media format that’s similar to that of your ad.

Another example is Outbrain. This advertising platform helps global to emerging brands connect with consumers on the open web through engaging ad formats that inspire action.

Reaching Higher With Ad Tech

Ad tech has grown rapidly, and it’s showing zero signs of slowing down.

As it continues its spread, agencies will be able to take advantage of ad tech’s opportunities to develop more integrations, more data sharing, extended reach across all channels, and cleaner integrations against content.

When ad tech and agencies partner up, user experiences will be increasingly polished and positive, and agencies will get the reward for their commitment to embracing the benefits of a lasting relationship with ad tech providers.

One of the most frequent questions we get from aspiring and current inbound marketers is, “How do you manage all of that content?”

The answer: we rely on an editorial calendar in Google Calendar to stay keep our content organized.

There are a lot of great calendar tools out there you can choose from. In fact, for those of you who are HubSpot customers, there’s a marketing calendar built right into HubSpot’s software. But after trying a ton of other solutions, our team found that we really operated the best with just a simple Google Calendar. In fact, this has actually been the longest-running editorial calendar solution our team has ever seen.

Here’s how we set it up.

Follow Along With Free Editorial Calendar Templates

Download the Template for Free

1. Download HubSpot’s free editorial calendar templates.

First thing’s first: Download the calendar templates, above (they’re free.) By doing this, you’ll have three editorial calendar templates on your computer to use at your leisure: one for Google Calendar, one for Excel, and one for Google Sheets. In this blog post, we’ll be going over how to import the Excel template into Google Calendar.

2. Customize your template and prepare for import into Google Calendar.

By default, the publish dates on the templates you download will be stamped for the year 2016. Feel free to change them to the present year in the spreadsheet itself — you can also drag them to the dates of your choosing after you upload the file into Google Calendar.

Google Calendar makes it easy to load a calendar you might have pre-created in another program into Google. This includes Microsoft Excel. Here’s how to import the Excel calendar template you downloaded in the previous step into Google Calendar:

3. Open Google Calendar.

Once you’ve downloaded (or, for that matter, created) a calendar that opens in Microsoft Excel, it’s time to open Google Calendar. Just make sure you’re already logged into the Gmail account you want this calendar to give access to.

4. Use the lefthand dropdown menu to create a new calendar.

Now it’s time to set up your Google Calendar to accommodate the information in your Excel spreadsheet. First, go into your Google Calendar and click the plus sign to the right of “Other Calendars,” as shown in the screenshot below. In the dropdown menu that appears, select “Create new calendar.”

5. Fill out the details of your new calendar.

Fill out the fields that appear on the next screen. This includes a brief description of your calendar, as shown below, to give people proper context when you invite them into this calendar. When you’re done filling in the details, click “Create calendar.”

6. Import your XLS or CSV file from the same dropdown menu.

Using the same dropdown menu you used to create your editorial calendar, you’ll now import the Excel file itself into Google Calendar. Click that plus sign and select “Import.”

Click the upload box that reads “Select file from your computer,” and locate the file entitled “Blog Editorial Calendar – Excel” that was included in the ZIP file you downloaded in Step 1, above.

7. Select which calendar to add this file to.

In the second box below your imported file, click the “Add to calendar” dropdown. Be sure to choose the name of the calendar you just created from the dropdown menu, as shown below. Then, click “Import.”

8. Click Import.

Once you’ve uploaded your Excel file and selected the calendar you want to add this file to, click “Import.” You should see an Import calendar dialog box telling you that seven events were successfully imported. Click “Close.”

Now, if you didn’t change the dates of the first seven assignments in the original Excel document, you can now. Navigate to January 3, 2016, which is the start of your calendar. Be sure all of your other calendars are temporarily hidden by clicking the colored box to the left of the calendar name. On the week of January 3, 2016, you should just see one “Blog TBD” calendar event on each day from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.

Use the edit window of each assignment to change the publish date. For example, if you’re satisfied with the 10 a.m. publish time, you can simply change the date from January X, 2016 to January X, 2021. Each assignment will then appear as event blocks in your 2021 monthly calendar view.

9. Determine your publishing schedule.

Now that you have your calendar created, it’s time to fill it in with assignments for the year. This is when you have to make some decisions about your blog’s publishing schedule.

While the Excel file you imported accounts for one blog post per day, this doesn’t mean you need to publish seven days a week. Maybe you want to publish every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Or perhaps you plan on publishing on just Thursdays. Remember, the key to successful blogging is quality over quantity.

Don’t overcommit to a blogging schedule if the quality of your content will take a hit. How often your company should blog will vary depending on your business goals and resources. 

If you decide to decrease the number of days you want to publish, click on the calendar event of that day and select “Delete.”

Even if you wanted to publish multiple times a day, updating this calendar is as easy as adding an event. Select a slot on your calendar to add another “Blog TBD” event and copy the default description from another one of the events you imported.

Next, it’s time for some minor adjustments. Currently, the “Blog TBD” events are set for 10 a.m. Feel free to move these events to whichever time your blog publishes during the day. 

10. Set up recurring events.

Now that you have your publish dates and times set, you can make these recurring events on your calendar. If you have a regular publishing schedule, like every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00 a.m., then put that in as a recurring “slot” on your calendar. It’s okay if you don’t have a piece of completed content — or even a working title — to put there yet. It’s just a reminder that you want to publish something that day.

To add your recurring slot, click on your first “Blog TBD” event and click the pencil icon to edit your event. This will take you to the details of the post, where you can create a custom recurring schedule for each assignment, as shown in the screenshot below.

You can set the post up as a recurring post so it automatically appears every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00 a.m. (or whatever days and times you want).

Once you’ve selected the recurring days, hit “Done” and “Save,” and you’ll have an editorial calendar framework to work with.

For now, keep the title of the event as “Blog TBD,” but feel free to customize the description with any extra details you want to be sure you include for each post. Wait to invite any guest, as we’ll use this to assign posts to an author once you begin filling in your topics. With everything complete, click “Save.”

If you don’t have a recurring schedule like this, you might not be in need of an editorial calendar just yet — but it is a good way to set goals for yourself. If you know you want to publish a certain number of posts each week, even if you don’t hit every single slot, it’s a good reminder for yourself and your team that this is something you should all be striving for.

11. Fill your publishing slots.

Now that you know all of the slots you want to fill, you gotta actually … you know … fill ’em. (If you don’t have topic ideas yet, check out this free topic idea generator. It’ll give you some good ideas for content to put in the calendar.)

Let’s say one of the posts you want to write is “10 Surprising Facts About Tapirs,” and one of the posts you’ve already written and want to publish later is “Think You’re Cut Out to Own a Tapir? Read This First.” Cool! Just add ’em both to the calendar by clicking on “Post – TBD” on the correct date, choosing “Edit Event,” and then changing the “Post – TBD” text to the actual title of the post.

Now, let’s say you don’t actually want to write “10 Surprising Facts About Tapirs,” and you want your colleague to write it instead. To assign the post an author, you’ll invite them to the event as a guest. To do this, click on the event, hit “Edit Event,” then invite that colleague to the post by typing his or her name or email address into the “Add guests” box, selecting “Add” when their name pops up, and hitting “Save” on the event once you’re done.

Now, anyone can see who is responsible for writing the post that’s going up in that time slot.

You can take it a step further by adding details to the “Description” box of the event, as shown in the large box in the screenshot above. You might include a quick synopsis, the keywords you plan to target the post for, the target audience you’re trying to reach, and the offer or CTA you will direct the reader to at the end of the post. Don’t forget a due date for the draft.

Before Google Calendar will let you save the event, you’ll see a dialog box asking if you would like to change just this event or all of the events in the series. Select “Only this event.”

Repeat these steps to assign each blog topic today and in the future.

12. Share your editorial calendar with others.

Now that you have your calendar set up, you can start to invite people to see it. I’d recommend you start with your immediate team and regular contributors — as well as anyone who regularly asks you about publishing content on your company blog.

To share this editorial calendar with people, simply find your editorial calendar under “My Calendars,” as shown below. Click the three dots next to the calendar name and then select “Settings and sharing” when it appears in the dropdown menu. You’ll be taken to the same screen we saw when you first filled out the details of your editorial calendar in Step 2.

Then, you can add in the names of people with whom you’d like to share the calendar and set the right permission levels for each invitee.

It’s wise to keep those with the permission settings to manage changes and sharing to a minimum so there aren’t too many cooks in the kitchen — but I recommend you let everyone see all event details so it’s clear exactly what content is going up in each slot.

Under the “Share with specific people” heading, enter the email addresses of those on your content team and decide if they have viewing, editing, or admin privileges. Save your updated settings.

Why Using Google Calendar as an Editorial Calendar Works

I mentioned earlier that we tried a lot of different editorial calendar solutions, and this is the only one that’s stuck for more than a couple of months. I think one reason for that is because we use Gmail for our corporate email, which means everyone on our team is already in Gmail (and their calendar, specifically) all day. As a result, it isn’t hard for people to form a habit of checking the editorial calendar, because it’s not difficult for them to find it.

Google Calendar also makes things really easy to move around and schedule because … well … it’s already a calendar. It has all the functionality you need to schedule stuff out and let the people who need to know about it know. When we were using other solutions for this, we were trying to hack a calendaring function instead of just relying on one that already existed.

Along those lines, adding people to view your calendar is simple, which makes it easy for multiple teams to collaborate, see what’s being published, and figure out when they might be able to launch content and campaigns.

Finally, this sets a precedent for other teams to coordinate with you in a really simple way. You can have a calendar for upcoming campaigns, offers, social media pushes, product launches — you name it. And you can all share those calendars with one another for a single-screen view of everything that’s going on so you can coordinate more easily.

Are there other solutions of there for maintaining an editorial calendar? Of course. But if you’re looking for a minimum viable product, and a free one at that, this ain’t too shabby. It’s kept our content team sane, agile, and transparent for quite some time — and I think it could do the same for you.

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

A conference website is a powerful way to generate buzz about your event, answer commonly asked questions, and boost ticket sales and attendance.

Since 2020, the majority of events have been hosted virtually — and this trend will likely continue in 2022 and beyond. In fact, the global virtual events industry is expected to grow 23.7% each year from 2021 to 2028, according to data from Grand View Research. 

In an increasingly digital-first world, a conference website is more important than ever. As many people’s first introduction to your event, it can influence whether someone buys a ticket, or abandons the page entirely. 

Below we’re going to explore over 20 of the coolest conference websites we’ve found. You can use these examples as inspiration when designing your own site.

Conference Website Design Best Practices

Before we dive into the examples we’ve collected, let’s explore some best practices to keep in mind when designing your own conference website.

A good conference website design should follow these best practices:

• Put your location and date above-the-fold: People should know immediately where, and when, your event is taking place. If they can’t find it easily, they could abandon your website. Before you dive into speakers or any other information, ensure your visitors know whether they can attend in the first place.
• Use interactive elements: Videos or animated graphics can go a long way towards making your website look sleek and professional. Plus, video is a good opportunity to showcase highlight reels from past events.
• Center the page around your visitor: What’s in it for them? Great speakers to inspire their work? A chance to network with industry leaders? Ensure your copy outlines — clearly and concisely — how your website visitor will benefit from your event.
• Have a clear call-to-action: Your page is ultimately meant to convert web visitors into event attendees — so make this easy to do. Create a bold “Register Here” or “Buy Tickets” button so your visitors can easily convert when they’re ready.
• Include fun visuals: One thing that’s apparent in all the conference web designs we chose is interesting, unique, fun visuals. Too much white space will likely bore visitors and not pique their interest enough to purchase a ticket. Use visuals to grab your visitor’s attention, and communicate through images what your event is all about.
• Create time-pressure by including a countdown feature: In a few of the websites we’ll look at below, you’ll see a countdown that outlines how many days, hours, or minutes visitors have left to sign up for the event. This is a fantastic way to create a sense of urgency and encourage visitors to sign up immediately — or risk missing out.
• Align with your brand identity: A conference is a great way to generate brand awareness to a much larger audience. With that goal in mind, you want to make sure your conference website aligns with your brand identity. Using the same or similar typography, color schemes, and logos can ensure you achieve a consistent look and feel across your marketing collateral. 

Now that we’ve covered some conference website best practices, let’s see how these 20+ conferences put those ideas into practice.

1. FloQast’s Take Control

Less than three months before Floqast’s annual user conference was scheduled to take place, it had to shift from in-person to virtual. Using CMS Hub, FloQast and its web design partner agency Aptitude8 was able to deliver a seamless conference experience and website.

FloQast’s Take Control conference website revamps its well-recognized green and navy blue colors in a unique color scheme, using brighter and more analogous colors. It also has two clear CTA buttons above-the-fold encouraging visitors to watch the event on demand. 

What we like: The website design is unique, but consistent with FloQast’s branding. 

Pro tip: Expand your color palette with analogous colors to provide your conference website with an enhanced look and feel. 

Great example of: Consistent brand identity

2. Leading Design Festival 

Color is an important factor to consider when designing any web page, and this homepage for the Leading Design Festival does a good job using complementary colors to evoke a sense of warmness. Additionally, you have everything you need at the top of the page — including a button to purchase tickets, the date of the festival, and what you’ll get for attending (a month of design leadership activities). This page proves that oftentimes, less is more.

What we like: This website clearly provides visitors with all the information they’re looking for about this year’s Leading Design Festival. 

Pro tip: Use one accent color to highlight important elements on the page, like the date of the conference and CTAs.

Great example of: Minimalist design

3. Canvas Conference 

To underscore the value of the Canvas Conference — insider stories from product people —  an image of people chatting and networking at a previous event serves as Canvas’ backdrop image for the 2021 conference homepage. Additionally, the page doesn’t shy away from bright, vibrant colors — like purples, greens, and blues — to attract the visitors’ attention.

Plus, the price is clearly stated front-and-center, which helps visitors know whether they can afford the event before exploring anything further.

What we like: Everything on Canvas Conference’s homepage — from the background image to the copy — emphasizes that the event is community-centric. 

Pro tip: Try to center your website around your event’s value proposition so everything from the layout to the copy is emphasizing the event’s benefits for attendees. 

Great example of: Copy that underscores the event’s value

4. UX Fest 

This scroll-triggered, interactive page is so fun, I scrolled it a few times. As you move down the page, you’re introduced to new information about the conference, with fun, unique design elements, like the “Stay Home and Level Up” image to the right of the first Conference box. Best of all, the page is incredibly simple, with plenty of blue space on either side, to evoke a sense of calmness as visitors learn about the conference.

What we like: UX Fest’s interactive website invites users to scroll and click on different CTAs to learn more about the speakers, masterclasses, and festival and purchase tickets.

Pro tip: Use animations and other interactive elements to guide the user down the page to the “Get Tickets” CTA button. 

Great example of: Interactive design

5. GOTOpia Chicago

One of the best features of this conference page is the “Early Bird Ends In…” countdown that appears above-the-fold as soon as a visitor enters the site. The sense of urgency encourages visitors to sign up immediately, or risk losing out on a good deal. The page also does a good job outlining all the critical information you need to know in just a few words — including “Engaging Talks”, “Keynotes”, and “Trivia + Happy Hours”.

Plus, who doesn’t love the bright vibrancy of a red-and-white color scheme?

What we like: The countdown timer shows how much time is left before early bird registration ends. It’s a subtle but effective way to generate ticket sales.

Pro tip: Use a countdown timer to encourage visitors to buy tickets as soon as possible, but keep the design simple and unobtrusive so it doesn’t seem overly promotional.

Great example of: Creating a sense of urgency

6. Consumer Technology Association

The CES conference page combines bold colors with interesting visuals to grab a visitor’s attention immediately, with a simple “Beyond the everyday” tagline. The page offers all necessary information, including date, location, and a CTA, from the very top of the page, ensuring CES-fans can sign up immediately.

What we like: Consumer Technology Association’s CES 2022 homepage provides users with an immediate event registration path. 

Pro tip: Make registering for your event as easy and quick as possible. 

Great example of: Signup flow

7. UX+ Conference

The UX+ Conference website is an excellent example of using interactive elements to engage and delight visitors. There’s a background animation and several text and hover animations that immediately grab visitors’ attention.

Combining past attendees’ testimonials with an animated speaker lineup, this is a powerful page that makes the most of its real estate to demonstrate why the UX+ Conference is a must-attend event for anyone in the UX industry.

What we like: The UX+ Conference home page uses interactive and visual elements to engage and impress the UX professionals visiting the site.

Pro tip: Create a website that will attract and delight your unique audience. 

Great example of: UX design

8. Chargebee User Conference

This sleek-looking homepage uses bold colors, typography, and animation to evoke a futuristic vibe. What I loved most about this conference website was the moving, interactive elements they’ve used to keep your interest as you scroll the page, including spinning visuals and continuously-moving text. This also reinforces the theme of the conference — “change is essential” — and its calls-to-action to adapt, evolve, and innovate.

Visit and scroll through the site yourself — it’s more entertaining than you might think.

What we like: Centered around the conference theme — “Change is essential” — Chargebee’s website is thoroughly dynamic and interactive.

Pro tip: Your theme should inform the color scheme, animations, CTAs, and every other part of your website design. 

Great example of: Theme-centric design

9. Circles Conference 

When attendees are choosing which conferences are worth their time and resources, one of the first questions they’ll ask is, “Why this conference over all others?”

This question is answered immediately on the Circles Conference homepage, and it’s answered using powerful, engaging text. For instance, the first sentence you’ll read in response to “Why Unmasked?” is “Shed layers of fear and doubt, and reveal your inner creativity” — convinced yet?

What we like: Circles Conference does an excellent job of persuading visitors to attend their 2022 event by clearly explaining this year’s theme and speaker lineup and displaying highlight reels from previous years and recordings of past sessions. 

Pro tip: Clearly explain why visitors should attend your specific event. 

Great example of: Answering “why this event?”

10. Collision Conference 

Seeing Seth Rogan at the top of the page is undoubtedly reason enough to pause on the site for anyone who’s a fan. Plus, “The Olympics of Tech”, a quote from Politico, does a good job demonstrating the value of the conference.

But what impressed me the most was the slider right below the hero image and “What Others Say” testimonials section. The slider displayed how many attendees, countries, startups, journalists, partners, and investors were represented in the event. For anyone whose unsure whether to attend, this is a compelling argument to not miss out.

What we like: Collision Conference uses a carousel slider to display impressive stats about its audience. 

Pro tip: Instead of telling website visitors how large your conference is, show them in terms of real numbers to persuade them that they can’t miss it.

Great example of: Creating FOMO

11. An Event Apart 

Consider standing out from the crowd by using in-house designs on your homepage, like An Event Apart does. The page is cheerful and colorful, and provides all critical information in only a few words. Before a visitor has even scrolled, they’ve learned where (online), when, and for whom the conference benefits.

For those that need more convincing, they can visit the “Why Attend?” page to see attendee testimonials (displayed as text messages), key reasons to attend, and answers to common objections.

What we like: An Event Apart clearly explains where, when, and who the event is for, and why UX and front-end designers should attend. 

Pro tip: Consider how to say more with less. 

Great example of: Concision

12. Startup Grind Global Conference 

Using a mixture of photography and unique design shapes works well in this case, and the bright purple, pink, and green colors you see at the top of the page contrasts well against a simple off-white backdrop. The page is sleek and uses three bold CTA buttons above the fold to provide all information a visitor will need to attend the event, either as a startup, “scale up” business, or individual attendee.  

What we like: Startup Grind Global Conference provides clear and distinct paths for different groups, including startups, scale-up businesses, and individuals, as soon as they land on the homepage.

Pro tip: Clearly explain how different segments of your audience can participate in your event. 

Great example of: CTAs

13. The Martech Summit Singapore 

If you’re hosting a conference in a unique or exciting location, consider using an image of that location as a compelling backdrop. In this case, The Martech Summit used an image of Singapore to remind website visitors of the other benefit they’ll get if traveling from another location for the conference — a trip to a vibrant city. Plus, the attendee count helps persuade hesitant buyers who likely don’t want to feel like they’re missing out.

What we like: The Martech Summit clearly emphasizes that its location is another benefit of attending the event. 

Pro tip: Identify what will excite attendees about your event and showcase it in your design and copy. 

Great example of: Emphasizing location as an event benefit

14. React Day New York 

First off — who doesn’t love hot dogs?

This React Day page does a great job using humor to stand out. Not only is there a big illustration of a hot dog — which hooked me immediately — but there are multiple mentions of hot dogs, including below Buy Tickets (“Psst: There will be hot dogs”), and used in response to “Why” to the right of the page.

What we like: Humorous illustrations and copy about hot dogs makes this conference website about a slightly intimidating topic — React — more accessible. 

Pro tip: Use humor on your own conference website to surprise and delight new audiences. 

Great example of: Humor

15. INBOUND

Okay, okay — I might be biased, but hear me out.

This INBOUND page does an excellent job of exciting visitors about INBOUND 2022, even thought INBOUND 2021 just happened. It shows a video outlining this year’s speakers to excite and impress visitors with the possibilities of similar popular speakers in 2022. This is a good idea if your conference has pulled in some big names in conferences’ past, to give visitors a sense for what they can expect at an upcoming conference if you haven’t officially released upcoming speakers.

The rest of the page also effectively outlines all necessary information, including prominent CTAs to view the 2021 Content Library and sign up for a newsletter to get the latest INBOUND announcements. 

What we like: HubSpot generates excitement for INBOUND every year by making past content and future announcements accessible to existing and prospective attendees.  

Pro tip: Add elements like a highlight reel, email opt-in form, and content library to get people exciting about next year’s event. 

Great example of: Generating excitement for an annual event

16. ProductCon 

One element that made this #ProductCon page, a conference held by the Product School, stand out to me was the easy-to-find “Get Free Ticket” box, which is front-and-center for new visitors. Particularly if your conference is online and free — which creates minimal barriers to entry — it’s a good idea to make it easy for prospects to sign up instantly.

What we like: Product School encourages prospective attendees to get their free tickets to #ProductCon as soon as they land on the homepage.

Pro tip: If pricing is a competitive differentiator of your conference, emphasize that in your design. 

Great example of: Emphasizing free admission as event benefit

17. NRF 2022: Retail’s Big Show

One of the cleaner, sleeker designs in this list, NRF’s Conference Website employs a bold background image and minimal text to simplify the user experience. You’ll find everything you need to know at the top of the page — including the theme of the conference, location, dates, and how to register.

If you need more convincing, then you can scroll to the “Why Attend NRF 2022” to learn four key reasons this event is so valuable for retailers and vendors to attend.

What we like: NRF’s conference is designed to “not just to help retail move forward, but speed ahead.” This idea is captured not only by the theme (“Accelerate”) and copy, but also by the graphics used throughout the website.

Pro tip: Pair powerful and concise language with visuals to tell new visitors what your conference is all about.

Great example of: Copy and visuals supporting the theme

18. AdWorld Conference

If you’re going to have some impressive companies attending or sponsoring your event — including Google, Facebook, and IBM — it’s a good idea to showcase them on your conference’s homepage, like AdWorld does in the example above. Plus, what really stands out about this example is the small videos of various speakers that move across the page, creating a dynamic and unique experience.

What we like: AdWorld Conference showcases its speakers in a completely unique way, displaying video thumbnails of speakers moving across the screen. 

Pro tip: Re-think how to display common sections of a conference website — like the speaker line-up or agenda — to create a unique user experience.

Great example of: Showcasing speakers

19. Growth Marketing Summit

One element I appreciated about this page was the clear, “No Risk. Order Can Be Cancelled Free of Charge…” text right below the CTA, which helps dissuade any visitors’ concerns over being unable to attend and losing money. The page effectively leverages bright colors and a futuristic-looking heart to grab visitors’ attention from the get-go.

What we like: Objection handling is a common term in the sales world and applies to conferences as well. The Growth Marketing Summit anticipates and resolves one common objection of prospective attendees — non-refundable tickets — immediately on the homepage. 

Pro tip: Identify and alleviate common concerns of your prospective attendees on your homepage. 

Great example of: Objection handling

20. Design Thinkers

Design Thinkers begins its DesignRethinkers conference home page with a fun, interactive section. If you click inside the hero image banner, you can add sticker elements to change words like “Define” and “Consider” to “Redefine” and “Reconsider.” The homepage is modern yet retro-looking, particularly with the black-and-white images and what looks like scrapbook materials in the corner. The unique combination of muted and neon colors also helps. 

What we like: Users are invited to re-examine and re-work parts of the website design by clicking and hovering over different elements on the page. 

Pro tip: Invite users to engage with your site by clicking on CTA buttons and other design elements, scrolling, and more.  

Great example of: User-centric design

21. From Business to Buttons

Since From Business to Buttons took place in a never-seen before digital platform, their website design had to strike a balance between distinctive and familiar. The website, which reminded me a little bit of a carnival ride, uses bright colors and an unusual typography to stand out. The page is fun and unique, and has a clean navigation menu at the top to help visitors find exactly what they’re looking for.

What we like: The website design is unusual but still user-friendly. 

Pro tip: Pair non-traditional typography and image overlays with traditional navigation menus and links to make your website one-of-a-kind but still easy to navigate and use. 

Great example of: Unique design to reflect uniqueness of event

22. Red Hat Summit

We round out this list with an incredibly simple yet sleek page from Red Hat Summit, which states the theme — “Open Your Perspective” — and a brief summary of the conference above-the-fold. The use of white space and minimal design elements helps to highlight this minimal copy, which piqued my interest in the conference. Plus, the “Register” button is clear and easy-to-find.

What we like: Red Hat Summit’s theme, “Open your perspective,” informs every part of the design, from the logo to the layout to the use of whitespace. 

Pro tip: Reflect your conference theme in your website’s design. 

Great example of: Conference logo

Conference Website Templates

Ready to create your own?

Fortunately, there are plenty of templates available to help you craft a compelling conference website.

1. WordPress Conference Templates

If your website is hosted on WordPress, for instance, you can use one of WordPress’s themes to create an inspiring, sleek, professional website to attract and convert event attendees.

Best of all, you can start with a pre-designed theme, and then use WordPress’s easy website builder to add unique features to make your conference stand out. WordPress offers a free version, and the Business plan is $25/month.  

Take a look at 21 Best Conference WordPress Themes of 2021 for more WordPress theme inspiration.

2. Wix Conference Templates 

Another great option is Wix, which has a large compilation of clean, interactive conferences and meetups website templates. Wix has a free option available, and the Professional version is relatively inexpensive at just $23/month.  

You can also edit your site for mobile, ensuring your mobile site visitors will want to attend your conference just as much as your desktop visitors.

3. Canva Conference Templates

Finally, take a look at Canva’s conference and event program templates. Canva is incredibly easy-to-use, with drag-and-drop features, color schemes, and high-quality stock photos, illustrations, and graphics.

Best of all, if you’re designing with your team, you can easily share your editable file from Canva and then place your colleagues’ suggestions right into Canva.

Building Your Conference Website

And there you have it! Now you’re ready to begin creating your own conference website to attract visitors and increase attendees to your own branded event. Who knows — maybe your company will make it on this list in the future. Good luck! 

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Imagine watching the Super Bowl without any commercials — or driving through a bustling city with blank billboards.

Now imagine watching YouTube without ads.

For some people, this is a reality. With YouTube Adblock, viewers can block ads from appearing in videos and on the webpage.

This begs the question: should video marketers worry about ad blocking?

Let’s learn more about YouTube Adblock, if consumers actually use it, and tips from real video marketers on how to get around them.

Ad blockers may feel like a marketer’s worst nightmare. But there is power in understanding why people use them.

Here are some quick stats: 48% of ad blocker users felt there were too many ads online. And 47% of users found these ads annoying or irrelevant.

Think of your own experience — have you ever been bombarded with pop-up ads while reading an article? Or watched a video ad that wasn’t relevant to your interests… at all?

This study signals a clear trend: Users want a less intrusive experience with digital ads. And they’re willing to guard their time and attention with ad blockers.

Do Consumers Use YouTube AdBlock?

We know the motivations behind using YouTube Adblock, but how many people actually use it? Take a look at HubSpot’s survey about ad blocker use on YouTube:

More than half (63%) of respondents do not use any type of ad blocking software on YouTube, whereas a slim 11% of respondents do.

Does this mean marketers can breathe a big sigh of relief? Not so fast.

While the adoption of ad blockers is low, it is slowly increasing year-over-year. It may not be an immediate threat to your digital marketing strategy, but this could change in the coming years.

And, if your target audience consists of millennials, you may feel the effects of ad blocking more. People in the 18-to-24 range are the highest users of ad block software, while people younger than 12, and 65 and older, are among the lowest.

Marketers must get creative to leverage YouTube without ad blockers getting in the way. Here are four tips from video marketers on how to get started.

4 Tips for Navigating YouTube AdBlock, According to Video Marketers

1. Keep it in perspective.

Don’t let the fear of ad blockers drive you away from YouTube entirely.

For Nicole Ondracek, marketing manager, paid advertising at HubSpot, advertising on YouTube still proves effective — even with pesky ad blockers.

“You’re still able to reach so many people on YouTube that [AdBlock] doesn’t really play a factor in our strategy.”

Ondracek adds, “For example, one of our audiences is a Custom affinity audience, which is a type of audience that targets people with interests in B2B CRM software. This segment alone can still reach 500 million to 1 billion impressions a week.”

While ad blockers “mute” a portion of your audience, YouTube still provides access to billions of users (2.1 billion to be exact), along with plenty of opportunities to reach them.

2. Diversify your ad channels.

It’s never a good idea to put all your eggs in one (marketing) basket.

For instance, if your digital marketing solely revolves around YouTube advertising, you may want to diversify your marketing strategy to include “ad blocker-proof” channels, such as social media or content marketing.

Jennifer Brault, channel promotions manager at HubSpot, tells me, “When running any sort of digital marketing campaign, it’s important to meet your audience where they are.”

Brault continues, “By diversifying your advertising spend across multiple channels, you’re not only reaching a variety of audiences, but you’re also learning more about what platforms your audience spends their time on, which can help inform future ad spend and organic efforts.”

3. Create a meaningful ad experience.

“Rather than trying to find ways around ad blockers, focus on finding ways to make advertising more meaningful and appealing to end users,” says Bernard May of National Positions.

As ad blocker usage slowly rises, video marketers must put their audience at the center of their video strategy. This means getting to the heart of customers’ interests, questions, and pain points — and then finding ways to address them.

Remember, consumers don’t hate advertising — they hate bad advertising.

4. Focus on targeting.

While we can’t necessarily get around ad blockers, we can focus on putting ads in front of the right people.

With Google AdWords (YouTube’s ad platform), video marketers can target people who already demonstrate an interest in specific topics or keywords relating to your business.

Affinity Audiences is an especially helpful targeting mechanism in Google Adwords. With Affinity Audiences, you can reach people based on their browsing history and place them in certain segments such as “bargain hunters” or “DIY.”

For example, a marketer selling outdoor sports equipment could target users who recently searched for “ice fishing” or “best hiking trails near me.”

Final Thoughts

Ad blocking technology isn’t going away soon. Fortunately, all isn’t lost for digital marketers who can still benefit from YouTube by auditing their current practices, diversifying their marketing channels, and identifying areas for innovation.

Did you know that it takes 5 to 7 impressions for people to remember a brand? With branding, the goal is to continue making those positive impressions on an ongoing basis. One way to do that is through brand activations.

In this post, we’ll dive into what brand activations are, how to strategically plan a brand activation, and give you some ideas to inspire your own branding events.

While a brand activation is a singular event or campaign that is meant to elevate your brand it shouldn’t be confused with ongoing brand strategy. So, what does brand activation strategy look like? Let’s dive in now.

Brand Activation Strategy

Before you get started with planning different brand activation events, it’s important to understand the goal of each separate campaign.

The best way to plan a strategy is to identify your goals. It could be customer acquisition, user sign-ups, social media engagement, etc. Ultimately you’ll want to increase brand awareness, however, narrowing down your goal, even more, will make it measurable and attainable (hello SMART goals).

Once you know your goals, you can begin brainstorming various brand activation events or campaigns that you can do to achieve your goals.

For instance, let’s say your goal is user sign-ups. One brand activation for that goal could be going to a trade show. There you can talk to potential customers and then hopefully sign up users on the spot (depending on your offerings).

Once you have a list of ideas, goals, and metrics, it’s time to begin your brand activation plan. You should decide on one campaign or event to move forward, plan the logistics of that event, and use your brand playbook (with a clear vision, value propositions for key targets, brand personality, character, voice, and experiences). Keep in mind that brand activations don’t necessarily need to be events, but can be sampling campaigns, social media contests, or other digital marketing campaigns.

Now, let’s go over some ideas to help you come up with your own brand activation plan. Below, we’ll have the ideas separated by the goal to give you an idea of how to strategically brainstorm brand activations.

Brand Activation Ideas

Goal: User sign ups

• Experiential marketing event
• Trade show
• Digital marketing campaigns

Goal: Increased impressions/brand awareness

• Sampling campaign (giveaways)
• In-store/virtual events
• Digital marketing campaigns
• Influencer marketing

Goal: Customer acquisition

• Digital marketing campaigns like PPC, display advertising, etc.
• Interactive events
• Live demonstrations

Goal: Social media engagement

• Social media contest
• Social media movement
• Behind-the-Scenes series
• Influencer marketing

Now that we have some ideas, let’s look at some examples of brands that have run excellent brand activation events.

Brand Activation Examples

1. Vitamin Water | Brandon

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A colleague, Clifford Chi, uses this as a great example of brand activations. He usually doesn’t pay much attention to subway ads, but Vitamin Water’s “Brandon” was so funny, it made him laugh out loud. Then, a few weeks later, when Chi was walking around Boston, he strolled past Forbes’ Under 30 Summit and saw someone holding a sign that said, “Need Handshaking Tips?”.

That person was a part of Vitamin Water’s “Brandon” marketing campaign. There were also other members of the campaign, handing out Brandon’s business cards, some swag, and even bottles of Vitamin Water.

The funniest (and most impressive) part of the “Brandon” marketing campaign, though, was that the members acted like they actually worked for Brandon.

Vitamin Water’s “Brandon” campaign resonated with so many people because instead of just giving subway riders a quick laugh on their way to work, they made the extra effort to interact with their target audience and bring the ad to life. To make things even more personal, Brandon accepts all of his LinkedIn requests.

2. Revolve | Revolve Festival

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An excellent example of brand activation is the Revolve Festival that Revolve holds at Coachella each year (or at least has for several consecutive years). This is often known as the celebrity party of the year.

Revolve hand picks celebrities and influencers (macro or micro) to party while the music festival is occuring.

Revolve Fest trends on social media almost each year it happens because of the influencer marketing that the company focuses on. Influencer marketing helps the company bring in sales for its clothing line and more. In fact, influencers drive 70% of sales for the company.

Each of these festivals is a brand activation to bring in sales and drive awareness for the brand.

3. HBO | SXSWestworld

To promote the second season of their hit show Westworld, HBO built a miniature replica of the show’s Wild-West-themed amusement park in Austin, Texas for attendees of SXSW 2018 to explore.

With over 40 “hosts” who guided attendees on their own unique narrative within Sweetwater, the attendees felt like they were actually in an episode of Westworld, traversing a town full of trotting horses, troublemaking bandits, and money-hungry gamblers.

The park also contained clues of season two’s storyline and new characters, which helped generate a ton of suspense and anticipation for its upcoming premiere.

4. HubSpot | INBOUND

Each year HubSpot holds the INBOUND event. This brand activation is a way to drive brand awareness, customer sign ups, and ultimately help our customers in whatever way we can as a company.

INBOUND is an excellent example of brand activation because it’s a singular event each year that drives engagement and interactivity for HubSpot.

With INBOUND, we can provide an experience for our customers and any business that wants to learn from the best of the best.

5. Netflix | Altered Carbon at CES

At CES 2018, Netflix designed one of the most popular booths at the event. But it didn’t showcase the inner workings of their recommendations algorithm or their process for green-lighting shows. It actually spotlighted a concept their show Altered Carbon revolves around — immortality.

In their booth, fictional employees from Psychasec, the company that offers transfers of their clients’ consciousness to new bodies, or “sleeves”, in Altered Carbon, pitched the benefits of their service and even displayed some models of their sleeves.

Netflix deeply immersed CES’ attendees in the narrative of their hit sci-fi show, and it made them feel like they could actually live forever — if only Psychasec’s service was real.

6. CALM | Project 84

In the U.K., suicide is the number one cause of death of men aged 18 – 45. CALM, a suicide prevention charity, decided to spread awareness for the issue by creating 84 life-size sculptures of hooded men, which is the number of men who take their own lives every week in the U.K. and placing them on top of one of U.K.’s top TV network’s building.

Every sculpture is unique and tells the story of a real person who committed suicide. And to produce as much publicity for male suicide prevention as possible, ITV, the TV network CALM partnered with, agreed to air the campaign on their morning show and dedicate three days of programming to male suicide. The campaign also promoted a petition that urges the government to take suicide more seriously and take greater action to help solve the urgent issue.

Brand Activation Takeaways

Putting on a brand activation event or campaign can help you increase brand awareness, impressions, and ultimately bring in new customers. With tactics like experiential marketing, digital campaigns, influencer marketing, and in-person or virtual events, you can engage and interact with your audience in a personal way.

To succeed with brand activation, it’s important to focus on your audience, make your experiences shareable, and be creative.

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