Category: Marketing Automation

Hello there, what’s the best tool that allows to create bots for social media, for instance, that allows to automatically post content using mixed sources and logic? Thanks. submitted by /u/presenta_staff [link] [comments]

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Every marketer faces different challenges. And, ever since 2020, the ways we’ve had to pivot, adjust campaigns, and address challenges has been unlike anything many of us have had to do before.
And, even if you’ve somehow navigated the past two years without any surprising or tough marketing challenges, there’s likely at least one task, tactic, or strategy you’ve always wanted to improve upon. 
Today, marketing is so fast-paced that it can be difficult to identify which areas you’ll want to develop to facilitate stronger growth in 2022 and beyond. For that reason, it’s important to pause for a moment and reflect on the biggest challenges marketers feel they’re facing this year.
Below, let’s review the current global marketing issues impacting the industry, according to data from HubSpot’s 2022 Marketing Industry Trends Report and marketing experts.

1. Training Marketing Talent
While you might expect the top challenge to involve one of the many KPIs marketers are goaled around, our research shows the top barrier facing marketing teams today is actually much more fundamental than quantifiable goals or simply hiring top-tier talent who will easily hit them.
In fact, according to our survey of over 500+ marketing professionals, the top overall challenge marketing departments are facing is team training.
Why? When you hire someone or get hired by your dream company, your the work needed to grow doesn’t just stop at the offer letter.
If you’re a manager or marketing leader, you’ll need to take time to teach that employee how your company works. This could include voice and messaging training, helping them understand buyer personas, or getting them acclimated to the tech stack or processes you use. 
Meanwhile, regardless of whether you’re a seasoned marketing team employee or new hire, you might wish your company had more opportunities for training, onboarding, or professional development that could allow you to excel and learn while also hitting your KPIs.
Why It’s a Challenge
Unfortunately, in the fast-paced world of marketing, it can be challenging for leaders to find the time to train while employees might not have the time or money to access professional development outside of their day to day tasks. 
That’s why it’s not shocking that 30% of marketers say that team training was the biggest challenge of 2021 and 21% say it will continue to be athe top challenge for marketing departments in 2022. 
What Can You Do?
The first step to solving this problem, regardless of whether you’re an individual contributor or manager, is reframing what “training” means to you. Remember that even the most top-tier, ROI-generating unicorn marketer will need time to get used to how your company works and grow as an employee and potential leader.
Ultimately, businesses should think of training and professional development offerings as indirect ROI-generators. Ultimately, even the most top-tier, unicorn talent will need time to get used to how your company works.
On one end of the spectrum, companies and leadders can retain employees and save money on talent searches because of their offerings. Meanwhile, their talent will learn more, grow more, become even more competitive, and — most importantly — feel more fulfilled and supported in their role. Additionally, you don’t always have to hire instructors or take time out of your day to train. For example, you can:

Encourage project managers or individual contributors looking for visibility to present experiments, strategies, or learnings at events, weekly meetings, or annual team conferences.
Book an annual professional development day during a slow season where all employees are asked to take a free online course of their choosing and report back on how it went.
Consider hosting quarterly or bi-annual new employee or new manager training days where newer hires and new managers can plan to go to in order to train with minimal impact on their quarterly projects. 
Create evergreen training videos, internal quizzes, or other resources that you can send to new or newly promoted employees on their first day.
Have managers develop 100-Day Plans for new hires or those that transfer to their team which includes training assignments, resources to read through, and a contact list of people to meet or schedule training with.  

On the other hand, if you’re an individual contributor, participating in your company’s professional development training and/or taking free or affordable courses online could help you negotiate a stronger role and salaries for yourself at your company or elsewhere. 
If your company doesn’t offer training or reimbursement for it, check out this list of free courses. 
2. Generating Traffic and Leads
While you might have been surprised by the top challenge, you probably aren’t surprised by No. 2. As you might expect, generating traffic and leads is always top of mind with marketers. And, even if teams are doing well with these metrics, they’ll always want to improve them. 
In our survey, 27% of marketers across industries believe generating traffic and leads will be their top challenge in 2022. 
Why It’s a Challenge
John Lee, Head of Evangelism at Microsoft Advertising, believes that generating leads will be a particularly big challenge for marketers. He told me, “Getting quality traffic isn’t a challenge today, and likely won’t be tomorrow. There has been growth in search and content marketing in 2021. New channels continue to surface and show promise, too (TikTok or audio chat rooms anyone?).”
Lee adds, “‘Sea change’ is the phrase that comes to mind for the state of digital marketing today. Change in the realm of privacy, identity, and changes to cookies. Change in the form of lost data clarity (will cookie-based conversion tracking continue to work, GA4, access to search queries, etc.). And all of this sits within the context of change to how and where we work and economies in flux as the world continues to move through the pandemic.”
Fortunately, privacy changes don’t mean the end of generating leads — it simply means learning how to re-think strategy.
As Lee told me, “To weather this storm of change, marketers need to be vigilant in monitoring and understanding industry-wide acceptance of privacy protocols and updates to search, social, and display/native platforms (consumer-side and marketing/advertising-side). And last, but not least — lean into the power of peer support and networking for sharing best practices and learning.”
Additionally, marketers are struggling with producing enough demand for their content. And as the year’s progress and competition stiffens, this will only become truer. With so many options of platforms for marketers to publish their content and even more ways to promote it, it’s hard to know where to focus your efforts.
What Can You Do?
When it comes to creating content that produces enough traffic and leads, marketers should ask themselves two questions: Are you truly creating high-quality content — the type of content people would pay for? And, do you know the type of content your audience actually wants?
For instance, when asked how they’d most like to learn about a product or service, 69% said they’d prefer to watch a short video over a text-based article, infographic, or ebook. This means, if most of your product-related content is in ebook format, you could be missing out on the majority of consumers who prefer video.
Additionally, the length of videos produced by businesses has increased (albeit more slowly than the increased creation rate of short video). While short-form video is still King/Queen, the number of videos in the 30-60 minute category grew 140% in 2021, compared to 2019 — suggesting that long-form video content is still a viable option for companies.
To ensure you’re creating content that resonates best with your audience, you’ll want to refer to analytics often. Use effective tools to properly track the types of content that perform best with your audience to generate more leads in 2022.
Additionally, once you know you’re creating the type of content your audience wants, the focus shifts to promoting it in a way that makes your audience take notice.
More than ever before, people are being flooded with content. Consumers don’t have to use a search engine to find answers. Instead, articles fill their news feed or buzz in their pocket via mobile notifications. To keep up, consider exploring alternate distribution methods — like social media or podcasting — to increase brand awareness.
Lastly, if you have the budget for online advertising, one example of a helpful distribution method is by promoting your content with HubSpot’s LinkedIn Ads Integration. Learn more about it here.
3. Demonstrating ROI of Marketing Activities
Measuring the ROI (return on investment) of your marketing activities has remained a top marketing challenge globally year-over-year.
In our survey. 28% of marketers saw it as their top challenge in 2021 while 21% of marketers expect to see this continue to be their biggest issue in 2022. 
Measuring and gaining ROI continues to be a vital way for marketers to understand the effectiveness of each particular marketing campaign or piece of content. It also can be what decision-makers at your company rely on when determining if they’ll invest more in your project, deparment, or team headcount in the future. 
Ultimately, proving ROI often goes hand-in-hand with making an argument to increase budget: No ROI tracking, no demonstrable ROI. No ROI, no budget.
Why It’s a Challenge
Although return on investment is a crucial stat that shows your campaigns success or progress, tracking the ROI of every single marketing activity isn’t always easy, especially if you don’t have two-way communication between your marketing activities and sales reports.
What Can You Do?
Providing ROI often comes down to using effective analytics measurement tools. For instance, Beautiful.ai Director of Marketing Kim Giroux told me, “Marketers are constantly challenged to illustrate the ROI of their efforts and [this year] is no exception. Proving ROI doesn’t always have to mean extra work or effort though. In fact, certain technologies bake ROI into existing work processes.”
Giroux adds, “Take presentation software, for instance. Savvy marketers today can create and use pitch decks with built-in presentation analytics that offer real-time data — such as how much time was spent viewing individual slides. Armed with these insights, marketers can better gauge stakeholder interest, inform their strategies, and adjust their campaigns.”
Christina Mautz, CMO of Moz, believes measuring ROI comes down to redefining the marketing process as a whole. She told me, “My biggest challenge, and one all marketers face in providing ROI, is the prospect of meeting traditional KPIs in the modern workspace.”
Mautz says, “Instead of leads and trade show success, marketing wins are now largely digital: engaging prospects and generating more clicks, downloads, and page visits.”

CMO of Moz Christina Mautz says, “To better measure marketing progress, we have to redefine the marketing process, encouraging collaboration with sales and reaching KPIs together.”

“For example, statistics such as page visits per sale or rising higher in the search engine results page (SERP) give marketers and SEOs tangible evidence as to how their work is meeting their ROI. New buying patterns and a customer-centric world require a divergence from the old, but measuring ROI will look far different than it did before and some leaders may not understand how or why.”
When it comes to providing ROI, there’s a strong case to be made for dedicating time and resources to establishing links between marketing activities and sales results.
This means using both marketing software (like HubSpot) and a CRM solution (like HubSpot’s free CRM) and then tying them together to close the loop between your marketing and sales efforts with a service-level agreement (SLA). That way, you can directly see how many leads and customers are generated through your marketing activities.
4. Justifying Your Budget
How can you create a winning marketing campaign without a budget? The truth is, it’s pretty hard. But, even when you have a great, revenue-generating idea, you still usually need to get your budget approved by a higher-up.
As the global pandemic began, some companies didn’t have the means to increase marketing budgets or shifted budgets to other key priorities like paying staff or operations teams.
But, in 2022, marketers are running into a good problem to have. With the importance of marketing, online content, and digital media being proven time and time again for businesses during the pandemic, marketers actually began to see budget increases.
In 2021, more than 80% of marketers’ budgets increased or stayed the same as in 2021 (with over 40% saying budgets increased). Moving into 2022, 48% of marketers expected their budget to increase in 2022. 
While this is great news for marketers, it poses a new set of unique challenges that they might not have dealt with before. 
Why It’s a Challenge
Securing a budget has always been a pressing challenge for marketing globally. And, while marketers seem to be getting what they need for budget in 2022, companies could be eager to shift back to pre-panddemic strategies of placing money into sales, facilities, and other departments in the future. 
Now that marketers have their budget, they’ll need to fight to keep it and grow it even more. 
And often, getting and keeping more budget is easier said than done — especially for smaller organizations that aren’t working with sizable or flexible marketing spend.
But the key to securing more money for your team might not be that complex. Here’s what you can do.
What Can You Do?
The key to unlocking budget lies in being able to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts (as we’ve noted above). Use your whole budget to demonstrate need, but also ensure you’re spending money on things that will provide high performance, like high-traffic, lead-gen, or revenue-generating projects or headcount.
According to our research, organizations that can calculate ROI are more likely to receive higher budgets.
Again, success with inbound marketing also plays a large role in driving higher budgets. Effective strategies obviously produce results and make a strong case for increasing your budget. But remember, inbound marketing is a long game. If you get off to a slow start, you shouldn’t back off — in fact, you might consider doubling down.
To learn more about how to understand and leverage marketing ROI, check out this simple guide.
5. Managing Your Website
In 2021, 64% of companies said they were investing in website upgrades. Meanwhile, 27% of survey participants said that managing their website was the top challenge in that year, with a chunk more saying they will continue to rise to this challenge in 2022. 
And, honestly, this isn’t surprising. If you have an online presence for your business, your website serves as a key place that consumers will go to when researching your brand. And, there, they might find company information, marketing content, and other resources that nurture them into becoming a lead or buying your product. On the marketing end, your site can also be a tool that can help you drive search result and social media awareness when it is optimized and shared around the web. 
Although managing a website is consistently a challenge to marketers, it seems to be growing less threatening. While website management was the third-biggest challenge facing marketers in 2021, it didn’t even make the Top Five Challenge list for 2022. 
However, we’re still placing this challenge in the fourth slot because — more than ever — businesses need to continue growing, improving, and optimizing web experiences, especially on their website. 
Why It’s Still a Challenge
Chances are, your website’s performance is high on your list of priorities — particularly since website speed and performance plays a major role in your website’s SEO ranking. It’s an asset that works around the clock to draw in visitors, convert them, and help you hit your goals.
Issues with website management include a variety of different factors, from writing and optimizing the content to designing beautiful webpages. Here are a few things marketers can do to deal with this challenge.
What Can You Do?
First, try HubSpot’s free website grader to determine how your website stacks up on key metrics including SEO, mobile, and security performance — and how you can improve it. 
If your primary challenge with managing a website has to do with the skills and resources you have available, you aren’t alone. This is especially true for small companies who don’t have all the talent in-house required to cover content, optimization, design, and back-end website management.
One solution? Hire freelancers and agency partners. To find freelancers, we recommend:

Tapping into your personal and professional network by posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networks with a description of what you’re looking for.
Browsing freelance writers and designers based on their portfolios and areas of interest. 
Browsing HubSpot’s Services Marketplace, which lists a wide variety of designers from partner companies and agencies we’ve deemed credible.

Overall, you can make website management easier on your team by hosting your website on a platform that integrates all your marketing channels like HubSpot’s COS.
Finally, for the projects you want to keep in-house, here is a list of ebooks and guides that might be helpful to your team:

Run a Website Grader report
Ebook: Website Redesign Guide
Ebook: 77 Brilliant Homepage Design Examples
Ebook: How to Design and Optimize Landing Pages
Blog: 27 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Ebook: The Ultimate Workbook for Redesigning Your Website
Ebook: The Marketer’s Guide to Mobile

6. Reaching Global Audiences
Targeting is a key component of all aspects of marketing.
With 65% of marketers currently marketing internationally, it’s important to have an international strategy.
But, international marketers face a whole bunch of challenges that can make it difficult for your brand to gain awareness globally. And, even if you aren’t on an international marketing team, knowing this data can still help you help them. 
That’s why we asked international marketers specifically about their biggest challenges. The top three they pointed out were:

Cultural differences (44%): Creating content and marketing campaigns can be different from country to country, or require different strategies entirely due to cultural differences, trends in different regions, and even regulations in different areas. 
Exchange rates (43%): Creating, tracking, and updating pricing for products, services, or resources can be tricky when exchange rates change nearly all the time. 
Localization (43%): Along with taking cultural differences and geographical trends into account when creating content, brands going global need to have a localization strategy to ensure their content is readable, searchable, and discoverable in different languages, which can cost a great deal of time and money. 

Why It’s a Challenge
Building or maintaining an international marketing strategy can be a big challenge not only when figuring out the best ways to target and market to different regions, but it can also be hard to organize and optimize your site so it can be easily navigated in different countries.
What Can You Do?
Download our free ebook, The Global Marketing Playbook. There are some really helpful tips in there that’ll help give you some direction on global marketing, including how to identify your top three growth markets, how to explore local trends, and tips on choosing the best localization providers.
Additionally, when marketing to a new region, the most common tactic marketers use is to shift their product offering.
Remember, your website visitors might speak a plethora of different languages and live in totally different time zones.
To make your content appealing to a wide audience, you’ll need to keep your global visitors top-of-mind when creating all your content. This means being aware of seasonal references, translating units of measure and monetary references, and giving translators the tools and permissions to customize and adapt content for a specific audience when they need to.
When in doubt, solve for local or cultural challenges by hiring locally. With a newly hybrid workforce, physical location is no longer a limit to who you can hire. 
Finally, be sure you’re optimizing your website for international visitors, too. For more SEO-related tips and resources on global marketing expansion, take a look at How SEO is Different Around the World, According to HubSpot Content Strategists.
7. Hiring Top Talent
As we mentioned above, 21% of marketers expect hiring top talent to be their biggest challenge in 2022. And, we’re not too surprised. Hiring talent with a great track record takes time, effort, and money — which many marketing teams do not have. 
While hiring is a challenge marketing teams have faced throughout the past five years or so, concerns are continuing to grow even more with news of worker shortage and recruiters competing for applicants that have chosen to shift roles following the global pandemic. 
Why It’s a Challenge
Many companies are shifting more resources to inbound marketing, which means higher and higher demand for top marketing talent. But supply simply isn’t keeping up. From sourcing the right candidates to evaluating for the right skills, finding the perfect person could take months … or more.
What’s more, the type of marketing talent companies are looking for is changing, too. According to a report from LinkedIn, employers are seeking marketers with soft creative skill sets as well as hard technical skills. And the quick rate at which the demand for these jobs are rising has caused a marketing skills gap, “making it difficult to find candidates with the technical, creative, and business proficiencies needed to succeed in digital marketing.”
What Can You Do?
Stefanie Grieser, co-founder of Shine Bootcamp, a professional speaker accelerator for women, understands the challenge of hiring top talent.
She told me, “When I talk to high-growth companies or marketing agencies (and the marketers running those teams), I’ve found that hiring not only top talent, but diverse top talent is extremely challenging. In fact, I was just having a conversation with an agency owner who hires SEO and paid marketers, and he told me, ‘Hiring is still the biggest challenge we face.’”
In 2022, hiring talent can be incredibly difficult — particularly as more companies become competitive with 4-day work weeks, transparent salaries on job descriptions, and the adoption of remote work, which enables companies to hire anywhere. Fortunately, Grieser provided me with a few tips for employers to stand out from the crowd. She told me, “My suggestion here is for marketers to invest heavily in their employer brand for the long-term. Just like you need to market your product, you also need to dedicate resources, time and energy into marketing your company as an employer.”
Grieser adds, “I would suggest Diversity Tech Co, Tech Ladies, and Girlboss as go-to resources to post jobs. These organizations are run by incredible individuals who really care about diversity, equity, inclusion and intersectionality. I’m also seeing niche communities and job boards pop up. For marketers specifically, I would post your open roles here: Dave Gerhardt Marketing Group, Hey Marketers, and Superpath (which is focused on content marketers specifically).”While it might seem random to discuss employer branding in a post about marketing challenges, it isn’t — since it’s often the marketing team that cultivates a strong employer brand. As Grieser points out, “Airbnb has an Engineering and Data Science blog, Intercom has an Instagram dedicated to their design team, and Dooly posts short, LinkedIn posts (see an example here) interviewing their fun team with a few fun hashtags #doolydreamteam and #meetadooligan.”
“Guess who leads this initiative? The marketing team. Think about how you and your team can showcase your work and your team’s work. I won’t try to assume that employer brand falls solely in your court, but as a marketer, you have natural skills that will lend themselves to marketing the company as whole.”
LinkedIn data shows that the number one reason candidates will consider or accept a job is career growth. This means that job listings and a company culture that offers employees a plan for growth will see the most interest from talent.
Other Common Challenges
While our survey identified the biggest challenges in marketing, teams are still facing dozens of other challenges that are worth mentioning, but weren’t ranked as a top concern. Here are just a few:
Content Marketing Challenges
The content marketing world is vast and full of different strategies. And, each major tactic comes with its own challenge. 
For example, if you’re a blogger or video creator, SEO and ranking on Google will likely be one of the biggest hurtles and opportunities your team will face because both blogs and videos are always competing for the covered first-page of search results on Google.
Meanwhile, if you focus on multimedia, such as videos, podcasts, or design, views, view-time, and shareability could be key to nurturing a lead. And, as many marketers struggle with demonstrating ROI — your efforts will be no different. While bloggers could include a form, purchasing link, or landding page URL in their posts which are easier to track, you won’t always be able to easily determine the ROI of content that doesn’t allow URL embedding in it. 
As a content marketer, it’s important to determine which goals are most important to your team and company’s growth and focus first on the challenges that will hinder reaching them. 
Email Marketing Challenges
Over the last year, email marketers have run into all sorts of challenges, such as pandemic-related low engagement and Apple iOS 15’s privacy protection policy impacting open tracking and open-rate based strategies. 
But, by far, the biggest challenge email marketers will probably always face is gaining and retaining subscribers. In fact, our research found that 19% of marketers see email and social media list growth being a top challenge throughout the year. 
If you identify with our participants, check out this post with more data on why consumers subscribe and unsubscribe from email. 
Affiliate Marketing Challenges
Sometimes, spreading the word requires the help of partners (or affiliates). These could including other companies willing to feature your brand on their site, thought leaders or influencers who will share links to your products and even happy customers who will spread the word in order to get a reward. This is why affiliate marketing has grown much more popular over the years. 
However, despite its popularity, affiliate marketing takes work. To launch a campaign, you’ll need a clear message, process, a commission budget for your partners, and — oh yeah — affiliates who will help you reach your goals. To learn more about how to execute successful and effective affiliate marketing, read this guide. 
Some of these challenges aren’t new.
If you’re a marketer who sees the same challenge year-over-year, it might be a barrier worth putting on your radar. However, some challenges can be industry-wide. Year-over-year challenges across the industry are incredibly important to note, regardless of whether they impact you or not.
Why? These challenges might not just be something you’re facing, but could also be faced by your competitors. If you can figure out how to navigate a reoccurring industry challenge effectively, you could have a leg up against the competition. 
With that said, let’s look back at some of the data we gained las year, 
In 2021, I surveyed over 120 marketers on our HubSpot Marketing Blog subscriber list to gauge the biggest challenges affecting the industry. Here’s a quick graph highlighting what they said. 
By far, “Generating traffic and leads” was marked by nearly half as the biggest challenge marketers are facing this year. 
This challenge was followed by 21% who said “providing ROI for your marketing activities” was their biggest challenge. 
“Delivering an account-based marketing strategy” (8%), “securing enough budget” (6%), and “managing your website” (5%) were the other three notable challenges marketers feel they’re facing in 2021. 
It’s important to note, a few other marketers marked “targeting content for an international audience”, “training your team”, and “hiring top talent” as their top challenge … but these three challenges were marked by less than 3% of the respondent pool, so they’re less statistically significant. 
Identifying Your Marketing Challenges
A thorough analysis of your marketing strategy and its current performance will help you discover where your biggest marketing opportunity lies. This will allow you to focus on improving the areas that need the most attention, so you can start making your marketing far more effective.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2012 and has been updated annually to include new, exclusive HubSpot data and expert insights. 

During my days as a journalist, I saw many different forms of recruitment take place. It was common to see reporters and photographers recruited from all over the country to work with the team.

It was also common to see employees move to different positions internally. A reporter could go from reporting outside to producing a show in-house. Associate producers could rise in rank and become executive producers.
This type of internal recruitment isn’t common only in newsrooms. Many companies recruit from their current roster of employers rather than recruit externally. Internal recruitment is often faster and less time consuming. On average, the cost to hire someone is about $4,000, according to SmartRecruiters, but hiring internally can cost much less.
With that in mind, you may wonder if internal recruitment is the right move for your business. Here’s everything you need to know:
The internal hire might be from a different department within the company or have a different job title on the same team. This new role could be a promotion in which there is more responsibility and a higher salary. If not a promotion, the change could be a lateral move in which the employee maintains the same level of seniority but may not see a change in compensation.
A company may choose to open job postings only to internal applicants or it may do so before opening the posting to external candidates. This can save time and money — and also ensures folks within your organization have a shot at the upward mobility they desire.
In other cases, internal candidates can apply for the open position, but recruitment efforts may focus on external candidates. This may be because of a lack of interest in the posting among current employees or because the desired skill set doesn’t exist internally.
4 Internal Recruitment Methods
1. Promotions
As mentioned before, a promotion entails moving an employee into a higher position of seniority in which they’re given more responsibility and a higher salary. For example, when the lead news director at my newsroom took a job elsewhere, the assistant news director was recruited internally to take over the role.
2. Transfer
A transfer is when an employee remains within the company but moves to another location. For example, the station I once worked for was owned by a company called TEGNA. TEGNA owned multiple televisions across the country, and it was common for journalists from my station to transfer to other TEGNA stations in a different city or state while still maintaining their same role.
Transfers are often the result of a change in business needs or the employee’s desire to make a change, such as working closer to family or living in their desired climate.
3. Reorganization
It’s normal for businesses to grow, shift priorities, or merge with other entities. In these cases, reorganization might occur. It can take the form of employees being shifted to other teams or leadership taking on less administrative duties and working directly with employees to keep up with increased demands.
An example of reorganization happened back in 2017 when Dow Jones announced that its flagship publication, The Wall Street Journal, would be reorganized to shift its focus away from print and into a digital strategy. New jobs were created and employees were re-allocated into new roles that were focused on the publications digital presence and goals.
4. Role Change
Usually, a role change is not a promotion. In this case, an employee may be recruited laterally, meaning they maintain the same level of authority but are operating in a different role.
This is a great solution if an employee is showing skills and interests outside of their current role. An example of this occurred when a television producer at my former TV station showed immense talent for creating content for the station’s website and social media. When a digital producing role opened up, that television producer was selected and a lateral move was made from television producer to digital producer.
Legal Implications
Regardless of the method of internal recruitment used, employers must create a policy that is fair and equitable for internal applicants, according to the Society of Human Resource Management.
In this policy, clear expectations must be established for employees who wish to apply. These expectations must be implemented consistently and communicated effectively throughout the company.
It’s also important to remember that federal laws prohibit employment discrimination based on:

Age
Citizenship
Disability
Family and/or medical leave use
Genetic information
Military service
National origin
Pregnancy
Race
Religion
Sex, gender identity, and/or sexual orientation

3 Advantages of Internal Recruitment
1. Talent Retention
Hiring within your company can send a message to your employees that there are clear opportunities for advancement. This can motivate your best employees to stay long term because their hard work will pay off.
2. Cost Effectiveness
Often, the benefits of hiring externally cannot outweigh those of hiring from your current pool of employees. That’s because internal recruitment eliminates costly job board fees, time-consuming rounds of interviews, and pricey background checks.
3. Shorter Learning Curve
Chances are that whoever you hire internally will already have a solid understanding of the company’s culture, practices, and processes, thus lessening the time it would take to get acclimated to a new role.
3 Disadvantages of Internal Recruitment
1. Workforce Gap
When a position is filled internally, you’re moving an employee from one role to another. This effectively closes one gap but creates another that needs to be filled.
2. Stagnation
One of the perks of recruiting externally is that employees from outside the company can bring unique perspectives and innovative processes to propel the company forward.
This can be the opposite for internal hires who are likely to work using the same processes and ideas they’ve been using throughout their time in the company. Lack of fresh approaches and ideas can create stagnation in the workplace and can put the business behind competitors.
3. Lack of Skills
With internal recruitment, there is a chance your current roster of employees may not have the right set of skills for the position you’re looking to fill. And while internal hires typically require less training than external hires, you may run the risk of spending more time and money training the internal hire if they don’t possess all the qualities to succeed in their new role.
In those cases, it would be better to recruit externally to find a candidate who already has the necessary skills from previous experience.
So, is internal recruitment right for your business?
Ultimately, there are many factors that determine whether internal recruitment is the right choice over external recruitment. If your company has a position to be filled and you have one or more employees who could be successful candidates, then recruiting internally could be a timely and cost effective choice. However, if your employees do not currently seem to be the right fit, or you’re concerned about limiting your candidate pool, then it wouldn’t hurt to expand to external recruiting.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the internet and social media helped us connect with our coworkers, friends, and loved ones during times of extreme isolation.
But, our web-based lifestyle wasn’t perfect. While you could see and talk to people, interactions still felt distant and impersonal. And, despite having every delivery app at our fingertips, we still missed going outside, exploring the world, and experiencing life to its fullest.
And, for a small — but growing — group of people, that’s where the metaverse came in.
Although metaverses are nothing new, we started hearing more buzz than ever about futuristic virtual reality worlds that could allegedly supplement or expand on our own. As more people began to dive deeper into online gaming, social media, and purchasing VR headsets and accessories, the opportunities of the metaverse gained even more intrigue.
Then, in late of 2021, Mark Zuckerberg shocked the world when he announced the change of his company’s name from Facebook to Meta, adding that it would represent a new evolution of the company’s offerings.
Soon after, Meta’s first metaverse, Horizon Worlds was opened up to anyone with an Oculus or Meta headset. Almost immediately, fans began to refer to this as “the metaverse.”
But, there’s more to the story of the metaverse, and a lot of things you’ll need to know before even asking yourself, “Is investing in a trendy VR world right for my brand?”
In this post, I’ll walk you through what “the metaverse” really is, how you can access all sorts of virtual worlds, and where the brand potential lies in this emerging space.

Does Meta own the Metaverse?
Because Facebook changed its name to Meta, and has a thriving virtual reality platform, you might think the company owns “the metaverse.” In reality –- and virtual reality –- Meta owns one of many metaverses. While Meta’s VR universe is called Meta Horizon Worlds, and is accessed through the company’s Meta VR headsets (formally titled Oculus), there are many other metaverses that early adopters have been using for years.
What happens in the Metaverse?
To explain what happens in the metaverse, we’ll dive into a few types of metaverses and explain what you or your brand can do in each. But, before we dive deeper, here are some definitions you’ll want to remember (and links to more context, courtesy of the HubSpot Blogs and our partners at The Hustle):
Metaverse Terms to Know

NFT: The much-buzzed-about non-fungible token is a finite or unique digital token, such as digital art, avatar clothing, or VR-based objects, that you can purchase ownership of or stake in. Deep in its blockchain-based coding, there’s a certificate saying that you own or have ownership in the item. (And, yes. There’s much more complexity here than a quick definition can explain.)
NFT Real-Estate: A non-fungible digital house or piece of land in the metaverse that can be invested in, sold, or even rented out. Buyers get a digital deed or certificate saying they own the real estate.
Blockchain: A digital ledger of transactions, certificates, and contracts.
Cryptocurrency: Digital money that you can invest in, sell, or use to purchase products online or in a metaverse. Each type of digital coinage has different values. Popular examples include Bitcoin, Ether, and Dogecoin.
Open-source: Open to all users for editing and not usually controlled by a brand or single entity. Open-source metaverses can be founded by developers who market and do maintenance on the world, but might not have an obvious company owning them – or customer service when something goes wrong. However, they often allow much more freedom to the users.

Now that you have those quick definitions, let’s take a look at some of the most discussed metaverses out there.
3 Popular Metaverses (And What You Can Do in Each)
While there are many metaverses out there, and we’d love to talk about them all, I’ve focused this post around the three metaverses that are most buzzed about today.
And, because many metaverses have a lot of similar opportunities for brands, I’ll break down brand opportunities (and show you examples of them) in the following section.
Meta Horizon Worlds
Meta’s universe can be accessed by Meta headsets sold by the company (which were previously called Oculus headsets). While this universe can only be accessed by headsets at the moment, Mark Zuckerberg has already discussed trying to expand the experience to contact lenses and even holographic experiences in the far term. Although this metaverse is potentially the most well-known to late adopters and marketers, it is one of the newest major metaverses.
Once you enter Horizon Worlds, you can do almost anything that all earlier metaverses allowed users to do, including:

Creating your avatar or virtual likeness.
Talking to other people in the Meta Horizons world.
Playing games with other Meta Horizons users.
Asking a Meta support rep (also in the metaverse) questions.
Teleporting to different locations and experiences within the universe.
Purchase digital products, such as virtual clothing, from the Horizons Marketplace.

Two key things that make Horizon Worlds different from other major metaverses we’ll discuss below are:

That it’s centralized, which means it has a known owner who regulates and manages the platform. When you’re in Horizon Worlds, you agree to terms of use and must follow rules or you can be ejected. Meanwhile, other decentralized metaverses have minimal rules, management, and regulations since they usually have initial creators or developers, but no current or obvious owners. In fact, to ensure that users are behaving and learning how to use the Horizon Worlds space, virtual Meta staffers are usually present in each public space:
You can’t buy land or monetize your brand in Horizon Worlds just yet. While Horizon Worlds does offer a general marketplace, there are no other clear ways to generate revenue on the platform. Meanwhile, on other metaverses that we’ll discuss below, one major goal of users is to buy, sell, or monetize virtual real-estate.

@itskaceymon @Oculus
#HorizonWorlds Employees get headsets? Yes, fam.
#meta
#metaverse
#vr
#fyp
#fypシ
#mixedreality
#oculus
#readyplayerone
#StepandFlex
♬ original sound – Kaceymon Official

The Sandbox
The Sandbox is one of the oldest decentralized gaming metaverses. Created by gamers around the globe, the platform has gained interest from VR and NFT investors. Once you enter this metaverse, your character can buy and build on land with crypto called MANA. From there, you can sell your land, rent it out, meet people, make connections, and even get paid and buy more land via Sandbox jobs – like architect or landlord. Sandbox, which reminds me of an extreme LEGO universe, is pretty easy to access and create an account on when visiting its website.

Because of its age and credibility in the VR world space, Sandbox is home to many affluent early adopters who already own real estate there, including major gaming companies like Attari and the rapper Snoop Dogg. Additionally, because land plots and the number of SAND tokes that will be created in the game are considered “finite,” the price of the real estate and tokens in this metaverse have skyrocketed in recent years.

Image Source
Decentraland
One of the most popular metaverses that early adopters have explored and invested in is Decentraland. Created in Argentina by developers Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano, has been notable for its vast cities and millions of dollars in virtual land and NFT real estate. In fact, a simple Google search reveals that there are already a number of virtual real-estate agencies that specialize in selling NFT land in Decentraland and other metaverses.
As its title would hint, Decentraland is also decentralized, meaning that it has no specific owner or manager and anyone can create in this virtual open platform. Unlike Horizon Worlds, it can only be accessed by personal computers.

A lot of information to consider and unsure where to start? Below is a comparison chart to help. 

Metaverse Comparison Chart

Name
Meta Horizon Worlds
Decetraland
Sandbox

Years Active
Last than 1 year
5 years
10 years

Estimated Number Users
300K reported users (unknown daily users)
300K reported users (18,000 reported daily users)
1 million reported users (16,000 reported landowners)

Owner
Meta
Decentralized (no known owner)
Decentralized (no known owner)

Availability
US and Canada for 18+ users only
Unknown but likely global
Unknown but likely global

Equipment Needed to Access
A Meta or Oculus VR headset
Various VR Headsets or a personal computer
Various VR Headsets or a personal computer

Cost to Access
Accessed with an Oculus or Meta headset (prices vary)
Free to access, but users need a digital wallet with tokens called MANA and LAND to access most experiences.
Free to access, but users  need a digital wallet with tokens called SAND to access most experiences.

How to Get Around
Teleportation
You must purchase a virtual car or teleportation device
You must purchase a virtual car or teleportation device

Gaming Opportunities
Various free team and individual games
Users can play and create games that other users can play.
Users can play and create games that other users can play.

Social interactions with other users
Yes
Yes
Yes

NFT Art/Product Shopping
Not yet.
Yes
Yes

NFT Real Estate
Not yet.
Yes
Yes

Virtual Events
Yes
Yes
Yes

Virtual customer service available?
Yes
No
No

Crypto-currency and USD conversion (as of March 2022)
You can’t make purchases in Horizon Worlds.
MANA (1 MANA = $2.69 USD)
SAND (1 SAND = $3.14 USD)

Price of Land
You cannot purchase real estate in Horizon Worlds.
By the end of 2021, 1 plot of land cost over 4,000 MANA or $15,000 USD 
By the end of 2021, 1 plot of land cost more than 3,150 SAND or $9900 USD

5 Early Opportunities for Brands in the Metaverse [+Examples]
While each virtual world has slightly different experiences, environments, and audience targets associated with it, many of them host a handful of opportunities for brands that want to embrace emerging marketing strategies. Here are just a few ways brands can leverage some of the metaverses that exist today:
1. Inbound Sales and Networking
Today, many marketers and sales reps alike find ourselves messaging, zooming, and emailing prospects to tell them about our product or service. And, rarely, we might go to a networking event or meeting where we talk to prospects face to face.
Now, imagine doing all of this – but digitally with avatars. In almost all metaverses, you can explore a place and talk to other users for free. This means that if you sell or market a B2C product, you could casually discuss the product in conversation, as you would with anyone else you’re networking with, and then tell users where they can learn more. While you still might not be able to send them to a branded experience, virtual shop, or have them click a link to your website just yet, you can still spread the word to multiple people on a more personal level than an email without leaving your seat.
If you work in the VR or metaverse space, you could also leverage sales in a more extreme way by selling NFT items, like art, real estate, or virtual cars. While it seems many virtual salespeople don’t record transactions and post them for the world to see, here’s a video of someone buying a car from a dealership salesman in a metaverse.

@kramerbrian Selling cars in the Metaverse is the future of sales.
#nft
#meta
#metaverse
#blockchain
#nfts
#nftgame
#vr
#ar
#augmentedreality
#virtualreality
♬ original sound – BrianKramer.eth

If you’re wondering, “Where could I go to ensure I’m talking to the right people?”, one opportunity is attending virtual events, which I’ll discuss next.
2. Virtual Events
While virtual events are still being developed for general businesses on Horizon Worlds, Decentraland, Sandbox, and other virtual worlds host many landowners that are will to rent out their virtual space for events or virtual parties. Similarly, some companies and entrepreneurs have also built their own lands with the goal of using them for events like NFT art shows, conferences, or meetups.
If you can afford to run, host, or even sponsor part of an event, you can gain crypto revenue or awareness from users who are interested in the topic, while also gaining awareness for your product or service.
For example, here’s a video of a TikTok user who attended an Afro Tech conference in a metaverse.

@tialeeapproved this definitely changed the game of virtual interaction
#ROMWEnextgen
#afrotech
#blackwomenintech
#blackintech
#computerscience
#meta
#metaverse
♬ Calm LoFi song(882353) – S_R

While INBOUND and HubSpot haven’t hosted a conference in a metaverse just yet, we too are embracing the possibility of virtual events by building out a similar platform for INBOUND 2022’s hybrid attendees. If you’d like to get a virtual conference experience without committing to a metaverses digital currency or platform, consider registering for our event.
If you don’t have the budget for creating virtual events just yet, you can still consider attending, buying a ticket for one, or even speaking at one. While there, you can use it as a networking opportunity to get to know others in your industry or potential prospects who might even buy your product outside of VR.
3. Influencer and Community Marketing
In any metaverse, you could potentially talk to a handful of people at once, while casually mentioning your product or even wearing NFT clothes with your logo. You could also pay people who are familiar with their metaverse or selling in the metaverse to continue to spread the word about your brand or services for you.
But, influencer and community marketing might not just stop there. If you find that your metaverse has an audience of users that are interested in your product, service, or industry, you can work to bring them together – even if you can’t afford or figure out how to schedule a virtual event.
For example, you could host a meetup on your brand’s virtual land or in a free-to-access metaverse space for those who want to chat about topics rated to your industry or product. And, while you’re there, you could just open the door to casual conversation. Or, you could all join a fun game and bond, then get to know each other in a less active space.
Not only will you network, show credibility, and spread the word about your product, but you’ll build a group of people that are interested in your industry, similar topics, or your brand.
4. Owning Branded Locations, Games, Avatar Fashion, and/or Shops
In many metaverses, including Decentraland and the Sandbox, brands with a solid budget can buy and brand real estate, such as art galleries or stores where you can purchase NFT products. While Meta Horizon Worlds doesn’t allow this opportunity yet, it will no doubt be an expanded feature eventually, but might be more structured than decentralized worlds that have no owners or rules.
One example that a brand that embraced the metaverse, VR, and NFTs to drive both awareness and crypto revenue was Gucci who sponsored a “Gucci Garden” on the platform Roblox. When entering the Gucci Garden, a VR avatar could walk up to a wall of Gucci products, select clothing, accessories, or bags they wanted to buy, and purchase them as an NFT.

Although Roblox falls more into a gaming category rather than a full metaverse, something similar could be done in Decentraland, Sandbox, or even Horizon Worlds (if brands gain more advertorial opportunities in the future.)
Another more experiential example is the prospect of Welmart stores in Meta Horizon Worlds. In 2021, Walmart released a demonstration of how they envisioned a metaverse store that helps people in VR order physical Walmart products that would then be shipped to their actual home addresses:

Although Horizon Worlds is just exploring how to monetize experiences for businesses, Decentraland and Sandbox, among other metaverses, have had digital shops (primarily for buying NFTs), car and teleportation device dealerships, art galleries, and paid brand experience locations for years.
5. Advertising on or Sponsoring Metaverse Content
While this might be more challenging and a tad riskier in decentralized metaverses, brands can provide money to creators, events, games, experiences, shops, and galleries to get their products, logos, or NFTs featured or mentioned.
One way to get started could be by researching NFT land owners with a history of advertising, which can be done on the web, as well as in VR. One business I came across while doing research for this piece was NFT Plazas. The brand claims to own NFT real-estate and plazas where many avatars spend time and will project ads, QR codes, or special digital experiences on their buildings or plaza signs.
Here’s a reel that highlights some of its work in Decentraland:

While this is a great way to spread the word about your brand if you don’t have the means to build your own virtual land, you’ll ideally want to make sure you know who the creators are in the real, non-virtual world, ensure you trust them, look out for scams, and use easy-to-understand paper trails or contracts whenever you can.
Remember, when you’re in a decentralized world, there won’t always be a customer service rep or legal entity to reach out to if you provide coinage to avatars that can’t be found later.
Should you invest in the metaverse?
Today, metaverse audiences are still growing, there’s still a learning curve for users, and some brands and audiences won’t be able to afford virtual world investments in the near future.
But, it’s important to remember that the metaverse is getting both the same hype and skepticism as social media did when MySpace and Facebook began to launch. In a world where technology is quickly evolving and improving, what’s not accessible to all today will be used by most people in the future.
If you’re an enterprise brand that can afford to take risks and explore emerging virtual worlds, it might be worth considering some of the marketing strategies above, or even creating a task force to determine if the metaverse is a worthy investment for you.
For other brands, it might be a while before you really need to start considering metaverse opportunities. But, that doesn’t mean you should wipe it from your emerging trend radar completely. In the coming year, a few things could really change the game for brands in the VR space, including:

New Meta Horizon Worlds Features. Everytime Meta has launched or purchased a platform, its next major step has been figuring out how to monetize the content and build brand tools for it. Horizon Worlds could be no different. And, because Meta platforms have been a trusted source for ad revenue and brands for years, expect to see brands flocking here when and if monetization tools are launched.

Metaverse competition: Like social media platforms, there are also new metaverses popping up all the time, and their creators (even if we don’t know them) all want them to be superior to pull in more users. This could create metaverse competition and these worlds could see new features aimed to pull in more users and more monetization opportunities for all sorts of brands. Similarly, large companies that specialize in VR might opt out of using decentralized worlds and might follow-suit of Meta by developing their own worlds.
More accessible technology: Currently, VR users must have an incredibly strong internet connection and a computer, while Horizon Worlds users must have an Oculus or Meta headset (starting at $300). While most people around the globe can access the internet, millions still struggle to access high speeds that would allow for VR. But, as VR gains more interest and we see the launch of technology like 5G and Web3 in many global regions, these experiences could require less machinery and lower finances to access.

Ultimately, the metaverse is vast, complex, and growing. And although we’ll do our best to keep you up to date, you’ll need to do some digging and understand your persona to know if investing time, money, or crypto in it is right for your brand.
To keep up with the latest emerging trends and tips, subscribe to daily emails from the HubSpot Blog for industry-specific advice, or The Hustle for general news and trends.

Last Updated on March 21, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta Big Idea or Enduring Question: How to sign up for the product-specific developer orgs? Objectives: After reading this blog, you’ll be able to: Sign up for Financial Service Cloud developer org Sign up for Salesforce CPQ developer org Sign up for Tableau
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Last Updated on March 21, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta Big Idea or Enduring Question: How to track your organization daily maximum and the remaining allocation limits? Objectives: After reading this blog, you’ll be able to: Understand maximum and remaining allocated limit Track all limits in once place via REST API
The post Easiest Way to View Organization Daily Limits appeared first on Automation Champion.

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Numerous resources talk about how to keep remote employees engaged — and that’s hundreds more than there were before much of the global workforce went remote in 2020.In 2018, I shared a few of our People team initiatives focused on internal community-building, but a lot has changed in four years, and we have new activities on the horizon for 2022.In addition to the ever-evolving landscape of remote work in a time of a pandemic, we instituted a four-day workweek in 2020, which had an impact on the amount non-work things we wanted to ask of our team. We just switched from quarterly to monthly All Hands, which are recorded for anyone who cannot attend.Our team engagement scores, which I measure with a survey every six months, have decreased from the beginning of 2021. Decreasing engagement scores is something tied to many factors including team turnover, product direction, and external influences. One thing that has been highlighted in our surveys is the reduction in team-building events like casual Zoom hangouts, guest speakers, and in-person events.And we’re not alone. In our 2022 State of Remote Work, a small majority (52%) of folks who started working remotely due to COVID-19 say they feel less connected to their coworkersIn 2022, we’re diving back into more intentional team-building both asynchronously, synchronously, plus we’re planning the occasional in-person meetup where available. Here’s how we’re approaching all of these events and all of our current initiatives.Culture and connection: Who is responsible?Culture is a continual evolution at any company. While every team and individual contributes to the broader culture, the People team at Buffer is responsible for helping facilitate the processes and events for connection and engagement to thrive.Many other pieces feed into the larger, nebulous thing that is culture: values, company goals, events, internal communication, managers and so much more. That said, events and teammate connection are two of the main areas of focus for me going into 2022.Last year, the important but never-as-urgent work of team-building easily fell to the bottom of the list in the scheme of other projects.  Now, we’ve intentionally re-shifted a few of the larger roles within the People-Finance team to have more clear ownership. We hired a new teammate to focus completely on recruitment and hiring (hi, Janet!) and have optimized the existing strengths of our broader People-Finance team, to make my singular focus on culture and engagement.This was the first strategic decision we made to address our overall team engagement: someone has to be the designated “driver” of a more values-based culture of connection and engagement. Without clear ownership and burden on one or more individuals, the team can flounder.Remote workplace event philosophyIn 2022, we’re moving forward with initiatives of all categories: synchronous, asynchronous, in-person, and remote, plus, we’re getting more creative with how we hold those events and are looking to be as inclusive as possible of all timezones and personalities.We tend to approach projects with a mentality that there is no one-size-fits-all. Some of the things we try will work for some and not for others. Here’s how we break down event categories along with expectations are for attendance. Note: Our required events and timezone guidance are in flux as we experiment with different approaches.A screenshot of our internal event guidelinesBeing explicit about the attendance expectations helps to alleviate confusion and ensures we don’t ask too much of teammates — especially with a four-day workweek.Most of the initiatives we’re going to do in 2022 fall into the “extracurricular” category, as we have heard that most people can get their work done in four days, but that for about a quarter of the company, they regularly have to work a bit over the four days to get their work accomplished. We want to provide the opportunity to engage with the rest of the team, without adding additional work to their plates.The tried-and-true initiativesI’m the broken record when it comes to this: Pair calls and masterminds are invaluable. If teammates can make it work, we ask them to first give these a chance.Pair calls (casual, one-on-one chats)We love Donut for automating our rotating weekly one-on-one chats with a different teammate.Donut artificially creates those moments that would happen naturally if we were all located in the same office: You’d see someone in the hall, stop for 10-20 minutes, and catch up about life. Those moments don’t happen in a remote environment. You have to make them happen, and you have to create an expectation of team-wide participation.In the past few years, usage of this program has ebbed and flowed — and the general sentiment is that teammates love it but sometimes opt-out during busier periods of work expectations. We ask all new teammates to participate in this program, especially for the first 90 days of their onboarding.For 2022, we put all teammates into our #people-pairs channel and allowed them to opt-out individually. Pair calls take 20 to 30 minutes and are meant to be very light-weight and yet, they add up over time in a really powerful way.Masterminds (deeper connections)Masterminds are meant to create a deep bond with a teammate you don’t work with directly, but hopefully have some things in common — it’s a space to share successes, failures, life events. Some matches work great, others might take some time. Some partnerships last well past tenure at Buffer!Teammates are welcome to opt-out any time of masterminds for any reason, but we’ve seen clear data to show that when mastermind pairings work, it works very well. Here’s some of the feedback we’ve received in the past:“I’ve found that opening up with my buddy has helped me open up with my managers.”“Talking to someone outside of my team is really valuable for me.”“I think it’s been really helpful to have a designated space to share and grow with another Bufferoo who isn’t my manager or someone on my team.”“A great opportunity to connect with teammates and dive deeper into conversations that might not happen in a typical pair call.”New cultural initiatives for 2022SynchronousBuffer TED talksOne of our first experiments for 2022 is monthly TED-style/lunch-and-learn talks from amongst our teammates! These will be 20-minutes long and then we’ll have 10-20 minutes of optional hanging out after. We might also bring in external speakers for these. Each talk will then be shared with a recording and a space for comments for the conversation to continue asynchronously. We hope to build out a huge library of teammate talks.Specific groupsSome of our most successful team initiatives have been around specific, special-interest groups with a clear topic. Whereas whenever we have broad, open-invitation events, we see a very poor turnout. Book clubs and side-project discussions are two groups that we’ll encourage even more this year. These are two of the most active Slack channels we have, so it’s clear where the most passionate teammate conversations are happening, and beneficial to move those to a Zoom call.Monthly All-HandsWe’re moving to monthly All-Hands (compared to our quarterly cadence last year), which allows for more frequent touch-points and chances to see teammates on Zoom. Some of the most popular features of All-Hands meetings include small-group breakouts and unique teammate speakers.We’re planning to invite more external speakers, especially to support our DEI goals and initiatives. We’ll share a lot more on this approach in future posts.AsynchronousSlack as our team water coolerSlack continues to be our virtual water cooler and we have seen great success with recurring prompts to spark conversation in that channel.Weekly Slack prompts (that we’ve tried before and will do again!)In our water cooler channel, we use Donut’s feature to send out regular questionsIn our gratitude channel, we might ask What are you grateful for today?In our books channel, we might ask What are you currently reading? What book has made the most impact on your life?In a self-improvement channel, we might ask What are you working on about yourself lately?Donut prompt in SlackFor November 2021, we tried out a daily gratitude prompt (inspired by Passion Planner’s 21-day gratitude challenge) and ended up with really great discussions over the days we posted this in November.Screenshot from the gratitude challengeInternal podcast episodesAnother asynchronous initiative we are leveraging this year: regular, internal podcast episodes. We’re launching this in a lightweight, quick way, simply recording some of the existing conversations that already happen every week. We might iterate on a more polished version in the future, but for now, we want to share the latest thoughts on our exec’s team’s mind or share a profile of a teammate.Quick questions with teammatesIn the same theme as using audio and other asynchronous formats, we’ve done weekly “Quick Question” video interviews with new teammates (and some longer-tenured teammates!) in our weekly company newsletter.Here’s a sample with Dave and Lexi from our Advocacy team!0:00/1×Here’s Lexi and Dave from Buffer’s advocacy team answering some quick questionsIn-PersonRegional meetupsWhile this is very much in the early stages, we are exploring the model of regionally-based meetups and encouraging local gatherings for our company in 2022. This is in place of a company-wide, one-location meetup, which we feel is still a bit too difficult and unpredictable given international travel considerations.We’ll share a lot more coming up as this takes shape, but it’s a piece of the larger engagement puzzle as we look ahead.Over to YouWhen it comes to keeping a team of nearly 90 teammates spread out across the globe connected and engaged, there isn’t one solution or one easy approach. It takes time, intentionality, and team accountability. What have you tried with your team, or which of these would you like to learn more about? Send us a tweet!

How to Query a SQL Database:

Make sure that you have a database management application (ex. MySQL Workbench, Sequel Pro).
If not, download a database management application and work with your company to connect your database.
Understand your database and its hierarhcy.
Find out which fields are in your tables.
Begin writing a SQL query to pull your desired data.

Ever heard of SQL? You may have heard about it in the context of data analysis, but never thought it would apply to you as a marketer. Or, you may have thought, “That’s for the advanced data users. I could never do that.”
Well, you couldn’t be more wrong! The most successful marketers are data-driven, and one of the most important parts of being data-driven is collecting data from databases quickly. SQL is the most popular tool out there for doing just that.
If your company already stores data in a database, you may need to learn SQL to access the data. But not to worry — you’re in the right place to get started. Let’s jump right in.

Why Use SQL?
SQL (often pronounced like “sequel”) stands for Structured Query Language, and it’s used when companies have a ton of data that they want to manipulate. The beauty of SQL is that anyone working at a company that stores data in a relational database can use it. (And chances are, yours does.)
For example, if you work for a software company and want to pull usage data on your customers, you can do that with SQL. If you’re helping develop a website for an ecommerce company that has data about customer purchases, you can use SQL to find out which customers are purchasing which products. Of course, these are just a few of many possible applications.
Think about it this way: Have you ever opened a very large data set in Excel, only for your computer to freeze or even shut down? SQL allows you to access only certain parts of your data at a time so you don’t have to download all the data into a CSV, manipulate it, and possibly overload Excel. In other words, SQL takes care of the data analysis that you may be used to doing in Excel.
How to Write Simple SQL Queries
Before we begin, make sure you have a database management application that will allow you to pull data from your database. Some options include MySQL or Sequel Pro.
Start by downloading one of these options, then talk to your company’s IT department about how to connect to your database. The option you choose will depend on your product’s back end, so check with your product team to make sure you select the correct one.
Understand the hierarchy of your database
Next, it’s important to become accustomed to your database and its hierarchy. If you have multiple databases of data, you’ll need to hone in on the location of the data you want to work with.
For example, let’s pretend we’re working with multiple databases about people in the United States. Enter the query “SHOW DATABASES;”. The results may show that you have a couple of databases for different locations, including one for New England.
Within your database, you’ll have different tables containing the data you want to work with. Using the same example above, let’s say we want to find out which information is contained in one of the databases. If we use the query “SHOW TABLES in NewEngland;”, we’ll find that we have tables for each state in New England: people_connecticut, people_maine, people_massachusetts, people_newhampshire, people_rhodeisland, and people_vermont.
Finally, you need to find out which fields are in the tables. Fields are the specific pieces of data that you can pull from your database. For example, if you want to pull someone’s address, the field name may not just be “address” — it may be separated into address_city, address_state, address_zip. In order to figure this out, use the query “Describe people_massachusetts;”. This provides a list of all of the data that you can pull using SQL.
Let’s do a quick review of the hierarchy using our New England example:

Our database is: NewEngland.
Our tables within that database are: people_connecticut, people_maine, people_massachusetts, people_newhampshire, people_rhodeisland, and people_vermont.
Our fields within the people_massachusetts table include: address_city, address_state, address_zip, hair_color, age, first_name, and last_name.

Now, let’s write some simple SQL queries to pull data from our NewEngland database.
Basic SQL Queries
To learn how to write a SQL query, let’s use the following example:
Who are the people who have red hair in Massachusetts and were born in 2003 organized in alphabetical order?
SELECT
SELECT chooses the fields that you want displayed in your chart. This is the specific piece of information that you want to pull from your database. In the example above, we want to find the people who fit the rest of the criteria.
Here is our SQL query:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
;
FROM
FROM pinpoints the table that you want to pull the data from. In the earlier section, we learned that there were six tables for each of the six states in New England: people_connecticut, people_maine, people_massachusetts, people_newhampshire, people_rhodeisland, and people_vermont. Because we’re looking for people in Massachusetts specifically, we’ll pull data from that specific table.
Here is our SQL query:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
;
WHERE
WHERE allows you to filter a query to be more specific. In our example, we want to filter our query to include only people with red hair who were born in 2003. Let’s start with the red hair filter.
Here is our SQL query:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
WHERE
     hair_color = ‘red’
;
hair_color could have been part of your initial SELECT statement if you’d wanted to look at all of the people in Massachusetts along with their hair color. But if you want to filter to see only people with red hair, you can do so with a WHERE statement.
BETWEEN
Besides equals (=), BETWEEN is another operator you can use for conditional queries. A BETWEEN statement is true for values that fall between the specified minimum and maximum values.
In our case, we can use BETWEEN to pull records from a specific year, like 2003. Here’s the query:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
WHERE
     birth_date BETWEEN ‘2003-01-01’ AND ‘2003-12-31’
;
AND
AND allows you to add additional criteria to your WHERE statement. Remember, we want to filter by people who had red hair in addition to people who were born in 2003. Since our WHERE statement is taken up by the red hair criteria, how can we filter by a specific year of birth as well?
That’s where the AND statement comes in. In this case, the AND statement is a date property — but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. (Note: Check the format of your dates with your product team to make sure they are in the correct format.)
Here is our SQL query:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
WHERE
     hair_color = ‘red’
AND
     birth_date BETWEEN ‘2003-01-01’ AND ‘2003-12-31’
;
OR
OR can also be used with a WHERE statement. With AND, both conditions must be true to appear in results (e.g., hair color must be red and must be born in 2003). With OR, either condition must be true to appear in results (e.g., hair color must be red or must be born in 2003).
Here’s what an OR statement looks like in action:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
WHERE
     hair_color = ‘red’
OR
     birth_date BETWEEN ‘2003-01-01’ AND ‘2003-12-31’
;
NOT
NOT is used in a WHERE statement to display values in which the specified condition is untrue. If we wanted to pull up all Massachusetts residents without red hair, we can use the following query:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
WHERE NOT
     hair_color = ‘red’
;
ORDER BY
Calculations and organization also can be done within a query. That’s where the ORDER BY and GROUP BY functions come in. First, we’ll look at our SQL queries with the ORDER BY and then GROUP BY functions. Then, we’ll take a brief look at the difference between the two.
An ORDER BY clause allows you to sort by any of the fields that you have specified in the SELECT statement. In this case, let’s order by last name.
Here is our SQL query:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
WHERE
     hair_color = ‘red’
AND
     birth_date BETWEEN ‘2003-01-01’ AND ‘2003-12-31’
ORDER BY
     last_name
;
GROUP BY
GROUP BY is similar to ORDER BY, but aggregates data that has similarities. For example, if you have any duplicates in your data, you can use GROUP BY to count the number of duplicates in your fields.
Here is your SQL query:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
WHERE
     hair_color = ‘red’
AND
     birth_date BETWEEN ‘2003-01-01’ AND ‘2003-12-31′
GROUP BY
     last_name
;
ORDER BY VS. GROUP BY
To show the difference between an ORDER BY statement and a GROUP BY statement, let’s step outside our Massachusetts example briefly to look at a very simple dataset. Below is a list of four employees’ ID numbers and names.

If we were to use an ORDER BY statement on this list, the names of the employees would get sorted in alphabetical order. The result would look like this:

If we were to use a GROUP BY statement instead, the employees would be counted based on the number of times they appeared in the initial table. Note that Peter appeared twice in the initial table, so the result would look like this:

With me so far? Okay, let’s return to the SQL query we’ve been creating about red-haired people in Massachusetts who were born in 2003.
LIMIT
Depending on the amount of data you have in your database, it may take a long time to run your queries. This can be frustrating, especially if you’ve made an error in your query and now need to wait before continuing. If you want to test a query, the LIMIT function lets you limit the number of results you get.
For example, if we suspect there are thousands of people who have red hair in Massachusetts, we may want to test out our query using LIMIT before we run it in full to make sure we’re getting the information we want. Let’s say, for instance, we only want to see the first 100 people in our result.
Here is our SQL query:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
WHERE
     hair_color = ‘red’
AND
     birth_date BETWEEN ‘2003-01-01’ AND ‘2003-12-31’
ORDER BY
     last_name
LIMIT
     100
;
INSERT INTO
In addition to retrieving information from a relational database, SQL can also be used to modify the contents of a database. Of course, you’ll need permissions to make changes to your company’s data. But, in case you’re ever in charge of managing the contents of a database, we’ll share some queries you should know.
First is the INSERT INTO statement, which is for putting new values into your database. If we want to add a new person to the Massachusetts table, we can do so by first providing the name of the table we want to modify, and the fields within the table we want to add to. Next, we write VALUE with each respective value we want to add.
Here’s what that query could look like:
INSERT INTO
  people_massachusetts (address_city, address_state, address_zip, hair_color, age, first_name, last_name)
VALUES
  (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, blonde, 32, Jane, Doe)
;
Alternatively, if you are adding a value to every field in the table, you don’t need to specify fields. The values will be added to columns in the order that they are listed in the query.
INSERT INTO
  people_massachusetts
VALUES
  (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, blonde, 32, Jane, Doe)
;
If you only want to add values to specific fields, you must specify these fields. Say we only want to insert a record with first_name, last_name, and address_state — we can use the following query:
INSERT INTO
  people_massachusetts (first_name, last_name, address_state)
VALUES
  (Jane, Doe, Massachusetts)
;
UPDATE
If you want to replace existing values in your database with different values, you can use UPDATE. What if, for example, someone is recorded in the database as having red hair when they actually have brown hair? We can update this record with UPDATE and WHERE statements:
UPDATE
  people_massachusetts
SET
  hair_color = ‘brown’
WHERE
  first_name = ‘Jane’
AND
  last_name = ‘Doe’
;
Or, say there’s a problem in your table where some values for “address_state” appear as “Massachusetts” and others appear as “MA”. To change all instances of “MA” to “Massachusetts” we can use a simple query and update multiple records at once:
UPDATE
  people_massachusetts
SET
  address_state = ‘Massachusetts’
WHERE
   address_state = MA
;
Be careful when using UPDATE. If you don’t specify which records to change with a WHERE statement, you’ll change all values in the table.
DELETE
DELETE removes records from your table. Like with UPDATE, be sure to include a WHERE statement, so you don’t accidentally delete your entire table.
Or, if we happened to find several records in our people_massachusetts table who actually lived in Maine, we can delete these entries quickly by targeting the address_state field, like so:
DELETE FROM
  people_massachusetts
WHERE
  address_state = ‘maine’
;
Bonus: Advanced SQL Tips
Now that you’ve learned how to create a simple SQL query, let’s discuss some other tricks that you can use to take your queries up a notch, starting with the asterisk.
* (asterisk)
When you add an asterisk character to your SQL query, it tells the query that you want to include all the columns of data in your results.
In the Massachusetts example we’ve been using, we’ve only had two column names: first_name and last_name. But let’s say we had 15 columns of data that we want to see in our results — it would be a pain to type all 15 column names in the SELECT statement. Instead, if you replace the names of those columns with an asterisk, the query will know to pull all of the columns into the results.
Here’s what the SQL query would look like:
SELECT
     *
FROM
     people_massachusetts
WHERE
     hair_color = ‘red’
AND
     birth_date BETWEEN ‘2003-01-01’ AND ‘2003-12-31’
ORDER BY
     last_name
LIMIT
     100
;
% (percent symbol)
The percent symbol is a wildcard character, meaning it can represent one or more characters in a database value. Wildcard characters are helpful for locating records that share common characters. They are typically used with the LIKE operator to find a pattern in the data.
For instance, if we wanted to get the names of every person in our table whose zip code begins with “02”, we can write this query:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
WHERE
  address_zip LIKE ‘02%’
;
Here, “%” stands in for any group of digits that follow “02”, so this query turns up any record with a value for address_zip that begins with “02”.
LAST 30 DAYS
Once I started using SQL regularly, I found that one of my go-to queries involved trying to find which people took an action or fulfilled a certain set of criteria within the last 30 days.
Let’s pretend today is December 1, 2021. You could create these parameters by making the birth_date span between November 1, 2021 and November 30, 2021. That SQL query would look like this:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
WHERE
     hair_color = ‘red’
AND
     birth_date BETWEEN ‘2021-11-01’ AND ‘2021-11-30’
ORDER BY
     last_name
LIMIT
     100
;
But, that would require thinking about which dates cover the last 30 days, and you’d have to update this query constantly.
Instead, to make the dates automatically span the last 30 days no matter which day it is, you can type this under AND: birth_date >= (DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 30))
(Note: You’ll want to double-check this syntax with your product team because it may differ based on the software you use to pull your SQL queries.)
Your full SQL query would therefore look like this:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
WHERE
     hair_color = ‘red’
AND
     birth_date >= (DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 30))
ORDER BY
     last_name
LIMIT
     100
;
COUNT
In some cases, you may want to count the number of times that a criterion of a field appears. For example, let’s say you want to count the number of times the different hair colors appear for the people you are tallying up from Massachusetts. In this case, COUNT will come in handy so you don’t have to manually add up the number of people who have different hair colors or export that information to Excel.
Here’s what that SQL query would look like:
SELECT
     hair_color,
     COUNT(hair_color)
FROM
     people_massachusetts
AND
     birth_date BETWEEN ‘2003-01-01’ AND ‘2003-12-31′
GROUP BY
     hair_color
;
AVG
AVG calculates the average of an attribute in the results of your query, excluding NULL values (empty). In our example, we could use AVG to calculate the average age of Massachusetts residents in our query.
Here’s what our SQL query could look like:
SELECT
  AVG(age)
FROM
  people_massachusetts
;
SUM
SUM is another simple calculation you can do in SQL. It calculates the total value of all attributes from your query. So, if we wanted to add up all the ages of Massachusetts residents, we can use this query:
SELECT
  SUM(age)
FROM
  people_massachusetts
;
MIN and MAX
MIN and MAX are two SQL functions that give you the smallest and largest values of a given field. We can use it to identify the oldest and youngest members of our Massachusetts table:
This query will give us the record of the oldest:
SELECT
  MIN(age)
FROM
  people_massachusetts
;
And this query gives us the oldest:
SELECT
  MAX(age)
FROM
  people_massachusetts
;
JOIN
There may be a time when you need to access information from two different tables in one SQL query. In SQL, you can use a JOIN clause to do this.
(For those familiar with Excel formulas, this is similar to using the VLOOKUP formula when you need to combine information from two different sheets in Excel.)
Let’s say we have one table that has data of all Massachusetts residents’ user IDs and their birthdates. In addition, we have an entirely separate table containing all Massachusetts residents’ user IDs and their hair color.
If we want to figure out the hair color of Massachusetts residents born in the year 2003, we’d need to access information from both tables and combine them. This works because both tables share a matching column: user IDs.
Because we’re calling out fields from two different tables, our SELECT statement is also going to change slightly. Instead of just listing out the fields we want to include in our results, we’ll need to specify which table they’re coming from. (Note: The asterisk function may come in handy here so your query includes both tables in your results.)
To specify a field from a specific table, all we have to do is combine the name of the table with the name of the field. For example, our SELECT statement would say “table.field” — with the period separating the table name and the field name.
We’re also assuming a few things in this case:

The Massachusetts birthdate table includes the following fields: first_name, last_name, user_id, birthdate
The Massachusetts hair color table includes the following fields: user_id, hair_color

Your SQL query would therefore look like:
SELECT
     birthdate_massachusetts.first_name,
     birthdate_massachusetts.last_name
FROM
     birthdate_massachusetts JOIN haircolor_massachusetts USING (user_id)
WHERE
     hair_color = ‘red’
AND
     birth_date BETWEEN ‘2003-01-01’ AND ‘2003-12-31’
ORDER BY
     last_name
;
This query would join the two tables using the field “user_id” which appears in both the birthdate_massachusetts table and the haircolor_massachusetts table. You’re then able to see a table of people born in 2003 who have red hair.
CASE
Use a CASE statement when you want to return different results to your query based on which condition is met. Conditions are evaluated in order. Once a condition is met, the corresponding result is returned and all following conditions are skipped over.
You can include an ELSE condition at the end in case no conditions are met. Without an ELSE, the query will return NULL if no conditions are met.
Here’s an example of using CASE to return a string based on the query:
SELECT
     first_name,
     last_name
FROM
     people_massachusetts
CASE
  WHEN hair_color = ‘brown’ THEN ‘This person has brown hair.’
  WHEN hair_color = ‘blonde’ THEN ‘This person has blonde hair.’
  WHEN hair_color = ‘red’ THEN ‘This person has red hair.’
  ELSE ‘Hair color not known.’
END
;
Basic SQL Queries Marketers Should Know
Congratulations. you’re ready to run your own SQL queries! While there’s a lot more you can do with SQL, I hope you found this overview of the basics helpful so you can get your hands dirty. With a strong foundation of the basics, you’ll be able to navigate SQL better and work toward some of the more complex examples.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 25 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.