Category: Marketing Automation

SEO. While this is a strategy we’ve been aware of for a while, did you know that 89% of marketers say SEO is successful?
And since more than 50 percent of all website traffic comes from organic search and 93 percent of online experiences begin with a search engine, it’s not surprising.

However, what do upmarket companies, with thousands of web pages and keywords, do when they’re in the maturation phase of implementing SEO?
Instead of focusing on the small business and mid-market SEO strategies, they’ll need to begin focusing on enterprise SEO.
In this post, let’s review what enterprise SEO is, what tools to use, and what it looks like in practice.

What makes enterprise SEO different?
The main difference between small business/mid-market SEO and enterprise SEO strategies is that the tactics for larger organizations need to be scalable for thousands of web pages.
While a small business or mid-market company might have a few pages, or a couple hundred, larger organizations have thousands of web pages on their site. And it makes sense that the strategies that work for a small number of pages might not necessarily work for larger sites.
Why is enterprise SEO important?
Enterprise SEO is important because strategies that work for smaller businesses won’t work for larger ones.
One of the main strategic differences between the two is that small businesses usually aren’t targeting highly competitive, short tail keywords, while larger enterprise organizations are.
Additionally, larger companies need a specialized enterprise SEO team to keep track and maintain organic rankings. At smaller companies, the person in charge of SEO is usually also the content marketer and might even be in charge of social media.
When you’re targeting more competitive keywords, and have thousands of pages on your site, you need a dedicated team working on your SEO, instead of one jack-of-all-trades that’s spread too thin.
If you’ve worked at companies and felt like SEO just wasn’t working for you, it’s probably because you didn’t have a dedicated team with experts when your company needed it.
Enterprise SEO will benefit large organizations because their SEO issues will be more complex due to the number of web pages on the site, the number of backlinks already acquired, domain authority already acquired, etc.
As a larger site, enterprise companies usually have great brand authority. But that means you can’t undermine that authority by deleting or redirecting pages that have acquired backlinks and high page authority. You also need to keep this content up to date and fresh. And as you can imagine, the larger the company, the harder that is.
Ultimately, enterprise SEO needs to be smarter, scalable, and more sophisticated.
Now that we know why enterprise SEO is important, let’s discuss some of the more sophisticated strategies you’ll need to implement as a larger company.

1. Maintain page speed.
One of the technical SEO elements that becomes more complex with larger sites is maintaining page speed.
First, you’ll need to test your website speed with a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to see how quickly your website loads for users.
Then, to improve the page speed of individual pages you can compress images, reduce redirects, and cache your web pages.
2. Group content in subdomains.
Another strategy for enterprise SEO is to group your content into subdomains.
A subdomain is a type of website hierarchy under a root directory, but instead of using folders to organize content on a website, it kind of gets a website of its own.
This subdomain is still closely associated with the root directory, but it will usually have a separate content management system, template, analytics tools, and more.
See the image below to get an idea:

This is helpful for enterprise SEO because subdomains can house a lot of content that would be difficult to manage all on one website.
While some SEO experts believe that Google’s crawlers could confuse a subdomain for an entirely different website from the main domain, others say its crawlers can recognize subdomains as extensions of parent domains.
Essentially, subdomains lead to a better user experience, which could result in better engagement rates, therefore improving your SEO. Ultimately, you’ll have to decide what works best for your company and have your enterprise SEO team discuss what would be best.
3. Refresh old content, but protect domain authority and backlinks.
One of the challenges for enterprise SEO teams is keeping content up to date, accurate, and refreshed for current industry standards.
However, you don’t want to delete old content that has high page authority and backlinks. Instead, you’ll want to refresh your content, while balancing the line of adding new information, without taking away secondary keywords that content is ranking for.
With an enterprise company, refreshing content is a delicate process. But it also needs to be scalable for your SEO team to find out which pages need to be updated and what would make them more competitive. The entire point of enterprise SEO is to have a process that’s scalable.
4. Quality content creation at scale.
Of course with SEO, quality content creation is one of the most important components of your site.
Again, on an enterprise level, this needs to be scalable for your SEO team to find new keywords to rank for and handoff to a content creation team.
Usually, your enterprise SEO team will choose target keywords and give writers guidelines on how to make the post competitive, whether that’s including secondary keywords, tips on image alt-text, including snippets, etc.
To implement enterprise SEO, you’ll need a team that is dedicated to creating content instructions and doing keyword research at scale.
5. Strategic keyword selection.
As we’ve been talking about, keyword selection becomes more difficult the more you’ve written about a topic. Sometimes it can feel like you’ve said everything there is to say.
That’s why you need a dedicated enterprise SEO team to conduct regular keyword research and content gap analysis to find new topics to write about.
6. Automation.
So we’ve talked a lot about doing things “at scale.” But how can you do that? One of the best ways for an enterprise SEO team to scale its processes is to use automation.
Automation can help with SEO tasks like keyword research, identifying problematic areas on your site, monitoring the quality of backlinks, analyzing title tags and meta descriptions, and more.
Additionally, you can use workflows to simplify project management. With larger organizations, you might have several locations with distinct websites and SEO needs. This means that your SEO teams should be using the same workflows so the process is scalable.
7. Don’t forget about technical SEO.
Besides page speed, there are more technical SEO elements that your enterprise SEO team will need to manage.
This means that your SEO team will need a scalable process for using 301 redirects, eliminating technical issues that hamper crawlability, etc.
8. Link building.
Again, one of the most important elements of SEO is link building. On an enterprise level, this becomes more complex (as does everything, I suppose).
The more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google. You can use outreach strategies to find unlinked mentions and request to turn the mention into a backlink.
Additionally, you can always do cold outreach as well if you find articles where your site naturally fits. As a larger company, you’ll have the benefit of already having brand authority and recognizability.
9. Internal pillar/cluster content linking.
Another SEO task that will need to be done at scale is internal pillar and cluster content linking. Your enterprise SEO team could either find these internal links for your content creators during the keyword research process or could advise your writers to link to the pillar and any necessary internal content.
10. Create templates for your pages.
When creating new pages for your site, SEO plays a large role. That’s why your team can create templates that your developers can replicate over and over again in line with enterprise SEO needs.
So, now you might be wondering, “What does this look like in action?” Let’s look at some examples below.
Enterprise SEO Examples
1. HubSpot

HubSpot is a great example of enterprise SEO because while we might not have the same amount of employees as other big tech companies, we have over 35,000 pages on our site.
Additionally, our site ranks on the first page of several hundred thousand keywords, and in position 1 for over 30,000 keywords.
Because of the number of pages and keywords we target, this means that we need a highly specialized, dedicated enterprise SEO team to focus on backlinks, comarketing, technical SEO, and to protect our domain authority.
With enterprise SEO, we need to be careful about updating keywords on content that has high domain authority while keeping our content fresh and updated.
2. GitHub

GitHub has an estimated 81 million pages on its site. And the impressive part is that it ranks in position 1 on Google for over 80,000 keywords.
This means that the company is able to manage its site in bulk and focus on maintaining old pages, while still earning links to reinforce its organic rankings for hundreds of thousands of keywords.
3. Microsoft

Enterprise company Microsoft has more than 8 million pages on its site. With several varying products, it’s no surprise that the company ranks on the first page for over 1 million keywords. Additionally, it ranks in the number 1 position for over 450,000 keywords.
A major difficulty with Microsoft’s enterprise SEO is that the team is targeting very different types of keywords because of the variety of products. And they need to protect their domain authority across several industries from business tools to video gaming consoles.
The Future of Enterprise SEO
For large organizations, enterprise SEO is the future. To protect current domain authority and backlinks, while keeping content fresh and updated on thousands of pages, you’ll need a dedicated, sophisticated team of experts.
This means an enterprise SEO team will focus on strategizing how to enhance content, working on comarketing, attaining backlinks and protecting those backlinks, and more. The more pages your site has, the harder and more complex it becomes to maintain your SEO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few weeks ago, I appeared for the Salesforce Certified User Experience Designer Certification exam and – Yay – Passed! After I announced on the Social Media that I am now a Certified User Experience Designer, lots of people messaged me to ask about my expeirence and how to prepare for
The post User Experience (UX) Designer A Must Have Certificate for all Savvy Salesforce Professionals! appeared first on Automation Champion.

Back in 2015, we launched our first social media calendar. We were so excited to bring a new way of planning and scheduling to Buffer, and it proved to be a favorite feature among customers.Since then, Buffer has changed a lot. We’ve re-designed our interface and added new planning features, like Stories Scheduling, Campaigns, and Hashtag Manager. Inevitably, our calendar started to feel a little dated and out-of-sync with the rest of Buffer. It even began living on a completely separate codebase, which made it difficult for engineers to make updates and fixes.
What started as a quiet call for improvements became a chorus of feedback from customers. In fact, the word “calendar” has appeared a whopping 247 times in our feature request form since the start of 2020.
The most common theme? Having all social media channels visible in one global calendar view. Here are a few examples:
So, our design team got to work; interviewing customers, looking at existing usage patterns, and digging deeper into the ideal experience. This is how we summed it up in our design brief:
Which brings us to today, many prototypes later, launching a brand new calendar experience that’s available on free and paid Buffer plans.
Let’s take a closer look!
Total planning visibility
The new calendar sits within your publishing dashboard and you can access it from the menu on the left-hand side of the dashboard. You can choose between a weekly or monthly view.
The weekly view shows you the key details of each post you’ve scheduled for the week; the channel to which it is scheduled, a preview of the text, and a thumbnail of your image.
The monthly view gives you a higher-level snapshot of the month with timestamps for every scheduled post. It’s a great way to spot and fill gaps in your strategy.
If you want to exclude certain channels from the calendar, you can use the Channels dropdown to choose which channels are shown.
To add a new post to your calendar use the Create Post button. This will pop open the composer, where you can choose the scheduled time. Note: we’re currently exploring other ways to add and rearrange posts; for example by clicking on a timeslot and dragging and dropping. We’d love to hear whether this is important to you!
Check your calendar anywhere, anytime
The new calendar is built into our iOS and Android apps. It’s the quickest way to stay in sync with everything you have scheduled and add content on the go.
Much more to come
We’re excited to hear your feedback and to add more power to the new calendar. What should we add next? How can we make it twice as good? We have some ideas, including:

Dragging and dropping posts around the calendar.
Creating a post by clicking on a timeslot.
Viewing and filtering Campaigns.

Share your thoughts
Excited about the new calendar? Have some ideas for us? Send us a tweet @buffer or use the Share Feedback button we’ve added right above the new calendar in your Buffer dashboard.

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In the marketing industry, we talk a lot about reader engagement and quality content creation, but when it comes to email marketing the first step to reaching your audience — and one that should be continuously repeated — is building your list. After all, if nobody receives your emails, the quality of the content included…
The post Email Marketing Success: How to Create and Build Your Email List appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Love learning about business and how some of today’s most successful entrepreneurs and companies are operating? Business podcasts serve as a great way to stay informed (and inspired) on the happenings.
All you need is your smartphone and a pair of headphones to tune in to everything from one-on-one interviews with today’s top leaders to recaps of the day’s most pressing business news.
So whether you’re a seasoned executive looking for something to listen to during your commute or just someone who’s always itching to learn something new, this list of the best business podcasts is for you. From Kai Ryssdals’ Marketplace to Tim Ferriss’ self-titled collection of wisdom, the following seven business podcasts will teach how to strategize, lead, and grow your business. 

12 Best Business Podcasts
1. iDigress Podcast

Troy Sandidge, host of iDigress Podcast, has a track record of generating over $100M for various business ventures. He’ll use his experience to expertly guide you through the world of marketing, moving you away from confusion and towards the techniques and tools that will help you forge a path to business success. iDigress is a great fit for all marketers seeking across the board advice, from how to identify a business direction to finding clarity in your messaging. 
Episodes are 30 minutes or less, making it a great snackable podcast for on-the-go listening. 

 
2. Radical Candor

Radical Candor is all about how to succeed at work without sacrificing your humanity and happiness. Amy Sandler hosts discussions about why it’s important to have honest communication when working (with yourself, management, and coworkers), and how honesty will help you build relationships that will lift you up and help you succeed. 
Topics discussed on the podcast include how to have candid conversations at work, how managers and business leaders can create a culture of guidance and feedback, and how to stand up for yourself in the workplace. 

3. Duct Tape Marketing Podcast

Duct Tape Marketing Podcast features interviews with expert authors and thought leaders who share actionable business marketing tips and resources. As a listener, you’ll learn about various topics like how to maintain happiness at work and best-practices for retaining customers. Fast Company named this podcast “One of the Best Podcasts for Business-Savvy Listeners.”

 
4. The Goal Digger Podcast

Jenna Kutcher, host of The Goal Digger Podcast, is an experienced educator and digital marketer. Described as a live workshop, the show helps businesspeople learn first-hand about how to define their own personal success and chase after their dreams. 
Topics covered include productivity hacks, creating business pitches, improving your website’s SEO, social media tips, and how to build the job of your dreams. Kutcher is often joined by notable guests and industry experts, like entrepreneur Lori Harder.

 
5. CodePen Radio

CodePen is an online tool for web developers to test HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code snippets. Hosted by CodePen employees, CodePen Radio contains personal stories about successes and failures they’ve come across when scaling their company. It’s great for professionals in the software industry, as you’ll gain valuable insight into everything involved in starting and maintaining a web software business. 

 
6. Choose Inclusion

Three hosts, Mike Hess, Nina Baliga, and UB Ciminieri, have authentic and honest conversations about the different ways diversity, equity, and inclusion impact businesses. It’s a great listen for all professionals as they discuss everything from developing a DEI program at your own business to being an active participant in workplace events. 

 
7. The MarTech Podcast

The MarTech Podcast, hosted by Benjamin Shapiro, shares the stories of marketers and the different ways they use technology to achieve growth and business success. Each episode features a different business leader and marketing professional, making it suitable for listeners in all industries. All guests provide insight into MarTech best practices through real-life experiences and recommend tools and tips for success. 

 
8. Brown Ambition

Brown Ambition Podcast features financial advice from two professional finance reporters, Mandi Woodruff-Santos and Tiffany Aliche. Listeners can leverage the host’s experience and learn how to make smart career choices that contribute to financial success personally and in business. 
The hosts also tackle issues commonly faced by communities of color, acting as a resource for groups often left out of financial wellness conversations. They also have entire Q&A episodes dedicated to answering listener questions, helpful for those with a unique situation they want advice about. 

 
9. Happiness At Work

Happiness At Work is an interview-based podcast featuring authors, entrepreneurs, coaches, and leading industry experts that discuss, well, happiness at work. 
It is great for business professionals looking to create a better work-life balance or those simply looking to maintain their happiness levels on the job. As a listener, you’ll learn actionable tips for creating a positive and uplifting workplace culture and the benefits it brings to the workplace. The best summary of the show comes from the creators themselves — “We believe that happiness at work should be the ‘norm’ and not the exception.”

 
10. Inclusion Works

Inclusion Works focuses on discussing the importance of creating a workplace culture that is inclusive to all communities. Hosts speak to seasoned DEI business professionals, like Jiquanda Nelson and Margot Slattery, who provide actionable advice on DEI strategies that work and help businesses thrive. 

 
11. HBR IdeaCast

HBR IdeaCast is a weekly podcast that features notable leaders in business and business management. Rotating hosts give listeners a different experience, and topics range from workplace innovation and productivity to creating a better work-life balance to managing employees. Running between 20 and 30 minutes, episodes are snackable and easy to consume on-the-go, or during work breaks where you’re looking to decompress. 

 
12. TED Business

TED Business is a great podcast for high-quality snackable business content. Host Modupe Akinola talks listeners through getting a promotion, setting realistic goals, and forming positive workplace relationships. You’ll leave with actionable tips for forging your path, as, at the end of every show, Akinola gives a mini-lesson on how to apply the tips discussed within the episode. 

Ready to Listen?
Select the show that best fits your needs, and start listening from wherever you are, whenever you want.