Author: Franz Malten Buemann

There are a few things in life where having more is better, even if the quality leaves something to be desired (see: pizza). But most of the time — and especially when it comes to your content marketing — it’s quality, and not quantity, that really counts. With so much content out there, you’d be…
The post Content Marketing: Quality Over Quantity appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Has anyone out there recently made the switch from Hubspot to Marketo? We’re considering a move and were hoping to hear some pros and cons of doing so. We’ve been using Hubspot for about 6 years now but before that, at a different company, I used Marketo and liked it.
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As your business scales, your marketing team will grow and evolve too.
While this growth is happening, it’s important to maintain reliable avenues for collaboration and communication on your marketing team. Otherwise, your business won’t be able to perform at the highest level. The good news is that marketing collaboration software can help with this.

In this article, we’ll cover what marketing collaboration software is, why it’s important, and 20 of the best tools currently on the market.
Marketing Collaboration Software
Marketing collaboration software helps marketing teams maintain easy communication, manage projects and campaigns, prioritize tasks, establish schedules and editorial calendars, promote organization and productivity, and more.
Why is marketing collaboration software important?
No matter which industry your business is in, what size your team is, whether you’re in-office, remote, or a mix of both, marketing collaboration can help your team improve in a number of areas — all of which impact your bottom line. Some examples include improved and streamlined…

Communication
Teamwork
Productivity
Organization
Efficiency
Task management
Scheduling
Data sharing
Transparency
Content creation

Marketing Collaboration Features
Here are some common features found across many marketing collaboration tools today.

Group communication
Shared files, documents, calendars, notes, and other assets
Task management and time/ progress tracking
Document management
Campaign management
Editorial calendar
Content creation capabilities
Content, file, and data organization
Integrations (to connect the marketing collaboration software to your other marketing and business tools)
Audio and video conferencing
Marketing automation
Reporting and analytics

Marketing Collaboration Software
Here are 20 of the best marketing collaboration software available today.
1. HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a marketing automation platform that allows you to attract your target audience, convert website visitors, and run inbound marketing campaigns at scale. Marketing teams can seamlessly collaborate to plan and execute large-scale, omnichannel marketing campaigns.
Marketing Hub also allows for frictionless collaboration with other teams — such as sales — in order to offer delightful customer experiences. This is known as CRM-powered Marketing — HubSpot makes it possible by pairing marketing automation tools with an all-in-one CRM platform.
Pro Tip: Use HubSpot’s Marketing Hub to attract your unique audience, convert visitors into customers, run complete inbound marketing campaigns at scale, and automate redundant processes, all via one, easy-to-use platform.
2. Slack

Slack is a platform that allows for easy communication and collaboration on any scale. Slack Channels serve as central communication areas where you and your team can chat with one another and share relevant information, files, tools, and more.
Send messages via chat, host video calls, or speak with your team via voice call all without leaving the tool. There are also over 2,200 integrations and apps, such as Google Drive and Office 365, to help your team streamline workflows.
Additionally, the Slack Connect feature makes it possible to communicate and collaborate with teams at other companies the way you do with your own.
3. Trello

Trello is a collaboration and productivity tool for managing, tracking, and sharing work projects and tasks. The tool organizes your work into Kanban-style lists — that means your work is separated into categories for an easier workflow (such as to-do, work in progress, and complete).
Your team can communicate and tag each other on each project card, share and attach files, add due dates, move cards into different Kanban-style lists to track work, and archive cards once they’re complete.
4. Asana

Asana is a task and project management platform that allows both remote and distributed teams to organize and manage work. Teammates can collaborate on project lists, timelines, or boards, all of which have individual tasks and stages that you can customize, share, and archive. The tool’s messaging feature makes it easy to distribute, assign, and manage work.
Automate various project management tasks to save your team time and integrate your tool with one of 100+ apps that bring together all of your work to improve collaboration and coordination across your team.
5. Monday.com

Monday.com is a work operating system and project management tool that allows you to create workflows for any project. There are over 200 templates workflows available that marketing can use, as well as other departments such as IT, sales, design, web development, operations, and HR and recruiting.
Your team can manage and collaborate on all aspects of a project from a single location. The 200+ templates mentioned above are completely customizable and allow all team members to visualize your project, and its different stages, in a way that’s preferable to your team (e.g. map, calendar, timeline, Kanban-style list).
You can also integrate Monday.com with your other tools and apps to access and manage all parts of your projects and campaigns without leaving the tool.
6. Teamwork

Teamwork is a collaborative project management software meant for managing and delivering client work on time and on budget. You can simultaneously manage multiple projects of varying complexity with Teamwork’s Board View, dashboards, and project health status updates.
Hold all team members accountable for their part of a project or campaign by assigning responsibilities and using time tracking to determine how long certain tasks are taking.
7. CoSchedule

Rather than collaborating and handling your marketing via various spreadsheets, tools, calendars, and emails, CoSchedule’s actionable Marketing Calendar is where your team can see, schedule, and share all aspects of your marketing jobs and campaigns.
You can also share your calendar in a read-only format so higher-ups and other teams can view your project plans and trajectory without having to worry about someone accidentally making an edit.
8. Evernote Teams

Evernote Teams is a collaborative note-taking app ideal for managing, arranging, and organizing your thoughts, ideas, to-do lists, and more. The tool makes it easy to collaborate, sync, and share knowledge, as well as ensure progress is being made on certain projects and tasks.
Evernote’s Spaces provide visibility into progress on team projects as well as relevant workflows and documents. You can make, leave, and search across Spaces for notes and notebooks that you created or other team members created.
9. Sharelov
Sharelov is a cloud-based marketing collaboration platform for brands and agencies to manage their teams, campaigns, assets, projects, and work. No matter what you’re working on or what your creative assets include, Sharelov makes it easy to collaborate, share feedback, and approve assets, plans, and projects.
Use the tool to establish your teams, improve ease of collaboration within those teams, and track team and individual progress in real-time. Team members can provide feedback for each other for every creative — this simplifies the process of managing internal and client feedback and change requests across individual projects.
10. Acoustic

Acoustic is a digital marketing experience platform — the platform’s Marketing Cloud tool helps you better understand your customers and their behaviors at scale.
Acoustic allows your entire marketing team to manage and collaborate on campaigns, content, insights, and personalization, all via a single tool. There are AI-powered analytics and insights features to help you understand customer behaviors and experiences.
11. Zoom

Zoom is a video conferencing, cloud phone, webinar, and online events software. It makes team collaboration and communication easy, no matter the industry or whether your team is in office, remote, or a mix of both.
Use one of Zoom’s many available integrations to connect the software with your other business tools (e.g. HubSpot, Google Workspace, Slack, etc.).
Host Zoom Webinars or Events depending on the level of collaboration and engagement you’re looking for. You can also follow up on a discussion topic, share links, or communicate with others in real-time using Zoom’s Chat feature.
12. Lucid Chart

Lucid Chart is an intelligent diagramming software that makes it easy for teams to collaborate on the visualization of complex ideas related to your team’s processes, systems, and organizational structure.
Individuals and teams can map out progress around a certain task and determine what needs to be done next and what’s missing. Then your team can align on and apply all resulting insights using Lucid Chart’s common visual language, which streamlines collaboration.
You can also use Lucid Chart to create, manage, and collaborate on business process maps, user flows, cloud architecture diagrams, scrum teams, and data flows.
13. Canva

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Canva is a graphic design and publishing tool that allows your team to collaboratively plan, design, create, publish, and share a variety of content types including logos, social media posts, documents, graphs and charts, prints, and more.
The tool makes it easy to invite team members to review and edit designs via shareable links, email, or Canva folders. Canva also ensures your team has everything they need to use brand-ready and team-approved assets — there’s a Brand Kit feature where your team can establish and save templates, fonts, colors, images, logos, and more.
14. Click Up

Click Up is a cloud-based collaboration and project management tool that aims to bring all of your team’s work — docs, chat, goals, insights, and tasks — together in one place.
Within Click Up, your team can establish, refer to, collaborate on, and customize all aspects of every project including to-do lists, wikis and documents, emails, spreadsheets, events, reminders, goals, time-tracking, screenshots, recordings, resource management, and more.
Then, organize these project elements into one of 15 different views (e.g. list, box, mind map, Gantt) based on your team’s needs and preferences.
15. Funnel.io

Funnel.io is a data mapping and collection tool — it transforms collected data into automated marketing reports for your team to analyze, share, and build off of.
Once you connect all of your data sources — a process that Funnel.io makes easy with its over 500 marketing app integrations — it will be cleaned, organized, and mapped for you.
Then, decide where you want your finalized data and reports to go — whether in Google Data Studio, a data warehouse of your choosing, Google Sheets, etc. There, your entire team can identify insights and collaborate on how you’ll apply the information.
16. Domo

Domo for Marketing combines your marketing team’s data with data from sales, finance, and other departments within your company so you’re able to increase transparency, improve collaboration, and maximize ROI across the company.
Data visualizations and predictive analytics and alerts help marketers identify and pull out the most important insights from the data.
Set alerts for data that deviates and/or hits your goals to accurately track progress. Your team can then create real-time visualizations of data (without any code), and access and collaborate on those insights via any device.
17. Dropbox

Dropbox is a file hosting software that centralizes your team’s content and tools. It gives your team secure access to all of your files via one location. Your marketing team can collaborate with each other in Dropbox by storing, organizing, sharing, referencing, and downloading files.
Use the tool to manage team tasks, track file updates, and remain in contact with team members and even clients on projects. You can also deliver completed projects to higher-ups, other teams, or clients — whether they’re large files or a collection of files — with passwords, expiration dates, and delivery confirmation.
18. Wrike

Wrike is a project management software with features meant for increasing transparency and improving team-wide as well as cross-departmental collaboration. It allows you tocollaborate on work in real-time — no more communication across various channels such as email, meetings, and instant messages.
No matter the project, your team can use Wrike to make comments, edit work, set notifications, and build reports, and share insights with each other — all in real-time. You can also view your individual tasks, the responsibilities of other team members, as well as the status of specific projects to track progress.
19. Google Drive

Google Drive is secure, cloud-based storage software that allows you to store, share, and access files and folders — from Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and more — via your mobile device, tablet, and computer.
Once you upload your content or files to Google Drive, you can create a shared folder for them to live in — this way, your team can access and collaborate on anything in the folder.
Edit and add comments to any of the files in the shared folder in real-time — if your team members aren’t already in the Doc, Slides, or Sheet, they’ll still receive an email notification about your edits or comments. You can also review the edit history on any of your files. And it’s alright if your files aren’t Google files — that’s because the platform supports over 100 file types including Microsoft Office.
20. Brightpod for Marketing

Brightpod is a tool that simplifies marketing collaboration and planning — it’s a project management and time tracking software meant for digital marketing and creative teams.
The tool provides clarity around your team’s projects, campaigns, tasks, workflows, and deadlines. Individual teams can collaborate with each other as well as reference and communicate about other projects that are going on across the team via a single dashboard.
All projects that are listed on your dashboard have milestones and tasks so everyone on the team knows what’s expected of them what progress on each task looks like.
Grow Better With Marketing Collaboration Software
Marketing collaboration software can help your team easily communicate, manage projects, prioritize tasks, organize content, and more. Start using one of these tools to increase team-wide productivity and teamwork.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in September 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

What are some advertisements that live rent-free in your mind? As a millennial, ads that will always have a place in my heart include Britney Spears’ iconic run as a Pepsi spokesperson, the enduring”got milk?” campaign (which is ironic considering myself and many others now prefer non-dairy alternatives), and the classic iPod silhouettes.
These ads were not only compelling, but they were also incredibly influential. As marketers, we know that if we want to persuade an audience, we need to evoke an emotional response from them. But how do you actually do that?

Before we discuss how to refine your persuasive advertising strategy, let’s review what it is.

Below, we’ll examine key persuasive advertising techniques you can use in your advertisements, examples you can reference if you ever need some inspiration and informative advertisement examples that are surprisingly just as compelling as the persuasive advertising examples.
1. The Carrot and The Stick
Humans are hardwired to move towards pleasure, like a horse towards a carrot, and away from pain, like a donkey avoids a stick. When people read or watch your advertisements, “carrots”, or promises of gain, can fill your prospects with hope and compel them to pursue that potential feeling of pleasure. “Sticks”, possibilities of loss, evoke fear in your prospects, which will compel them to flee from that potential feeling of pain.
Both tactics can pull your prospects into a narrative and evoke emotions that inspire your desired action. Carrots, like a product’s benefit, entice people to take the desired action. Sticks, on the other hand, like anti-smoking campaigns, evoke fear in people to stop doing a certain action and start doing the alternative. To better understand how to craft advertisements that feature a carrot or stick, check out these insurance copywriting examples below.
Carrot: “15 minutes could save you 15% on car insurance.” — Geico
Stick: “Get All-State. You can save money and be better protected from Mayhem like me.” — All-State
As you can see, Geico’s ad uses a small-time investment that could potentially produce big gains as a lure to get you to buy their product. Conversely, All-State’s ad uses the character”Mayhem” to evoke fear into people to stop using their”inferior” insurance and start using All-State’s.
2. The Scarcity Principle
People value objects and experiences that are rare — having something that most people want but can’t have, boosts our sense of self-worth and power. If you use words and phrases that imply scarcity and evoke a sense of urgency, like”Exclusive offer” or”Limited availability”, you can skyrocket your product’s perceived scarcity and consumer demand.
3. One Message Per Advertisement
To immediately hook people and persuade them to read or watch the rest of your advertisement, try sticking to only one message. Spotlighting your product or offer’s main benefit or feature will make it easy for your customers to understand its value and increase the likelihood of their conversion because you’re only conveying one message to your audience: your product’s main feature will benefit your customer’s life somehow, someway.
4. Write in the Second Person
Since your prospects primarily care about how you can help them, and pronouns like “you” and “your” can engage them on a personal level and help them insert themselves in the narrative you’re creating, writing advertisements in the second person can instantly grip their attention and help them imagine a future with your product or service bettering their lives.
5. Give Your Audience a Sense of Control
According to a research study conducted by three psychology professors at Rutgers University, the need for control is a biological and psychological necessity. People have to feel like they have control over their lives.
If you want to give your audience a sense of control, you need to give them the ability to choose. In other words, after reading or watching your advertisement, they must feel like they can choose between the option you suggest or another path. If they feel like you’re trying to force them to buy your product, they’ll get annoyed and disengage from your message.
To give your audience the ability to choose, and in turn, a sense of control, use phrases like “Feel free” or “No pressure” in your advertisements, like this example from Hotwire.com below.

6. Use a Call-to-Value Instead of a Call-to-Action
Call-to-actions are crucial for getting prospects to take the next step, but a “Download Now” or “Call Now” CTA isn’t always going to convince the more skeptical prospects to take your desired action. You need to make sure your ad’s last line of copy or quip is the best of them all.
So instead of writing an uninspiring, final line of copy like “Download Now”, write one that clearly communicates your offer’s value and gives a glimpse into your prospects’ potential life if they take your desired action, like this call-to-value prompting readers to download a blogging eBook: “Click today and be a blogger tomorrow.”
Persuasive Advertising Examples
Ready to see persuasive advertising in action? Check out these examples.
1. Nikol
Showing — not telling — your audience about your product’s benefits is one of the best ways to capture attention and get an emotional response. Obviously, Nikol’s paper towels can’t actually turn grapes into raisins, but this ad highlights the product’s absorbent powers in such a clear and clever way, they didn’t need to write a single line of copy.
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2. Heinz
In relation to food, the word “hot” has multiple meanings: having a high temperature and being spicy. Heinz brilliantly used the connotation of high temperature to highlight the spiciness of their ketchup, and their creative method of communicating the value of their product helped them instantly attract people’s attention.
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3. Mondo Pasta
With this crafty use of guerrilla marketing, Mondo Pasta perfectly aligns their copy with their creative — the guy slurping the noodle literally “can’t let go” because it’s a rope tied to a dock. By designing such a visual, unexpected, and literal ad with a seemingly one-dimensional prop, people’s eyes can’t let go of this ad either.
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4. Bic
Another example of guerrilla marketing, Bic takes advantage of an unkempt field to highlight the power of their razors. By just mowing a small strip of grass on a field, this ad is an unconventional, simple, and extremely creative way to catch people’s attention and spotlight a razor’s shaving capabilities.
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5. Siemens
Siemens’ skillful ad shows the benefits of their product by unexpectedly placing their washers and dryers in a library to show you that they’re so quiet, even a librarian wouldn’t need to shush them.
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6. Pepsi
“More Than OK” poked fun at how Pepsi usually takes a back seat to Coke, especially at restaurants. And by featuring a star-studded cast that included Steve Carell, Lil Jon, and Cardi-B (who hilariously and fervently backed up Pepsi’s OKness) their boldness to call people out for undermining Pepsi’s quality got a lot of laughs and persuaded a massive audience to reconsider their own perception of the soft drink.

7. Match.com
The year 2020 was challenging for countless reasons. Online dating company Match.com channeled the collective feeling towards the year with an ad depicting Satan meeting his perfect match – 2020.

Informative Advertising
Informative advertising is a form of persuasive advertising that focuses more on the facts. The main goal of informative advertising is to educate the audience on why they need your product instead of appealing to their desires.
It highlights how your product’s features and benefits solve your customers’ problems and can even compare your product to your competitors’ products. Although this type of advertising relies on facts and figures to trigger the desired action, the ad’s message is usually framed in a compelling way.
To better understand the difference between informative and persuasive advertising, check out these examples.
1. Miller Lite
After Bud Light took some jabs at Miller Lite for using corn syrup in their beer during their Super Bowl 53 ads, Miller Lite decided to throw a few punches back. A day later on Twitter, they revealed that their beer actually has fewer calories and carbs than Bud Light, which helped them persuade people that drinking Bud Light and Miller Lite actually have similar health benefits.

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2. Siskiyou Eye Center
There’s an old folk tale that carrots can improve your eyesight, but science has actually debunked this myth. That’s why this Siskiyou Eye Center ad is such a creative informative advertisement.
While it pokes fun at this common fable, it’s still relying on the facts of carrots not being able to improve your vision and the Eye Center’s ability to provide quality treatment for your eyes to persuade people to do business with them.

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3. Burger King
In 2020, Burger King released an ad showing a time-lapse of its famous Whopper over the course of 34 days. While it may seem like an odd choice to show its product in such an unappetizing light, the goal of this ad was to announce the company planned to remove preservatives and other artificial ingredients from its products to differentiate itself from key competitors.

4. Calm
Popular meditation app Calm experienced an increase in downloads by sponsoring CNN’s coverage of the 2020 US Presidential Campaign. Through clever product placement in front of an audience that was experiencing stress, the app was positioned as helpful a resource ready to educate on mindfulness during a turbulent time.
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5. Dove
In addition to creating popular body and skincare products, Dove has set out to educate its audience on the importance of body confidence, and the harmful impact fabricated social media imagery can have on the self-esteem of young people.
In the reverse selfie campaign, Dove depicts how social media users may be inclined to change their appearance for public approval. Other materials provided by Dove also share facts and statistics related to social media usage and body image.

6. Google
Last year, Google released a Black History Month ad called “The Most Searched” that was equally informative and inspiring. Showing clips of famous Black figures, each clip read “most searched” to indicate each person shown and event shown was a history-maker.

 
Persuasive advertising vs. informative advertising: which one is better?
Persuasive advertising and informative advertising definitely focus on different aspects of persuasion, but they still aim to achieve the same goal: convincing your audience to take the desired action. So whether you pursue one advertising strategy or another, remember that if you can trigger an emotional response, regardless of the stimuli, your ad will be a success.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.