Author: Franz Malten Buemann

If your SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) teams exist in complete silos, it’s time to change that.
Commonly held opposing viewpoints are: PPC is too complex, and SEO is too slow. (For the record, I don’t agree.)
When these two teams collaborate, you’ll be rewarded with magical insights, learnings, and results that neither team could get on its own.
These channels aren’t meant to be siloed, and getting them aligned is one of the most underrated ways to improve your overall digital marketing performance.
PPC is one of SEO’s most powerful tools — and vice versa. Here are seven ways to thrive in both SEO and PPC.

1. Avoid paid keyword traps.
Sharing keyword intelligence is a standard best practice. Sometimes, certain types of keywords can have subtle differences, and end up aligning to the wrong intent. It’s important to understand the intent behind search terms, because you want to avoid keyword traps.
SEO-focused marketers are the masters of understanding search intent, and therefore collaboration between SEO and SEM is critical.
For example, the restaurant POS software, Toast, is bidding on “phone systems for restaurants” but they don’t sell phone systems! They’re broad match bidding on terms containing “restaurant.”

This is why Google has become a modern day casino for advertisers. The marketing team at Toast is gambling on the mere possibility that restaurant managers seeking a phone system might also be in the market for POS software.
While it might work, the potential for bleeding is likely. That said, Toast is venture-backed and valued at $4.9B, so this is probably a gamble they’re comfortable taking.
You need to study the search results closely if you want to master the art of understanding keyword intent. Google often signals their own interpretation of a search term, based on the types of results.
For example, if you Google “sales funnel” the search engine results page (SERP) indicates you’re looking for the definition of a sales funnel.
The results are largely definition style SEO pages, and therefore it’s obvious that a product page wouldn’t rank for this query.

Let’s examine another example of a keyword trap. If you perform a Google search for “online training” you’re going to see two vastly different results in the ads.

Cisco – Virtual Classroom Solutions

Udemy – Best Selling Online Courses

These are two wildly different search intents. How do you know if a searcher wants online training software versus online courses? There’s no way to be 100% certain.
However, the organic results are overwhelmingly online course companies such as Udemy, Lynda, and Coursera. The people also ask box is hinting at the search intent, because most of the questions are about online training.

Based on what the organic listings are showing, I would conclude that Cisco’s ad is largely irrelevant. They might get lucky and grab some clicks, but they’re probably losing money on this ad set.
Now, the question becomes, do they care? Probably not. After all, they’re a $180B market cap, which means Cisco can afford to continue making Google rich.

What about the small guys? This is where SMBs have a tremendous disadvantage, and can’t afford to bleed on paid ads like the behemoths. For that reason, I would recommend startups prioritize SEO efforts in order to avoid the royal rumble of paid ads with giant companies like Cisco.
Let’s also examine “sms marketing examples” where Mobile Monkey nails the search intent with this page, and gets rewarded with the organic featured snippet. Meanwhile, advertisers are off the mark.

Vonage – hoping that a subset of searchers might be interested in APIs for SMS.
Remarkety – hoping that a subset of searchers might be interested in SMS marketing solutions.

What’s the bottom line?
SEOs will habitually review SERP signals to make sure the content they publish matches with Google’s organic search results, and ultimately delivers a high degree of satisfaction with regard to searcher task accomplishment.
Is your content helping searchers accomplish the task they need to complete?
This is particularly useful when there are potential keyword traps — words and phrases that sound good, but have dual meanings or a mismatched intent.

If potential dual meanings exist in your industry, SEOs will catch them. All that’s left to do is to get them to share their insights with your PPC team.

2. Share PPC insights on best performing headlines and descriptions.
When your SEO team decides to pursue a new keyword, it can be months before they see measurable results. If it was the right keyword and phrase to target, that’s success.
But if click-through rate (CTR) and engagement is low — even if it ranks on page one — you’ve now spent your time and budget running circles in an SEO hamster wheel. And, by the way, CTR is an indirect SEO ranking factor.
SEM is the exact opposite. You’ll know whether or not PPC ad copy is working — usually within a matter of days with low investment. So you might consider using PPC to get fast, short-term results, and use those insights to fuel your larger SEO strategy.
Test as many ad copy variations as possible, until you have the data that will support your SEO campaigns.
Here are some things you can test:

Headlines, title tags, and description copy.
Keywords and topics.
Specific keyword angles.
Landing page variations.
New product messaging.

PPC campaign results will reveal each headline’s impact on clicks, time on page, bounce rate, goal completions, and other meaningful engagement signals. If you run longer tests, you can also learn how a specific keyword’s demand fluctuates from month to month, which will help you set more accurate expectations with your SEO team.
Use PPC insights to choose the best topics, write and optimize your headlines and meta descriptions, and align to your audience’s needs and expectations.
3. Optimize your landing pages to reap both SEO and PPC benefits.
Spending money on paid ads without running efficient landing page tests could result in tons of wasted money and effort. 
The benefits of optimizing your landing pages are fairly obvious: you don’t burn precious marketing dollars on ineffective content experiences.
If you’re looking for more in-depth specifics on creating landing pages that convert, I would recommend checking out 19 of the Best Landing Page Design Examples You Need to See in 2020.
Ultimately, SEO & PPC teams must align their most valuable assets —landing pages.
3 important actions need to happen:

You have a noindexed, conversion focused landing page built for PPC advertising. Your main goal conversions are going to be form completions, demo requests, live chat inquiries, etc.
You are working with the SEO and CRO teams to build new landing page variants with intelligent hypotheses. Your goal is to split test these pages and monitor the results.
You are working with the SEO team to create a separate asset, which is longer-form and educational, on the same topic for which you want to drive organic visibility.

Ultimately, marketers should craft a surround sound search engine marketing strategy.
Say, for example, a shopper searches for your brand or product name, clicks on your PPC ad, stays for a minute, and then exits the page.
Days later, they search for guides to help them choose a solution, which leads them to an educational piece of content you produced on that same topic.
As they click around, browse, and scroll through the online listings, your brand is on their radar. They get used to your tone, visuals, and messaging. If they liked what they saw through your PPC ads, they’ll look for your name in a sea of organic listings the next time — and vice versa.
In brand marketing, what gets repeated gets remembered, and what gets remembered, gets done.
SEO expert, Rand Fishkin, wrote about the ludicrously powerful influence of brand repetition in his 2020 election recap article:
“Hear a song over and over, and even if you hate it, your brain will subconsciously hum it. Hear a brand name over and over and you’ll assume the company behind it must be a big, important, and probably trustworthy one.”
4. Work together to achieve SERP domination.
Taking up the first organic spot for your target keyword is not enough anymore. There’s so much noise and clutter in Google’s result pages, that you need to occupy as much digital real estate as possible.
Udemy has clearly figured this out. Check out their ad + organic listing, flying high together for the SERP targeting “excel courses.”

Check out GetVoIP’s SEO + PPC combo strategy for an insanely competitive SERP. They’ve got a killer landing page targeting “Business VoIP” and it’s soaking up both organic and paid traffic. This particular SERP is a double whammy for GetVoIP, because they’ve also got the precious featured snippet.
You can also see Nextiva ranking organically below GetVoIP. Since Nextiva is mentioned positively and has excellent reviews on GetVoIP’s listing page, this is a strategic chess move which is part of the surround sound search marketing playbook, coined by Irina Nica from HubSpot.

The list of SERP features that could push your organic success down the page is endless, including: 

Rich snippets.
Google shopping results.
Knowledge cards.
People also ask.
Video carousels.
Image packs.
Localized results.

It can leave your SEO team feeling deflated, doing all that grueling work to earn a #1 organic ranking just to be thwarted by Google’s UX schemes.
The reality is that Google is extorting companies for playing brand defense. (Bing is just as guilty).

While this is a challenge for some marketers, don’t hate the player — hate the game. You can still fight back with smart collaboration between SEO, PPC, and affiliate partners.
Apart from Google’s questionable ethics, you should still continue to bid against the high value search terms you’re already ranking for, in order to achieve what’s known as SERP domination.
Here’s how the productivity platform ClickUp achieves this.

Out of the top five results we can see above the fold, ClickUp took up two. The paid result takes you to a product page, while the organic result is a blog post — both super specific to the search term.
To implement this, analyze your SEO performance to find your highest-ranking pieces and run paid ads against those keywords. This will unlock SERP domination for your most valuable keywords.
5. Reveal “hidden keywords” within the buyer journey.
It’s unrealistic to expect every keyword, blog post, landing page, and paid search ad to convert visitors into leads. In fact, I’ve talked about this extensively with Chris Walker on the state of demand generation podcast — stop creating content purely for lead generation, and instead focus on educating a niche audience.
All roads lead back to user intent. Your keyword research needs to focus on the searcher’s ultimate goal and be broken down into three main intent buckets: transaction vs. research vs. education.
Here’s how we’ve mapped out the customer journey at Nextiva within the context of marketing our commercial phone service offering. Each stage of the buying process has a distinct emotion tied to it.

Unaware: Not aware I have a problem → I’ve never actually considered we may have a problem communicating with our customers, prospects and partners.

Problem aware: I think I have a problem but I’m not doing anything about it yet → I think we’re having issues communicating with our customers, prospects and partners, but I haven’t started searching for a solution yet.

Solution Aware: I’m actively searching for a solution → I’ve finally realized we have a problem communicating with our customers, prospects and partners, so I’m searching for a solution online.

Product aware: I’ve found a few solutions, including yours → I’ve seen your solution, but I’m not entirely convinced you’re the right one for me.

Most aware: I’ve chosen your product and I’m ready to commit → Show me the buy button.

This concept is nothing new. HubSpot pioneered the buyer’s journey in B2B before it was a big thing.

Based on the buying process, you should bucket your keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns into:

Educational: Guide, tutorial, resource, questions like ‘how,’ ‘what,’ and ‘why,’ examples, tips.

Solution: Best, reviews, integrations, comparison, top.

Transactional: Demo, free trial, buy, pricing.

Advertisers should avoid bidding on education keywords, and focus on solution + transactional.
The following graphic is a brilliant resource from Mike Sonders, outlining the highest demand keywords for SaaS consideration stage content:

At this point, you should align with your PPC team on the following:

Which keywords have tolerable CPC (cost per click) + high conversion rates?
Which keywords have the best cost per acquisition?
Which keywords are the most profitable?
Which keywords actually generate meaningful pipeline value?
Which keywords have the best sales close rates?
Which keywords drive the longest LTV customers?

At this crossroad is where the greatest SEO and PPC magic typically happens.
6. Use audience insights to test and clarify messaging.
I mentioned the value of instant results that come with PPC campaigns compared to SEO. Another key benefit of PPC is testing ads against various demographics and interests.
You can analyze specifics such as:

Age groups
Gender
Household income
Locations
Devices
Interests and lifestyle

We once tested some aspirational messaging on Nextiva’s homepage. And I’ll be honest, it bombed.

At least we were able to course correct quickly, thanks to the speediness of learning via paid ads.
The greatest benefit of audience targeting is that you can test brand and product-specific messages against various demographics and interest groups. Some companies claim they’ve mastered the art of personalization based on the website traffic segment visiting the page, but I have yet to see one company do this excellently.
Pro tip: Look at the search terms report in your Google Ads platform (formerly Google AdWords) to find those long-tail gold mines. These are the search terms that are actually generating clicks from your broad and phrase match campaigns.
With this unique wealth of knowledge, you’ll be able to better inform your SEO strategy by unlocking hidden long-tail opportunities, aligned to your different target audience segments.
7. Apply PPC conversion data to your SEO strategy.
The benefit of search engine optimization is that the longer you do it, the more actionable your data becomes. At Nextiva, our SEO strategy is aligned closely to our PPC campaigns, therefore allowing us to grow organic traffic in a meaningful way, rather than vanity driven top-of-funnel visibility.

We’ve followed HubSpot’s classic pillar clustering model to rank for outrageously competitive head terms like VoIP (mind blowing 80,000 monthly searches), supported by adjacent longer tail content all cross-linked together.
Not only is this a brilliant internal linking mechanism, but it helps your website build authority and topical depth. Eventually, Google starts to closely associate your brand with important concepts and entities. This is how you evolve past SEO 101 and unlock SEO mastery.
Ranking for an 80,000 monthly search volume keyword is pretty damn sweet. But it’s even better when you’re at position zero with a glorious featured snippet.

Why did Nextiva focus on ranking for VoIP? Because our PPC data told us it drives larger line size opportunities. That’s the beauty of SEO & PPC alignment — uncovering those precious hidden insights.
Your PPC team operates like a stock broker, optimizing for the highest return on investment. This means that their marketing campaign reports tell them which keywords:

Convince the most visitors to become subscribers and leads.
Generate the most engagement.
Lead to most purchases.
Are the most profitable.

Believe it or not, most SaaS companies are not running profitable Google Ads campaigns. There are many reasons why this happens. I’ve spoken extensively about this with Chris Walker on the State of Demand Generation podcast.
What’s the bottom line?
PPC conversion data is powerful. When you match these keywords to your SEO goals, you can focus your organic SEO efforts on keywords that will make the biggest difference to your organic search traffic — including brand awareness, engagement, and net-new customer acquisition.
SEO + PPC = Search Marketing Glory
When you break down your SEO and PPC silos, you’ll unlock a world of opportunities. Use this list and start uniting your SEO and PPC teams without getting overwhelmed.
It’s not about SEO vs. PPC anymore — it’s about crafting a holistic approach to search marketing, increasing your competitive advantage across your best performing channels, and reaching your target customers exactly when (and how) they are looking for you.

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This is a guest post from Charity Engine.
Businesses and nonprofits alike had to adjust to the “new normal” brought about by coronavirus. Everyone had to change strategies to adhere to new social distancing guidelines and safety precautions. It’s likely that your nonprofit’s doors are still closed and your staff members are still working from home. 
Given all the commotion, your organization probably enacted some short-term fundraising goals and marketing objectives to weather the crisis. But, as the year progressed, nonprofits adjusted their strategies to think more long-term. 
Specifically, nonprofits are starting to think beyond immediate fundraising needs to how they’ll develop long-term relationships with their supporters and strengthen big-picture fundraising while following COVID-19 guidelines.
To do this, nonprofits need to think critically about how they’re reaching supporters by leveraging their CRM software and donor data. In this guide, we’ll be covering four top tips to help nonprofits with these donor management concerns.
Now, let’s dive deeper into an ideal donor management strategy. 
1. Build comprehensive donor profiles. 
Before you start compiling donor data and incorporating it into your organization’s relationship-building strategies, you need to ensure you have the right tools to store and organize the information.
This comes back to the idea of having a donor database that can build out donor profiles with all the information you need. CharityEngine’s CRM guide explains that nonprofits need to track donor data to build out a complete view of all the engagement metrics that compose the donor journey. For instance, be sure you have access to engagement data such as: 

Donation history. When you know donation history, you can tailor fundraising appeals to meet their needs. For example,  let’s say one donor has contributed to your online donation page three times in the last few months. You should send them an email that details your recurring gift options and explains how they can sign up if interested. 

Events attended. Keep track of the nonprofit events (including virtual fundraising events) your supporters attend to support your mission. If a supporter frequently attends your events, you might create specialized invitations for them to the next one you plan. Similarly, if a supporter hasn’t donated in a while but regularly attends events, you’ll know that you haven’t lost their engagement altogether. As we all know, this is a tough time and some people might not be able to stay involved in their usual way.

Connections with other supporters. Understanding the familial connections within your donor database can go a long way in your communications. You can address entire families at once, particularly when it comes to direct mail. Also, be sure to track business connections to determine if your cause resonates with a specific company’s employees. If so, that business might be a good potential partner for your organization. 

Contact information. Many people have multiple email addresses, phone numbers, and several other ways to contact them. So, you should be able to save various aspects of contact information to a single profile when applicable. Also, keep track of how each supporter prefers you to contact them so that you reach out using the best channels. Otherwise, they may feel as though you’re overlooking their preferences and only doing what’s convenient for your team.

Collect and save this information to take the first step in developing an effective and engaging marketing strategy. From here, you can use supporters’ preferences to create smart donor segments, which we’ll discuss more in the next section. 
2. Create smart donor segments.
The best way to develop relationships with your donors is by paying personalized attention to each one of them. But, it’s not feasible to send individualized emails to each supporter every time you want to contact them. That would take far too much time. That’s why nonprofits create smart donor segments to reach out to supporters in a more efficient way. 
Donor segments allow your organization to tailor outreach to address groups of supporters who share common characteristics. 
To get a better grasp of this concept, let’s walk through some of the segments that your organization may consider creating: 

Giving levels. Consider how much and how frequently your donors give to your organization then create segments based on this data. After all, you wouldn’t communicate with your low-level donors in the same way you would with your mid-level supporters. Your mid-level donors have greater potential to become major donors, so your messages should lead them toward this goal. Meanwhile, if you sent those messages to a low-level audience, the difference in giving will be too great of a leap, which might steer them away.

Major and prospective donors. Use your prospect research and wealth screening tools to identify your major donors or major prospects. These individuals should be held in high regard and stewarded accordingly. Consider giving them their own segment in your donor database. 

Engagement level. If you have donors with high engagement levels, it’s important to note that in your donor database. This means you’ll have a group of accountable individuals that you can reach out to for volunteering, contributions during tough times, and so on. You can also reach out to prevent a supporter from lapsing altogether if someone from this group suddenly drops in their engagement rate. 

Once you’ve identified and created meaningful donor segments for your organization’s outreach, you can craft the most effective message possible tailored to each group of supporters. You’ll know that the message will be relevant to every person in that group, but you won’t need to spend time crafting individual messages. 
3. Track nonprofit communications.
One of the purposes of your nonprofit donor data is to guide your organization’s marketing strategy. According to this guide, your organization should consider the channels that will interest your audience. Then, use a variety of those channels in your outreach strategy.
By collecting more data and tracking communications with supporters, you’ll add more data for your nonprofit’s donor profiles. Using this data, you can craft more marketing segments that can be used to hyper-personalize outreach and get the most use out of your strategies.
Consider the following personalization strategies that you can use to reach your supporters: 

Use individuals’ preferred names in direct messages. Using names assures supporters that they’re not just receiving mass communications. Specifically, you should use their preferred names, to further develop your relationships.  

Use the preferred method of communication with supporters. Send a simple survey to ask supporters their preferred method of communication. Then, make sure you honor their preferences. For those who don’t respond to the survey, you can use data in their donor profile to make inferences about their preferred channel. 

Send personalized invitations for things they’re interested in. Take note of your supporter’s interests. In another survey (or the same one) ask supporters about their interests, such as their preferred events, programs, and volunteer opportunities. Once you know what their interests are, you can send personalized invitations for those activities that interest them.

Your nonprofit will need a place to store information and data to make all this possible, which leads us back to the importance of your CRM system. 
Within your CRM system, you should track your marketing campaigns to see how successful they are with your intended audience. From here, you can analyze the success rates and make adjustments to your marketing strategy where necessary. 
For instance, keep an eye on metrics such as: 

Email open rate. This shows how initially appealing your emails are. If it’s low, you may consider adjusting your subject line or further diversifying your content. 

Bounce rate. If people are bouncing from your emails or your website, you’re probably not meeting their expectations in terms of content. Consider what it is they want and expect from the marketing materials. Then, deliver that material. 

Click-through rates. High click-through rates for emails, social media, and other marketing sources indicates that your message successfully drives supporters to your targeted action. 

These metrics are key to understanding the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. If it’s not going well, you may need to go back to the drawing board with donor data. Ask yourself: what isn’t meeting expectations or where are interests misaligned? 
4. Craft and track campaign data. 
One of the functions of your donor database is to track your fundraising campaigns as a whole. When you have a software system that’s interconnected with your donor data, your fundraising tools, and marketing solutions, you can track all campaign information in a single location. 
Using your CRM to track and analyze campaigns helps measure the impact of campaign elements. Then, you can make necessary adjustments to your marketing strategy.
Campaign data is, essentially, the composite donor data that you collect. For instance, consider the following campaign data: 

Total money raised. When you set up your fundraising campaign, you created a primary goal that you want to reach. We recommend that you also set benchmarks and checkpoints along the way as well to make sure you’re on track. If you’re not on course to hit the goal, take a look at your marketing strategy. Is your message reaching the right audience? Are they paying attention?

Donation page abandonment rates. With the right technology, you can track your website’s visitation rates. If you find that potential supporters navigate to your donation page but leave without giving, you may need to optimize that page. Try streamlining the donation process by requiring supporters to fill out fewer fields on the donation page itself.

Giving platforms used. If you’re employing a multichannel fundraising campaign, you’ll have multiple places to track incoming donations. You may have gifts from your donation page, direct mail, a peer-to-peer fundraiser, or social media fundraising platforms. Use your data to maximize your most effective platform and improve the other ones.

Analyze campaign information within your database to visualize fundraising campaign trends and make adjustments.
These trends can lead you to make smart decisions that will improve your fundraising efforts. However, you need to have the right software in your toolbox. re:Charity’s list of the top fundraising software for nonprofits can guide your organization in the right direction to choose solutions that will make this analysis possible. 
Wrap up
Effective donor management is essential to help nonprofits like yours collect data, enhance fundraising, and better build relationships with supporters. Be sure you have a software system that empowers your nonprofit. It should help you conduct research, collect data, store information, analyze trends, and take appropriate actions. Good luck! 
The post Nonprofit Donor Management: 4 Essential Tips for Success appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

If you follow @Pardot on Twitter and happened to check your timeline between Dec. 8 and Dec. 11, you probably saw us tweeting excitedly about the ongoing events at ParDreamin’ 2020. This was one of the biggest Pardot-related virtual events ever, and it was great to get the Pardot community together to network, share tips and best practices, and get extra training on Pardot and Salesforce. 
The four days of ParDreamin’ 2020 were packed with informative sessions and keynotes. If you registered to attend ParDreamin’ 2020, all sessions will be streamable in the platform for 30 days. If you didn’t register, no worries. All sessions will become available for public streaming in early 2021. To be notified when the videos are public, you can join the email list on the ParDreamin’ 2020 website.
For now, let’s take a brief look back at all four days of ParDreamin’ 2020.
The Lead-Up: #MarketingChats
To generate engagement within the Pardot community and spread the word about ParDreamin’ 2020, we teamed up with our friends at Marketing Cloud to host a #MarketingChats Twitter event on December 3rd.

Welcome back to our third #MarketingChats!
First things first…
What are your new year’s resolutions?
Let us know with emojis only.
Ready Set Go pic.twitter.com/wVIzYOMXAF
— Marketing Cloud (@marketingcloud) December 3, 2020

Responding to a series of fun questions posed by @MarketingCloud, we wove ParDreamin’ 2020 into the discussion. The entire event ended with a final tweet tagging @ParDreamin and featuring the #WheresParDragon hashtag.

That’s all for today!
Thank you for participating! We had so much fun chatting with you and @Pardot.
Bonus question: #WheresParDragon? @ParDreamin pic.twitter.com/SxIHbPUVoh
— Marketing Cloud (@marketingcloud) December 3, 2020

If you participated in #MarketingChats, we hope you enjoyed the conversation — and that it may have inspired you to join us at ParDreamin’ 2020!
Dec. 8: Day One
ParDreamin’ 2020 started with a set of exciting and intensive workshops, including:

Bootcamp: Pardot Basics with Erin Duncan

Campaigns & ROI Reporting with Allie Capitelli

Essentials of Salesforce Reports & Dashboards with Mike Morris

Pardot Developer: API & Advanced Troubleshooting with Adam Erstelle

Scoring & Grading Workshop with Heather Rinke

Our thanks go out to all attendees — we hope you learned a lot and had fun with these workshops!
Dec. 9: Day Two
The second day of ParDreamin’ 2020 opened with Marketers Leading Through Change, an inspirational and insightful keynote presentation hosted by Mike Kostow, SVP and GM of Pardot. Mike was joined by Carrie Pena from BuildOn and Gail Moody-Byrd from Noodle.ai for a moving discussion about how companies can successfully overcome crisis situations and create innovative solutions to new problems. Throughout the pandemic, BuildOn and Noodle.ai have both used Pardot to share information with customers, build connections between internal teams, and solve problems in a changing business landscape.
This keynote was followed by a series of morning sessions, including:

Benchmark Your Pardot Database Health with Matt Lincoln

Deliverability vs. Mailability – Nightclub Guide for Pardot Marketers with Lucy Mazalon

Pardot & EDA: Solutioning for Higher Ed with Michelle Littlefield

Leads in Salesforce: And Why You May Be Doing It Wrong with Erick Mahle

More Than Martech: Wall-to-Wall Automation with Sara McNamara, David Kreitter, and Mike Creuzer

Syncing Salesforce Custom Objects with Pardot with Dan Umbro

In the afternoon, we held the Marketing’s Role in Digital Transformation Panel, and then settled in for these sessions:

11 Key Insights About the New Pardot Email Builder with Jen Kazin

Getting Sophisticated with Scoring with Jessica Hope

Cool Handlebar Merge Language (HML) Tricks with Bill Fetter

Full Funnel Marketing with Auseh Britt

Passing Drivers Ed: How to Avoid a Crash as a First Time Pardot Admin with Marcos Duran

Dec. 10: Day Three
ParDreamin’ 2020’s third day opened with a Product Roadmap Keynote hosted by Kyle Skibbe and Prasanna Vijayakumar. If you’re the type of person who’s always wondering what’s next for Pardot, this one was for you! We’re so excited about the future of Pardot, and it was a big thrill to share our plans with the community.
You already know what came after the keynote — the morning sessions! Here’s what was on offer that morning:

How to Show Marketing’s Influence on Pipeline with Salesforce Campaigns with Ben Lamothe

No Ninjas, Unicorns or Rockstars: Real Career Options for Pardot Marketers with Holly Gage

Pushing the Boundaries of Marketing Measurability Towards True MROI with Jaime López

From Marketing to Support, Take Your Customers on a Journey Down the Appinium River with Steven Jacobson

Inside Out: 5 Personas of Email Marketing with Chris Zullo and Karmel James

The Recipe for Successful Lead Management with Jay Vira

After a well-deserved lunch break, we returned for the Enterprise Panel hosted by Luke Wotten, Rebecca White, and Lindzee Barrera. Then it was time for the afternoon sessions:

Always Be Testing: How Nonprofits Can Use Pardot to Increase Impact with Kirsten Kippen and Sheridan Marfil

Designing Pardot and Salesforce Solutions That Track ROI Off All Your Online Channels with Kristina Alexandra

Supercharge Pardot Insights with Datorama with Ryan Deshazer

The Hand-off Between Marketing & Sales Powered by Process, Salesforce & Pardot with Jennifer Schneider

Level Up Challenge: The One With Landing Pages! with Marcos Duran

Not Just for Customers: Use Pardot to Revolutionize New Hire Onboarding with Kate Lessard and Heidi Hodges

Dec. 11: Day Four
We may have saved the best for last — the final day of ParDreamin’ 2020 featured some of the most exciting sessions of all. Day four opened with a Demo Jam hosted by Celine Newsome and Mike Creuzer, showcasing products from sponsors of ParDreamin’ 2020. After that, we dove into a morning of exciting sessions, including:

Bad Data is the Plastic of the Marketing Ecosystem – How Much Should We Pay to Clean It Up? with Skip Fidura

Pardot Automation Rules to the Rescue with Thimuth Amarakoon

Building Custom Integrations with Pardot with Lauren Drugan and Mike Creuzer

GDPR, CASL, CAN-SPAM, Oh My! with Chloe Wilde

The Ugly Duckling – How 2020 Showed the Importance of Agile Ops Team in Traditional B2B Enterprise with Adele Heikkilä and Jaime Lopez

Snippets – Connected Campaigns Power Tool with Marianne Fields

The afternoon brought with it one of the most spectacular ParDreamin’ 2020 events: Transform ABM with the Power of the Platform hosted by Neha Shah and Meredith Brown, plus a fireside chat with Pardot co-founder Adam Blitzer and Mike Kostow, Pardot SVP and GM. It was incredible to hear Adam’s thoughts on the future of digital transformation — and Pardot’s place in it!
After the fireside chat, it was time for the final sessions of ParDreamin’ 2020:

Content That Converts with Ashley Anger

Deliver Richer Personalization Leveraging Pardot and Interaction Studio with Michael Roberts and Grace Izard

Pardot Sync Errors – Diagnosing, Solving, and Preventing Them with Lara Black

Bet You Didn’t Think You Could Put That in an Email! with Jacob Filipp

Dynamic Content: Personalization Taken to a New Level with Stephen Stouffer

The Future of Marketing is Conversational: Using Pardot + Conversational Marketing to Engage with Buyers in Real Time with Sean Whiteley

If you joined us at ParDreamin’ 2020, we hope you had just as much fun connecting with the Pardot community as we did! And if you missed it, there are still lots of virtual Pardot-related events on the horizon — stay tuned. 
We were proud to work with BuildOn at ParDreamin’ 2020 to raise funds toward building a school for a community in need. To give to BuildOn and help us reach this goal, please visit BuildOn’s donation page.

According to the National Retail Federation, eCommerce accounted for 20.9% of total holiday sales in 2019, and that number seems to increase every year. As a result, you have the opportunity to position your online shop in front of a huge base of consumers who are actively browsing the web with intent to purchase goods.

The smartest marketers prepare for website traffic increases not only by prepping their website for higher-than-normal traffic and optimizing it for mobile devices, but also by giving their website design a dose of holiday cheer.
It all starts with the homepage: The first page many people will see when they come to your website.
Holiday Homepage Designs to Get You in the Spirit
How have other companies redesigned their homepages for the holidays? Let’s take a look.
Note: Businesses change their homepages on a regular basis. The examples below may not be current.
1. Free People

When your business has a loud personality like American bohemian retail company Free People does, making a big first impression on your homepage can be a great thing. Free People’s redesign is all-encompassing, starting with a large banner promising free express shipping, which appeals to any buyers concerned about delivery times when doing their last-minute shopping.
Underneath the main banner are four navigational calls-to-action emphasizing gifts and festive products. This directs holiday shoppers to the pages of their site they’ll find most useful.

2. PayPal

Who ever said online money transfer websites can’t have fun at the holidays? After all, sometimes the best gift is a little more padding in your bank account, and PayPal acknowledges this with the slogan: “Making Spirits Brighter: Spend, send and see the savings for extra joy all season long when you use PayPal.”
This holiday design from PayPal works because it still looks like PayPal — just a little more festive. It’s still easy to navigate but adds seasonal flair with a clever spin on a lyric from “Jingle Bells” as its holiday slogan. The whitespace encourages visitors to focus on the happy models in the image, putting human faces to an industry that’s businesslike and technical.

3. Sephora

Like PayPal, Sephora didn’t make many changes to the overall look and feel of its website. What it did do was feature a holiday edition of its highest-rated products and editors’ picks, specially curated for different gift recipients, price ranges, categories, and so on.
By putting editors’ picks front and center, Sephora is reminding customers how much the company values customers’ success. Plus, we love the gold background color — it’s a cute, festive way to make the homepage cheery and bright.

4. Baudville

While seasonal website redesign is often dominated by B2C companies, a few B2B businesses have been known to dress up websites a bit too. Baudville, an employee recognition solution, is one.
While some web designers like to add a ton of new elements to their holiday designs, Baudville’s design below shows you don’t have to. Something as simple as adding a holiday gift shop slide to your homepage photo banner can be enough to warmly welcome users to your site during this time of year.

5. La Colombe

La Colombe’s holiday homepage design features soft, warm hues and with festive red accents. Visitors are greeted with an image of La Colombe coffee products in boxes, a call-out to the idea that many shoppers are sending gifts through the mail. The slogan “Give the Gift of Coffee” is a great example of a business staying true-to-brand with an added holiday touch.

6. L.L. Bean

For a U.S. outdoor retail company like L.L. Bean, the holidays mean winter… which means cold. (For most of us, unfortunately.)
This design keeps the holidays out of the seasonal redesign completely: The featured photo on the homepage is a model wearing apparel in front of pine trees covered in show, which is in keeping with the brand’s outdoorsy theme.
L.L. Bean shares a list of holiday gift ideas featuring some of its most popular and beloved products. The seasonal homepage slogan — “Gifts That Last Beyond the Present” — reminds visitors of L.L. Bean’s amazing satisfaction guarantee.
If you’re more attracted to a winter-themed seasonal redesign, consider using winter-themed stock photos for your homepage. You might also consider cooling down the color scheme of your whole site for the holiday season. This means using cooler tones like blues, purples, and greens to give it a more “wintry” feel.

7. The Container Store

The Container Store’s homepage design below is a fantastic move for the holidays because it is chock-full of goodies for visitors. Every module on this homepage has something helpful to offer customers — stocking stuffers, gift ideas, luggage for holiday travel, party favors, and DIY projects.
The various CTAs on the homepage are clear and tell visitors everything they need to know about what’s on the rest of the site. The geometric shapes organize all of the content cleanly, so despite the fact that the homepage has several different offers on it, it’s not cluttered.

8. Base Butter

Instead of tapping into the greens, reds, and golds that you’d typically expect on a holiday homepage, Base Butter keeps to their cool color palette and foregoes the pine trees, ornaments, and other holiday imagery. Instead, they use a minimalistic image of their product being gifted from one person to another with the headline “Gift a Glow.” This is significant because it’s emphasizing the act of giving.
Notice also that it’s “Gift a Glow” rather than “Gift Skin Care Products.” They are selling the outcome rather than their product, enhancing the idea of giving a gift that truly matters.

9. J. Crew

This J. Crew holiday homepage design goes above and beyond expectations for a clothing store. The whitespace on the page is simple and lets the clothing and accessories stand out to prospective shoppers while keeping the website true to brand.
Its homepage advertises “Present-Topia,” a Gift Guide that breaks down J. Crew products by age, gender, and price for ease of shopping. The black callout box advertises a sale it’s running that includes seasonal clothing. J. Crew also published curated looks that visitors can browse or directly shop from to make the shopping experience easier and more visual. This homepage redesign prioritizes the user experience while still keeping the site beautiful and on-brand.

10. Lume

Like the rest of Lume’s advertising, they take a humorous spin with their homepage.
As a natural deodorant company, Lume flips expectations of “Your Days Will Be Merry and Bright” in their hilarious and witty copy, which instead says “Your Days Will Smell Merry & Bright.” This falls in line with the tone of their brand, pushing the benefits of their product with entertaining jokes.
Paired with the copy is attractive imagery of their products along with a snowy pine tree spread and ornaments in the background.

11. Fitbit

The dark background of this Fitbits homepage design lets the festive gold color scheme and the products shine. The photography styling positions Fitbits as a gift similar to jewelry in beautiful boxes, rather than a piece of sporting equipment, to make Fitbit products appeal to a wider variety of shoppers and not just athletes.

The primary CTA — “Shop The Gift Guide” — serves to lead visitors through all of the products with descriptions that suggest who they might purchase it for, making it easy for shoppers to imagine their family and friends using the product.
Fitbit included a neat feature where visitors can hint to someone that they themselves want to get a Fitbit as a gift.

12. Peloton

Peloton doesn’t change much by way of copy, choosing instead to highlight membership information and their most important CTAs. However, here they do include several videos in their full-page slider that are quite festive. Happy Peloton users exercise in front of decorated Christmas trees, in cozy living rooms, or in front of snowy windows. The focus stays on the bike and its benefits, but the setting is one of holiday cheer.

13. HP

Instead of the traditional holiday homepage layout presenting products as potential gifts, this HP design kept the page minimally decorated with only their featured video, “Reinvent Giving,” above the fold. 

The touching video features a brother using HP technology to come up with the perfect gift for his brother, who is hearing impaired — a guitar set that displays flashing lights when played so his brother can see himself playing music, even if he can’t hear it.

HP – BROTHERS REINVENT GIVING from 151 Awards on Vimeo.
Emotion in advertising is effective, especially around the holiday season — everyone has a friend or family member they want to find the perfect gift for. We can’t guarantee that HP’s holiday homepage video won’t make you cry, but we can say that it’s a unique and heartfelt spin on traditional holiday marketing.
14. Madewell

The image and header on Madewell’s design are very much in line with the company’s typical branding: a model wearing a gorgeous dress in front of a neutral background, accompanied by a holiday spin on their name in festive, embellished font.
This is both attractive to first-time visitors who are greeted with simple imagery and user experience as well as returning users who expect a design like this but still appreciate the added holiday touches. The #giftwell hashtag prompts visitors to start a conversation about their shopping experiences on social media, which fosters a sense of brand loyalty.

15. Pholk

Pholk also uses the word “glow” on their homepage, pairing this benefit-driven copy with a seasonal touch: “Tis’ the Season to Glow.” However, their focus is on treating yourself, which is a refreshing angle when other websites are hoping to attract shoppers that are getting gifts for others.
What makes this holiday homepage especially attractive is the typographic style paired with a soft, cool pine background image. Of course, it wouldn’t be complete without an image of a bag of their products advertised on the opposite side of the text.

16. Pillow Cube

Pillow Cube is… pretty much what it sounds like: A cube-shaped pillow designed for side-sleepers. On their homepage, they use imagery to bring up an important question: What if Santa was a side-sleeper?
The copy then calls the website visitor to consider buying a Pillow Cube for the side-sleeper in their life: “Support the side-sleeper who makes your dreams come true.” Support being a sneaky way to talk about the product’s big advantages.In addition, the big heading “Merry Cubemas!” is just adorable.

As you plan your own marketing strategy and website design for the holidays, be sure to plan and prepare your site for higher-than-normal traffic. The last thing you want is for your site to go down during a time when you hope to be doing great business.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.