Category: Marketing Automation

The quality of your CRM data impacts your entire organization, bottom to top.
Your marketing teams rely on quality data to segment contacts, personalize messaging, and create targeted campaigns.
Your sales teams require accurate data to speak to your prospects’ biggest concerns.
Your customer support team needs accurate data for context in conversations with customers. Finance teams need accurate customer data for forecasting. Even your executive team relies on accurate CRM data for strategic decision-making.
Most organizations know this. Yet, bad data costs U.S. companies as much as $3 trillion per year, and up to 60% of organizations do not calculate the true cost of their bad data.
That signals that there is a lot of room for improvement in data maintenance in many companies. Companies of any size would be impacted by that much inaccurate data in their customer database, although they may be unaware of just how painful the impact may be, with many of the day-to-day issues flying under the radar.
That much “bad” data represents a huge problem for your marketing teams in particular. How do you speak to your customers’ biggest concerns if you can’t be sure that you know exactly who they are and what they care about? You need accurate, reliable data to be confident in your assertions.
Today, companies often lean too heavily on manual work to fix data issues, which can be extremely time-consuming and draining for your teams. Relying on your employees to export data, fix it in Excel using complicated formulas, and import it back into your CRM issue-free is a big ask.
Let’s consider how poor data quality impacts your marketing teams, slowing them down and giving them less creative options when launching new campaigns.

Impact of Data Quality On Your Marketing Efforts
While the impact of poor customer data quality is felt throughout your organization, it has an especially volatile impact on your marketing teams.
Everything that a marketing team does — every strategy employed, campaign launched, messaging delivered, & creative produced — is influenced by customer data. Or at least it should be.
That’s what great marketing teams do — understand their customers deeply and speak directly to them in a way that resonates. You can’t do that if you don’t know them, and you can’t be sure that you know them if you can’t rely on your data.
Let’s look at some of the specific ways that data issues and low-quality data can impact your marketing teams.
Segmentation
A big piece of any marketer’s job is segmentation. Or, the practice of analyzing long lists of customers and breaking them down into smaller lists so that you can more reliably speak to each segment’s concerns.
You wouldn’t market your B2B software product in the same way to both CEOs and Marketing Managers, even though both might be targeted buyer personas for your product. They have different needs and concerns. If you try, the language that you use will never fully resonate with both.
So you break things down. You make the list of people that you are speaking to smaller and more manageable. Then, you can use specific language that will resonate with that segment. But if your data isn’t reliable, you can’t effectively segment it down into those smaller groups.
Marketers cannot properly segment contacts with inconsistent data. With inconsistencies, creating even basic campaigns becomes a complicated analysis effort that requires experts on hand that understand all of the nuances. As a result, it prevents marketers from creating effective campaigns and impedes their ability to execute quickly.
Let’s consider an example. Let’s say you’re a B2B software company, and you want to send out an email campaign to CEOs in your HubSpot CRM.
If you aren’t regularly standardizing and formatting your job title field data, you’ll find that CEOs are listed in your database in many different ways:

CEO
C.E.O.
Chief Executive Officer
Founder/CEO
Founder & CEO
Owner and CEO
Etc.

And there are likely to be many other variations as well.
To run a thorough campaign, you need to bring all of these different job titles together, as they are all effectively the same title. To do this, you’ll need to either run some creative Excel formulas, create complicated search filters to “catch” all the relevant titles, or enlist the help of a developer. Either way, you are still unlikely to catch every single error in the field.
This doesn’t even include typos and other errors in your data, either. Some people might be listed as “CEOn” or have job titles listed that include other data issues. And these standardization and data quality issues can potentially impact your entire database.
For instance, this standardization problem wouldn’t only affect CEOs, but every job title in your database. Or, what if you wanted to segment your CRM contacts by city, country, area code, or years of experience? Data issues are present in every field.
Every data point in your database has a host of potential issues that could impact your ability to segment your contacts and deliver effective campaigns that meet your KPI goals.
Data issues make your segmentation efforts complicated and unreliable. Ultimately your marketing teams will be forced to segment less often and less creatively until the issues are rectified.
Personalization
Data issues will also impact your ability to personalize your messaging as well. And personalized messages are critical for successful campaigns.
80% of consumers are more likely to purchase a brand that provides personalized experiences. 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging.
Your ability to personalize messaging is critical and relies on high-quality, consistent data in your CRM. Have you ever received an email and had your name uncapitalized, or been mistakenly referred to by your last name?
Inherently, you probably know that this is a simple data oversight. They didn’t mean to refer to you by your last name. But it does still impact your feelings about the company in question, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s not intentionally rude, but it’s unprofessional to keep your customer data in disarray.
And it’s not just about {FirstName} or {JobTitle} either, although those are important. True, deep personalization may not reference the data so directly, but use conclusions drawn from that data to guide your messaging.
For example, one common personalization issue that arises out of CRM data problems comes from associations. In HubSpot CRM, your B2B contacts are associated with companies.
If that association was missing and a portion of your contacts were free-floating, that would make it impossible to execute account-based marketing strategies. Additionally, personalizing the message based on account engagement becomes difficult when you are missing data.
Inconsistent associations also contribute to inaccurate lead scores in account-based marketing. Because scores are applied on the account level, based on variables for the independent contacts within the account, missing contacts will impact the account scores. Ultimately, the difference in lead scoring could affect the lifecycle stage of the entire account, slowing its movement through your pipeline and potentially derailing a deal.  
Customer Experience
Issues with segmentation and personalization ultimately impact the experience that customers have during their customer journey. With less specific marketing messaging that is less likely to resonate, their experiences and opinion of your brand will suffer.
92% of marketing professionals see personalization as a “crucial” element of the customer experience. And personalization often relies on your ability to segment customer data effectively to deliver relevant messaging. All of these impacts are interconnected, hurting your entire marketing operation.
Duplicate data, for instance, presents a customer experience issue that can potentially harm your brand reputation. If you don’t regularly merge duplicates, many of your customers will receive your messaging multiple times. This drives up the costs of your campaigns, harms your brand reputation, and makes your reporting less reliable.
Deduplication helps achieve a single customer view, which is when your data on your contacts and accounts can all be reliably found in one system. Having one single ‘record of truth’ means that your marketing teams can effectively segment and personalize communications. A single customer view provides your teams with faith in your data, allowing them to focus their attention on other areas.
The quality of your data impacts customers every step of the way. Without reliable data, each of those touchpoints is cheapened. Less data, or less reliable data, limits what can be used and what your teams know about each contact. Across months and dozens of touchpoints, that adds up.  
The only way for companies to fix these issues is to recognize and embrace data management strategy and regular CRM data maintenance.
What is CRM data maintenance?
CRM data maintenance is the ongoing process of auditing your CRM data, identifying issues, and fixing those issues within your database.
The larger process of maintaining your CRM data can be broken down into numerous focus areas, including:

Data Quality
Data Cleansing
Data Operations
Data Deduplication
Data Purging
Data Monitoring and KPIs

Data Quality
Data quality refers to data that is accessible, consistent, and relevant. Your entire organization is impacted by the quality of your data — from individual campaigns through larger strategic decisions.
Accessible means not only that the data is accurate, but that the right people within your organization can access it when they need it. Siloed data creates bureaucratic redundancies that slow your organization down.
Data consistency largely refers to how consistently data is formatted and standardized in your database. Are your phone numbers formatted uniformly? Are your job titles standardized? Are your contact names appropriately capitalized? Consistency allows you to slice and dice data in interesting ways.
Then there is relevance. It doesn’t matter if you have a million perfectly accurate records in your CRM if none of them are in your target market. The data that you collect must be relevant to be useful.
Data quality is achieved through other data maintenance processes like data cleansing.
Data Cleansing
Data cleansing is the process of fixing or removing incorrect, improperly formatted, duplicate, or incomplete data within your CRM.

Fixing first and last name capitalization issues (jane vs. Jane)
Standardizing addresses and phone numbers (1234567890 vs 123-456-7890)
Standardizing Job titles (CEO vs. C.E.O vs. Chief Executive Officer)
Removing redundant data
Removing incorrect and fake data
Removing special characters
Identifying and fixing outlying issues

The process of cleansing data can be time-consuming. Often it involves breaking out chunks of your database and assigning fixes and tasks to members of your team. Then, they will load the data into Excel and use VLOOKUP and complicated formulas to identify and fix errors in your data. Once complete, the data has to be reimported back into your CRM.
It’s a non-exact process. Unless you have a true Excel wizard on your team, you’re likely to miss many issues and still require ongoing help from developers to update data in bulk.
Data Deduplication
All companies deal with duplicate data. Duplicate contact or company records might be created through manual entry, either by your customers into forms or by your team through your backend CRM. Or, they may be created through data imports or integrations with other software.
No matter how duplicate records are created, they can be a thorn in the side of your marketing team.
Duplicate data leads to increased campaign costs and lost productivity. As your teams spend time ironing out data issues instead of focusing on other areas, leading to missed opportunities. Every second they spend sifting through records to identify the “correct” or most complete record is wasted time. Duplicate data shatters your single customer view, as there is no single ‘source of truth’ that can be relied on.
When you have high duplication rates, your marketing teams will always be aware of that fact. They know that they will have to deduplicate any list of prospects or customers before new campaigns go out, adding a new task to every campaign launch.
Most critically, duplicate data harms the customer experience. Not just because they are likely to receive mixed messages and redundant messaging. But because your ability to understand them will be halved throughout the customer lifecycle, leading to less fulfilling interactions over and over again.
Data Operations
Data operations encompasses the ongoing day-to-day tasks that are required to maintain your CRM data and ensure the usability of that data across your organization.
Data operations tasks include day-to-day bulk updating of data, consolidating fields and redundant data, migrating free-text fields to picklists, importing data (from events or third-party sources), and other tasks.
These tasks are a necessity for high-quality data, and for putting your data in a position where data cleansing can be as effective as possible.
Data Purging
Data purging encompasses the removal of garbage data, outdated data, redundant data, and low-quality data that will only serve to clutter up your database and negatively impact your reputation and email open rates.
There are many types of data issues that could potentially make records a good candidate for purging. Examples include:

Undelivered emails
Clearly fake data
Outdated records
Unqualified prospects
Bad records from integrations
Incomplete Contact Data
Free and role-based email addresses
Unengaged contacts
Unqualified contacts
Duplicate contacts

Purging this data is critical for improving the usability of your CRM data as a whole. Without having to continually sift through and remove garbage data for campaigns, your productivity will improve.
Without clutter, you’ll be able to keep costs down on data storage and contact-based CRM fees, along with the time that your teams would usually spend dealing with the purged records.
Without low-quality data dragging down your email delivery and open rates, you’ll avoid being penalized and enjoy an improved sender reputation.
Data Monitoring and KPIs
To fix issues in your CRM database, you’ll need to be able to identify where those issues lie. Between the different data issues that you’ll find in your database, understanding what those issues are and what kind of issues there are helps you to prioritize fixing the most impactful problems.
Of course, you could monitor your KPIs and generate reports manually. But that involves running reports or exporting data to Excel and analyzing it. However, some tools can automate diagnostics and collections KPIs.
For example, the CRM Data Grader is a tool that connects directly to HubSpot, analyzes the CRM database, and surfaces specific issues that you need to fix. This ensures you have visibility into the quality of your data and actionable insights for dealing with those issues.  
Having a clear key performance indicator, such as the percentage of clean records in your database, allows you to track your progress and quickly assess the overall health of your customer data.
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Differences Data Maintenance and Standard Cleanup Projects
Standard data cleanup projects are short-term and tactical. You find a fire, you put it out. Data cleanup projects are reactive because they have to be. Sometimes unexpected data issues can grind things to a halt and need to be fixed immediately. Those needs will always be there, but less often with a data maintenance strategy.
Unlike one-off cleanup projects, data maintenance is an ongoing strategy. It requires consistent investment and attention, but with the help of modern data management tools you can automate a majority of your data maintenance tasks, improving operations across your teams.
As your customer data grows, management of that data becomes more complicated. It requires more focus and planning to ensure your data is accessible, consistent, and relevant.
As this happens, companies tend to move through several stages on their way toward true data maintenance optimization:

Undefined and chaotic. No understanding of issues and no processes in place to deal with them.

Visibility. Aware of data-related problems have visibility into the specific problems in their database, with reporting generated automatically regularly.

Standardization. Established data quality standards and alignment among cross-functional teams about data expectations and goals. To execute effectively, standards need to be enforced automatically.

Optimization. Employ automation to proactively cleanse and maintain data, avoid repetitive manual work, streamline data corrections and collaboration, alert about exceptions.

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Data maintenance isn’t something that you do once and then never again. This process is something that you’ll need to do over and over again. You need accurate documentation and processes in place to minimize your time investment.
New data is always flowing into your CRM database, and with that data will come a range of issues and errors that have the potential to slow down nearly every team in your organization. Tools like Insycle help you to audit your existing data, identify common data issues, and fix them on an automated set schedule.
Improving your CRM data maintenance processes enable your marketing teams to produce more marketing qualified leads through improved segmentation, personalization, and nurturing.
Quality data means that you can represent your brand professionally in all communications with customers while improving their experience throughout the customer lifecycle.

If you’re a blogger looking to start doing more sponsored posts, you may want to check out the different blogging networks. These websites offer a place to apply for sponsored post opportunities in an easy way. While you may only secure a few of the many opportunities you apply for, it can be a great way to get your foot in the door with sponsored content. You have control over the topic of the posts and the way they are promoted through the blog. The website has the tools you need to create a content piece, and have a good understanding of the search engine best practices that are in place. For those of you looking for a place to run your own paid campaigns, these platforms do a good job of helping you set up a budget. Most of the blogging networks allow you to control the keywords and how they are displayed in the campaign. This makes your campaign easier to manage and it gives you a good foundation to build from. These are all great opportunities to make money online without having to worry about getting your sponsored posts approved or running ads. All of these sites offer you their tools and resources, so you can build your own campaign or create an existing one. Some allow you to create unlimited campaigns, this will give you the control you need. All of these websites also offer you tools to help you research your audience and the competition. These are all great opportunities to find the best traffic generation method for your site. As you run your paid campaign on these sites, the resources will help you track your results so you can keep track of your leads, conversions and sales. There are many blog networks available, and you can use some of these sites to create your own resources. You can use these resources to publish articles, videos, embed tweets and more. All of these will help you build a resource website that can help you in your quest to build back links and revenue online. One of these websites will offer you the tools you need to develop an article website, and you can use this to post your resources on other sites. These sites will give you the tools to run an advertising campaign and publish your resources in the network. Again you will have the opportunity to track your results and publish reports online. A blogging network is also a great place to make money by writing and publishing ads. You can create a landing page that links to your resources and publish your ads to the network. This will get your ads indexed quickly, and you will have access to paid ad placement. Once you post your ads, you will be indexed and ranked in the search engines. Your ad will also be published on the page of the blog network that you are posting ads to. Your ads will be indexed and ranked on that page. Your resources will be published on every blog in the network. You will get exposure and traffic to your resources. This tactic works, but requires a lot of effort. This is a more manual process. You may also want to consider outsourcing this process. You can get services to post your resources to other blog networks or to article sites. There are a number of tactics for building your resources. Many of these can be automated so you can focus on other aspects of your business. You can automate these tasks to get your resources out on the web. In these instances you may prefer to pay a service that will manage your resources. Again this is something you will need to consider in your business. The most important thing is that you make sure you build and have published your resources on high ranking sites. These are high ranking because they are published in the network, and they will help you in your quest to build back links. It’s important that you build links to your resources and articles and videos. Your resource may have a higher Page rank because they are published on a page that has a high Page rank. Page rank helps you get more traffic to your resources and resources can help you get more traffic to your website. Again you want to be sure that your resources and articles are published in the right networks and that they are published with the right anchor text links. These links are also helpful for your on page optimization and for your search engine optimization. Your resources and your articles need to be good quality. There should be a good volume of high quality backlinks to your resources and to your website. This is the way to get better search rankings. Page rank is important to your business because it’s the measure by which you will get more traffic to your website. It’s important to your business to have a higher Page rank. Your website needs to be a good resource. You want to get links from high Page rank sites. If you are not a high Page rank site then you don’t get many backlinks from that site. The more backlinks that you get the better you will be in the search engines. Google will assign more weight to your back links from a page that is a high Page rank. Your website needs to be a good resource. You want to make sure that your resources and your articles are good quality. The content of your resources needs to be good quality. This is very important. This will help you in getting links from high Page rank sites. And the link between your website and those high Page rank sites will be very good. Page rank is important in any online business and it is important to see that your website is good quality. When you are doing SEO you want your website to be indexed well by Google. Your website needs to be good quality. When you are doing SEO you want your article to be optimized well. You want your website to be a good resource. P.S. My goal is to help provide the best information I can. I do not participate in spam an always look to improve. If this was any help please feel free to join our newsletter for all up to date content. Join here
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Last November, my husband and I were on our honeymoon in Maui. One of the main activities we wanted to do was a hiking tour near the waterfalls. We dreamt of swimming in the cascading water at sunrise.
When you hear the word “waterfall,” that’s typically what you imagine. However, today, we’re going to talk about a different kind of waterfall — the waterfall chart.

Waterfall charts are a data visualization resource that can help you gather and track important data such as traffic goals and lead generation. Below, let’s review what a waterfall chart is, how to read one, and how to create one.

In marketing, a waterfall chart could display the number of leads, traffic sources, or blog views over a period of time. More specifically, you could use a waterfall chart to showcase how your blog traffic has increased or decreased in the last year, giving values month over month.
You could potentially use line charts, bar charts, and even bullet graphs to show this type of data. But waterfall charts have the advantage of showing your gains as they’re impacted by losses over time.
Why use a waterfall chart?
You should use a waterfall chart instead of other types of charts when trying to visualize data that experiences both gains and losses. It’s especially useful if you want to see how a loss affects a subsequent value.
One of the reasons that waterfall charts are effective in marketing is because they give context on the data it’s reporting. Most data visualizations suffer from ignoring circumstances that result in a fall or rise in numbers, such as seasonality.
For instance, let’s say you create a waterfall chart of your Twitter followers over time. Rather than using a line graph that shows your total number of users over time, a waterfall chart shows how many you lost — and how that impacts subsequent figures.
At first glance, these charts can be difficult to read. Below, let’s review how to read a waterfall chart.
How to Read a Waterfall Chart
Reading a waterfall chart will seem foreign at first if you’ve never done it.
However, it’s important to remember that you’re reading it sequentially, from left to right.
For instance, let’s say you’re tracking blog traffic from month to month. On the far left, you’ll have the total traffic from the previous year. Then, you’ll include the gains and losses month over month for the entire year. At the end of the chart, you’ll see the total traffic for the year.
Here’s what that looks like:

Notice how each value ends either where the previous value ended or began. In January, there was a gain of 5,000 visitors, but in February and March, there was a loss of 2,000. April’s traffic value takes that into account by starting from the -2,000 figure and going up from there.
Essentially, a waterfall chart is supposed to show you where you started and where you ended up, with details of how you got there. In this example, you can see which months gained the most traffic compared to the months that lost traffic. This could help you see seasonal adjustments, while also keeping the big picture in mind.
Now, you might be wondering, “That chart looks difficult to make. How can I make my own in Excel?” Below, we’ll review the simple process to creating your own waterfall chart.
Not sure how to actually get it done? Below, we include a template and further instructions.
Bonus: You’ll also find instructions for creating waterfall charts in Google Sheets, in case that’s your preferred spreadsheet software.
Waterfall Excel Template
1. Create a table with four columns.
Before you can build a waterfall chart, you’ll want to create a table of values that you want represented on your chart.
For example, are you tracking blog traffic numbers? Or perhaps you’re looking at leads generated from a certain marketing campaign? Either way, before you can create a waterfall chart, you’ll need to gather your data.
All you have to do is open Excel or Google Sheets, and begin manually entering your data. When you enter your data, make sure you denote the difference between positive and negative values. To denote a negative value, just add a minus sign in front of the number.
For this template, we’ll track blog traffic. Note: all numbers are arbitrary and not reflective of traffic to any blog.

Create four columns. The first two columns will have no headings. In cells A2 to A15, write START, then all 12 months, then END. 
In cell C1, write “GAIN,” and in cell D1, write  “LOSS.” 
From there, place your traffic numbers. How much traffic are you starting with? Write that in cell B2, next to START. Then, for each month, write how much you gained or lost. 
Add everything together, including negative values, and place them in cell B15, next to END. 
2. Highlight all of your data, then insert your waterfall chart.
Now that you have your values, highlight the table you just created. In Google Sheets, go to Insert → Chart → Waterfall chart.
This will create a waterfall chart and the Chart Editor will show up on the right-hand side. When the Chart Editor comes up, make sure that “Waterfall Chart” is selected under Chart Type.

In Excel, go to Insert → [Waterfall chart symbol] → Waterfall.
Your chart will automatically be created based on the values in our template.
3. Format your waterfall chart.
At this point, all the hard work is done. All you have to do is format your chart and make sure it looks how you want.
In Google Sheets, click on the three dots in the upper right-hand corner of the chart and hit Edit Chart. You’ll get to the Chart Editor. Here, you can choose the colors of your bars, adjust your legend, or add gridlines. Most likely, the main thing you’ll want to do here is to adjust your legend.
In Excel, you’ll click on the chart, then choose “Chart Design” and “Format” on the top ribbon to make the chart look the way you want it to.

The process of creating a waterfall chart manually can be a hassle. Luckily, you can also create a waterfall chart using a dedicated dashboard tool. For example, HubSpot offers marketing dashboard and reporting software that you can use to create charts. Here’s how.
How to Create a Chart in HubSpot
1. Go to analytics tools.
Once you log in to your portal, hover over the Reports tab and click into the Analytics Tools.

2. Choose what you want to track.
Next, you’ll choose what you want to track. Perhaps you want to analyze blog traffic like we did in the example above. Or maybe you want to review analytics for a certain campaign.
Either way, you can choose what you want to track in the Analytics Tools.

3. Choose the chart type.
Lastly, all you have to do is choose the style chart you want. Right now, you can choose between an Area chart, Column chart, Line chart, or a Combination chart. You’ll want to choose “Column,” which is closest to the waterfall chart format.

Waterfall Analysis
Now that you have a waterfall chart, it’s time to analyze it.
To repeat, here’s how to understand your waterfall chart:

A waterfall chart shows a series of negative and positive values. Each value impacts the value after it.
For example, if one week you lose 3 leads, the next value will take that into account. If you gain 5 leads, the waterfall chart will use -3 value as a starting point, so that your ending point is a gain of 2 leads.
Each column is color-coded to distinguish positive from negative values.

And here’s how to analyze it.
Examine the time ranges with the greatest losses.
Which months or weeks did you see the greatest losses? It’s important to see and understand these figures to get the most out of your chart. From there, you can troubleshoot or come up with a new strategy for those months.
Examine the time ranges with the greatest gains.
Conversely, look at the time ranges that saw the greatest gains. You’ll want to emulate what you did during those months — or research trends that gave you a boost during those times.
Examine the net change over the entire time range.
From start to end, how big of a difference did you see? Was it a positive or negative difference? Could your business have seen better results?
Look at week-to-week gains and losses after implementing a new strategy.
After creating a new strategy, it’ll be helpful to use a waterfall chart to see how it impacts you from week to week — whether you’re seeing more positive or negative results.
Use a Waterfall Chart to Better Analyze Your Performance
To ensure you’re examining the full scope of your analytics, we recommend creating a waterfall chart. It’s a worthwhile data visualization tool that can help you understand your analytics sequentially. No longer do you have to rely on typical line graphs — with a waterfall chart, you’ll understand your gains and losses over time at a much more granular level.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2011 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Magnets, in marketing, are an effective technique for gaining a prospect’s contact information.
The problem is these magnets can take a lot of time and energy to produce. Podcasts, e-learning courses, video series, and contests all sound great – but who has time to create them all?

In this article, I’ll reveal 19 lead magnet ideas you can create today by repurposing content you already have.
Before I share lead magnet examples, let’s quickly review the conversion path that turns website visitors into leads – and the role email marketing plays in this process:

Call to Action (CTA): This is the button that website visitors click to access the resource you’re offering.

Landing Page: This is where your lead magnet captures information provided by the visitor. Once visitors click on the CTA, they’re brought to a landing page where they fill out a form with their name, email address, and any other relevant information you’ve deemed important.

Thank-You Page: The visitor-turned-lead now lands on a thank-you page with information on where to access their resource and is added to your mailing list.

Kickback Email: The kickback email is your follow-up message to the lead a short time after the exchange takes place. This email marketing campaign starts a conversation with the lead to keep them engaged with your business.

Every blog post in your archive has the potential to generate new leads for your company, so let’s make sure that your blog is a lead-generating machine.
1. Figure out who you’re targeting and what they want.
The goal of a lead magnet is to offer something your audience wants in exchange for their contact information.
To do this, you have to know what user persona you’re targeting and what offer would entice them.
You may have one to three personas with different needs and pain points. That means one lead magnet likely won’t appeal to all three personas.
For instance, let’s say you are an influencer marketing agency. You may have two personas, each facing these issues:

Influencer #1 doesn’t fully understand the inner workings of an influencer-brand relationship. They don’t have all the tools to brand themselves and foster relationships.
Influencer #2 is overrun with brand partnerships and has reached a point in their success where they are so busy with managing administrative tasks that they have limited time to create content.

Knowing this, the agency could create knowledge-based lead magnets for influencer #1, focusing on ebooks and knowledge libraries. For influencer #2, the agency may offer resource-based magnets, such as templates and tools.
During this process, you can also get some ideas from your competitors. What offers are they creating? What are they including in their offers? Use that as your starting point.
In addition, look at your current content library. What has your audience responded most to? Are they asking questions on a particular topic? Are they more engaged in videos or blog posts? This can be a big indicator of what they’ll want in a content offer.
2. Create, design, and name your lead magnet.
Now that you know what your offer will be, it’s production time. You have to create and design your lead magnet.
If you don’t have an in-house designer, you can utilize a platform like Canva. Their platform offers hundreds of templates that you can customize to build your lead magnet, everything from books and presentation slides to worksheets and reports.
You can also outsource the work using an independent contractor with the skills to produce a high-quality offer.
Once the design work is done, name your lead magnet.
Think of something catchy that will pull in your audience and highlight its benefits, like “The Ultimate Worksheet Every Influencer Needs,” and “101 Ways to Monetize Your Brand.”
3. Build your conversion path.
The next step is building your conversion path, which must include your landing page, thank-you page, form, and email sequence.
Starting with your landing page, there are a few best practices to improve conversions:

Have a dedicated landing page that doesn’t include a navigation bar. This will keep users’ focus on your offer and not the other pages on your website.

Write a clear call to action. Your CTA should be clear, short, and to the point. It should also use words that will appeal most to your audience.

Consider eye scanning patterns. Users in Western cultures typically follow F- and Z- reading patterns, which is why most landing pages are designed with key elements placed in those zones.

Add social proof. Adding reviews and testimonials to your landing pages adds credibility to your offer and can increase your conversion rate.

For your form, the two pieces of information you’ll want to include are name and email. Everything else is optional. However, keep in mind that the more fields you include, the higher the chance a user may abandon the form.
Next up, your email sequence: Once you’ve acquired your lead, you can add them to a nurturing sequence that will lead them further down the funnel. This can include additional resources, such as webinars and newsletters.
Lastly, make sure to set up tracking on your conversion path to see how users are behaving on it and identify optimization opportunities.
4. Set a schedule to update regularly.
Depending on the type of lead magnet you create, you may need to update it every six months to a year.
For instance, let’s say you created a report on 2021 data science salaries. As you get closer to 2022, you’ll need to update the information on the report to reflect current data. Otherwise, your offer may no longer be valuable to your audience.
In addition, if you conduct feedback surveys on your offers, sift through your leads’ comments. Their comments could give you ideas on how to improve your current offer.
Lead Magnet Examples
1. The Sales Evangelist

The Sales Evangelist is a sales coaching and training business designed to help sales managers and their teams thrive.
The company offers a free ebook titled “How to Transform Your Small Business Sales,” which offers insights on how to generate more sales.

What’s clear is that this particular offer targets small business owners who may not have the proper sales process in place to make sales consistently.
The copy addresses the user’s pain point, provides the potential reasons, and leads into why this offer will help resolve it – a classic and effective formula for landing page copy.
2. Karmen Kendrick Creative

When you think of a lead magnet, you probably think of an ebook.
But here’s another quick and easy lead magnet you can develop that will only take you a few hours (at most): a quiz.

In this example, this brand, which offers WordPress maintenance services, tests its audience with their WordPress knowledge.
After answering a few questions, they must enter their email address to view the full results. Then, you land on a landing page with your knowledge level and the option to share your results on social media.
As a maintenance service, this is a great lead magnet strategy. It can serve as a signal to users who are considering outsourcing this service that they may not have the knowledge to manage their site on their own. And it’s interactive, which is already a win.
In addition, this quiz will require little to no maintenance, as all the questions are based on historical facts – making it a simple but effective lead magnet.
3. HubSpot

Another interactive lead magnet you can consider is a grader or calculator.
HubSpot offers a website grader, which takes seconds to scan your website and provides a score based on performance, mobile experience, SEO, and security.

After providing your email and website, you get a detailed report about your website’s performance along with a corresponding course based on your results.
What works well: The grader helps you identify potential issues with your website and offers a solution to resolve them.
4. Clever Girl Finance

Clever Girl Finance is a personal finance platform that empowers women to take charge of their finances.
Among the host of free resources on their site, this one, in particular, stands out.

It’s a video library filled with recordings from personal finance coaching calls and when users sign up, they gain access to past and future recordings.
What’s great about this tactic is it answers a need.
Clever Girl Finance’s target audience likely wants a community in which to discuss financial topics, get their questions answered, and hear directly from experts. This lead magnet does just that.
It’s also one of those one-and-done magnets that require little maintenance beyond uploading new recordings.
The team can then repurpose the content of those recordings for future blogs, video snippets, and more.
15 Additional Lead Magnet Ideas to Try
1. Ebooks
The ebook is perfect when you have a series of blog posts about a related subject.
For example, if you were running an online pet store, you might pick out the following five posts from your blog to combine into an ebook:

“The 5 Pieces of Equipment That Every Puppy Needs”
“The Ultimate Guide To Housetraining a Puppy”
“The First 6 Months: What You Can Expect From Your New Puppy”
“The Puppy Nutrition Guide: What Your Dog Should and Shouldn’t Eat”
“The 7 Things You Should Never Do When Training a Puppy”

These posts could be logically compiled into an ebook entitled: “The Puppy Planner: Everything You Need To Know To Prepare for Your First Puppy.”
This type of ebook is effective because you’re making the lives of your website visitors easier – which should be the goal of any lead magnet you create. Rather than asking them to find all this content one article at a time, you’re packing it up into a convenient bundle that they can keep and refer back to.
The most successful lead magnets offer an irresistible and instant reward to your visitors, and the ebook checks off that box.
Featured Resource: 18 Free Ebook Templates

2. Guides
If you’re in an industry that is already well established, it can be hard to come up with original content.
Sometimes other people have covered a subject in such detail that it’s almost impossible to add extra value. In this situation, I’d recommend producing an ultimate guide.
An ultimate guide is a comprehensive collection of the best articles about a particular subject. The main difference between this and an ebook? You’re not recycling posts from your blog; you’re linking directly to other sites.
It’s important that you don’t copy and paste someone else’s content into your guide, but rather include a link back to the original article.
In the example below, Brian Dean from Backlinko.com produced “Link Building: The Definitive Guide.”

Link building is a complicated and broad subject. Dean’s definitive guide saves his audience a lot of time looking for this content.
And because so many other experts have written fantastic content about link building, Dean also saved himself the time of competing with content that already exists.
Rather than just listing the links, Dean adds extra value to his audience by categorizing them and including a brief introduction for each category.
This guide has also been well designed, reiterating that this is a valuable resource that should be kept and referred back to.
Do you work in an industry that is already bursting with quality content? Think about making your own ultimate guide.
Do you work in an industry that is already bursting with quality content? Think about making your own Ultimate Guide.
3. Bonus Packs
Offering additional content that is not included in the original blog post is the perfect way to reward readers who opt-in.
If you have an article titled, “The 5 Pieces of Equipment That Every Puppy Needs,” you could offer readers an exclusive PDF with a few more pieces of equipment that may have come on the market since the original post was published.
In his article, “How to Go From One Facebook Ad to $197 in Less Than 60 Seconds,” blogger Bryan Harris took this one step further and combined a PDF version of the article along with five links that weren’t in the original post – people only received these bonuses when they subscribed.
4. Resource Libraries
If you’ve already written a strategic blog post, consider offering a resource library or guide as a lead magnet.
A resource library is a collection of tools that help people achieve results.
David Dean from Backlinko used this strategy in his post, “SEO Tools: The Complete List.” He offered a free download that detailed the 153 tools featured in his post – the perfect resource for a reader to keep and refer to whenever they need.
This library could be as simple as a list of five books or apps that you recommend.
What resources could you recommend to a potential customer that would help them to achieve better results?
5. Checklists
Instructional blog posts are just waiting to be turned into checklists – and they couldn’t be easier to create.
Just take your blog post and simplify it into a series of bullet points. Next, remove any points that don’t contain actionable advice. Split the list into several numbered steps to make the outcome more achievable.
Bonus points if you offer the checklist in a printable format so people can physically tick off each item on the list as they complete it. This sense of achievement is a great feeling that people will attribute back to your business.

The “Ultimate Webinar Checklist” from HubSpot above is a valuable lead magnet because of how practical it is.
Hosting a webinar involves balancing a lot of different tasks coming together at the same time. This checklist informs you about everything you need to watch out for, from pre- to post-webinar.
6. Workbooks
In its simplest form, a workbook is a download-and-complete resource that helps people to apply the principles of your blog post to their own business.
The goal of a workbook is to have the participant learn by doing. As the teacher in this scenario, you’re positioning your business as an expert on the subject matter at hand.
With that in mind, you’ll want to choose the exercises included in your workbook carefully. Tease information out of the participant gradually, so that at the end of the workbook they can combine their short answers into a comprehensive piece of work.
A workbook is the perfect stepping stone to your premium products or services, so be sure to include a strong call to action at the end that tells the participant how you can help them to apply their newfound knowledge.
Is there a particular subject that you could help your audience understand more clearly with a workbook?
7. Case Studies
Case studies depend on very specific types of content, but the successes they reveal can entice a site visitor to take action.
If you have a blog post or interview clip that spotlights a real customer you’ve worked with, package this content into a written case study that expands on the need the client came in with and the metrics of their success.
Then, gate this case study behind a form that website visitors can fill out with their name and email address to access.
Keep in mind that you’ll need permission and approval from the client on which you’d like to create a case study.
Once you receive this approval, however, it’s a perfect lead magnet to host content that tells your readers about a customer success story.
Featured Resource: 3 Free Case Study Templates

8. Webinars
Webinars don’t have to be long, collaborative presentations with multiple colleagues or partners.
If you’ve got a blog post that merely touches on a subject you’re an expert in, use this blog post as a springboard into a live talk hosted by you and a coworker.
If you’ve written an article about the latest IOS cookie restrictions, for example, convert this article into a slide presentation and present it through a live conferencing platform, using helpful visuals.
You should also provide insight that listeners wouldn’t have gotten from just the blog post.
As a bonus, you can use the webinar recording as an additional offer.
9. Cheatsheets
If your blog post covers a complicated topic, it might be a good idea to offer readers a one-page sheet that they can refer back to when they need to refresh their memory. This could be a glossary of terms or just a summary of some key points.
This type of download-and-keep resource takes the pressure off readers so they don’t have to memorize or implement your strategy immediately. It does compel readers to opt-in to your list though, which is the ultimate goal.
In addition, the compact format means that people can quickly glance at it while they are going through the editing process. It’s a complementary tool for an existing process.
10. Guestbooks
Guest blogging is a terrific backlink strategy, but those who use it typically agree to not republish that particular post on their own blog.
This is fairly common, as Google punishes sites that duplicate content onto two publications – it’s in nobody’s interest to do so.
What you can do, though, is compile all these guest posts into a book format.
Since the content will be gated behind a lead capture form, there is no risk of Google flagging it as duplicate content and you get to squeeze a little bit of extra value from that content you worked so hard on.
11. Whitepapers
Have an interesting survey that your team recently ran? Or perhaps you know your audience is looking for specific information to inform their future strategy?
If so, leverage this knowledge to create downloadable reports based on your team’s research.
You may have talked about these findings in a blog post or a recent webinar. Repurpose that content for a detailed report.
This will position you as a credible resource in your industry and bring you that much closer to converting your target audience.
12. Templates
Templates are some of the most popular lead magnets out there.
Why? Because they help users streamline their processes and save time. But at the core of it, it solves the problem many of us have: creating and designing from scratch.
You can create templates for just about anything:

Emails
Social media
Spreadsheets
Graphic designs

It’s all about tapping into what your audience needs the most and creating that for them. Plus, it’s another low-maintenance magnet.
13. Email Course
Companies offer online courses all the time, but they’re not the only place to launch a course.
A 2019 Statista survey found that most people (over 80%) check their emails every few hours including outside of normal business hours.
We also know that email newsletters are very popular, with just about every company sending its top insights to your inbox every day.
With this in mind, starting an email course is a great lead magnet option.
An email course is a series of emails that can be anywhere from three to 10+ emails that cover a topic in depth.
The benefit for you? It’s a format most users are familiar with and it’s quick to launch.
In addition, you have multiple opportunities to nurture your audience and guide them down the buyer’s journey, compared to a one-and-done ebook that a user may or may not read.
14.Access to a Private Group
As a business, community management is a key aspect in gaining brand loyalists. It can also be an effective way to generate leads.
Platforms like Slack, Facebook Group, and LinkedIn allow you to do both.
For many businesses, their target audiences value community and want a space to discuss topics relating to their needs, goals, and challenges.
Creating that space will help you generate leads and get to know your audience better.
15. Behind-The-Scenes or “Secret” Insights
One of the best lead magnets I’ve ever seen was produced by Tim Soulo. It was so effective that I immediately opted-in without thinking twice. Suolo had written a blog post about sending an outreach email to well-known SEO expert Rand Fishkin. His call-to-action was the following:

This call-to-action was pitch perfect because it got me curious. I just had to know what the email subject was.
I also knew that it would be a relatively short read so I wouldn’t have to commit to a lengthy ebook – lazy, I know, but that’s human nature sometimes.

Suolo’s lead magnet is just one page and was made using a standard word processor. There was no point in spending time or money on the design in this case because the secret is the only thing that matters.
I blurred out the tell-tale image and text in the above screenshot – if you want to know Suolo’s secret, you’ll just have to download the lead magnet!
Do you have any behind-the-scenes insights to a blog post that are compelling enough to offer as a downloadable secret?
There you have it, 19 ways to recycle your existing content into lead-generating assets. You already have the blog content – all you have to do is implement lead magnets and an email campaign that gets them into your contact database.
Editor’s note: This piece was originally published in May 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

In 1898, Elias St. Elmo Lewis, an eventual inductee of the Advertising Hall of Fame, anonymously wrote a column about three advertising principles he found useful throughout his career in a printing magazine called The Inland Printer, one of the most influential American magazines of the 19th century.
In his column, he states that a successful advertisement should always follow a specific formula.

“The mission of an advertisement is to attract a reader, so that he will look at the advertisement and start to read it; then to interest him, so that he will continue to read it; then to convince him, so that when he has read it he will believe it. If an advertisement contains these three qualities of success, it is a successful advertisement.”

In other words, copy is only good if it attracts attention, generates interest, and creates conviction, in that order.
Over a century later, Lewis’ principles still ring true. They’re expressed as an acronym, AIDA, and widely used in the advertising industry. In the digital age, brands have even based their entire marketing strategy on the AIDA model.
Before we cover how you can apply the AIDA model to your own content marketing strategy, let’s go over what it is and why it works.

The AIDA Model
The AIDA model describes the four stages a consumer goes through before making a purchasing decision. The stages are Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA). During these four stages, your content will ideally attract attention to your brand, generate interest in your product or service, stimulate a desire for it, and spur action to try or buy it.

Brands use the AIDA model to determine the way they should craft and distribute marketing messages to their target audience at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
The AIDA model is considered a hierarchy of effects model, which means consumers must move through each stage of the model to complete the desired action. Just like a typical marketing funnel, each stage has fewer consumers than the previous one.

How to Apply the AIDA Model to Your Marketing
By creating campaigns and structuring your website with the AIDA model in mind, you can get more control over your prospects’ paths to a purchasing decision.
In theory, as they progress through each stage of the model, consumers who learn about your brand will develop certain feelings or emotions about your product or service, which is what ultimately compels them to act.
Here’s what you can do to implement AIDA:
Attract Attention
If your content can grab their attention and deeply engage them, your target audience will start to become curious about what your company actually does.
In this stage, the consumer is asking, “What is it?”
In order to get to this stage, you must first get your content in front of them. This comes with increased brand awareness and effective messaging.
Example
Effective content marketing is one method of attracting visitors to your website. If you create content that solves their problems and focuses on their passions, you’ll be able to draw them in and provide a solution. When executed effectively, your target audience should be able to discover your content through Google, social media, and other channels.
Wistia does this well with their content marketing, producing not just educational blog posts that drive traffic but also entertaining or inspiring “shows.” This tactic allows them to not just address the pains their prospects have but also go above and beyond to make solving that problem easier (and, in some cases, entertaining). Leaning into video as a medium instead of just blogging ties into their product and mission, keeping Wistia’s solutions top of mind as prospects consume this content.

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Generate Interest
Once your target audience is interested in your product or service, they’ll want to learn more about your brand, the benefits of your solution, and your potential fit with them.
In this stage, the goal is to get them to think, “I like it.”
In order to get to this stage, your content must be persuasive and engaging. While the first stage of AIDA is capturing their attention, this stage is about holding it. You can do this with a hook.
Example
Let’s say your content marketing was effective in drawing them to the website to learn about a pain, problem, or need they have. You might then “hook” them with engaging storytelling that demonstrates the why behind your solution.
Stories resonate with humans, and it’s a simple way to convey information in a way that stimulates empathy and curiosity.
To generate enough excitement in your prospects to compel them to act, you need to make sure their affinity for your brand hits a certain threshold. The more aligned you are with their needs and values, the more likely you are to achieve success.
Below the Fold is a service that delivers relevant news articles to its users. It generates interest with its hook: “Stories that don’t make it to the front page.” The intrigue in this line opens up a loop (What have I been missing without this service?) while highlighting their value proposition of surfacing stories that aren’t getting coverage but are still important.

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Stimulate Desire
People do business with those they know, like, and trust. The first two stages of the AIDA model establish the know and the like.
The goal of this stage is to change “I like it” to “I want it.”
And that’s done by cementing in the final piece of the puzzle: Trust.
To do this, keep serving them content. Make sure they subscribe to your blog, follow you on social media, and download your offers. The more prospects interact with your brand, the more they’ll trust you, boosting the chances they’ll eventually buy your product or service.
Example
The prospects you’re most likely to close are the consumers who envision a future with you — they already enjoy consuming your content and think your product or service will be even better.
For this reason, you must institute a gap between where they are and where they could be with your solution. At the same time, you must establish social proof with case studies and testimonials.
“Before and After” style content is a great example of how to stimulate desire while gaining trust. Check out the headline on this case study by Calendly: “Convert 60% more PPC leads into bookings using Black Propeller’s secret weapon.” This helps a prospect envision a future with this product (What would my life be like if I achieved similar results?). The “before” is them at their current stage, and the “after” is the vision of them with a 60% increase in conversions. Then, if they read the full case study, they get exposed to social proof from a customer just like them.

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Spur Into Action
After you generate enough desire for your product or service, give your prospects the chance to act on it. After all, what’s the point of creating content and building deep relationships with prospects if there isn’t a clear next step?
The goal is to get them to decide, “I’m getting it.”
No matter what the “next step” is, you should compel them to respond with low-friction but high-incentive calls to action.
Example
Whether they’re far away or close to a purchasing decision, the next step that you present should be “high-value.” In other words, it must help them in some way.
If they understand what the outcome of your offer is and find it valuable to them, they’ll be more likely to act (since they aren’t simply committing to a sales call or sales content).
Consider exactly how you can provide that value while motivating them to engage with you.
The CTA for this “next step” or offer should be prominent, clear, and uncomplicated. Perhaps it’s a button or banner that spells out what action they must take and what they get if they do. By eliminating friction in the process, you increase your likelihood of success.
Nerdwallet, a personal finance site that provides resources on everything from credit to mortgages, has such a CTA. The idea is that they can engage their audience and compel them to action by offering a comparison tool. They highlight this tool directly on their homepage with a grabby headline and value-driven subheadline along with a high-contrast button. The setup is uncomplicated and friction-free. Nerdwallet is simultaneously able to generate leads while empowering and delighting those leads with high-value information.

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AIDA Drawbacks
Now that you are familiar with the AIDA framework and how it operates, you should also consider some of its limitations:
1. It doesn’t take into account non-linear buyer’s journeys.
AIDA does a fantastic job of describing a linear thought process for a purchasing decision. However, not all purchasing decisions are linear.
A prospective customer might get their interest peaked but ultimately choose a different solution, only coming back to the original provider if their needs aren’t met.
More commonly, someone might have a desire for a solution before being aware of it and taking action to find it (thus experiencing the Desire and Action before the Attention and Interest).
2. It doesn’t take into account impulse purchases or super short sales cycles.
In addition to a non-linear journey, a prospective customer might cycle through multiple stages of AIDA at the same time — all four for an impulse buy or emergency purchase.
3. It’s only a small piece of a holistic business strategy.
AIDA is also limited to first-time purchases. Some organizations try to align their strategy around marketing funnels like AIDA, but this is a mistake. Funnels have customers as an output when they should be at the center of a growth strategy. After all, it’s easier to retain and/or upsell an existing customer than acquire a new one. In addition, with a little customer delight, you can earn testimonials and referrals, generating more attention, interest, and (therefore) customers.
AIDA doesn’t accommodate for this, which is why other models — like the flywheel — are more appropriate for holistic business strategy.
4. Focusing on one AIDA element per marketing tactic may not be effective.
Even when using a funnel for one particular aspect of your business rather than a holistic strategy, it can still be easy to fall into the trap of segmenting out the four letters of AIDA and applying one letter per each tactic in your marketing strategy. For example, you might think, “This blog post is to get their attention,” and only focus on that. However, a blog post should ideally attract awareness and generate interest… and at least get them to take some kind of action before they leave your site.
In other words, marketing should be able to cycle a prospect through multiple stages of AIDA. An effective ad, for example, might prompt three or four stages of AIDA, spurring a potential buyer to action.
5. It’s almost too simple.
AIDA might also be effective in conceptualizing the buying process in a consumer’s mind when they are faced with an ad or other piece of marketing collateral. However, AIDA may be too simplistic to describe the stages of a buying process, particularly for decisions that are more involved or nuanced. Today’s buyers have more resources at their disposal to research, comparison shop, etc.
Using the AIDA Framework
Despite its drawbacks, the AIDA model is a sturdy framework for guiding your audience through the buyer’s journey and spurring them to act. And if you apply it to your content marketing, you’ll be leveraging a proven formula that can consistently engage, persuade, and convert an audience into customers. However, it starts with knowing your customer journey.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Until recently, many of us have been doing almost everything from home with no immediate hopes of in-person outings.
But, this summer — as entire countries reopen — people who’ve been stuck inside are finally breathing a sigh of relief. At the same time, some company leaders are doing the opposite.
Why? In past years, entire industries have seen summer slumps — or seasonal dips in sales or web traffic. This year, business leaders are expecting sharper dips as more consumers travel or unplug. They’re also dealing with frequent HR requests from employees who’ve been waiting months to take vacations.
On top of the challenges above, the Society of Human Resources Management reports that 41% of employees feel burnt out while 48% feel mentally exhausted by the end of their workdays. This, in turn, could impact productivity and job retention levels.
Ultimately, many leaders worry that the summer trends above could impact their bottom line.
To help businesses navigate the changing landscape, we dove into 2021 web traffic and deal closing data from over 103,000 anonymous HubSpot customers around the globe. Then, we compared their summer results to pre-pandemic benchmarks from the summer of 2019.
Below are some of our key findings.

Summer Trends to Watch, According to HubSpot Data
Note: When looking at the charts and data below, each year’s traffic or deal benchmark is equal to its April numbers. Therefore, if industries were 10% under benchmark in June 2019, they saw a 10% dip since April 2019.
Web Traffic is Seeing a Summer Slump
So far in 2021, global traffic is dipping across almost all industries and segments. Compared to 2019, websites are also seeing less overall traffic growth.

At this point, the only industry that isn’t slumping is Leisure and Hospitality, which saw a whopping 17.72% traffic increase between April and June of 2021. This is almost the opposite of what we saw in 2019 when traffic decreased for websites in the industry by 13.27% from April to June.
Although Leisure and Hospitality’s current traffic patterns are impressive, they’re still fairly unsurprising as news outlets continue to report spikes in reopening-related travel, outings, and excursions this summer.

A few of the industries seeing the largest dips in traffic from April to June 2021 are Construction (-12%), Financial Activities (-11%), Manufacturing (-7.2%), and Trade, Transportation, and Utilities (-7.1%)
As compared to 2019, some of the segments seeing larger traffic slumps this year are Trade, Transportation, and Utilities — which saw 3.7% growth from April to June in 2019 and a 7.11% loss during the same time in 2021; Education and Health Services — which saw 17.52% growth in 2019, but a 2.7% loss in 2021; and Construction — which only saw a 0.16% decrease by June of 2019 but saw a 12.06% loss in 2021.

Aside from Leisure and Hospitality, segments seeing the smallest slumps in summer traffic are Professional and Business Services with under a 1% drop, and Education and Health Services with just a 2.7% drop.
From a geographical standpoint, these web traffic trends are happening in all locations we’ve examined, except for Asia — which is seeing steady traffic growth.

While it’s unclear why Asia’s web traffic is rising, this continued growth could be due to lockdowns and stay-at-home orders in various Asian territories that are still dealing with COVID-19 and its variants. During Q2 and Q3 of 2020, the United States and other territories around the world saw similar traffic bursts as citizens were stuck at home with only the internet to entertain them or connect them to others.
Deals are Going Up
Yes. You read that correctly. While traffic is seeing a summer slowdown, deal closings across industries are climbing.
Industries seeing the biggest growth from April to June of 2021 include Leisure and Hospitality (+44.7%), Manufacturing (+13.65%), and Trade, Transportation, and Utilities (+10.62%), while segments seeing the slowest growth are Construction and Financial Activities, which both have just under a 2% increase from their April benchmarks.
Businesses are also seeing a higher rate of deal closings than they did between April and June of 2019 — when five of the eight segments we studied saw at least a 3.5% dip in deal closings.

While deal closings were up in June, it’s still important for company leaders to remain cautious at this point of the summer.
Although deals are climbing, businesses could still see dips in later summer months due to consumers continuing to travel, employee vacations, or teams feeling less pressured to close deals at the beginning of a new quarter. However, one optimistic point to consider is that deal closings did not see similar lifts in June 2019, when many industries actually saw dipping.
Ultimately, as the summer continues, it will be key to monitor your traffic, as well as deals created, qualified leads, and deals closed to get a full look at your brand’s performance.
If your team’s seeing more deal closings, but fewer qualified leads, signups, or deals created this summer, it might not be a cause for panic. However, when your business sees a slowdown or shift of any kind, there are plenty of steps you can take to ensure future success.
How to Prepare For and Respond to Summer Business Trends
1. Prepare when you can for business shifts.
Because we’re only halfway through summer, businesses can still take time to predict and prepare for what’s to come.
Alicia Butler Pierre, Host of the Business Infrastructure Podcast and CEO of Equilibria, Inc. says, “There are two major ways businesses can predict, diagnose, and/or prepare for a seasonal slump: resource planning and contingency planning.”

Contingency planning: This strategy — which often includes creating a premortem, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), and disaster recovery and business continuity plan –helps brands prepare for unexpected dips or upticks caused by outside factors like news events or national disasters.

Resource planning: “As your company utilizes different resources that serve as inputs into producing a good or delivering a service (outputs), you should collect data such as transaction dates, sale or invoice amounts, product or service type, and some customer demographic data.” says Butler Pierre. “If you notice the same patterns and trends year after year, you are in a better position to forecast and prepare for seasonal slumps. This, in turn, lets you know when to expand or contract inputs like labor and inventory.”

Image Courtesy of Alicia Butler Pierre
Data shows that a strong plan can be rewarding when business begins to pick up. In 2020, as consumers quickly turned to online stores for essentials, businesses that weren’t online were rushing to build online stores, while online stores were struggling to fulfill high-demand orders on time. Around this time, more than 50% of shoppers chose to buy products from brands with more product availability over brands they were originally loyal to.
“I strongly advocate businesses focus on improvements to their business infrastructure during seasonal slumps. It’s difficult to make improvements while things are moving so quickly, as all hands are on deck trying to fulfill orders and meet project deadlines,” says Butler Pierre.

“Improvements can include things like technology and equipment upgrades, process automation, and reconfiguring (or relocating) your physical work location. With these improvements in place, your company can work through the chaos that can accompany a seasonal uptick without compromising quality and excellent customer service,” Butler Pierre adds.
2. Launch demand plays.
“Unfortunately, when you’re dealing with macro trends in the market a lot is out of your control,” says Emmy Jonassen, HubSpot’s VP of Acquisition. “For example, there’s not much you can do if prospects are not visiting your site or talking to reps because they’re all on vacation.”
While you might not be able to solve seasonal business patterns, Jonassen says there are things you can do in the now to help the short and long term:

Getting through the slump: When you’re facing a period of slowed demand, any incremental lift at the top of the funnel can go a long way. During times like these consider adjustments you could make in the short term to help in the short term. For example, could you increase your paid spend temporarily? Could you remove a field in your lead form for a period of time to improve CVR? Could you manufacture a bit of demand with a campaign or offer that provides timely and unique value?

Making the most of what you have: In periods of soft demand, you want to make sure that you’re not leaving anything on the table. One way to do this is to perform an audit of your key acquisition drivers and invest in making optimizations. For example, if you’re able to improve search rankings and conversion rates of core landing pages, it will help you generate incremental demand. Investing in these kinds of optimizations will also put you in a much better position to capture demand when traffic does start to pick up.

Weatherproof for the long-term: Periods of slowed demand can help us see where the holes are in our demand-generation engines. Use this time to identify where your engine’s holes are and put in place plans that work toward patching them in the future. For example, if your desktop conversion rates are outperforming your mobile conversion rates because you haven’t invested in a mobile-optimized site, now could be a great time to start planning that project.

3. Use data to guide your strategy.
Although dips on website views might concern you, summer traffic slumps aren’t unusual. But, you can use analytics tools to prepare for and respond to them.
On the HubSpot Blog team, we use tools like HubSpot Traffic Analytics to examine and prepare for seasonal dips due to vacations, office closings, and global holidays that take people off-line during the summer. Because summer is filled with vacations and holidays, we often use part of the season to focus on historical optimization, long-term conversion plays, process planning, and trend-responsive content that can gain quick bursts in traffic when search engines are impacted by seasonality.
While a summer slump is a good time to look at and respond to unexpected traffic losses, it’s also important to remember that some decreases could be beyond your control and mostly due to seasonality. Additionally, if you’re a leader, you should look at other data aside from just traffic.
For example, you might also want to take a wider look at KPIs like online leads, email subscriber growth, online sales, and deal creation to learn how much web traffic losses are immediately impacting you. If traffic is down, but leads or deals are up, you might not need to pivot your whole strategy. If everything is going down — that’s when you might want to take a deep look at your overall processes.
Ultimately, as with process planning, digging into the analytics you have available will help you determine the best way to handle a traffic slump or uptick. To learn more about building an effective web analytics strategy specifically, check out this post.
4. Don’t forget about your current customers.
While deals are on the rise at the moment, some industries, such as construction and financial activities historically see dips or slower growth in the summer. Luckily, when business is slow, you can still take the time you need to maintain and potentially gain more business from your current clientele.
From a sales leadership perspective, Dan Tyre, Director at HubSpot, says that managers and teams should “look for ways to upsell or cross-sell new customers from the first six months of the year” or “use the time to work your referral program.”
“I like to call top customers in July to check in regarding the state of our relationship and see if there are other divisions or connections that can use similar help,” Tyre adds.
Additionally, leaders and companies can take more time to ensure their processes and operations are running smoothly when business is slow.
Regardless of whether you’re focused on gaining new clients or maintaining your customer list, tools like HubSpot’s Sales or Service Hubs can help you by allowing you to track deal creation, contact activities, and service inquiries. You can also use these tools to communicate with customers and prospects across different platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.
5. Strengthen team communication.
While you’ll want to stay in contact with prospects and customers during times of slump or business uptick, communication with your team will also be incredibly vital. While poor communication can halt processes completely, great communication could speed up the pace of projects that provide great revenue.
Regardless of how busy your business is, take time to check in with your teams through meetings, platforms like Slack or Zoom, or email updates.
Additionally, to keep everyone in the know of each other’s schedules during a busy summer, you should ensure that calendars are up to date with meeting times, blocks for heads-down solo work, and time off.
6. Balance results with employee well-being.
As summer trends fluctuate, it can be easy for managers and teams to get swept up with work and forget about taking time to unplug. And, as economies reopen and employees gain the ability to travel, the balance between self-care and productivity will be even more important for leaders to consider.
“Time away from the office may be a bit more pronounced this year, but it’s not unique. The key to any process is managing expectations and understanding who’s available when to keep consistency in the sales process,” Tyre explains. “It’s advantageous for everyone to manage lower levels of stress and take time off. In many cases, a no-meeting Friday or work from home Friday can increase salespeople productivity.”
Senior Product Marketing Manager Alex Girard similarly says, “First, I think it’s important to understand the value in taking time off. When employees use their time off, they’ll come back refreshed and able to do their best work.”
“Second, make sure you’re prioritizing the important work that will drive real impact,” Girard adds. “If your team is taking time off, make sure everyone on the team is aligned around what’s important, what is not, and what can be postponed for later. This will ensure you keep things moving during periods of high vacation time.”
Tools to Help You Navigate a Summer Slump or Uptick

HubSpot Business Software: HubSpot’s CRM, Marketing, Sales, Service, and CMS Hub can help you and your team measure your performance; identify slumps, upticks, or major snags in your process; and assist you in moving customers through the buyer’s journey — even during a time of seasonality.  

Google Workspace or Microsoft Outlook: These programs allow teams to keep all their documents, calendars, and emails in one suite of tools that can streamline communication, project management, and the creation of new processes that will be vital to business growth.

Task Management Tools: If you work with multiple teammates or are managing multiple projects this summer, tools like HubSpot, Trello, Asana, and Jira can help you track the progress of what your team is working on and identify where any blockers might exist.

Communication Tools: Lastly, if you’re on a dispersed team like many HubSpotters, you’ll want to leverage a communication platform like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom to stay in contact with everyone you’re working with — even when there’s not enough time to schedule a meeting or check-in.

Editor’s Note: The data from HubSpot’s customer base is reflective of companies that have invested in an online presence and use inbound as a key part of their growth strategy. Because the data is aggregated, please keep in mind that individual businesses, including HubSpot’s, may differ based on their own markets, customer base, industry, geography, stage, and/or other factors.
How We Protect the Privacy of Our Customers’ Data
We employ the following anonymization techniques to remove or modify personally identifiable information so that data cannot be associated with any one individual:

Attribute suppression refers to the removal of an entire part of data in a dataset. Before sharing any customer data we apply suppression to any data attribute that on its own identifies an individual (e.g. name, company name) or has been assigned to an individual.
Generalization involves a deliberate reduction in the precision of data, such as converting company size into a company size range. We apply generalization to indirect identifiers. These are data attributes that on their own don’t identify individuals, but could identify an individual when combined with other information. We use the k-anonymity model as a guideline to ensure any record’s direct and/or indirect identifiers are shared by at least k(set at 100)-1 other records,  protecting our customer’s data against linking attacks.
Aggregation refers to converting a dataset from a list of records to summarized values. We apply aggregation by displaying a cohort’s mean or median values for a metric.

Before GDPR, compliance didn’t mean as much to marketers as it does today. It was seen as something that “someone else” should have to worry about, like your legal team. Three years on from the biggest shift in the privacy landscape, organizations around the world have had to adapt company-wide to its effects far beyond the European Union where it has its most direct impact.
A lot of these effects rest on the incumbent shoulders of the marketer — who has had to grapple with the evolution of privacy landscapes as they gain momentum worldwide and has to figure out how to work with them in their day-to-day.
In today’s busy world of communications and data processing, it’s easy to overlook compliance marketing responsibilities with the pressure of deadlines and business objectives. Knowing what the responsibilities are for compliance in marketing is often unclear at an operational level. This inevitably opens your company up to risk which can cost your company dearly if not addressed.
In building your compliance strategy, it is often hard to know where to start and what to focus on — but becoming aware of some basic marketing compliance guidelines can be advantageous for your company, big or small, and equip you with invaluable ammunition to help you achieve your objectives.
That’s why below I have compiled a list of some best practices that every marketer can achieve within their own organization.

5 Things Marketers Should Know About Compliance
1. Wait, What ‘Data’ is It?
As a marketer, you are probably naturally closest to a lot of the user data that your company collects. It can tell you a lot about your users or customers and it is used by teams internally to achieve sales and marketing objectives. 
Unfortunately, such wide use of this data across your organization can open it up to the risk of being misused or unprotected if there are no proper controls put in place. That’s why it’s best to put structures in place to keep this data organized, audited, and secure.
Taking stock of the various data sources that are across your company and how they interact with software and systems is essential.
Using this intel allows you to create a lock-tight plan to maintain consistent data structures and implement necessary changes, whilst giving you the ability to pivot as the business expands.
Maintaining an audit trail of data records is paramount in order to be able to respond to any requests by regulatory bodies. Using automated software to sync system logs and less reliance on excel sheets is by far the best way to manage large data sets and produce reports upon request. Using machine learning to scan and catalog data assets across the enterprise helps you better understand your data so you can derive more value from it.
2. Compliant Data Collection and Use
Most businesses are in the habit of collecting data on their customers, but you must remember that these ultimately belong to them, and not so much you!
A person is merely choosing to share their data with you with the expectation that you will keep their interests safe. Each individual needs to always be informed as to its intended use.
This information is contained in your privacy policy which should be under constant review and if you make changes to this, you are obligated to inform every individual within its purview. Not only that, a person may choose to request and withdraw their data at any time, which you are also obligated to comply with. Having your data organized in tenets as described above and having systems in place that can extract and delete this data are crucial in order to respect your customers’ wishes.
Compliance tools have been developed with these requirements in mind. Using systems that run with precision and reliability, that are flexible and can scale with you as you grow, gives you the ability to adapt to change and be compliant without having to build a bespoke system or rely on pesky excel sheets.
3. Create a Compliance Team
Organizations large and small benefit from having a multi-disciplinary team focussed on compliance who are scattered across various company activities. It is no longer just a siloed issue for one person or team to solve. Undoubtedly, if a marketer needs some help from a web or tech colleague, it can often be difficult to get assistance from them if compliance is not high on their priority list too. 
Each member has the benefit of knowledge in their own specialism, which can only be of benefit if shared. For example, a tech manager’s responsibilities could include knowing how data sets across the org are structured and how compliance controls should be implemented. They need to ensure a marketer is equipped to do their job using data housed in compliant and secure systems. 
Partnering with your legal team on marketing initiatives means you are working together to achieve creative objectives in a compliant manner. Without access to these subject matter experts, who have in-depth knowledge of compliance matters, especially as they change in other jurisdictions, makes it difficult to achieve business goals and can cause roadblocks. Using compliance software to connect these teams/individuals can help a team collaborate on initiatives in a more efficient way.
Building a team that can make compliance a priority and work together on an ongoing basis to maintain and adapt data governance principles is key for success.
4. Create Compliance Checks and Internal Data Governance
With data processes being managed across organizations, it can often be difficult to ensure a cohesive environment when it comes to compliance practices.
Therefore, it’s important to put guardrails and processes in place to mitigate risk by ensuring all employees are up to date on internal data management practices and checks in place to improve these processes. Ensuring regular training is provided is an easy way to meet your due diligence in this regard. After all, data management is everyone’s responsibility, with any misuse resulting in it being costly to the company.
Managing and controlling brand cohesion across all of your marketing content channels including digital, print, and social media is a no-brainer.
Assessment of future campaigns will allow you to anticipate potential compliance issues at an early stage. Maintaining this consistency across partner and co-marketing content campaigns ensures any legal requirements can be followed. Documenting data collection and management practices for different teams is essential and the provision of regular updates can be helpful as the law continues to evolve in different territories where your customers might do business from. 
It’s also very important that each employee knows who to contact with any urgent request as they may be in a customer-facing role where an aggrieved customer may require an urgent response to a grievance with their data. Such requests can be time-sensitive so being able to escalate sensitive issues to a representative needs to be made an easy task in order to avoid any potential regulatory enforcement that could ensue for not responding to an issue within a defined window.
5. Monitor Global Privacy Regimes and Incorporate Changes
You may have noticed that privacy is now top of mind for many countries with local approaches to privacy being spun up on the daily.
Largely following the regulatory aspects that flow from the GDPR and the E-Privacy directive, territories are now adapting, and are seeking to uphold and respect the privacy of each individual. With that, it’s important to know what applies to you. 
While you may think that something like the GDPR has no bearing on you or the privacy of your customers because you are not based in the EU, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
The GDPR is applicable to where you may have users or customers and so being able to meet the privacy needs of individuals in those areas is required.
Whether it is adapting cookie management for web/application use or making sure that your communication to your DACH customers is compliant using a double-opt-in email, it is essential to keep abreast of the regulatory requirements when you develop your marketing initiatives. Consideration needs to extend to local laws also if you are expanding your reach into new territories.
Knowing what is compliant in a new territory should be top of mind in this case as no territory is the same with regards to their approach to marketing compliance. Creating a compliance strategy and working closely with your legal and wider compliance team is vital to achieving your objectives.
Regulatory guidance is constantly evolving, so making sure you are consistently evaluating and meeting the requirements of different jurisdictions — it’s a full-time job.
Final Thoughts
When implementing marketing compliance into your company it’s important to treat it as a key priority for your business. As marketers continue to fight for creativity but are hindered by compliance, it is challenging to strike a balance between the two. Having a detailed understanding of applicable compliance rules and best practice techniques makes a marketer a valuable asset to any company. Being able to have foresight into potential compliance challenges early on in developing your marketing initiatives is powerful, and can lead to more effective decisions.More than ever, brand integrity has become a cornerstone for companies. Showing your users that you are serious about marketing compliance and respecting their privacy will set you apart from your competitors.

There are 96 mountain peaks in the US with an elevation of at least 14,000ft. Colorado has the most of any state at 53. No doubt, if you’ve been to Colorado, you’ve heard about these “fourteeners”. It’s a common goal to try to summit all 53. None are easy, but many are just long beautiful hikes. Eventually, though, you finish those and need to take on more challenging climbs.
Last summer, my son and I set our sights on Snowmass Mountain. The fastest and safest way up is via a steep snowfield that covers much of the mountain well into summer. An ice axe and boot crampons are essential equipment. When shopping for crampons, I came upon a pair for a little over $20. Sure, they were from some company I’d never heard of, only had 2 customer reviews and were a fraction of the cost of name-brand competitors. But the price was right! I bought them.
Did they just about get me killed? Yep. Did they prevent me from getting to the summit? Yep. They just kind of fell apart when I needed them most, as my son continued on to eternal glory and bragging rights. Sometimes not investing in the right tools can cost you a lot more in the end. The same is true in marketing.
Ads and Attribution
If you manage a marketing budget, you know how much money goes into two critical areas: paid media and marketing technology. This post is about the intersection of those two things. Namely, B2B advertising leader LinkedIn and the #1 B2B marketing attribution application, Bizible. Each brings unique value and, now connected via an enhanced integration, their combined value has become downright mountainous! Marketers have never been in a better position to break through the clouds and step onto their own summit of marketing mastery.
LinkedIn Ads have proven to be a powerful tool for B2B marketers. Sure, LinkedIn Ads might cost a little more than some competitors, but do they get you to the top of the mountain? Do they pay you back many times over in revenue growth? The evidence suggests they do. But more on that in a bit.
Measuring B2B Marketing Performance
As it turns out, measuring revenue and ROI performance in B2B advertising (and really B2B marketing overall) is a sufferfest. Why? In short, your CRM.
CRM holds hostage all of your sales opportunity, pipeline, and order value information and it’s built to track sales reps instead of buyer behavior. Thankfully, Bizible solves this problem by combining B2B marketing channel and CRM data to create a new 1st party dataset. It’s built exclusively to help you measure and optimize marketing performance at every stage of your lead-based or account-based demand funnel. With it, you can finally prove and improve the impact of marketing. With it, you can see what pipeline and revenue is coming from LinkedIn or any other channel. And that’s how we know LinkedIn rocks.
The ROI of LinkedIn Ads and Bizible
Results certainly vary and different advertising tactics work better at different times, but Bizible benchmark data showed that, on average, LinkedIn Ads provided the #1 ROI among major paid media platforms. Bizible is also a great example of “You get what you pay for”. There are other ways marketers try to do B2B marketing attribution without investing in a B2B marketing attribution application. But the other ways have limitations. These limitations are what has brought (and continues to bring) thousands of marketers to Bizible.  In a 2020 Total Economic Impact Study commissioned by Adobe and conducted by Forrester Consulting, Forrester found that organizations investing in Bizible saw a 298% ROI and a <1yr investment payback period. Since each interviewed Bizible customer was already doing some form of attribution before they implemented Bizible, this return is even more impressive because it reflects not the value of doing attribution, but the value of doing attribution right.
A Strong Integration Gets Stronger
If LinkedIn and Bizible are each capable of providing such great returns, can that get even better when you connect them? Oh yes. How? Bizible automates the tagging, tracking, and attribution of LinkedIn Ads. Bizible proves the revenue contribution and ROI of advertising to win more budget. Finally, Bizible gives you the insight you need to know which ads, campaigns, and creative are generating not just leads, but leads that turn into pipeline and revenue. Of course, Bizible also helps you compare performance across all your channels so you can optimize your channel mix and overall spend.
As the latest result of Adobe’s strategic partnership with Microsoft, we’re excited to introduce a new native integration between Bizible and LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. This new capability enhances the current and very popular integration between Bizible and LinkedIn Sponsored Content. Now, when marketers choose to take advantage of LinkedIn’s awesome auto-filling, high-conversion-rate forms in conjunction with Sponsored Content, Bizible can track and attribute revenue to those form fills. And it’s all automated. Bizible also captures form metadata such as Form Name and ID, Campaign Name and ID and more so that marketers can understand and optimize form performance right along with ad performance.
“This integration will make a huge difference for our team in assessing the impact of our LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and using Bizible data to pivot our campaigns, as needed, to drive even more growth.” -Sydney Mulligan, Sr. Manager, Marketing Automation, Hyperscience
All of this is available to joint Bizible and LinkedIn users at no additional cost. This isn’t just a “possible integration” you need to sort out and maintain yourself or connect through some third-party data integration tool.  Like all of Bizible’s marketing channel integrations, it’s easy to set up with just a few clicks and is fully vendor-supported.
Reaching your Summit
There are few things more important in marketing than knowing which investments and engagement tactics are driving progression and wins (and which are not).  Marketers who have the tools to do this put themselves in a unique position to win and help their organizations win. LinkedIn Ads and Bizible are two tools we should all bring with us on our climb to the summit of state-of-the-art B2B marketing.
For more information, please visit our Bizible LinkedIn Integrations product docs or ask an Adobe representative.
The post Reaching the Peak of LinkedIn Ad ROI With Bizible appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

There are 96 mountain peaks in the US with an elevation of at least 14,000ft. Colorado has the most of any state at 53. No doubt, if you’ve been to Colorado, you’ve heard about these “fourteeners”. It’s a common goal to try to summit all 53. None are easy, but many are just long beautiful hikes. Eventually, though, you finish those and need to take on more challenging climbs.
Last summer, my son and I set our sights on Snowmass Mountain. The fastest and safest way up is via a steep snowfield that covers much of the mountain well into summer. An ice axe and boot crampons are essential equipment. When shopping for crampons, I came upon a pair for a little over $20. Sure, they were from some company I’d never heard of, only had 2 customer reviews and were a fraction of the cost of name-brand competitors. But the price was right! I bought them.
Did they just about get me killed? Yep. Did they prevent me from getting to the summit? Yep. They just kind of fell apart when I needed them most, as my son continued on to eternal glory and bragging rights. Sometimes not investing in the right tools can cost you a lot more in the end. The same is true in marketing.
Ads and Attribution
If you manage a marketing budget, you know how much money goes into two critical areas: paid media and marketing technology. This post is about the intersection of those two things. Namely, B2B advertising leader LinkedIn and the #1 B2B marketing attribution application, Bizible. Each brings unique value and, now connected via an enhanced integration, their combined value has become downright mountainous! Marketers have never been in a better position to break through the clouds and step onto their own summit of marketing mastery.
LinkedIn Ads have proven to be a powerful tool for B2B marketers. Sure, LinkedIn Ads might cost a little more than some competitors, but do they get you to the top of the mountain? Do they pay you back many times over in revenue growth? The evidence suggests they do. But more on that in a bit.
Measuring B2B Marketing Performance
As it turns out, measuring revenue and ROI performance in B2B advertising (and really B2B marketing overall) is a sufferfest. Why? In short, your CRM.
CRM holds hostage all of your sales opportunity, pipeline, and order value information and it’s built to track sales reps instead of buyer behavior. Thankfully, Bizible solves this problem by combining B2B marketing channel and CRM data to create a new 1st party dataset. It’s built exclusively to help you measure and optimize marketing performance at every stage of your lead-based or account-based demand funnel. With it, you can finally prove and improve the impact of marketing. With it, you can see what pipeline and revenue is coming from LinkedIn or any other channel. And that’s how we know LinkedIn rocks.
The ROI of LinkedIn Ads and Bizible
Results certainly vary and different advertising tactics work better at different times, but Bizible benchmark data showed that, on average, LinkedIn Ads provided the #1 ROI among major paid media platforms. Bizible is also a great example of “You get what you pay for”. There are other ways marketers try to do B2B marketing attribution without investing in a B2B marketing attribution application. But the other ways have limitations. These limitations are what has brought (and continues to bring) thousands of marketers to Bizible.  In a 2020 Total Economic Impact Study commissioned by Adobe and conducted by Forrester Consulting, Forrester found that organizations investing in Bizible saw a 298% ROI and a <1yr investment payback period. Since each interviewed Bizible customer was already doing some form of attribution before they implemented Bizible, this return is even more impressive because it reflects not the value of doing attribution, but the value of doing attribution right.
A Strong Integration Gets Stronger
If LinkedIn and Bizible are each capable of providing such great returns, can that get even better when you connect them? Oh yes. How? Bizible automates the tagging, tracking, and attribution of LinkedIn Ads. Bizible proves the revenue contribution and ROI of advertising to win more budget. Finally, Bizible gives you the insight you need to know which ads, campaigns, and creative are generating not just leads, but leads that turn into pipeline and revenue. Of course, Bizible also helps you compare performance across all your channels so you can optimize your channel mix and overall spend.
As the latest result of Adobe’s strategic partnership with Microsoft, we’re excited to introduce a new native integration between Bizible and LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. This new capability enhances the current and very popular integration between Bizible and LinkedIn Sponsored Content. Now, when marketers choose to take advantage of LinkedIn’s awesome auto-filling, high-conversion-rate forms in conjunction with Sponsored Content, Bizible can track and attribute revenue to those form fills. And it’s all automated. Bizible also captures form metadata such as Form Name and ID, Campaign Name and ID and more so that marketers can understand and optimize form performance right along with ad performance.
“This integration will make a huge difference for our team in assessing the impact of our LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and using Bizible data to pivot our campaigns, as needed, to drive even more growth.” -Sydney Mulligan, Sr. Manager, Marketing Automation, Hyperscience
All of this is available to joint Bizible and LinkedIn users at no additional cost. This isn’t just a “possible integration” you need to sort out and maintain yourself or connect through some third-party data integration tool.  Like all of Bizible’s marketing channel integrations, it’s easy to set up with just a few clicks and is fully vendor-supported.
Reaching your Summit
There are few things more important in marketing than knowing which investments and engagement tactics are driving progression and wins (and which are not).  Marketers who have the tools to do this put themselves in a unique position to win and help their organizations win. LinkedIn Ads and Bizible are two tools we should all bring with us on our climb to the summit of state-of-the-art B2B marketing.
For more information, please visit our Bizible LinkedIn Integrations product docs or ask an Adobe representative.
The post Reaching the Peak of LinkedIn Ad ROI With Bizible appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.