Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, and sharing content with your target audience. It helps you generate brand awareness, convince customers to take action, and drive revenue.
There are various types of content marketing, like social media and blogs, but new trends and techniques emerge every year that change the ways businesses reach their audiences.
As a marketer, it’s essential to know what your competitors are focusing on, so you can create a strategy and stand out from the crowd. In this post, discover important stats to know about the state of content marketing in 2021 and trends to look out for throughout the year.

Content Marketing Stats to Know

47% of buyers view three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.

82% of marketers report actively using content marketing in 2021, up 70% from last year.
Marketers’ primary goals for running marketing campaigns are brand awareness, increasing sales, and increasing engagement.
Video is the most commonly used form of content marketing, overtaking blogs and infographics.
Google’s search algorithms are trying to transcend text to images, voice/podcasts, and videos.
The top technologies used by B2B organizations to supplement content marketing are analytics tools, social media publishing, and email marketing software.
The top three organic content distribution channels for B2B marketers are social media channels, email, and website.

Content Marketing Trends to Watch in 2021
1. Video takes center stage.
Media uploads increased by 80% YoY in 2020, as consumers spent most of their time at home passing time by watching content. Consumers watched 12.2 billion minutes of video in 2020 (as shown in the image below), equivalent to 23,211 years of content.

Image Source
As a result of this changing consumer behavior, video is now the primary form of media used within any content strategy, taking center stage for the second year in a row.

Image Source
As video consumption is now such an integral part of a consumer’s journey, HubSpot Senior Copywriter and Brand Campaigns Manager Alicia Collins and Senior Motion Designer Megan Conley say, “This [consumer behavior] also indicates that video can be used throughout all parts of the flywheel…businesses have historically used it as a means of introducing their brand and product or service offerings. But that’s not the case anymore.”
The videos you decide to create and the places you choose to share it can depend entirely on your individual business needs. Some businesses are opting for shorter form videos on TikTok to raise brand awareness, as National Geographic has done in the video below.

@natgeo
“How to photograph the night sky” with the expert himself! 📸🌌 #NatGeoTikTok #Photography #LearnOnTikTok
♬ original sound – National Geographic

 
Wistia found that long-form video is becoming more popular, making way for extended video length, as Patagonia has done in the video below.

 
2. Leveraging multimedia whenever possible.
In addition to video, it’s an increasingly popular strategy to incorporate multimedia into content whenever possible. Jason Lapp, President and COO of Beautiful.ai, says, “Video and photo-heavy social platforms have narrowed attention spans globally, forcing marketers to come up with new ways to break up text and increase content comprehension.”
Lapp adds, “Inserting multimedia — such as video clips and interactive slides — into text-heavy content will become a more popular way of engaging audiences and allowing readers to process material more easily.”
The gif below is an example of a blog post that has used an interactive video to further explain instructions given in the text.

Image Source
3. Strategic SEO tactics.
In 2020, HubSpot VP of Marketing Matthew Howells-Barby said he wanted to see the number of marketers actively investing in SEO go up. His wish came true — 69% of marketers in 2021 report investing in SEO, up 5% just from 2020.
Marketers are making these investments to create tailored experiences for website users. However, the shift in 2021 is less about SEO optimization in general but instead focused on “Capturing niche and long-tail keywords and creating content that’s more engaging than all the ‘Ultimate Guides,’ and ‘Top 55,’ lists,” says Brooklin Nash, head of content at Sales Hacker.
Businesses are looking for a way to simply appear in SERPs and create in-depth content that is unique, valuable, and different from what competitors offer on those same result pages. 71% of marketers support Nash’s assertion, reporting that their business’ 2021 tactic for SEO is capturing strategic keywords.
4. Podcasting will grow immensely.
A content marketing trend to watch in 2021 is the rise of podcasts. Consider the following statistics:

In October 2020, there were 34 million podcast episodes and over 1.5 million active shows.
In under three years, podcast listening in the United States has increased by more than 60%.
Big-name companies like Apple and Spotify are increasing their investments in podcasts and audio platforms.
The podcast market is expected to reach more than 2 billion by 2023, meaning that marketers are preparing to devote significant time and money to the channel.

So, why are podcasts so popular with consumers? Firstly, there is something for everyone. With 72,000 new episodes per day (as shown in the graph below), the likelihood of finding an episode that appeals to their interests is incredibly high, whether it’s a mystery tale or a real-life story about how their favorite business was built.

We’re now averaging ~72,000 new podcast episodes per day. Seems like a lot. pic.twitter.com/cUOd0pwq3H— Chadd Hollowed (@ChaddHollowed)
March 8, 2021

 
Second, podcasts feel like a conversation between the hosts and the listener. Rather than being talked at, listeners feel they’re being talked to and walked through the content in a more natural, human manner.
Businesses are investing in podcasts because they bring significant benefits: “Podcasts have the ability to drive real results and pay off in terms of leads and revenue,” says Zachary Bellinger, CRO at Casted. In fact, 53% of podcast listeners actually enjoy hearing ads during their listening experience, and 61% of consumers who hear these ads on a podcast were more likely to purchase a featured product, helping drive business revenue.
Holly Shannon, Producer and Host of the Culture Factor 2.0, says that podcasting is also a great way to use content to establish your business as a source of industry authority: “It can highlight you and your team as thought leaders. This allows you to speak authentically and bring your value to the table for all to hear globally.”
Featured Resource: How to Start a Podcast for Your Business
Learn everything you need to create, record, launch, and promote your podcast.

Download This Free Guide
5. Content personalization.
Craig Davis, Former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson, says, “We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.”
A focus for marketers in 2021 is sharing content with consumers that is contextually relevant to their interests and shown to them at the right time. This means that you study your audience’s likes, needs, and desires and share content that you know will speak to them. In turn, you’ll build brand loyalty, drive conversions, and generate revenue.
An example of leveraging this trend is studying user behavior on your website. If you notice that a browser lingers on specific product pages and places an item in their cart, lead them to those pages or products the next time they visit your site.
6. Valuable content trumps the quantity of content.
As businesses pivoted to entirely digital experiences in 2020, it became more important than ever to provide valuable content to consumers. This trend arises because, as consumers spent more and more time online, they see everything. If you post three Instagram stories per day and your competitors only posted one, what does it matter if your content didn’t provide your audience with any sort of value?
“Never before has ensuring your audience obtains true value from your brand meant so much,” says Kelly Hendrickson, Social Media Marketing Manager at HubSpot. For example, suppose your content marketing strategy focuses on your social media channels. In that case, you worry less about posting multiple times per day but instead about ensuring that the content you do share provides genuine value to your customers.
Lab Muffin Beauty Science, Michelle Wong’s YouTube channel, follows this strategy. She only posts once per week, and when she does, the videos are long-form, valuable pieces of content that teach her audience about something relevant to their interests.

Image Source
7. Hosting virtual events and webinars.
A webinar is a video presentation, seminar, lecture, or workshop delivered to an audience digitally. Despite once being declared outdated, webinars have become extremely popular over the past year, again credited to COVID-19 health and safety regulations:

Webinar platform BrightTalk reported a 76% increase in virtual events between March and June of 2020
ON24 saw a 167% YoY increase in usage of their webinar tool.

Attending events digitally allowed consumers to continue to interact with their favorite businesses and continue to derive value from presenters and industry leaders. As safety restrictions are lifted, webinars and virtual events are still here to stay — the global webinar market is expected to reach 800 million by 2023, up 253 million from 2015.
The new ‘work from home’ model makes this possible because of the convenience of attending an event from wherever a consumer is located. Plus, the added bonus of being able to access content on-demand if they are recorded and shared.
HubSpot’s yearly INBOUND conference is usually an in-person event, but it has been virtual for the past two years. Although health and safety restrictions in the United States are being rolled back, this event will still be a fulfilling, three-day virtual immersive experience.

Image Source
8. Repurposing existing high-value content.
As mentioned above, COVID-19 has pushed marketers towards prioritizing providing valuable content over anything, and repurposing content is a way to do so.
Nash says, “I’m most excited to see how content teams repurpose content instead of starting from scratch. In 2021, content teams will start figuring out how to most effectively use content from webinars, round tables, podcasts and conferences to stoke the content bonfire…We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just get it turning faster.”
Repurposing content is re-using your existing content and presenting it in a new format. Essentially, since you’ve already created high-quality, valuable content that you know your audience enjoys, you expand its reach.
You can repurpose content in various ways, like creating a slide presentation from a top-performing blog post, sharing screenshots of reviews from product pages on your Instagram profile, or creating text transcripts of your podcast episodes.
Holly Shannon is a fan of repurposing podcasts because transcripts can be used as SEO-optimized blog posts, and audio clips can be used as subsequent social media posts. Glowing Up Podcast has done something similar to Shannon’s suggestion, and they’ve repurposed their podcast by taking video of their recording session and sharing the clip on their Instagram page.

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by glowing up (@glowinguppodcast)

Stay Up-to-date On Your Industry
It’s always important to stay up-to-date on what is happening in your industry, and being aware of these trends is a way to do so. Should you choose to leverage one of these trends in your marketing strategy, ensure that it’s relevant to your business needs and will help you achieve your goals.
If you want to learn more about the marketing industry, read this post about general marketing trends in 2021.

In 2020, 42% of people used social media channels for product research.
With younger generations getting more and more connected to social media, the amount of product research done on these platforms is likely to grow. In fact, 16 to 24-year-olds already conduct more product research on social than on search engines.
Throughout the past few years, social media channels have embraced their new role as product research channels, devoting certain areas or features of their platforms to showcasing brands and products.
For example, Facebook Ads is considered an alternative to Google Ads, YouTube is a go-to site for learning about new products (and how to use them), Instagram offers Shoppable posts, and Reddit users regularly participate in discussion threads about products and brands. And let’s not forget Pinterest, which continues to position itself as a tool for advertisers by improving its ad software.
With all the social media platforms and product marketing opportunities out there, it might be hard to drill down which platforms are key to your marketing strategy.
By now, you might be on all the major social media platforms. But, as they expand and evolve, you might still wonder which you should focus your time and efforts on if you’re selling a physical product. To determine this, it helps to find out which social channels your specific audience is using, and then create strategies that meet them where they are on their preferred platforms.
To learn more about the social networks people prefer to surf for product research, I conducted a poll of 304 people using Lucid Software.

Why is shopper research important?
Shopper research is critical for a better understanding of the customer journey from initial searches to website visits and eventual purchases. The advent of digital- and mobile-first interactions has made this research even more important as the customer journey now includes multiple paths and touchpoints from start to finish.
For example, prospective buyers might hear about your brand from a friend, do their research on social media, and then interact with your ecommerce store through their mobile device. Understanding all touchpoints along this journey can help companies create more seamless and streamlined experiences for consumers and increase overall ROI.
Shopper Insights Reveal Social Media Research Habits

Source: Lucid Software
At first glance, the survey data seems simple: Facebook is far and away the market leader when it comes to product research and eventual purchasing, followed by YouTube.
But that’s not the whole story. Part of the reason Facebook and YouTube rank so highly is because of their installed user base — for example, Facebook has three times the user base of Instagram, despite being owned by the same company.
It’s also worth noting that while Facebook marketing appeals to a broader audience, volume alone doesn’t guarantee conversion. Users on Pinterest and Reddit tend to be much more engaged with their social community — meaning that if your brand can capture their attention you can create substantive consumer loyalty. LinkedIn, meanwhile, relies on authenticity and authority to inspire confidence, while Twitter is all about what’s trending right now.
Here’s a breakdown of the data:

Facebook: 51%, 155 people
YouTube: 30%, 91 people
Instagram: 6%, 18 people
Pinterest: 6%, 18 people
Reddit: 4%, 12 people
LinkedIn: 2%, 6 people
Twitter: 1%, 3 people

Facebook
Facebook has a whopping 2.7 billion active daily users and has been around since the early 2000s. Its audience includes multiple age groups and spans the globe, making it a solid place for most brands to market themselves.
When it comes to marketing your product, you have many free and paid options on Facebook. Here are a few examples of each.
Free Promotion
By now, you probably know that any company can create a Facebook Business Page. Once you create a business page, you can share posts about your products and offerings. If you have happy customers, you can even ask them to review your business on Facebook so prospects researching you can see how you’ve pleased your customers in the past.
Aside from creating a page to highlight your brand, you can also post your products in Facebook’s Marketplace. Marketplace listings can include product shots, pricing, product specifications, and purchasing information. Although individual users often use the Marketplace to sell items they no longer want to other people, Facebook Business pages are also eligible to use this feature.
You should also consider talking about your products or offerings on Facebook Stories. This might take a little extra effort because it will require you to film or create content in the Story format, but it can help you better connect with prospective buyers who want a better sense of what your brand is about.
Paid Promotion
Because Facebook’s feed algorithmically favors posts from individual accounts over businesses, you might decide that you want to put money into Facebook Ads.
Facebook Ads has a solid track record. It’s estimated that 10 million businesses were advertising on the platform in 2021.
With Facebook Ads, you can create advertisements with a certain goal in mind, such as conversions or in-store foot traffic. The detailed ads software also allows you to target specific audience demographics.
As a Facebook advertiser, you can either promote a post you’ve already created to ensure that it shows up on feeds of users in your demographic, or you can create native ads that might show up in feeds or on Facebook’s sidebars. While promoted posts look like an average post with a simple tag stating they’re promoted, the native ads look more like traditional ads to make it clear to users that the content they’re seeing is paid for.
If you want to launch video-based ads, Facebook also allows you to promote video content or buy in-stream ad placements that appear in Facebook Live videos or longer videos that other users have uploaded.

YouTube
If how-tos or video tutorials are part of your content marketing strategy. YouTube will be a natural fit for your brand. This is because YouTube users are three times more likely to prefer watching a YouTube tutorial video compared to reading the product’s instructions.
More and more companies are taking notice of YouTube’s product marketing opportunities. It makes sense, since 70% of viewers say they’ve made a purchase after seeing a brand on YouTube.
With a branded YouTube channel, you can publish video content such as demos, tutorials, or customer testimonial videos that give insightful details about why your product is valuable. By filming your own videos, you can insure that you’re highlighting all the great aspects of your product that make it stand out from its competitors.
Alternatively, if you don’t have time to create your own videos, sponsoring an influencer’s content, tutorial, or review related to your product allows you to tap into that content creator’s audience as they tell their followers more about your offerings.
Aside from creating your own account or hiring an influencer to give a review or tutorial, you could also consider paid advertisements. YouTube offers a few ad styles including TrueView, Preroll, and Bumpers.
These ads allow you to submit a short video ad to YouTube which is then placed at the beginning or in the middle of videos with metrics and demographics that match your brand’s target. To learn the ins and outs of setting up an ad and determining which style is right for you, check out this guide.

Instagram
Although Instagram ranked in third place in the poll above, you shouldn’t disregard it — especially if you’re targeting Gen-Z or millennials who make up the platform’s primary audience.
For years, Instagram’s visual layout has made it a hot spot for influencer marketing. Influencers regularly post sponsored photos and videos about their experiences with products. Like YouTube, these influencers also regularly publish video posts or Stories that present tutorials, reviews, and unboxings related to a product.
Aside from influencer marketing, many brands also promote their products on Instagram Stories, Instagram Live, and through standard video or photo posts on Instagram Feed.
Here’s an example where Kylie Jenner, the CEO and Founder of Kylie Cosmetics, films a Story-based product tutorial for her company’s Instagram account:

Along with free strategies, Instagram now offers Shoppable posts. With Shoppable posts, you can promote a product in an Instagram post that links to your Facebook Catalog. Here’s an example of what a Shoppable Post looks like:

To be eligible for Shoppable posts, you must have an Instagram Business page that’s linked to a Facebook Catalog. This feature is also only for businesses selling physical goods.
Here’s a blog post that goes into detail about how to use and optimize Shoppable posts.
Pinterest
Pinterest encourages people to pin image-based posts that inspire them to digital boards, mimicking the process of creating a physical inspiration board.
Because people come to this platform to be inspired to do something, such as travel or home decorating, they might find themselves pinning all sorts of product-oriented images to a themed board. For example, someone who wants to redecorate their office might create an “Office Inspiration” board and pin photos of furniture or decorative items that they’d like to buy.
Here’s an example of what these boards look like:

To make it easier for people to find your products, you could consider starting a Pinterest account and making a few boards to highlight your products. For example, if you’re marketing a travel company, you could make a board for each country that you offer packages to. On each board, you could place images of trip activities that link to your website.
Then, if someone is trying to plan a trip to a country you sell a package for, they might come across one of your posts and pin it to their own “Travel Inspiration” board.
To give you a real-world example of how brands use Pinterest, below is a Wedding Registry board created by Target which features images of products that a bride and groom might want to add to their gift registry.

Each of Target’s pinned images links to the company website so users can share the pin on their own Pinterest board, or click straight through the post to buy or register the product.
If you have an advertising budget, you can also consider launching pay-per-click ads on Pinterest. Pinterest Ads enables your posts to be seen by people in a specific demographic that matches your own. The platform also allows you to A/B test photos and target ads to Pinterest users on your contact lists.
Want to learn more about Pinterest Ads and effective experiments to run? Check out this blog post from a PPC and Pinterest expert.
Reddit
Reddit encourages users to create discussion threads in themed online communities, called subreddits. As the platform has evolved, many users have created both threads and subreddits devoted to talking about products, like fast-food restaurants or video games.
Below is an example of a subreddit, or online community, that Reddit users created to talk about all things related to Xbox One.

However, because comments with promotional language in them often get downvoted or buried in feeds by more engaging Reddit threads, you’ll need to be creative if you want to engage with audiences on this platform.
While you might want to keep an eye on Reddit or experiment with it, don’t put all of your time and resources into it — at least right now. As it evolves, the platform may become an easier platform to market your brand on, but at the moment, Reddit marketing strategies still require more brainstorming and time than tactics on other social platforms.
Although this platform has been called one of the “trickiest” for marketers to crack, some bigger brands have figured out how to reach the platform’s discussion-oriented users.
For example, some brands will create subreddits related to their product, while others will interact by commenting on threads related to their industry.
Aside from creating content for free on Reddit, you can alternatively pay into sponsored posts or ads, similarly to Facebook or Twitter. These ads will appear in a user’s feed or as a promoted comment in a thread or subreddit.
To learn more about the ins and outs of Reddit marketing, click here for tips and examples of how other brands have cultivated the platform.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s platform, which emphasizes networking and career-related chatter, might be well-suited for product marketing in B2B, academic, or professional industries. People who do product research on this platform might be looking for a service, tool, or software that can either escalate their careers or make their workdays easier.
If you’re marketing products like software, online courses, business-related publications, or anything that can help a professional or student do their job better, LinkedIn will be a great fit for you. However, if you sell more general, consumer-facing products like makeup or home decorations, you might want to put more marketing effort into other platforms on this list — like Facebook or Instagram.
While the professional nature of LinkedIn and its audience might not be suited for all brands, the platform still offers a variety of opportunities for brands to leverage it. For example, research shows that 80% of B2B leads come straight from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is very similar to Facebook in that you can post about your product or service for free, or purchase ads or post promotion to get information about your business front and center on feeds. To see a few great ad examples, check out this post.

Image Source
Twitter
Twitter has approximately 200 million daily users from a variety of backgrounds, geographic locations, and industries. Its broad demographic might provide solid marketing opportunities to many different types of businesses. Because of its broad user base, you might want to create an account on Twitter and post regularly for brand awareness.
If you’re interested in video marketing, you can also experiment with Twitter’s live video feature and use it to film a tutorial or Q&A related to your product.
Aside from posting about your product for free, you can also pay into targeted ads or promoted tweets. Twitter claims that its advertising ROI is 40% higher than some other social channels.
While the ROI of Twitter advertising and its user base sounds promising, you might be wondering why it ranked so low on the poll shown above.
Ultimately, what might make Twitter rank last is its trend-oriented nature. The platform encourages people to connect with each other and post tweets or comments about current events, trending hashtags, or their thoughts on other specific topics.
Brands and product discussion are both prevalent on the platform, but users might go to Twitter to learn more about what’s going on in the world, rather than new products. When people are asked to pick which platform they do the most product research on, it’s not surprising that Facebook or YouTube might seem like a more obvious choice than Twitter.
While you should be on Twitter due to its sheer user base and advertising ROI, you’ll want to keep its audience’s need to stay trendy and informed in mind as you’re creating posts and advertisements for the platform. This might help you make social content that both engages these audiences while still weaving in information about how valuable your product is.

Identifying the Right Platforms for Product Marketing
While running ads and product promotions on any social platform can help drive conversion, it’s a good idea to focus on platforms with audiences that already align well with your brand.
For example, broader audiences are actively looking for products or researching brands on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest while Reddit and Twitter users tend to be more trend-focused. Similarly, if you’re marketing a B2B company, you might see a better ROI from ads on a professional network — like LinkedIn — than ads on a more consumer-friendly platform like Instagram.
Use the information provided above, and start leveraging social media for lead conversion and product marketing.

If you spend time optimizing your blog or website’s content, headers, subheaders, and meta descriptions for search engines, the following image should alarm you:

The screenshot above is the first search engine results page (SERP) Google produces for the search term, “excel table examples.” Notice how, in addition to the “Images” tab at the top, Google pulls in a substantial pack of clickable images to the beginning of the main results page — before any organic text results are even visible.
Today, nearly 38% of Google’s SERPs show images — and that’s likely to increase. That means, despite your best SEO efforts, you could still be missing out on another source of organic traffic: your website’s images. How do you get in on this traffic source? Image alt text.

Whether or not you perform SEO for your business, optimizing your website’s image alt text is your ticket to creating a better user experience for your visitors, no matter how they first found you.
How to Add Alt Text to Your Images
In most content management systems (CMSs), clicking on an image in the body of a blog post produces an image optimization or rich text module, where you can create and change the image’s alt text.
Let’s walk through what the next steps are for CMS Hub and WordPress below.
How to Add Alt Text in the HubSpot CMS
In HubSpot, once you’ve clicked on an image and clicked the edit icon (which looks like a pencil), an image optimization pop-up box will appear.
Here’s what this image optimization window looks like in the CMS inside your HubSpot portal:

Your alt text is then automatically written into the webpage’s HTML source code, where you can edit the image’s alt text further if your CMS doesn’t have an easily editable alt text window. Here’s what that alt tag might look like in an article’s source code:

How to Add Alt Text in the WordPress CMS
In WordPress, clicking on an image will automatically open the Block tab in the sidebar. Under the section labelled “Image Settings,”add the alt text in the empty field.

When you’re ready, click Update from the toolbar at the top of your screen.
The most important rule of alt text? Be descriptive and specific. Keep in mind, however, that this alt text rule can lose its value if your alt text doesn’t also consider the image’s context. Alt text can miss the mark in three different ways. Consider the examples below.
3 Image Alt Text Examples (the Good and the Bad)
1. Keyword vs. Detail

Bad Alt Text
alt=”HubSpot office wall Singapore inbound marketing workplace murals orange walls ship it”
What’s wrong with the line of alt text above? Too many references to HubSpot. Using alt text to stuff keywords into fragmented sentences adds too much fluff to the image and not enough context. Those keywords might be important to the publisher, but not to web crawlers.
In fact, the alt text above makes it hard for Google to understand how the image relates to the rest of the webpage or article it’s published on, preventing the image from ranking for the related longtail keywords that have higher levels of interest behind them.
Worst still, if you stuff too many keywords, then you may incur a Google penalty.
Good Alt Text
With the bad alt text (above) in mind, better alt text for this image might be:
alt=”Orange mural that says ‘ship it’ on a wall at HubSpot’s Singapore office”
2. Detail vs. Specificity

Image via Winslow Townson
Bad Alt Text
alt=”Baseball player hitting a ball at a baseball field”
The line of alt text above technically follows the first rule of alt text — be descriptive — but it’s not being descriptive in the right way. Yes, the image above shows a baseball field and a player hitting a baseball. But this is also a picture of Fenway Park — and the Red Sox’s #34 David Ortiz clocking one over right field. These are important specifics Google would need to properly index the image if it’s on, say, a blog post about Boston sports.
Good Alt Text
With the bad alt text (above) in mind, better alt text for this image might be:
alt=”David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox batting from home plate at Fenway Park”
3. Specificity vs. Context

Image via UCLA
Both images above have clear context that can help us write good alt text — one is from a HubSpot office, and the other is Fenway Park. But what if your image doesn’t have official context (like a place name) by which to describe it?
This is where you’ll need to use the topic of the article or webpage to which you’re publishing the image. Here are some bad and good examples of alt text based on the reason you’re publishing it:
For an Article About Attending Business School
Bad Alt Text
alt=”Woman pointing to a person’s computer screen”
The line of alt text above would normally pass as decent alt text, but given that our goal is to publish this image with an article about going to business school, we’re missing out on some key word choices that could help Google associate the image with certain sections of the article.
Good Alt Text
With the bad alt text (above) in mind, better alt text for this image might be:
alt=”Business school professor pointing to a student’s computer screen”
For a Webpage on Education Software for Business School Teachers
Bad Alt Text
alt=”Teacher pointing to a student’s computer screen”
The line of alt text above is almost as descriptive and specific as the good alt text from the previous example, so why doesn’t it suffice for a webpage about education software? This example dives even deeper into the topic of business school, and specifies that the ideal audience for this webpage is teachers. Therefore, the image’s alt text needs to reflect that.
Good Alt Text
With the bad alt text (above) in mind, better alt text for this image might be:
alt=”Professor using education software to instruct a business school student”
Image Alt Text Best Practices
Ultimately, image alt text needs to be specific but also representative of the topic of the webpage it’s supporting. Get the idea so far? Here are a few important keys to writing effective image alt text:

Describe the image, and be specific. Use both the image’s subject and context to guide you.

Add context that relates to the topic of the page. If the image doesn’t feature a recognizable place or person, then add context based on the content of the page. For example, the alt text for a stock image of a person typing on a computer could be “Woman optimizing WordPress website for SEO” or “Woman researching free blogging platforms,” depending on the topic of the webpage.

Keep your alt text fewer than 125 characters. Screen-reading tools typically stop reading alt text at this point, cutting off long-winded alt text at awkward moments when verbalizing this description for the visually impaired.

Don’t start alt text with “picture of…” or “Image of…” Jump right into the image’s description. Screen-reading tools (and Google, for that matter) will identify it as an image from the article’s HTML source code.

Use your keywords, but sparingly. Only include your article’s target keyword if it’s easily included in your alt text. If not, consider semantic keywords, or just the most important terms within a longtail keyword. For example, if your article’s head keyword is “how to generate leads,” you might use “lead generation” in your alt text, since “how to” might be difficult to include in image alt text naturally.

Don’t cram your keyword into every single image’s alt text. If your blog post contains a series of body images, include your keyword in at least one of those images. Identify the image you think is most representative of your topic, and assign it your keyword. Stick to more aesthetic descriptions in the surrounding media.

Review for spelling errors. Misspelled words in image alt text could hurt the user experience or confuse search engines crawling your site. You should review alt text like you would any other content on the page.

Don’t add alt text to every image. You should add alt text to most images on a webpage for the sake of SEO, UX, and accessibility — however, there are exceptions. Images that are purely decorative or are described in text nearby, for example, should have an empty alt attribute. For a more detailed breakdown of when to add alt text and when to not, check out this decision tree.

How Alt Text Affects SEO
According to Google, alt text is used — in combination along with computer vision algorithms and the contents of the page — to understand the subject matter of images.
Alt text therefore helps Google to better understand not only what the images are about, but what the webpage as a whole is about. This can help increase the chances of your images appearing in image search results.
When creating content on a topic, consider how your audience might prefer to find answers to their questions on that topic. In many cases, Google searchers don’t want the classic blue, hyperlinked search result — they want the image itself, embedded inside your webpage.
For example, a visitor looking up how to remove duplicates in excel might prefer a screenshot so they can understand how to complete the task at a glance.

Image Source
Because this image has optimized alt text, it appears in image search results for the longtail keyword “how to remove duplicates in excel.” Since the post also appears in the web search results for the same keyword, visitors could land on the blog post through these two different channels. 
Why is image alt text important?
We’ve already alluded to several reasons why image alt text is important: namely, accessibility, user experience, and image traffic. Understanding these reasons will help you write the best alt text possible for your images. Below we’ll take a closer look at the major reasons image alt text is important.
Accessibility
Back in 1999, W3C published its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 in order to explain how to make content more accessible for users with disabilities. One of these guidelines was to “Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.” That meant any webpages including images (or movies, sounds, applets, etc.) should include equivalent information to its visual or auditory content.
For example, say a web page contains an image of an upward arrow that links to a table of contents. A text equivalent might be “Go to table of contents.” This would allow a user with a screen reader or other assistive technology to understand the purpose of the image without seeing it.
In other words, alt text helps ensure your visual content is accessible to all users, including those with visual impairments.
User Experience
Alt text not only provides a better user experience to users with disabilities — it provides a better UX to all users. Say, a visitor has a low-bandwidth connection so the images on your webpage aren’t loading. Instead of just seeing a broken link icon, they’ll also see the alt text. This will allow them to glean what the image was meant to convey. 
For example, a user might be able to see the image on the left. If they can’t — due to a disability,  bandwidth issue, or another reason — then they will hear or see the alt text on the right. This will help provide a better user experience than if there were no alt text. 

Image Source
Image Traffic
One of the most important things image alt text can do for you is turn your images into hyperlinked search results that appear either in Google Images or as image packs. Image packs are special results displayed as a horizontal row of image links that can appear in any organic position (including the #1 spot on a SERP, as seen in the example in the intro).
Images that appear in either Google Images or image packs provide yet another way to receive organic visitors. This can result in thousands of more visitors — at least it did in HubSpot’s case. 
Beginning in 2018, the HubSpot Blog team implemented a new SEO strategy that, in part, focused more intently on optimizing image alt text. This helped to increase the blog’s image traffic by 779% in less than a year, which resulted in 160,000 more organic views. You can read more about the team’s success in this blog post.
Adding Image Alt Text to Your Website
So, where do you start when developing alt text for your blog posts and webpages? Consider performing a basic audit of your existing content to see where you can incorporate alt text into previously untagged pictures. Watch to see how your organic traffic changes among the pages that you give new alt tags.
The more images you optimize, the better your SEO strategy will be moving forward.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in September 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Whenever I share a screenshot of a friend’s funny text on social media, someone always points out the huge number of unread text messages I have.

“Why do you have so many unread texts? And, who are you ignoring?”, my friends often ask.
The truth is that most of the texts I ignore aren’t from actual people. They’re usually quick marketing messages that I signed up to receive at some point and ended up forgetting about.
Whether you signed up for a mobile service, pharmacy alerts, furniture store promos, or another list, you’ve probably also received a few texts you’ve either deleted, opted out of, or blatantly ignored.
With experiences like those above in mind, you might think that SMS marketing is no longer effective. But, in 2021, as people are more attached to their phones than ever before, we might be wrong about the strength of text message promotions.
As it turns out, a recent study from SimpleTexting shows that text message marketing might still be alive and well.
The study, which surveyed over 1300 consumers and marketers, revealed that more than 76% of brands plan to invest in text-message marketing in the next year, while 62% of consumers subscribed to receive texts from at least one brand in the last year.
Below, we’ll dive into the study’s research, explain why some marketers might still want to consider SMS strategies, and note a few takeaways for an effective campaign.

Why SMS Could Be Coming Back Strong
While members of our blogging team once said SMS needed to be “put out of its misery” due to all the other messaging tactics in the world at the time, no one could have anticipated the changing landscape brought on by COVID-19. During the pandemic, which caused most people to get stuck in their homes, people gravitated to their phones and electronics more than ever, with 76% of consumers reporting increased screentime.
When it came to texting, 61% of consumers either increased or significantly increased the daily time they spent on their text apps.

Image Source
SMS Marketing Effectiveness in 2021
According to SimpleTexting, 62% of consumers have opted into texts from at least one business while 43% of consumers specifically have subscribed to one to three brands.
When it comes to text messaging effectiveness, consumers reply to marketing texts that require a response much faster than email. While most people reply to emails within a half-hour to an hour, 72% of consumers respond to texts within 10 minutes.
Aside from quick response rates, text messages can also receive very high engagement. 43% of surveyed business owners and digital marketers who use SMS marketing report click-through rates between 20% and 35%.
One interesting piece of the SimpleTexting survey reveals that 52% of brands reported increased opt-in rates between 2021. However, nearly 10% reported decreased opt-ins in the same year.
While the increased opt-ins are in line with screen and text-message time increases, the opt-out increases do hint that consumers could be as quick to unsubscribe from text message content as they are to subscribe from it.
The SimpleTexting study and other research points to reasons why people might opt out.

Too many text messages from one brand: 60% of SimpleTexting respondents say they’ve unsubscribed from SMS alerts from brands that send them too frequently. Furthermore, 56% of those consumers prefer to receive just one text from a brand per week.

Too many texts from multiple brands: If you do up your text cadence to two, keep in mind that your subscribers might be inundated with tons of texts from other brands as well. While your texts might still be meaningful, you might see more sensitivity to opt-outs simply because subscribers are tired of all the text alerts.

Meaningless content: Like email marketing, you’ll need to hook your reader and keep them engaged with the content they’ve signed up to receive. Sending too much over-promotional content, boring content, or content that isn’t what they signed up for might cause you to see unsubscribes.  

Image Source
Tips for Launching a Great SMS Strategy
While SMS certainly isn’t dead, text message or conversational marketing platforms can be hard to master. As you consider or build out a text-based strategy, keep these quick tips in mind.

Know your persona: Although people might quickly sign up to receive your messages, it won’t take much to get them to opt out. Be sure you know exactly what your audience members are looking for and how often they want to receive that content to avoid sending meaningless texts that go ignored. 

Give subscribers what they’ve signed up for: Remember, subscribers are trusting you with their contact information, and if you aren’t transparent about what you’ll be sending or how often you’ll be texting them, they might quickly opt. out. Be sure you stay consistent with what they’re expecting.  

Remember, less is more: No one wants to get their phone blown up with tons of meaningless over-promotional tests. Before you launch an SMS campaign, ask yourself questions like, “Am I contacting people too often?” and “Will they even engage with this content?” If you worry that the content will be ineffective, consider streamlining your SMS schedule and only sending the most important text content. 

To learn even more about message-based marketing and SMS strategies, check out the great resource below.