Category: Marketing Automation

In July, we shared that we were looking for a product leader to help us take Buffer forward in our next phase. After speaking to an incredible group of talented folks in product, I’m happy to share that Maria Thomas has joined us as our new Chief Product Officer.
We’re now a 10-year old company, and in the past year, I’ve done a lot of reflection on the purpose of the company and how we can set ourselves up to reach our potential and have the most impact. Buffer’s mission is to provide essential tools to help small businesses get off the ground and grow.
Maria brings with her a breadth of experience working in SaaS and working with small businesses. Her most recent roles have been as the VP of Product at Bitly for the past two years and Insightly for the prior three and a half years. These are both SaaS companies that served small businesses and navigated the ups and downs of all that comes with that segment, including having a large free user base. Maria also spent seven years building products for SMBs at Intuit.
The opportunity to bring on an executive is rare, especially at a company like Buffer, where we have some very loyal and long-tenured people and are striving to create a decades-long sustainable company. There’s much we can learn, however, from someone with experience of where we’re trying to go, and with Maria we have found a great blend of significant experience and expertise we can learn from and an excitement for the unique type of company we are. In particular, Maria and I connected and had great conversations around the freedom and creativity that can come with being unconstrained by VC investment and how that can help us have a more pure focus on the customer, and ultimately more compounding long-term success.
In Maria’s own words:
I am inspired and humbled to join Buffer. You have quite a following in the product management community. Several of my peers revealed that they’d had a long ‘crush on Buffer’ once they learned that I joined you as your CPO. I am thrilled to join a product-led company focused on helping SMBs, a profitable, transparent, sustainable SaaS business, and a majority female executive team.
We’re lucky to benefit from all of Maria’s great experience in product as well as her many years as an executive of similarly sized companies. Maria joined us late last year and has already had a significant impact, helping us to shape our goals and strategy for 2021. I’m confident that within the next few months, customers will start to see the positive and tangible results of her contributions.

Salesforce’s physical offices may have been closed in 2020, but Pardot’s product team didn’t stop working. If anything, our product innovation accelerated last year! Pardot became easier to use with deeper analytics, more built-in artificial intelligence (AI), and new features to help your scale your marketing.
Here are five of Pardot’s most exciting 2020 product advancements that will help you take your marketing to the next level in 2021:
1. B2B MARKETING ANALYTICS PLUS
Using B2B Marketing Analytics Plus is like adding a data scientist to your marketing team. Powered by the most advanced AI capabilities, not only can you better understand the performance of past campaigns — you can also receive suggestions on what to do next to maximize your return on investment (ROI) at every stage of the funnel. For instance: predict how much engagement you’ll gain with planned campaigns. The new connectors allow marketers to pull in data from external systems, like Google Analytics.

2. ENGAGEMENT HISTORY DASHBOARDS
Get the relevant analytics and insights you need directly on account, lead, contact, opportunity, and campaign records. With Engagement History Dashboards, you can embed dashboards on these records that visualize marketing engagement and surface key insights.
Marketing users need to understand that their efforts are creating engagement, while sales needs to understand who’s engaging, identify strong leads, and build targeted account plans. These dashboards allow all users – marketing and sales alike – to see the same data and use that data to inform decisions. You’ll be able to understand trends and patterns in campaign engagement and gather details on the who, what, when, where, why, and how behind the engagement.

3. EINSTEIN ATTRIBUTION
Don’t calculate marketing attribution the way your grandmother did. Use a customized model created by Einstein learning to more accurately identify the most effective campaigns in your customer journeys. Einstein Attribution leaves rules-based influence models in the rearview mirror. It uses AI to develop a data-driven model that attributes revenue share based on your actual customers, their engagement, and your successes.

4. NEW PARDOT EMAIL EXPERIENCE
Pardot marketers now have a more streamlined and user-friendly end-to-end email experience that uses the power of the Lightning Platform. The redesigned email experience includes enhanced email design capabilities, preview and test options, and a configurable send experience. Marketers can build email content from templates and add images, HTML, plain text, and HML merge fields to customize them. You can save email content for reuse and view reports on content performance. Pardot’s new email experience also allows users to take advantage of Salesforce CMS.

5. DEVELOPER SANDBOXES FOR PARDOT
Testing, auditing, and configuring Pardot is now easier than ever. Admins and developers can use sandboxes to safely test Pardot in an isolated training environment before going to live production. This provides the staging ground developers need to make configuration or asset changes and ensure all IT governance needs are met.
Want to learn more? Join us Jan. 20 for a webinar to learn how marketers are leveraging Pardot’s latest and greatest capabilities to transform their marketing.

Google Ads is one of the most effective advertising tools to get more traffic to your website, and generate more leads. In fact, most businesses see an average of 200% ROI on their Google Ad spend.
To create better, more powerful ads on Google, it can be helpful to receive a Google Ads certificate. Additionally, it’s a great resume booster.
If you’re looking to get a Google Ads certificate, you’ve come to the right place. Here, we’ve created a guide that will explain why a Google Ads certification through Google’s Skillshop is helpful, and how you can prepare and get certified.

What is Google Skillshop?
Google Skillshop is the home for all e-learning courses offered by Google product experts. This is where you’ll head to become Google product certified, including in Google Ads, Google Ad Manager, and Analytics Academy.

Whether you’re a beginner looking to dive into the world of Google products or an experienced marketing professional ready to up-level your skills, you’ll find what you need in Skillshop.
Increase your knowledge in Google Ads Display, Ads Video, Shopping Ads, or even Google Ads measurement. Not sure why you’d go deeper than a working understanding of Google’s product suite? Let’s talk the “why” of getting certified, below.
Why get a Google Ads certification?
Years ago when I was applying for work, I interviewed a couple dozen people who worked in the digital marketing industry to learn about their jobs and the application process. Many emphasized the importance of getting a Google Ads certification.
The truth is that many employers search for people with this certification on LinkedIn to find employees for their marketing team. LinkedIn generally offers a talent pool of higher-quality than standard job boards like Indeed. Plus, the demand for marketers skilled in Google Ads is high, while the supply of qualifying candidates is relatively low.
Thanks to the internet, it’s easier than ever before to apply for a job with little effort, so employers are swimming in low-quality choices.
To find qualified employees, then, many hiring managers use LinkedIn’s search engine to find anyone with a Google Ads certification because it’s one of the few defining qualifications that can show proven knowledge and skill. The certification shows the hiring manager that you’re somewhat savvy about the industry.
The good news is that a lot of fresh talent don’t have a certification on their LinkedIn profile or resume since they don’t know the value of it. In other words, you can easily stand out if you get certified.
Even if you don’t want a role in PPC, the certification is still helpful for any marketer. PPC advertising, especially through Google Ads, makes up the bulk of online advertising. If you understand the principles of Google Ads, you can translate those principles to other marketing efforts.
Additionally, having an understanding of neighboring areas of marketing helps with your communication among team members, and empathy. Ultimately, having that certification under your tool belt will only make you look better to employers.
How Applicable is the Certification in the Marketing Industry?
To be fair and objective, let’s acknowledge the case against getting certified.
First, in terms of actual skill and practice, a certification isn’t entirely applicable in a real marketing role. It’s possible to score well or even perfectly on this exam without having actual experience with the platform, especially when there are exam answers online.

The exam can, at times, teach you the best answer in theory, which isn’t close to the best answer
in practice.

Having been in the Google Ads platform myself, I know that a few questions are unnecessarily complicated, not applicable, or biased toward a response focused on spending as much money as possible on Google’s platform. Google makes money when you spend money on ads, regardless of whether the ad leads to a sale, so their intentions make sense.
With all that said, most of the questions are still valuable because they help you learn how to navigate the platform and make accurate calculations. You can grow a lot through preparing for this exam even if you initially have little to no knowledge of Google Ads.
You should take the test without cheating, learn from your incorrect answers, and retake it to improve. Otherwise, you may have a tough time with the platform later on, which can seem detailed and intimidating to beginners.
Here’s another huge reason why you should get certified and make sure you learn a lot during the preparation process, rather than speed through it — any decent marketing agency or department that you’d like to work for is going to test you on your understanding of terminology and pay-per-click reasoning during the application process. They’re going to find out whether you really know what you’re talking about.
Therefore, the knowledge that the exams offer does have some real-world value. That doesn’t mean you have to be a total whiz. But you should understand most of the concepts tested.
Treat the Google Ads exam as an opportunity to learn rather than a task to check-off a list. Your mindset shift will make all the difference because you’ll be learning from every question asked, while others rush through the exam just to finish it.
Topics and Exam Duration of the Google Ads Certifications
Google Ads Exam Topics
There are Google Ads certifications for different topics, including video, mobile, display, and shopping advertising. The most important version is the search advertising exam since that’s the area marketers use most often on the platform. The second most applicable Google Ads test for marketers is likely Google Ads display certification.
Google Ads Certification Exam Duration
Each exam has a different time limit, but it’s usually between 60 minutes and two hours. I’ve got a good sense for how long it actually takes since I’ve sat in a classroom with a dozen people taking the exam and have seen how quickly people finish. It usually takes 50–75% of the allotted time. A small percentage of people will use up to all the time if they’re new or focused on learning from each question.
Google Ads Certification Badges
Once you’ve passed the exam, you get a certification badge that you can show off on your LinkedIn profile. Adding this badge to your profile adds credibility and makes your profile more search-engine friendly. As mentioned, recruiters look for this certification and care about it, so you’ll be showing up more often when they search.
Google Ads Certification Training
The training resources that Google offers are a handy starting point. You can learn a lot about the testing format, style of questions, and concepts that’ll show up on the exam.
Additionally, one of the best ways to prepare for the exams is through YouTube tutorials, demonstrations, and tutorial articles. Most people are visual learners, and they will learn better when they see the platform itself with a video, rather than reading about it. That said, some blog posts have great screenshots throughout to help you better understand their tutorial.
It’s important to note — many of the resources online are overkill. It’s easy for beginners to feel overwhelmed by the details. However, try to focus on learning the fundamental principles — like what to tweak to make a big impact on performance.
If a tutorial article is 5,000 words long, then it’s covering every detail of the platform, which is too much for the certification exam.
Additionally, the exams themselves can be training tools. If you don’t pass the first time, you can learn from your incorrect answers and retake it. You can use your first attempt to get familiar with the format and duration. Reflect on why you got a question wrong so that you can remember the right answer for next time.
Some of the questions asked are recycled and randomized with different numbers. You can gain a lot of applicable math skills by learning the principles behind calculations. Unfortunately, many marketers skip learning from the exam itself and miss out on the bulk of where they can grow.
Take the exam with an attitude of learning, rather than completing.
Tips for When You’re Taking the Exam
1. Take notes.
Have printed notes on hand that you can consult quickly whenever you forget minor details here and there (don’t expect to rely on these for the entire exam, though). These notes are useful in case Google decides to implement restrictive browsing limits for exam takers in the future.
2. Plan for plenty of battery.
Make sure your computer is plugged in so it doesn’t run out of battery life while you’re taking the exam. This tip may seem obvious, but you don’t want to find yourself in that painful situation.
3. Pace yourself, while answering.
Take your time with each question. Most people end up with extra time. Remember — it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You’ll be answering multiple-choice questions for at least an hour.
4. Practice self-care, pre-test.
Hydrate. Get enough sleep. Some people overlook simple things, like making sure you have enough water and food before the exam, which can affect brain performance. Foods high in omega-3 are great for brain power.

Ultimately, getting a Google Ads certification is a worthwhile investment for your career growth. Digital marketing employers look for any valid evidence that you’re above entry-level applicants.

5. Don’t rush through without understanding the topics.
While it’s possible to pass the exam without understanding many of the principles, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice in the long run. Treat the exam as a learning process and an opportunity to shore up your knowledge and application of PPC terms and methodology because it’ll help you during the job interview, and in your career.
You don’t have to know everything about Google Ads since real-world experience can help you learn. But the knowledge you gain in preparing for this exam will give you a head start.

An outdated website won’t represent your brand well.
Web design experts recommend a site redesign every 2-3 years to keep up with web standards and design trends. This can often be accomplished with a simple facelift or re-skin. However, in some cases, you may be up against a site migration.

The end result of a site migration may include a cleaner interface, a new or improved user experience, an easier editing experience, and more. However, the choice to migrate your website should not be taken lightly. If executed poorly, you could end up with status code errors, negatively impacted SEO performance, and even irritated website visitors.
Why might you migrate a website?
Here are the circumstances in which you might need a site migration over a simple redesign:

You need to move your site’s location from one server to another.
You are changing the CMS platform your site operates on.
You are changing your domain name or URLs.
You need to make major changes to your site’s architecture (not just aesthetics).

Website migrations can be done on your own or professionally. (For example, HubSpot offers migration services to customers switching to HubSpot’s CMS.)
If you’re considering a website migration, keep in mind that you must leave yourself time to prepare and execute. Migration specialists usually take about three weeks, so plan accordingly. Now, let’s get into the details of migrating a website.
Pre-Migration
1. Crawl the existing site.
A website crawler retrieves the URLs and markup on your site, “seeing” this information similarly to how Google would.
Performing a crawl gives you a starting point for your URL mapping (more on that later) as well as a list to refer to in case something gets lost in translation. You can crawl your website yourself with a third-party tool such as Screaming Frog.
2. Record your benchmarks.
In some cases, analytics data can get erased during a site migration, and this historical benchmarks can be valuable, so it’s best to retain it.
You should also take the time to review your analytics and ensure you know how visitors currently navigate the site and which pages are your most valuable. This context can help inform your redesign and site architecture decisions.
3. Map your URLs.
If you’re making major changes to the URLs on your site, you’ll need redirections in place to guide Google and your website users from your old URLs to your new URLs. 

From a usability standpoint, if a page no longer exists, you don’t want your users to get a 404 status code error. Instead, they should be guided to the page that has taken the old page’s place. 

Improper redirects can mean a big hit against your SEO. They tell search engines and visitors of your website that a page has changed, whether it’s been removed, or no longer exists. They also tell search engines what new pages have replaced old ones.

From an SEO perspective, you don’t want to lose all of the history, backlinks, and (in essence) “authority” that the old page built up. A redirect tells Google where to attribute those signals instead. 

To get redirects implemented, you must first strategize by mapping your URLs. This involves building a spreadsheet with two columns: one for the old URL and one for the corresponding new URL. 
Don’t be concerned if there aren’t “perfect” replacements for every piece of content. Just do the best you can to direct your users based on their original intent.
If you have tons of pages, manual mapping probably isn’t in the cards for you, so to save time, look for patterns in your URLs that can be redirected in groups or sections.
Existing redirects should be migrated as well. Try to keep as many existing redirects as possible to lessen the workload, and make sure your URLs are mapped before you test redirects, to make sure you have backups if you lose them.
For more information on how to update URLs, check out this article.
4. Make sure you’re retaining titles, meta descriptions, and HTML markup.
Recall that website migrations help with website organization. As such, pages should be uniform and contain the same information as they did before. To illustrate, if the HubSpot Marketing Blog underwent a site migration, the content and descriptions for each blog post would be the same, just look different.
You can always update or rewrite titles, meta descriptions, and HTML markup, but you should still ensure that each page includes the proper information. 
5. Try out the new build on a test server (aka sandbox).
Seeing mockups or testing in a local environment will not give you a full picture of the new site’s functionality and implementation. For a seamless transition, take it online for a test drive before the official migration.
6. Choose the right date for the migration.
Hiccups will happen no matter what, but you can minimize them by avoiding peak hours.
Day of Migration
7. Prepare to update your site’s DNS settings.
If you’re moving your site to a new server, part of the process will include “pointing” to the site’s new location. Coordinate with your web/IT team and/or your hosting providers (new and old) to accomplish this.
8. Launch.
Set up your forwarding redirects, unpublish, and implement.
If DNS changes were involved, the site may be down momentarily.
If you’re not switching servers or platforms, the migration should be nearly instantaneous.
9. Crawl the new site.
Once the new site is live, you can do a crawl to see if it has been migrated how you expected it to. One thing you want to look for is proper indexability and crawlability.
10. Identify and resolve missing and duplicate content.
Using the crawl report, see if you find any anomalies, including duplicate content or 404 errors and broken links. In addition, you should click around the new site and look for issues.
11. Check for redirect chains.
Now that your site has been migrated, you have a lot of new redirects on your hands. If redirects already existed, chains may have been created.
Here’s what I mean:
If you were already redirecting A to B, your migration may have added a redirect from B to C.
This creates a chain of redirects: A to B to C.
Redirect chains can slow your site down and impact performance. You can avoid this by breaking the chains, redirecting A to C and B to C.
12. Ensure Google Analytics and Google Search Console are implemented.
To avoid any gaps in data and reporting, these should be up and running the same day.
13. Mark the date in Analytics.
Google Analytics allows you to make “Annotations” of important dates or events. This can help you contextualize the data and measure performance pre-and post-migration (unless you opted for a new Analytics setup).
14. Submit sitemaps.
Once everything is up and running, ensure your XML site map has no errors. Then, you can submit the sitemap in Google Search Console to invite Google to crawl the new implementation.
Post-Migration
15. Monitor performance.
While temporary dips in traffic are common after a migration, you should still be keeping a pulse on your analytics to ensure nothing big was missed that could be affecting performance.
16. Run site audits.
Sometimes, third-party tools can find issues you didn’t know about. SEMrush’s site auditor is excellent in situations like this.
17. Update your platforms.
If you have ads running or other platforms that may be using old URLs, be sure to add fresh links.
18. Have publishers update backlinks.
If your redirects have been implemented correctly, you’ll still get traffic and authority from your backlinks. However, it’s still best practice to use the freshest URLs possible. With that in mind, reach out to the publishers of your highest value links to notify them of the swap.
Website migration can be a lengthy process, but it’s not impossible. With preparation, you can have a migration that’s successful and friendly with your existing SEO efforts. 
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

When you’re focused on creating a meaningful, persuasive presentation, it’s easy to overlook the cover page. But giving that first page of your deck a little more love can actually go a long way towards grabbing your audience’s attention early on and setting the tone for the rest of your presentation.
A stunning presentation cover page can intrigue your audience into wanting to know more and increase engagement with the information you’re presenting. On the other hand, a lackluster slide, or even the lack of one, can dampen audience enthusiasm for your presentation, and maybe even your own.
You’ve put so much work into your presentation — why waste that valuable real estate on the first slide of your deck?
In this post, we’ll cover the basics of creating a presentation cover page that’s informative and attention-grabbing. Let’s dive in.

What’s included in a presentation cover page?
A good presentation cover page accomplishes three simple things:

It introduces the topic with a straightforward title.
It introduces you (and your organization, if applicable)
It sets the tone of your presentation.

Title
We probably don’t need to tell you this one, but your presentation cover page should be centered around a title. And ideally, a title that’s straightforward, descriptive, and simple. If you’re finding it hard to keep your title short, add a subtitle (in smaller print) to clarify what you’ll be speaking about.

Speaker
Next, identify the person (or group) who will be giving the presentation. In some cases, this will be as simple as including your own name, and in others, you’ll want to include your company name, logo, department, or other identifying information. As a general guideline, you’ll need less identifying information if you’re giving an internal presentation.
If your audience is mainly folks outside of your company (or there are plans to distribute your deck externally) you’ll typically want to include more information to identify your company clearly.

Tone
A successful cover page sets the “tone” of your deck — but what does that really mean? The colors, imagery, fonts, and placements of different elements on your cover page all create a specific visual style that the rest of your deck should follow.
A well-designed page conveys a sense of professionalism and preparedness that a simple monochrome text slide simply cannot. Even if you’re not a design expert, you need to pay attention to the aesthetics of your cover page. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to find free, professional-looking presentation templates without needing a degree in graphic design. Whatever you choose, it’s important to remain relevant to your presentation (and, if applicable, your company’s branding).
We’ll explore a few examples of cover pages below so you can see how different elements converge to set the tone for a variety of different presentations.
Presentation Cover Page Examples
Below, we’ve compiled a number of presentation cover pages that succeed in different areas. Remember: there’s no single perfect format for a presentation cover page, but hopefully, you get some inspiration from this list.
Setting An Emotional Tone
The right presentation page can set an emotional tone as well as a visual one. This presentation cover page for a nonprofit conveys a mission-driven approach to protecting nature, with a well-selected, relevant image, and a call-to-action directly in the subtitle. (Photo by Andy Køgl on Unsplash)

Focusing on a Photo
You don’t need to overcomplicate the format of your cover page, especially if you have a great photo to use as a full background image. A simple stock photo here provides a clean backdrop for this presentation on remote work. Just make sure your title text is legible over any background photo you decide to use. (Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash)

Leading With Your Brand
Even if you’re the central speaker for a presentation, it might make more sense to highlight your team or brand on your cover page, instead of including your own personal information (you can always include your own contact info at the end of your deck for follow-up questions). Context (if you’re speaking at a particular event or annual meeting) can be important to highlight as well on your cover page.

Go Minimal
There’s a big difference between a cover slide you didn’t put much thought into and a slide that makes good use of whitespace and leans on strong copy. Sometimes, the best way to lead an audience into your presentation is to create space for a little mystery.
If you’re giving a more casual presentation or a pitch that doesn’t need to follow a particular format, consider going the minimal route and opening with a simple cover page slide that asks your audience a question (one that you of course plan to answer).

Set a Purpose
Many presentations include an agenda slide directly after your cover slide, but that doesn’t mean you can use your cover slide to set a clear purpose upfront. Consider using your subtitle to explain a more robust (but still simple!) description of what you’ll cover.

Presentation Cover Page Templates
Instead of creating your presentation cover page from scratch, using a template can take much of the work out of the process. Check out these websites for templates that you can use for your presentation or for inspiration to create your own designs.
Canva
A tried-and-true favorite of many marketing teams, Canva offers up a wide selection of modern, drag-and-drop presentation templates with truly unique cover pages. If you’re on the hunt for a cover page that looks like you hired a graphic designer to create it just for you, Canva is a good place to start your search. Canva offers both free and paid options.

Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai has an intuitive, highly-customizable presentation builder that allows you to import your own visual elements directly from your computer or a Dropbox folder. Like Canva, they offer a number of free and paid template options (with great cover pages). Their biggest differentiating feature is their (frankly, very cool) adaptive AI technology, which intuits how you’re trying to design a slide and makes changes automatically to suit the direction of your project.

EDIT
For a completely free option with cover page starter template to suit a wide range of different projects across different formats, check out EDIT. Their online tool is specifically designed to create cover pages in a simple, easy-to-use interface.

Visme
Another highly-customizable template source is Visme, which gives users the ability to select a starting template from their (expansive) library and customize elements in a simple web editor.

VectorStock®

VectorStock® has a massive selection of PowerPoint presentation cover page templates for purchase if you’re looking for something that’s ready to plug and go without the need for customization (beyond adding your own name and title, of course).

First Impressions Matter
For better or worse, audiences will judge a presentation by its cover page. Because of this, it’s vital that you give your cover page the care and attention that it deserves. Ultimately, a cover page isn’t simply a placeholder, it’s a vital component that can drum up interest for your presentation. The best part is that with the tools available online, you don’t have to be an artist to create a stunning presentation cover page.
The featured image on this post was created using a Canva template.

A landing page is a standalone website page dedicated to a specific marketing campaign that is meant to convert site visitors into leads. Landing pages typically offer visitors something that they may be interested in, like an Ebook or a free trial, in exchange for contact information. Getting this information then gives businesses the tools they need to further nurture leads and urge them down the purchasing funnel.
Since landing pages are tailored to customer interests, using them in your marketing strategy can help you convert a significant number of qualified prospects since you can assume that they’re ending up on a landing page because its content interests them.
If you’ve yet to consider using them or you want to update your current landing page strategy, this piece will go over 11 stats that make a case for using landing pages as a means to increase your conversion rates and generate more leads.

11 Stats That Make a Case for Landing Pages
1. The average landing page conversion rate across all industries is 9.7%.
Given that 10% is a benchmark for a good conversion rate, taking the time to create a landing page that carefully considers the interests of your target audience will benefit your business. Whether you sell SaaS or clothing, a higher conversion rate from landing pages means a longer list of leads to nurture into paying customers.
2. Landing pages are the least popular type of sign-up form, but they have the highest conversion rate (23%), and 62.6% of leading landing pages already use them.
Using landing pages to obtain customer contact information for lead nurturing is likely to bring higher conversions. If you decide to use forms, the highest-converting number of fields is 3, with an average conversion rate of 10%. The most popular combinations use email address and name (7%) and email address and birthdate (5.7%).
3. Businesses using optimization software for their landing pages see an average conversion lift of 30%.
While optimization is always an essential factor for generating traffic, using optimization tools to perfect your landing page strategy is valuable for increasing conversions.
4. Addressing buyer fears on landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%.
Marcus Sheridan, a keynote speaker at Inbound 2019, ran an experiment where he found that addressing customer fears, like email spam or personal date use, on his landing pages increased his form conversion rate. If you’ve found that your landing pages aren’t converting as you’d like them to, consider using Sheridan’s strategy to be upfront with consumers about what will come from completing forms on your landing pages.
5. Personalized CTAs convert 202% better than default versions.
Consumers prefer personalization because it ensures that they aren’t overloaded with irrelevant information that doesn’t pertain to their interests. Given this, using personalized and targeted CTAs in your landing pages will likely increase your conversion rates.
6. 48% of top landing pages ranked in Google Maps and organic search query results
Ensuring that your landing pages are SEO optimized for both regular search and Google Maps results increases the likelihood that they’ll show up in both types of search queries, increasing exposure and the possibility of generating more leads. If you also link landing page CTAs in email ads, you’re ensuring exposure and visibility from three different channels.
7. 65% of top landing pages have their business name in the title tag.
Since customers value transparency, using a recognizable brand name and logo shows them that you’re not running a scam or being deceitful. You’re claiming ownership of the CTAs and personal information you’re asking for. Therefore, Including your business name on your landing page is a simple step you can take that can help you increase conversions.
8. 30% of top landing pages use video content.
If you already use video as a part of your marketing, incorporating it into your landing page strategy can help you increase conversion rates. In fact, relevant embedded video content can increase conversions by 86%, and 80% of video marketers say that video has directly increased sales.
9. 36% of top landing pages have testimonials, 11% have reviews.
You likely already solicit reviews and testimonials from current customers. Repurposing them to use on your landing pages can increase customer trust and higher conversion rates, especially considering that 60% of consumers think that user-generated content (UGC), like reviews, are the most authentic form of content a brand can use.
10. 55% of top landing page submissions on the HubSpot blog came from Ebook offers.
If you have a blog or website that wants to distribute long-form instructional content, offering Ebooks in your landing pages can help increase your business conversion rates.
11. 49% of marketers report that increasing customer acquisition is their primary objective in 2020, and a top priority for marketers was generating leads.
If you fall into either of these categories, landing pages can be a valuable element of your marketing strategy to generate leads and increase customer acquisition.
Landing pages are a valuable piece of your marketing strategy.
Considering the above stats, we can see that marketers who create landing pages that build trust with page visitors, provide valuable information, and use different content types see higher conversion rates.
Whether you already use them and aren’t obtaining the results you desire or you’re new to landing pages in general, using them will likely help you draw in new customers and drive revenue.

Email marketing is such a powerful strategy, yet if the right tool isn’t being used or the right approach isn’t taken, the benefits that come from it will never see the light of day. Don’t become victim to an email marketing strategy that falls flat. Instead, check out our case study with Katie’s Clothing and…
The post How Kate’s Clothing Uses Benchmark Email to Increase Engagement and Sales appeared first on Benchmarkemail.

The Lightning Component modern framework is a User Interface framework to develop dynamic web apps for mobile and desktop devices. As is the case with each release, the latest Spring’21 release is packed with rich features including, the newly added Lightning Component … Continue reading →

You know how hot visual content is, and you want to jump on board to enjoy the engagement, traffic, and leads that follow. But maybe you’re not keen on writing a blog post, and you don’t have the production resources to create videos. What to do? Create a SlideShare presentation.

I know, I know. You may have felt personally victimized by PowerPoint sometime in your career. When you open it up, you’re hit with stark black Calibri font on a white background, killing any creative spark you may have felt. It’s daunting enough to create a 10-slide deck to report your monthly marketing metrics — never mind putting together slides that can be seen by the large volume of SlideShare users.
Well, there’s good news: Creating a SlideShare presentation in PowerPoint doesn’t have to be that daunting. With the right templates and tools at your disposal, you could easily create an engaging, visual presentation — all without fancy design programs, huge budgets, or hiring contractors.
How to Create a Stunning  SlideShare Presentation in PowerPoint
To help you make a SlideShare of your own, we’ve created some free PowerPoint presentation templates for making awesome SlideShares. That way, your presentations will look great and be a breeze to put together.
Download the free PowerPoint templates, scroll down, and we’ll walk through how to use them. When we’re done, you’ll know exactly how to create a sexy presentation that gets featured on SlideShare’s homepage. Ready? Let’s dive in.
1. Get a feel for the types of presentations you can find on SlideShare. 
Just as you’d master any other medium, it helps to consume other content in that medium to get an idea of the format and what works. Go to SlideShare.net and discover SlideShares that interest you. You can view them on the platform or download them to your computer and peruse them on your local machine. 
SlideShare Presentation Download
Here’s how to download a PowerPoint from SlideShare:

Sign up for a SlideShare account.
Navigate to the SlideShare presentation that you want to download.
Click the button labeled “Download.”
When asked if you want to clip the slide, click “Continue to download.”
Click “Save File” and then confirm by clicking “OK.”

Some may not download as a .ppt file, and some may not be available to download at all. However, this method works in all other cases.
2. Decide on fonts and a color scheme. 
Before you get too caught up in the specifics of your storyline, figure out which fonts and color scheme you want to use. (If you’re using our free templates, you can skip this part.) 
When you’re choosing fonts, consider two different ones to use throughout your presentation — one for your headers and one for your body text. Your header font should be bold and eye-catching, and your body text font should be simple and easy to read. The contrast between the two will make it much easier for your SlideShare viewers to grasp your core messages. 
For your color scheme, pick a scheme that will have enough contrast between colors to make colors stand out. Whether you decide to use two, three, or four different colors in your presentation is up to you — but certain color combinations go together better than others.
Below is an example of what certain fonts and color combinations can look like. Notice how the header fonts stand out much more than the body? You can also see what different color palettes might look like: The top is monochromatic, the middle is complementary, and the bottom is analogous. 

3. Outline main takeaways and crucial sub-bullets.
Next up: Creating an outline for your SlideShare’s narrative. I like to treat SlideShare outlines just like I would blog posts — you decide on the working title and main takeaways first. Then, you elaborate on those sections with a few supporting points.
For each of those components (title, section headers, and a few supporting points), create a slide. Below is an example of what those slides might look like: 
Title

Headers

Supporting Points

You’ll also want to create slide placeholders for the call-to-action and conclusion slides (you don’t need to elaborate on them just yet).
Keep in mind that these slides should not be complex — just a title and maybe a few details that you want to remember down the road. No paragraphs. No supporting images. Nothing that’s not built into your template already. 
4. Fill out the body of your presentation.
Then, fill in the meat of the content — all the slides between the headers. Just make sure you’re not relying too much on text. SlideShare is a primarily visual platform — people are used to breezing through presentations. So if your presentation reads like an ebook, you should edit down the text and rely more heavily on visual content. 
Another thing to remember is to switch up your format from slide to slide. Try doing a checklist slide followed by, say, a quote slide — it keeps people on their toes as they flip through your presentation.

5. Add introduction slides. 
After you’ve created the majority of your SlideShare presentation, head back to the start. Wonder why we didn’t begin here? It’ll be much easier to tee up the bulk of your content if you already know what that content is about. In this step, just introduce what you just wrote about — it’ll be a breeze. 
6. Wrap up the conclusion.
Then, head to the end of your SlideShare and wrap it up in a slide or two. There is nothing more jarring than going from a body slide right to a CTA slide. You only need a slide or two to conclude your presentation, but it should naturally tee up the CTA that you will have next. 
7. Add a call-to-action slide.
At the verrrrrry end of your SlideShare, you want to keep your viewers engaged by providing a call-to-action. The CTA could be about downloading an ebook, attending an event, or even just visiting your website — pretty much any CTA you’d like to include. Here are two CTA slide examples that we included in the SlideShare template:

8. Edit, edit, edit.
You’re almost there! Next, you need to go through and edit your copy and design components. Try to get another coworker — marketer or not — to give it a once over. If you need some direction, you can use our ultimate editing checklist to make sure you’re catching everything you can.
9. Add “animated slides” and clickable links.
Though it’s easy to create a presentation in PowerPoint and upload it immediately to SlideShare, not all of the same features will appear in both programs. As a result, there are two things you’ll need to add in: “animated slides” and clickable links. 
As far as slide animation goes, SlideShare does not support PowerPoint animations. This means that all of those smooth entrances you planned for your text boxes and objects go out the window once you upload your presentation to SlideShare. But, it’s easy to manually introduce new elements on a series of slides to make it seem like it’s “animated.”
Once you’ve built in your animations, you’ll also need to make sure people can actually click on the CTAs in your presentation. 
10. Upload your PDF to SlideShare.
After you’re finished with your clickable links, your presentation will be in a PDF format. At this point, you’re ready for the final step: uploading your PDF to SlideShare. When you do this, you have the option to add a description and tags, and even schedule the SlideShare to go live at a certain time. Once your SlideShare is live, you should spend some time promoting it on your blog and social media accounts, and to your email lists. (For more SlideShare promotion tips, check out this blog post.)
Just follow this process when you need to create a SlideShare presentation, and you won’t have to fear that blank PowerPoint template ever again. 
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in August 2013 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

This post is a part of Made @ HubSpot, an internal thought leadership series through which we extract lessons from experiments conducted by our very own HubSpotters.
Have you ever tried to bring your clean laundry upstairs by hand, and things keep falling out of the giant blob of clothing you’re carrying? This is a lot like trying to grow organic website traffic.
Your content calendar is loaded with fresh ideas, but with every web page published, an older page drops in search engine ranking.
Getting SEO traffic is hard, but keeping SEO traffic is a whole other ball game. Content tends to “decay” over time due to new content created by competitors, constantly shifting search engine algorithms, or a myriad of other reasons.
You’re struggling to move the whole site forward, but things keep leaking traffic where you’re not paying attention.
Recently, the two of us (Alex Birkett and Braden Becker 👋) developed a way to find this traffic loss automatically, at scale, and before it even happens.

The Problem With Traffic Growth
At HubSpot, we grow our organic traffic by making two trips up from the laundry room instead of one.
The first trip is with new content, targeting new keywords we don’t rank for yet.
The second trip is with updated content, dedicating a portion of our editorial calendar to finding which content is losing the most traffic — and leads — and reinforcing it with new content and SEO-minded maneuvers that better serve certain keywords. It’s a concept we (and many marketers) have come to call “historical optimization.”
But, there’s a problem with this growth strategy.
As our website’s traffic grows, tracking every single page can be an unruly process. Selecting the right pages to update is even tougher.
Last year, we wondered if there was a way to find blog posts whose organic traffic is merely “at risk” of declining, to diversify our update choices and perhaps make traffic more stable as our blog gets bigger.
Restoring Traffic vs. Protecting Traffic
Before we talk about the absurdity of trying to restore traffic we haven’t lost yet, let’s look at the benefits.
When viewing the performance of one page, declining traffic is easy to spot. For most growth-minded marketers, the downward-pointing traffic trendline is hard to ignore, and there’s nothing quite as satisfying as seeing that trend recover.
But all traffic recovery comes at a cost: Because you can’t know where you’re losing traffic until you’ve lost it, the time between the traffic’s decline, and its recovery, is a sacrifice of leads, demos, free users, subscribers, or some similar metric of growth that comes from your most interested visitors.
You can see that visualized in the organic trend graph below, for an individual blog post. Even with traffic saved, you’ve missed out on opportunities to support your sales efforts downstream.

If you had a way to find and protect (or even increase) the page’s traffic before it needs to be restored, you wouldn’t have to make the sacrifice shown in the image above. The question is: how do we do that?
How to Predict Falling Traffic
To our delight, we didn’t need a crystal ball to predict traffic attrition. What we did need, however, was SEO data that suggests we could see traffic go bye-bye for particular blog posts if something were to continue. (We also needed to write a script that could extract this data for the whole website — more on that in a minute.)
High keyword rankings are what generate organic traffic for a website. Not only that, but the lion’s share of traffic goes to websites fortunate enough to rank on the first page. That traffic reward is all the greater for keywords that receive a particularly high number of searches per month.
If a blog post were to slip off Google’s first page, for that high-volume keyword, it’s toast.
Keeping in mind the relationship between keywords, keyword search volume, ranking position, and organic traffic, we knew this was where we’d see the prelude to a traffic loss.
And luckily, the SEO tools at our disposal can show us that ranking slippage over time:

The image above shows a table of keywords for which one single blog post is ranking.
For one of those keywords, this blog post ranks in position 14 (page 1 of Google consists of positions 1-10). The red boxes show that ranking position, as well as the heavy volume of 40,000 monthly searches for this keyword.
Even sadder than this article’s position-14 ranking is how it got there.
As you can see in the teal trendline above, this blog post was once a high-ranking result, but consistently dropped over the next few weeks. The post’s traffic corroborated what we saw — a noticeable dip in organic page views shortly after this post dropped off of page 1 for this keyword.
You can see where this is going … we wanted to detect these ranking drops when they’re on the verge of leaving page 1, and in doing so, restore traffic we were “at risk” of losing. And we wanted to do this automatically, for dozens of blog posts at a time.
The “At Risk” Traffic Tool
The way the At Risk Tool works is actually somewhat simple. We thought of it in three parts:

Where do we get our input data?
How do we clean it?
What are the outputs of that data that allow us to make better decisions when optimizing content?

First, where do we get the data?
1. Keyword Data from SEMRush
What we wanted was keyword research data on a property level. So we want to see all of the keywords that hubspot.com ranks for, particularly blog.hubspot.com, and all associated data that corresponds to those keywords.
Some fields that are valuable to us are our current search engine ranking, our past search engine ranking, the monthly search volume of that keyword, and, potentially, the value (estimated with keyword difficulty, or CPC) of that keyword.
To get this data, we used the SEMrush API (specifically, we use their “Domain Organic Search Keywords” report):

Using R, a popular programming language for statisticians and analytics as well as marketers (specifically, we use the ‘httr’ library to work with APIs), we then pulled the top 10,000 keywords that drive traffic to blog.hubspot.com (as well as our Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese properties). We currently do this once per quarter.
This is a lot of raw data, which is useless by itself. So we have to clean the data and warp it into a format that is useful for us.
Next, how do we actually clean the data and build formulas to give us some answers as to what content to update?
2. Cleaning the Data and Building the Formulas
We do most of the data cleaning in our R script as well. So before our data ever hits another data storage source (whether that be Sheets or a database data table), our data is, for the most part, cleaned and formatted how we want it to.
We do this with a few short lines of code:

What we’re doing in the code above, after pulling 10,000 rows of keyword data, is parsing it from the API so it’s readable and then building it into a data table. We then subtract the current ranking from the past ranking to get the difference in ranking (so if we used to rank in position 4, and we now rank 9, the difference in ranking is -5).
We further filtered so we only surface those with a difference in ranking of negative value (so only keywords that we’ve lost rankings for, not those that we gained or that remained the same).
We then send this cleaned and filtered data table to Google Sheets where we apply tons of custom formulas and conditional formatting.
Finally, we needed to know: what are the outputs and how do we actually make decisions when optimizing content?
3. At Risk Content Tool Outputs: How We Make Decisions
Given the input columns (keyword, current position, historical position, the difference in position, and the monthly search volume), and the formulas above, we compute a categorical variable for an output.
A URL/row can be one of the following:

“AT RISK”
“VOLATILE”
Blank (no value)

Blank outputs, or those rows with no value, mean that we can essentially ignore those URLs for now. They haven’t lost a significant amount of ranking, or they were already on page 2 of Google.
“Volatile” means the page is dropping in rank, but isn’t an old-enough blog post to warrant any action yet. New web pages jump around in rankings all the time as they get older. At a certain point, they generate enough “topic authority” to stay put for a while, generally speaking. For content supporting a product launch, or an otherwise critical marketing campaign, we might give these posts some TLC as they’re still maturing, so it is worth flagging them.
“At Risk” is mainly what we’re after — blog posts that were published more than six months ago, dropped in ranking, and are now ranking between positions 8 and 10 for a high-volume keyword. We see this as the “red zone” for failing content, where it’s fewer than 3 positions away from dropping from page 1 to page 2 of Google.
The spreadsheet formula for these three tags is below — basically a compound IF statement to find page-1 rankings, a negative ranking difference, and the publish date’s distance from the current day.

What We Learned
In short, it works! The tool described above has been a regular, if not frequent addition to our workflow. However, not all predictive updates save traffic right on time. In the example below, we saw a blog post fall off of page 1 after an update was made, then later return to a higher position.

And that’s okay.
We don’t have control over when, and how often, Google decides to recrawl a page and re-rank it.
Of course, you can re-submit the URL to Google and ask them to recrawl (for critical or time-sensitive content, it may be worth this extra step). But the objective is to minimize the amount of time this content underperforms, and stop the bleeding — even if that means leaving the quickness of recovery to chance.
Although you’ll never truly know how many page views, leads, signups, or subscriptions you stand to lose on each page, the precautions you take now will save time you’d otherwise spend trying to pinpoint why your website’s total traffic took a dive last week.