Category: Marketing Automation

I am leading marketing at a company called Coefficient and I am in need of feedback on our product. We are targeting people that are generally doing any type of reporting in spreadsheets. We are free till we hit product market fit. What’s Coefficient? Coefficient is a product/add-on for Google sheets that allows you to connect to any database or data warehouse to sheets. You can set scheduled imports, import individual objects, and set alerts on any cell. We have a number of advanced features like cloud pivot tables. What I need? I need feedback on our product. We want to make it extremely user friendly and build features that will empower users. If you could spare 30mins of your time to do a demo I’d be grateful and you can use our product free while we are in beta. If you feel like giving feedback here is the link to sign up: https://hubs.li/H0J6j7x0 – We require you to signup with a Gmail or gsuite business email – The product is free – We don’t store any data
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A strong understanding of your clients’ different customer journeys is crucial to maintaining a strong relationship with your clients’ customers. The more targeted and personalized each touchpoint or email feels to a customer, the more engaged they’ll be with your clients.
That’s good news for your clients, of course. But it’s great news for you and your agency, too. Better performance means a stronger relationship with your accounts, higher renewal rates, and a strong resume you can use to attract new business to your agency’s email marketing services.
Building highly targeted emails for every customer journey is time-consuming if sent as one-off campaigns. It’s simply not scalable to manually send messages to every target right at the most opportune moment. Fortunately, advanced marketing automation tools streamline the customer journey touchpoint process and empower your clients to connect with customers when it matters most.
In this guide, we will first discuss what customer journeys are, and will then explain how marketing automation plays a role in connecting customers to your clients.
What is a customer journey, and why is it important?
The customer journey is the sum of experiences, decisions, and interactions someone has leading up to and through making a purchase. It describes how someone first becomes aware of a brand, engages with it, and eventually buys (or doesn’t buy). And hopefully, the journey doesn’t end there.
Everyone’s customer journey is unique, and every brand will have different ideal paths to purchase. Even so, there are recognizable patterns in buying behavior and consumer preferences that can be identified, mapped, and acted on.
The goal for your clients is to acquire new customers and retain the customers they already have—one of the best ways to do this is by managing different customer journeys. For example, one customer journey can exist for someone who signed up for your client’s newsletter for the first time, and a different customer journey can exist for a customer who decides to extend their existing monthly subscription. As the experts, you should be offering advice, strategy, and support in recognizing and improving their journeys so potential customers are more likely to convert and keep coming back for more.
A common starting point for agencies that plan customer journeys for their clients is identifying which personas make up their client’s customer base. From there, you can determine which stages exist within a customer journey.
According to Daniel Newman, CEO of Broadsuite Media Group, you need to know customers’ different personas, goals, and what actions a customer needs to take in order to reach their goal. This will determine the different touchpoints your clients should prioritize for a personalized and targeted customer journey.
Some agencies decide to create customer journey maps and then use their analysis to discover where there are gaps in communication and where their clients succeed in customer satisfaction. According to Goran Paunovic, Creative Director at ArtVersion Interactive, 
“Journey mapping…encourages stakeholders to consider the customer’s needs, wants, emotions and questions, and [creates] the path to fulfill those needs.”
The main things to consider when developing and analyzing a customer journey is to look at what customers feel, expect, and need at each stage of the journey. A customer might want to feel appreciated after first signing up for a newsletter, and they will want to feel understood and heard later on in the journey when they are seeking an effective solution to their problem.
It’s important to be in touch with the customer from start to end of their journey and throughout the different stages to make sure that they feel valued, heard, and engaged. McKinsey & Company believes that doing so can “enhance customer satisfaction, improve sales and retention, reduce end-to-end service cost, and strengthen employee satisfaction.” Not only will customer journeys keep your client’s customers engaged—but they will also drive increased ROI.
Using automation to trailblaze email journeys
Marketing automation emails that are sent in customer journeys are based on triggers defined by an email marketing tool. This is known as an email journey. When each customer takes a specific action, the marketing automation tool of choice will send that customer a relevant email that you designed with or for your client.
These tools also allow you to define what each ‘trigger’ is, which will vary from client to client and journey to journey. You can plot different customer journeys as needed and create the content for each email in every stage of the journey. This is far more efficient than sending one-off email campaigns to a list of customers (though there’s still a time and place for that).
When designing behavior-triggered emails, the emails are automatically sent out based on the segmented lists you build with your clients and the stage in which each individual falls within their journey. This saves time and increases relevance and personalization. In fact, studies show that automated emails get 86% higher open rates, produce a 196% increase in click-through rates, and generate 320% more revenue than standard promotional emails.
Plotting the course to conversion: Customer journey mapping
Combining the ideas of customer journeys and email journeys may sound a little complicated at first, but visualizing them together can help explain them to your clients. 
The process of email journey mapping combines the customer journey with an automated email process to create an outline of the content the subscriber will receive during their journey. A basic customer email journey might look something like this:
You can begin with a simple outline of a journey for a given persona with your client, then build it out over time with more touches or adjustments based on testing results.

The different stages and touchpoints in an automated customer journey
One of the first steps in refining a great email journey map is determining how many touchpoints you should provide for, and what message you want to highlight at each point. The most compelling journeys are usually those with regular, consistent messaging – but if you send too often, or aren’t providing the right message for the moment, you risk an unsubscribe. It’s also important to factor in how your clients’ other channels might come into play, aligning email touches with a well-timed SMS or direct mail campaign can make for a powerful combination.
There are three basic stages most customers go through when exploring a brand. In the first stage, casual prospects have become aware of your client’s brand and offerings. The second stage involves active subscribers who have had their first experiences with your client’s business, whether it’s visiting a website, signing up for email, or even shopping in their store. Finally, in the third stage, these prospects indicate some willingness to become customers and should be guided toward making a purchase.
Potential customers at each stage have distinct needs and should receive different kinds of email content and messages that will guide them to the next. For instance, early messages in stage one should be more introductory in tone, explaining the ins and outs of your client and what they should expect. Later in stage three, it’s time to push more direct, action-oriented messaging. In between, helpful content and resources will help prospects feel more comfortable with the client and more confident about making a purchase decision.
To learn more about what the content of these journeys should be, you can read more here.
The power of email automation
When combined with email list segmentation, automation can turn your email marketing strategy from so-so to unstoppable.

Find the complete infographic of high-impact email marketing statistics here.
4 Automated customer journeys you can implement for your clients
Now it’s time to start thinking about how to transform customer journey strategy and implementation into marketable services and billable hours for your agency.
Creating automated customer journeys can be an intimidating task for brands to think through about all the varying types of subscribers they’ve accumulated. This is the perfect opportunity for you to swoop in and save the day with indispensable ideas and proven tactics to build out and optimize their customer experiences into high-converting purchase funnels. 
To assist in your creative process, we’ve compiled a list of automated customer journeys that could (and should) be included in every email marketing agency’s arsenal.
1. Welcome email
We all know how important first impressions are. When subscribers first sign up for your client’s newsletter or purchase a service, this behavior should trigger an automated welcome email or series of emails that makes a big, memorable impact.
These campaigns are also known as lead nurture campaigns since a new lead will often sign up for a brand’s newsletter or another email list prior to making a first purchase.
Through the use of a welcome email campaign, you can nurture your clients’ leads and slowly encourage products or services that may suit their needs instead of overwhelming them with purchase decisions right away.
Many agencies decide to send special offers in welcome emails, which encourages users to explore your client’s products. You can also include fun content with tips and tricks they can use when learning about your client’s brand. This is a good opportunity to incentivize further connection to your client, such as signing up for a rewards program or following their social accounts.
You can decide to include 5-10 emails in this initial stage spread out across the month in order to promote engagement through offers and storytelling content.

Source: Really Good Emails
2. Reminder emails
Reminder emails are most relevant to existing leads and customers who need to follow up with your client’s brand. This could include scheduling follow-up appointments, renewing a subscription, or taking advantage of certain perks and benefits. This is a great way to re-engage with current customers that have gone dormant by sending them a quick call to action.
You may want to have just a couple of reminder emails set up in this journey in order to prompt them to take action, while also providing them with useful content that relates to their next step.
For example, if they’re being reminded to renew a subscription, you might want to include what’s different about the new subscription model versus the old one.

Source: Really Good Emails
3. Milestone offers
Milestone emails can include anniversary offers or new VIP offers, as well as personal milestones like birthday messages. These emails are based on triggers and can depend on where someone is in their journey or what data you have on them in your client’s CRM. Sending relevant and personalized offers helps to build a relationship with your client’s customers, and also encourages them to make purchases.
These messages are especially useful because they nurture loyalty. Only your client’s most dedicated customers will receive these emails. These journeys send the message that the more loyal a customer is to your client’s brand, the more benefits and special treatment they will receive.

Source: Really Good Emails
4. Re-engagement emails
These “We miss you” emails target customers who seem to be at the end of their customer journey. As discussed earlier, the goal is to make sure a customer journey continues after the purchasing process and that customers remain engaged with your clients. One of the best ways to re-engage with customers is by understanding what their expectations are, why they became unengaged, and how you can appeal to their needs.
Customer journey mapping can really come into play here when designing these automated customer journey emails. Sending dynamic content, solutions to their problems, engaging stories, and offers can help to re-engage distant customers and bring them back into the fold.

Source: Really Good Emails
Wrap up
When creating customer journeys for clients, you need to take into account the different stages that exist in each journey and how these stages vary by segmented lists or personas. Pay attention to customers’ feelings and needs in each stage of the process. Take time to truly understand the customer experience of every client and how their various personas might begin a journey.
Marketing automation not only saves time, but it also increases relevance, efficiency, and revenue. The more you can focus on building strong relationships for your clients; the more effective their automated customer journey campaigns will be.
Email automation isn’t just good for sending relevant information to your email subscribers, it can also be used to gather valuable customer data. Check it out.
 
The post Advanced Email Automation and Customer Journeys to Implement for Your Agency Clients appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Hey there! I want to create a unified dashboard to get real-time updates from twitter, linkedin, facebook, youtube, instagram. For youtube I am able to get the reports on Data Studio. What would you recommend for the rest? What are some tools or methods you have tried out.
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Whether you’re part of an internal marketing team or an agency developing an advertising pitch, it’s imperative to nail your advertising proposal to gain stakeholder clarity and secure their buy-in.
After all, advertising is expensive, and a poorly managed campaign results in wasted funds and resources that fail to deliver a return on investment – which could hinder a company’s ability to hit its awareness and sales goals.
Executives need to know that an advertising project has been well thought-out from all angles before they front the money to develop creative and buy advertising space. And the best way to inform and persuade these decision-makers is with a crystal clear and actionable advertising proposal.
In this article, we’ll outline the actions to take, templates to use, and questions to answer when developing your advertising proposal, so you can get moving on your advertising project faster and maximize revenue from it.

Follow along with HubSpot’s free Advertising Proposal Template for PowerPoint. The template is completely customizable to your business’s needs and makes developing an advertising proposal presentation simple, covering sections thorough proposals need to have such as:

Project timeline.
Project team.
Project budget and fees.
… And more.

While the template is best-suited for marketing agencies, it can easily be adjusted for in-house marketing teams for internal project management. Download the template now to get started.
How to Make Your Advertising Proposal
1. Plan your advertising project.
Preparing an advertising plan is an essential first step in an advertising pitch project. As a rule of thumb, it’s best practice to work off of an advertising plan template to ensure you check all the necessary boxes when it comes to the project.

In the next few sections, we’ll highlight what you should include in your advertising plan and proposal, but the reason to start with this step is to ensure organization. By proactively setting up your framework, you’ll be better suited to prioritize your tasks down the road and understand which roadblocks you might face – and in the process, get ahead of them.
2. Specify your tasks and/or services.
So, you’re moving forward with your advertising proposal – but what exactly are you planning on doing?
The next step is to outline the scope of work for the project, including:

Conducting market research.
Choosing an advertising platform.
Developing creative and copy.
Working with media buying/selling vendors.
Analyzing and presenting results.

Depending on the makeup of your team or agency, you might be responsible for some or all of these tasks – or perhaps some not even listed here.

The important thing to remember in this step is to make the expectations of what your team will be doing abundantly clear.

There should be no question from those to whom you’re presenting regarding what will or won’t be done by your team.
3. Pick your team members.
An advertising campaign requires contributions from marketing, sales, sales enablement, finance, and/or the product teams.
In your proposal, put faces to names by explaining who will be responsible for what. Naturally, this process might take more time if you’re combining the efforts of those within and outside of your company, or if there are different team members in the same department who need to decide which person will be responsible.
4. Establish a timeline.
When boiled down, executives need to know what is happening and when it is happening. Thus, the next step in the process is to build a timeline for your activities.
Now that you have a list of those who will be involved in your campaign, work with their schedules and areas of expertise to determine who will be doing what, and at what point.
Your timeline should be clear, efficient, and attainable. When presenting your proposal, you don’t want anyone feeling unsure about your team hitting its targets, but you also don’t want to give off the impression that you’re not moving as diligently as possible.
As such, be sure you can speak to why each step of the process will take as long as you’re suggesting and what contingency plans – if any – you have in-place.
5. Solidify your budget. 
The key distinction between marketing and advertising is budget. Advertising requires an additional investment to buy space on a desired platform, and when asking for money, you’ll need to be transparent about how much you’re asking for, and why.
Your budget outline should speak to all funds required to execute the campaign, such as:

Agency fees (if applicable).
Creative development fees for video, imagery, and/or graphic design elements.
Advertising placement costs on your intended platform(s).
Additional headcount (internally or freelancers).

Alongside your budget, you should also speak to the projected monetary impact of your advertising campaign, including both revenue and profit, and, if available, the projected increase in customers and unit sales. Adding these elements can help make the budget more justifiable.
6. Share your presentation.
Once you have all of these elements laid out in your advertising proposal, it’s time to share your presentation.
If it’s via email, make sure to include relevant articles or resources in your messaging or in an appendix, and encourage the email’s recipients to promptly send any questions so you can address them and move forward with the project quickly.
If the presentation is in-person or over a video call, always be sure to rehearse your presentation – particularly if more than one person is explaining the proposal. As a best practice, you should leave ample time at the end of your presentation to answer any outstanding questions somebody may have before signing off on the proposal.
3 Tips for an Outstanding Advertising Proposal Presentation
1. Be creative.
You’re being tasked to work on this advertising project because you’re creative, so why would you allow your advertising proposal to be any less creative?
Make sure your proposal and presentation are filled with imagery and is well-designed. If appropriate, you might also want to consider throwing in some references, GIFs, or jokes to appeal to your audience’s more lighthearted side.
2. Be clear.
We’ve said this already, but advertising campaigns can require enormous investments of time, resources, and capital. Leave absolutely no stone unturned in your presentation, or you might risk setting false expectations about your team’s capabilities.
A lack of clarity might also convince your audience you haven’t fully answered all questions, which could result in the decision to not move forward with the campaign. When it comes to numbers, timelines, and processes, clarity is key.
3. Be concise.
Finally, always remember that we’re all pressed for time. While clarity is essential, there’s no point in redundancy or wasting your audience’s time. Some information is best suited to be clarified in the Q+A session after the presentation or in follow-up collateral if requested.
In your presentation, prioritize delivering the need-to-know information – but be prepared to follow-up on anything that needs clarification.
Delivering a Winning Advertising Proposal
With these steps and this template, you’ve got the foundation to bring your advertising campaign idea to life. Find the balance between clarity and creativity, know your numbers, explain your process, and you’ll be on your way to getting your advertising proposal approved.

 

 

While 29% of start-ups simply run out of money, 19% turn up worse than the competition, and 14% have awful marketing, the need for mysterious-sounding growth hacking arises.

 

The Definition

 

If you have ever had any interest in expanding the group of your audience, there’s no way you hadn’t heard this weirdly annoying buzzword: Growth Hacking. For those living under a rock, it may seem a little suspicious, dangerous and for most – illegal. 

 

Hacking is the term very close to hackers, and hackers are those guys in American movies, wearing masks and doing black magic on their computers with supernatural typing speed, right? Well, no, not really. Growth hacking refers to nothing more than just an umbrella of strategies, whose main purpose is to help your company grow. Rings any bell? Neil Patel explains growth hacker as someone who uses “analytics, inexpensive, creative and innovative ways to exponentially grow their company’s customer base.” Some call growth hacking the best way to grow a business or even the future of marketing. But as the reader sinks into many articles written about this phenomenon, it turns out that a single definition is unable to cover the whole topic.

 

What is all this about?

 

Growth hacking is relatively new on the marketing’s horizon. Coming down to the simplest explanation possible it’s a process consisting of data-driven and experiment-based processes. This definition may still seem enigmatic, so let me rephrase it to a more real-life example. 

 

A growth hacker is someone who constantly uses data – in the sense of technology and automation – to which they can then apply marketing and psychological strategies to conduct a series of experiments ultimately leading to the discovery of a hidden treasure – the Growth Hack.

 

How is it different from regular marketing?

 

The answer is: not that much. Growth hacking is considered in frames of marketing, as a subset. If we think of it, marketing is about increasing sales through generating leads, digital marketing it’s the variation of the very same but performed online, and growth hacking benefits from both, with the difference of using a more intuitive, and maybe even eccentric way with the heavy reliance on data. As Sean Ellis was the coiner of the very term we are discussing he defined a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth.” And yet, there are a few significant discrepancies between marketing and growth hacking.

 

The Differences

 

For starters, growth hackers operate in the future. Okay, it sounded a bit like they in fact were magicians, so maybe let’s change it to operate FOR the future. Their focus is mainly on next growth opportunities, rather than current day-to-day ones like marketers do. This allows to actually predict (basing on relevant data) the trends, which then can be used to the business’s advantage. 

 

Funnel-wise – mentioned “hackers” use the whole spectrum of it, including Retention and Referral, while most marketers stay in the area of Awareness and Acquisition. 

 

The bigger is not always the better – while marketers often focus on long-term projects, growth hackers are making it small. Trying everything little by little is for sure a more convenient way than eating the whole cake at once, hence the idea to run small experiments and see how accurate the results are – if not good enough, it’s easy to start over by running another test. 

 

There are also already mentioned differences like the use of technical skills and data-driven work specificity.

 

Alright, knowing all this, where we can expect to use growth hackers?

 

Either grow fast or die fast

 

I admit that may sound a little harsh, but isn’t that what marketing is? The thing is we are talking not only about enterprises who want to occasionally boost their revenue because they can. We are talking about start-ups whose first months of putting themselves in there might be decisive on their survival or extinction. That’s what growth hacking was created for. 

 

Let’s be honest, starting a business from scratch ain’t easy. It is estimated that 90% of new businesses fail severely due to poor growth in their early stages. After digging through businesses postmortems CB Insights reports that 29% of them simply ran out of money, 19% turned up worse than the competition, and 14% had awful marketing. I can bet that none of them had a growth hacker. 

 

It is the rapid growth that keeps start-ups from burning out faster than a can of hairspray thrown into a fire. That growth we are talking about provides financial strength, allows you to do successful marketing, and brings in enough money to give you the opportunity to grow and glow. 

 

To ensure this rapid growth to your baby-company you need to know how to expand your customer base and your revenue in a really short time. For that, you should be introduced to a certain skill set, which is a must-have for a growth hacker.

 

The Skillset

 

No Hogwarts certificate is needed for that, but for sure some wizard skills are welcome. A proper growth hacker in order to boost your start-up at the beginning of the journey is able to make customers feel emotionally linked to the company so that they keep coming back for more. The solid profile of a growth hacker should include:

 

Experience in product marketing and user retention
Ideally, clairvoyant abilities but knowledge of psychological principles and behavior patterns should also be sufficient
Experience with full-Funnel
Great analytical skills when it comes to data
Hands-on experience with marketing technologies

 

So, when should you consider growth hacking?

 

Analyzing who growth hackers are and why they can be of use when you are trying to build the empire (or just a prosperable company, whichever one you prefer) you should really set up your priorities. 

 

If you are prior to product-market fit, it’s better to wait until you are really sure that the mentioned product is fit to the market you are aiming for. Hiring Growth Hacker with no strategy whatsoever might end up pumping money into multiple channels before the need is validated. 

 

If you don’t have enough data to work on growth hacking won’t be as effective as it would be with a high volume of quantitative data. Make sure you have the numbers that are workable, such as web traffic, user behaviors, and other types of in-product data to power the optimization of growth channels.

 

If you are broke and your marketing budget is nonexistent, you have to remember that acquisition channels are pretty expensive and do not generate a lot of ROIs at the beginning.

 

Summing up

 

Growth hacking sounds cool, that’s a fact, and in most cases, when used properly it can also do cool stuff in terms of your start-up. Going back to the beginning of this article, it’s not just an annoying buzzword or a bunch of illegal actions – it’s a set of skills and knowledge from the combination of superficially unconnected fields, that have more and more sense when we sink deeper into the topic. The growth hacking strategies you decide to use greatly depend on what type of business you have, your current situation, and what you hope to accomplish. Then when your goals are clear, and fresh air of victory fills your lungs, your start-up will have the opportunity to thrive with the help of growth hacking.

marketing automation

marketing automation

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If you’ve ever been in charge of gathering reports for your marketing team, then you know there are a plethora of metrics you can measure.
One metric that you might not think to use for several channels is share of voice. However, this is a versatile metric that you can use in a competitive analysis for social media, organic traffic, or even paid advertising.

As a marketer, share of voice is important because it helps you understand how well your brand is performing against the competition.
Below, let’s review everything you need to know about share of voice.

While share of voice isn’t the same thing as market share (more on that below), share of voice tends to correlate with market share and revenue. For instance, the more you’re dominating in the conversation online, the more market share you’ll have and the more authority you’ll have among users.
This metric was mainly used as a way to measure success in paid advertising, however it’s much more than that now. You can calculate share of voice for organic traffic and social media, in addition to paid advertising.
By calculating your share of voice, you’ll have a better understanding of many people know about your brand, and you can identify areas to work on. For example, if you have a high share of voice in social media, but not as much in organic traffic, then you know you need to improve your organic traffic strategies.
Now, what’s the difference between share of voice and share of market?

Share of Voice Formula
To calculate share of voice, divide your brand’s measures by the total market measures. This could be your social mentions, paid advertising clicks, or website traffic.
To find these numbers, you’ll need to use some of your marketing tools. You can look at your social media automation tool, for instance, to count how many mentions your brand has. Then, you can calculate how many mentions your competitors have. After you add all those together, you can divide your mentions by the total to find the share of voice percentage.
Calculating share of voice should help you learn which channels need your attention the most and how you stack up against competitors. Now, let’s see which channels you should calculate share of voice for.
Share of Voice
Advertising
When it comes to advertising, it’s important to find your share of voice to see how much ad space you’re taking up compared to the competition.
To find this, you’ll divide how well you did in a paid advertising metric (such as impression shares), by the total number in the industry.
For PPC ads, you can look at impression shares, which represent the amount of times your ads were shown to users compared to the number of times your ads could have been shown, based on your keyword and campaign settings.
Share of voice is important in advertising because it will help you budget, measure campaign effectiveness, and give you a competitive advantage.
Social Media
Social media is one of the main channels where you can use share of voice as a measure of success since social media is where consumers go to be heard.
With social media, you can measure brand mentions, hashtags, reach, impressions, or even sentiment.
To calculate, use a social media tool to measure brand mentions. Calculate yours, your competitors, then add those numbers together and divide your mentions by the total.
Share of voice is important in social media because it will help you determine which competitors are getting mentioned more, so you can analyze what you do versus what they do. This will help you identify gaps in your strategy. Ask yourself, what platforms are working for your competitors, which influencers talk about them, and where they’re the most popular.
Now, you might be wondering, “How can I generate these reports?”
Share of Voice Reports
To create a share of voice report, you should be able to use your marketing automation tool to gather the numbers. You can simply create an excel sheet and begin calculating share of voice for several channels including social media, advertising, or organic traffic.
Calculating share of voice is a great way to learn how well you perform against your competitors. The best part is that you can use this metric for several marketing channels, from advertising to social media.

The irony doesn’t escape me that I’m currently writing a “How to” guide on … “How to” guides.
Fortunately, I’ve had my fair share of experiences writing How to guides for HubSpot over the years — some of my favorites include How to Give a Persuasive Presentation, How to Develop a Content Strategy: A Start-to-Finish Guide, and How to Write a Request for Proposal.
How to Guides are incredibly valuable opportunities to reach new audiences with useful, high-quality content. Plus, for both B2B and B2C businesses, How to Guides are often necessary components of a healthy lead generation strategy.
For instance, consider how many people search “How to [fill in the blank]” on Google each day:

These search queries demonstrate one of the primary reasons people turn to the internet — to learn how to do something.
If your business can reach those users with informative, relevant answers to their questions (related to your own products or services), those readers will begin to see your brand as an authority on the topic. Additionally, they’ll appreciate the value you’ve provided them.
Down the road, those same readers you first attracted with a How to Guide could become customers and loyal brand advocates who spread the word about your products or services to friends and family.
Suffice to say: How to Guides matter.
Here, we’ll explore the right structure to use when making a How to Guide and how to write a comprehensive How to Guide. We’ll also take a look at some impressive examples of How to Guides for inspiration. Let’s dive in.

How to Make a How to Guide
1. Conduct research to ensure your guide is the most comprehensive piece on the topic.
People read How to Guides to learn how to do things. And even if you know very well how to do something, it’s critical you conduct research to ensure you’re writing content that can help both the beginner and the expert who’s searching for your post.
Additionally, to rank on the SERPs, you’ll want to conduct keyword research and competitive research to ensure your How to Guide is the most comprehensive post on the subject.
For instance, let’s say you’re writing a blog post, “How to Make an Omelette.” Upon conducting research, you find Simply Recipe’s post is at the top of Google.
Diving into the post, you’ll see Simply Recipe has covered sections including “French Verses American Omelettes”, “The Best Pan for Making Omelettes”, and even “Ideas for Omelette Fillings”.
If you want to create your own How to Guide on omelettes, then, you’ll want to cover all (if not more) of the sections Simply Recipe has covered in its post.
Additionally, you should use Ahrefs or another keyword research tool to explore similar keywords or queries people ask when searching for topics like “Omelette”. This can help you create a well-rounded piece that will answer all your readers’ questions, and help you rank on Google.
Even if you know a topic incredibly well, research isn’t a step you should skip. In fact, knowing a topic well can make it more difficult to write a How to Guide on the topic, since it feels like second-nature to you. For that reason, you’ll want to rely on your research to ensure you’re including all relevant information.
2. Understand your target audience’s concerns and challenges.
For this step, you’ll want to use online community forums like Quora or internal data to identify all the various concerns or challenges your target audience might have that your How to Guide can answer.
If you’re writing “How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy”, for instance, you could start by looking at responses to “What is content marketing?” on Quora. These user-generated responses can help you identify common themes, misconceptions, or confusion around content marketing.
Next, you might reach out to your research marketing team to identify common pain points or questions they’ve seen in surveys or focus groups regarding “content marketing”. For instance, you might find that most of your audience says content marketing is a priority for them — but they don’t know how to do it on a budget.
Conducting qualitative research like this arms you with the information necessary to ensure your How to Guide answers all relevant concerns on a given topic.
3. Structure your steps in the correct order for your reader, and when possible, use screenshots.
Your readers will bounce from your page if it’s too difficult for them to quickly find the answer to their question, so you want to deliver all relevant information as quickly as possible — and in the right order.
Many readers will use your How to Guide as a list of instructions. For instance, if you’re writing, “How to Take a Screenshot on a Mac”, you’ll want to write down each specific action necessary to take a screenshot. When possible, images, screenshots, or videos can also help take your content to the next level.
For less tactical, more ambiguous topics, you should still list your tips for easy readability.
4. Tell the reader why it matters.
To write a high-quality How to Guide, it’s important you start by asking yourself: Why do my readers need, or want, to know this?
Understanding the high-level purpose behind a topic can encourage you to write with empathy. Additionally, it will help you create content that accurately meets your reader’s expectations and needs.
For instance, when writing “How to Create a Facebook Group for Your Business”, I took some time to identify that readers might search this topic if a) they are seeking out new ways to connect with customers or want to create a stronger sense of brand community, or b) they want to raise awareness about their products or services.
As a result, I wrote:
“A group is a good idea if you’re interested in connecting your customers or leads to one another, you want to facilitate a sense of community surrounding your brand, or you’re hoping to showcase your brand as a thought leader in the industry. However, a group is not a good idea if you want to use it to raise awareness about your products or services, or simply use it to post company announcements.”
In the example above, you can see I targeted a few different segments of readers with diverse purposes to help readers determine whether this How to Guide would even help them meet their own goals.
Ultimately, understanding the purpose behind your How to Guide is critical for ensuring you target all the various components or angles of the topic at-hand.
How to Write a How to Guide
Once you’re ready to start writing your How to Guide, you might wonder if your tone or writing style should differ, compared to other types of posts. 
In short: Yes, it should.
When people search “How to …” they’re often in a rush to find the information they need, which means it’s critical you write in short, concise sentences to provide an answer quickly.
Additionally, How to Guides need to offer tactical, actionable advice on a topic so readers can begin implementing the steps immediately.

There’s a world of difference between readers who search “what is an RFP”, and those who search “How to write an RFP”. While the former group is looking for a definition of RFPs and maybe an example or two, the latter group likely already has a fair understanding of RFPs and needs to create one ASAP.

If you’re writing a How to Guide, there are a few best practices to keep in mind when it comes to writing:

Use verbs when writing out steps. For instance, you’ll want to say, ‘Write a company background’, rather than ‘Your RFP should start with a brief background on your company.’

Use numbered lists, headers, and bullet points to break up the text and make your content as easy to skim as possible.

Use both screenshots and written text for readers who can’t load the image on their screen or don’t understand what you’re trying to tell them from the image itself. 

Link out to other relevant blog posts, pillar pages, or ebooks so readers can find follow-up information on certain topics mentioned in your How to Guide.

Provide examples to show your readers what you mean.

Write with empathy, acknowledging it can be frustrating when learning or refining a new skill. 

How to Guides often attract a wide range of readers, all with varying levels of expertise.
“How to Create a YouTube Channel,” for instance, likely attracts YouTube beginners who are simply interested in creating a channel to watch and comment on friends’ posts — but it probably also attracts professional marketers who need to create a channel for their business to attracts and converts leads.
With such a diverse audience, it’s critical you write clearly, but not condescendingly, to ensure you retain readers regardless of skill level or background experience.
To explore what this looks like in-practice, let’s explore some examples of How to Guides next.
How to Guide Examples
1. The Recipe How to Guide

McCormick’s “How to recipe guide on french toast” is neatly organized so readers can quickly determine a) how long the recipe will take, b) the ingredients you’ll need, and c) instructions for cooking.
If a reader already knows the ingredients necessary for french toast, she can click to “Instructions” to get started right away. Alternatively, if a reader prefers viewing instructions rather than reading, she can click “Watch How-to Video”. This offers good variety when it comes to how readers’ prefer consuming How to materials. 
Takeaway: When you’re structuring your own How to Guide, consider how you can best organize it so readers can jump straight to what they need. For instance, perhaps you put the most important information at the top, or include a jump link so readers can determine what they need to read — and what they can skip. 
2. The B2B How to Guide
Atlassian’s “How to write the perfect 90 day plan” provides important contextual details to the 90 day plan, including “What is a 90 day plan?” and “What should be included in a 90 day plan?” The piece is well-researched and empathetically-written. 
Best of all, the guide provides a downloadable 90 day plan PDF, so readers can immediately download and use Atlassian’s plan with their own team. 
Takeaway: Consider what ebooks, PDFs, charts, Canva designs, or Google Sheets you can make internally as an option for readers to download and use. Readers will appreciate the option to immediately apply what they’ve learned.
3. The B2C How to Guide
This “How to Become a Freelancer” guide from FlexJobs does a good job providing relevant links and data to create a comprehensive overview of what freelancing is.
Additionally, the post uses action verbs to inspire the reader — for instance, under “How to Start a Freelance Business”, you’ll see tips such as “Do Your Homework”, “Create a Brand”, and “Plan Ahead”. The language used in this post goes a long way towards encouraging readers to get started immediately. 
Takeaway: Use action verbs and concise language to keep a reader engaged. When possible, start with a verb instead of a noun when listing out steps. 
4. The Product-related How to Guide
“How to Find Data in Google Sheets with VLOOKUP” isn’t necessarily the most interesting topic, but How-to Geek effectively keeps the content engaging with empathetic statements like, “VLOOKUP might sound confusing, but it’s pretty simple once you understand how it works.” 
Additionally, How-to Geek includes useful, original images to demonstrate each tip they’re describing. These images don’t have to be state-of-the-art visuals created by a professional design team, either — as this post proves, a few simple screenshots go a long way towards helping the reader understand a complex topic. 
Takeaway: When possible, create your own visuals/screenshots to walk readers through each step-by-step instruction.
5. The Lifestyle How to Guide

I recently saw this post in Medium titled, “11 Ways to Quickly Stop Stress in Your Life”. I clicked it expecting a few quick, easy tips for stopping stress — but, instead, I was engrossed in the first section of the post, “The Effects of Stress in Your Life”. 
While I previously mentioned the importance of starting with a quick answer to the searcher’s How-to question, there are exceptions to that rule. In this case, it’s important readers understand why they should stop stress before knowing how. This Medium writer did a good job understanding the structure he should use to keep readers engaged throughout. 
Takeaway: Play around with structure. Consider what your readers need to know in order for the rest of the post to matter to them. For instance, you might start with a section, “What is XYZ?” and “Why XYZ matters” before diving into, “How to do XYZ.” This way, your readers are fully invested in finding out how these tips can improve their lives in some small (or big) way. 

Our Engineering team is the largest team at Buffer. It has a lot of moving pieces and is composed of several smaller teams. As with any large team, we’re keen to make sure no one individual lacks guidance or an opportunity to grow. In this post, I’ll share a little bit more about how we’ve done that through a new program at Buffer that we’ve already had a lot of success with, our Engineering Mentorship Program.
Why a mentorship program?
Over the years on our Engineering team, we’ve had great results from engineers pairing and sharing knowledge. We’ve also seen spontaneous mentorship relationships form and are currently at a point where we have several senior engineers who naturally fill the role of a mentor for a more junior team member.These relationships proved to be extremely beneficial both for the junior and the senior engineers’ growth and have helped the teams be more cohesive and move faster. To extend the mentorship opportunities to more engineers, we’ve decided to launch an official Mentorship Program in the Engineering team, to add momentum to existing relationships and form new ones between engineers interested in growing as mentors or learning from one.One of our main focuses on the Engineering Management team is helping engineers grow and advance in our career framework. At the same time, they learn and apply best practices to improve our codebase quality over time. In the past, we’ve heard some confusion from our engineers around how investing in code quality and best practices relates to our career framework, and concerns that some technical debts might be making it more challenging to advance for newer engineers. This Mentorship Program feels like it has helped to level up more junior engineers, something we’re always keen to do more of.
How we’ve set up our mentorship program
There are three roles in our Engineering Mentorship Program: mentors, mentees, and mentorship champions.
MentorsMentors are senior engineers who have a depth of experience to develop the skills of others. They have regular meetings with their mentees and provide a safe space for the mentee to think out loud and be a sounding board to explore new ideas and innovative thinking.Mentors can also be the personal cheer squad for a mentee, motivating mentees to achieve their goals and inspiring mentees with a mentor’s own accomplishments.Mentors will share best practices, code quality, testing, refactoring, and how those relate to our engineering career framework. A mentee’s promotion is a sign of success! A mentor’s goal is to grow mentees technically, and promotions are one (but of course not the only) way that growth shows up.Mentors will help identify and solve problems and provide practical, timely advice, and pair program to help remove any blockers and share knowledge.
Mentees
Mentees are engineers that feel they could benefit from having a mentor to guide career and skill growth. They don’t have to be “more junior” necessarily. A Senior Back-End Engineer who wants to learn front-end could be a mentee, too.This program is for mentees, so they own the relationship and are responsible for organizing and driving all meetings with their mentor. They shouldn’t wait for their mentor to drive this growth. In their discussions, they should prepare tasks they want help with and code examples. Mentees are responsible for implementing and growing from the feedback their mentor gives them. It’s on the mentee to take the advice and run with it.
Mentorship ChampionsWe’ve tried mentoring before, but we’ve had something missing: supporting our mentors. To fix this, we came up with the idea of Mentorship Champions. These are team members who are amazing mentors themselves, have extensive experience with teaching mentoring engineers and are highly experienced engineers.Mentorship Champions regularly meet with mentors to provide guidance and support on how to be a great mentor. They help with any blockers, challenges, or frustrations that mentors might have and give feedback on the program to the Mentorship Manager to make sure it’s successful.
The difference between a mentor and a manager
Although there are some similarities in the mentorship and management relationships, such as helping and guiding team members to achieve certain goals, there are also key differences.A manager’s focus is generally on achieving organizational and team goals, as well as ensuring their advice and decisions are aligned with the organizational vision. With a mentor, the focus shifts to personal and career growth. The agenda of a mentor-mentee relationship is focused on sharing knowledge and experience.A manager is responsible for reviewing the contributions of an employee and giving performance feedback, while mentor feedback and reviews are personal communication targeted to help a mentee remain focused on their long-term goals.Open and candid communication is a key element in a mentor-mentee relationship. In fact, the entire purpose of the relationship is to openly talk about mentees shortcomings and learn how to overcome them with the help of an experienced mentor, while it can be trickier to talk about ones technical gaps with a manager.In short:✅ Mentors give answers; managers ask questions✅ Mentors advocate for you; managers develop you✅ Mentorship is casual; management is formal✅ Mentorship is personal; management is organizational
Key principles of this program
To help guide our mentors and mentees, we’ve defined some key principles of this program:A mentorship session is all about the mentee. It’s the mentee’s time, so the mentor should focus the session around them, their questions, and what they need. The mentor should also be prepared to fill in the gaps that the mentee does not bring or struggles to see for themselves. Mentors help their mentees grow technically by supporting their mentee’s identity and interests. The program’s aim is not to take a one-size-fits-all approach. It provides the tools and support for mentors to help everyone flourish in their own unique way.Not everyone needs a mentor. Some people learn best alone, or from casual chats with lots of different people, or they might already be getting everything they need at this moment from their manager and do not require additional mentoring.An engineer does not need to be a mentor to grow. There are other ways for engineers to expand in their careers and our mentorship program isn’t a requirement in our career framework.
Feedback from the Mentorship Program
Initially, we ran this program as a six-month experiment. After the first 6-months, we asked those who participated for feedback on the program and if they wanted it to continue.The feedback we got from the program was extremely positive, showing that these kinds of relationships and the support the program provides has been very useful for the growth of both mentees and mentors.Here are a few highlights:

[…] I believe this mentorship has been the biggest factor in my growth at Buffer
[…] the mentorship syncs are definitely one of the most helpful syncs I have
[…] it’s a very positive experience overall, really enjoy building a trust relationship with my mentees, and seeing them progressing, it’s a rewarding experience for sure. It’s also a good way for me get more involved with different product areas, and problems, outside of my strict day to day work
This program has been an amazing help for me, I’ve been enjoying every single one of the calls I’ve had […], my mentor always challenges me and he has helped me to grow by doing the things I love.
[…] “it’s been only a joy full of learning and mutual trust. I felt that we were able to bond together and discuss many things on career framework, personal growth and technical decisions in our organization”

Based on the feedback and individual chats with engineers, we decided to continue the Mentorship Program indefinitely with a few changes.
What we’ve changed in the program
Adding more Mentorship ChampionsOne of the Mentorship program’s identified benefits was having dedicated support for our mentors through Mentorship Champions. So far, this role was fulfilled solely by our Staff Engineer, Mike San Roman, making it difficult to scale and add more mentorship pairings (support more mentors). Because of that, we decided to add additional senior engineers and experienced mentors as Mentorship Champions.Introducing regular mentorship chatsThere have been important topics that emerged from this experiment, such as ensuring the program is inclusive and diverse, supporting and growing women mentors, and making the program more transparent and collaborative with Engineering Managers.For this reason, we are now holding once-a-month calls between Mentorship Champions to discuss the above points, chat about any recurring themes in mentorship, and share learnings and updates with the Engineering Management team and wider Engineering team.Introducing async office-hoursIt has been quite tricky to gather mentors and mentorship champions on one call since so many of our team are in various time zones. With the 4 day work-week and leaning more towards asynchronous communication, we decided to introduce async office-hours where, on a dedicated day, everyone will share their updates asynchronously in our private Slack channel. The updates will include any successes, challenges, blockers, and celebrations that emerged during the past few weeks.So far, we’ve seen great results from the mentorship program for the Engineering team, and we’re excited to keep investing in it and supporting our engineers in their career journey.

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