Category: Marketing Automation

Some presentations are better than others. Some have gorgeous designs. Some have insanely actionable takeaways. Some just give down-to-earth advice. But the best presentations represent all three.
And if you’re looking to get started making your own presentation, why not learn from the best of the best?
To help you kick your own presentations up a notch, we’ve curated 24 awesome PowerPoint and SlideShare decks below. 

When you’re clicking through the presentations below, notice how they weave an interesting story through the format, design their slides, and make their presentations interactive with features exclusive to the platform on which they were created. These are all crucial elements to making an awesome presentation — ones that you can certainly adapt and apply them to your own, with the right approach.
Even better — you may just learn something new about marketing while you’re at it.

1. Less is more.
Here’s the thing — SlideShare exists for a reason. It allows users to view information in a presentation format without having to go somewhere else to see it presented. When you, a human being, deliver a presentation, chances are that that’s part of the reason why people are tuning in. They care about the topic, but they also are curious about the person speaking on it.
That’s why it can be valuable to keep your slides simple when delivering a presentation to an audience in-person. You want the focus to be on the message, rather than just the slides themselves. Keep the slides on-topic, but simple enough that people can still pay attention to what you’re saying, using the visual presentation to support your message.
2. Keep text to a minimum.
One way to accomplish the aforementioned simplicity is to reduce the amount of text in your presentation. People recall information better when images are paired with it (as opposed to text), so to help your message resonate with the audience, focus on visual content when you create your slides — we’ll cover more on that in a bit.
3. Rethink visuals.
When you reduce the amount of text in your slides, you’ll need compelling visuals to support the message you’re delivering to your audience. But that doesn’t mean you can just throw some nice-looking photos onto your deck and move on. Like any other content strategy, the visual elements of your presentation need to be strategic and relevant.
Templates

Download 4 PowerPoint Templates for Free
While PowerPoint templates have come a long way since the program was first unveiled to the world, chances are, they’re still commonly used. To help make your presentation unique, choose a theme that your audience hasn’t seen dozens of times before — one that matches your brand and complements the topic you’re speaking about.
Sometimes, it pays to look beyond to other presentation platforms other than PowerPoint to find unique templates, like Prezi. There are also many visual content design sites that offer customizable templates that you can adapt for your own brand and topic, like Canva. In fact, in addition to templates, Canva also offers its very own platform for building presentations from scratch. 
Additionally, you can also take a look at Venngage’s free presentation maker for more professionally designed templates, icons and high-quality stock photos that you can use right away.
Charts and Graphs
One of the best ways to support the message you’re delivering in your presentation is by including data and statistics — and the good news is that they, too, can be represented visually, rather than bulleted out in text.
That’s where charts and graphs come in: They provide a colorful and engaging way to present the details that support your point. That said, make sure they fit in with the rest of your presentation’s visual theme — otherwise, it’ll distract the audience from what you’re talking about, rather than enhancing it. 
Color Themes
There’s been some research around the way color can influence our emotions, especially when used in marketing.
And while the goal of your presentation may not necessarily be to make a sale, you might be trying to invoke certain feelings or impressions, which a strategic use of color can help you do. Check out Coschedule’s guide on the psychology of color in marketing, which highlights the ways different tones, shades, and combinations can influence purchasing decisions.
Fonts
When you do include text, you want it to be readable enough for your audience to fully consume and interpret it easily enough to avoid becoming distracted from your message. If you include text that’s too small or dense to easily read, they’ll become too focused on trying to decipher it to pay attention to what you’re saying.
That’s why the designers at Visage recommend choosing Sans Serif fonts that opt for “legibility over fun,” noting that text should not only be big enough for people in the back of the room to read it, but also, presented in the right color to maintain visibility over your background.
Image quality
Incorporating this fabulous visual content into your presentation will go to waste if the images are low-quality. Make sure your photos and other visual assets are high-resolution enough to be crisp and clear when displayed on a huge presentation screen.

4. Incorporate multimedia.
There’s a reason why we love examples. You can give out the best advice available, but sometimes, in order to believe it, people need to see it in practice.
Multimedia is one way to achieve that — in a manner that can also capture and maintain your audience’s attention. A simple Google search for “music in presentations” yields enough soundtrack results to suggests that it’s a unique way of engaging your audience, or at least create a welcoming atmosphere before and after you speak.
Within the presentation itself, video — as it is in so many other applications — serves as valuable visual content to keep your audience engaged. After all, 43% of people want to see more video content from marketers, often because it helps to illustrate and explain theories in practice in a way that the spoken word or photographs can’t do alone.

1. How to Produce Better Content Ideas Mark Johnstone
We all get writer’s block sometimes. You’ll stare at a screen, hoping for inspiration to strike — and for that idea to be amazing.
But that’s not actually the best way to think of ideas. In the presentation below, Mark Johnstone outlines a better way to brainstorm ideas that will help build your business.

2. How Google Works by Eric Schmidt
Ever wonder what it’s actually like to work at Google? The presentation below from Eric Schmidt (Alphabet, Inc.’s Executive Chairman and ex-CEO of Google) could clue you in — it outlines some of the top lessons he and his team have learned from running and hiring for one of the top companies in the world. Besides giving you a peek behind the scenes of a top company, it could inspire you to make changes to the way your business runs.

3. Fix Your Really Bad PowerPoint by Slide Comet
Okay, maybe your PowerPoint isn’t that bad, but this presentation has some awesome takeaways we all could learn from. Even if you’re following all the tips in this presentation (inspired by Seth Godin’s e-book), you can sure be inspired by its expert copy and design.

4. Why Content Marketing Fails by Rand Fishkin
Sometimes, the most helpful pieces of content tell you what not to do. Rand Fishkin’s presentation does just that. He takes an in-depth look at the most common reasons people fail at content marketing — and offers practical, original advice on fixing it.

5. The What If Technique by Motivate Design
Most marketers are looking to grow … but sometimes they can get stuck making incremental improvements. While these improvements are growth, larger, bigger growth jumps are what most people want. To help you get unstuck from incrementalism, Motivate Design outlined a process in the presentation below.

6. Digital Strategy 101 by Bud Caddell
Even though this presentation is almost 100 slides long, its content is pure gold. Caddell answers some of the biggest FAQs about digital strategy in a very accessible way. The reason his slides are so straightforward is because of the way he’s laid them out. He’s really adept at making “animated” slides explain his story — something we all should learn how to do.

7. 10 Ways to Win the Internets by Upworthy
Even though Upworthy’s got a bad rap for creating clickbait headlines, their lessons on going viral are incredibly interesting. Besides having great advice about going viral, Upworthy does a great job of making its presentation interactive using clickable links.

8. Crap: The Content Marketing Deluge by Velocity Partners
Even though this SlideShare is a few years old, it’s one every content marketer should flip through. The reason we love it so much is because the message — and delivery of that message — is pretty much flawless. Definitely take a second to flip through the presentation, as you’ll learn a great lesson while also soaking up a great piece of SlideShare content.

9. What Would Steve Do? 10 Lessons from the World’s Most Captivating Presenters by HubSpot
Not to toot our own horn, but this presentation has been one of our most successful ones, so we wanted to share it with you. I personally love how actionable tips are provided in a visual way. For example, in slides 47 through 49, the author explains the difference between “showing” and “telling” by putting the word “circle” next to a picture of a circle. Although showing, not telling, is a key storytelling technique in writing, it’s especially effective in presentations.

10. How I Got 2.5 Million Views on SlideShare by Nick Demey
Feeling inspired to create a SlideShare of your own? Make sure you flip through Nick Demey’s presentation first. He shares some tried-and-true tips for creating awesome presentations that rack up tons of views.

11. 10 Powerful Body Language Tips for Your Next Presentation by Soap Presentations
This presentation is inspirational from a design perspective — we especially love the color scheme. Using complementary colors (colors opposite each other on the color wheel) can be overwhelming at times, but because Soap Presentations uses them with lots of white space in the background, the colors draw your attention to the content of the slides.

12. What 33 Successful Entrepreneurs Learned From Failure by ReferralCandy
Learning from mistakes is a crucial part of growing in your professional and personal lives. But sometimes, it’s better to learn from others’ mistakes instead of making them yourself. This presentation outlines some core lessons successful entrepreneurs have learned by making mistakes. Read on so you don’t have to make the same ones.

13. Displaying Data by Bipul Deb Nath
We admire presentation for its exceptional display of data — now this post will explain how to do the same in your own presentations. I also love how this presentation is very concise and minimal, as it helps communicate a fairly advanced topic in an easy-to-understand way.

14. Design Your Career 2017 by Slides That Rock
This advice of this presentation is applicable (and its design admirable) even a few years later. The whole black-and-white color scheme really makes the salmon accent color pop — and the SlideShare creatively combines these elements for different slide layouts. Definitely bookmark this presentation as an example of a great SlideShare design.

15. A-Z Culture Glossary 2017 by sparks & honey

The first time I heard the phrase “on fleek,” I had no idea what it meant. (Apparently, it’s a term that means “on point,” in case you were wondering.)
If you’re like me and feel like it’s nearly impossible to keep up with the latest cultural trends, spend time with the presentation below. It’ll outline the most popular trends you should know this year — most definitely worth a read.

16. The History of SEO by HubSpot
SEO’s changed a lot in the past two decades. Most of us are concerned with keeping up with the latest and greatest changes … but have you ever taken a minute to step back in time? The presentation below will walk you through SEO history from the very beginning — it’s been a fascinating ride.

17. 5 Killer Ways to Design the Same Slide by Crispy Presentations
Once you start designing presentations, it’s easy to fall back on tried-and-true layouts, photos, fonts, and colors. While keeping everything consistent can be good for branding or for shipping a deck quickly, it can also prevent people from noticing the awesome new content you’ve put together. The quick presentation below shows you a few different ways you can design the same slide — all depending on what you want it to accomplish.

18. The Seven Deadly Social Media Sins by XPLAIN
Besides having some great takeaways for any inbound marketer, I love how this presentation successfully uses Creative Commons images in almost every slide. It’s pretty inspirational — even if you don’t have budget for stock photos, you can have an engaging presentation.

19. The Minimum Lovable Product by Spook Studio
When they’re first getting started, many startups and agile teams talk about creating a minimal viable product — using the smallest amount of resources to produce something that’s good enough to begin testing. After all, why pour tons of resources into something that you don’t know will work?
This presentation challenges the MVP concept in favor for creating something that people love. Check it out — it has lessons even for those of us who aren’t building technology every day.

20. How to Teach Yourself HTML and CSS This Month by Ryan Bonhardt
Lots of people have “learn to code” on their to-do list … but they never get to it. In marketing, knowing how to navigate code is becoming even more important to being successful. If you’ve been waiting to get started with coding, check out the presentation below.

21. How People Really Hold and Touch (Their Phones) by Steven Hoober
When you hear the phrase “design for mobile” what do you think? Probably that you need to create a responsive website, and that’s about it.
But that’s not all you need to worry about. When you’re creating mobile-optimized content, you need to know how people actually use their phones — and the presentation below will you a great overview of consumer behavior.

22. How to Really Get Into Marketing by Inbound.org
If you’re graduating from school or making a career change and looking to get into marketing, it can feel tough to actually get started. It’s one of those “you need experience to get the job, but you have no experience” conundrums.
Well, that’s where this presentation comes in. Hull growth marketer Ed Fry — once employee #1 at Inbound.org — gives real, actionable tips to help you get your foot in the door at your next marketing gig.

23. Search for Meaning in B2B Marketing by Velocity Partners
Sometimes, it’s easy to get bogged down and think you’re doing “just marketing.” You’re not operating on people and saving lives, right?
From the creators of “Crap: The Content Marketing Deluge” comes the following presentation. If you’re ever feeling down-in-the-dumps about marketing, I’d highly recommend reading it. It’s thoughtful, funny, and a great presentation to keep in your back pocket for a rainy day.

PowerPoint Your Presentation in the Right Direction
The best PowerPoint presentations have gorgeous designs, give insanely actionable takeaways, and provide down-to-earth advice.
Learn from these best PowerPoint presentation examples to create your own that represents all three.
Want more? Read 14 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Building More Creative Slideshows [+Templates].

When was the last time you ran a competitive analysis for your brand?
And most importantly, do you know how to do one efficiently?
If you’re not sure, or if the last “analysis” you ran was a quick perusal of a competitor’s website and social media presence, you’re likely missing out on important intelligence that could help your brand grow.

A competitive analysis can help you learn the ins and outs of how your competition works, and identify potential opportunities where you can out-perform them.
It also enables you to stay atop of industry trends and ensure your product is consistently meeting — and exceeding — industry standards.
Let’s dive into a few more benefits of conducting competitive analyses:

Helps you identify your product’s unique value proposition and what makes your product different from competitors’, which can inform future marketing efforts.
Enables you to identify what your competitor is doing right. This information is critical for staying relevant and ensuring both your product and your marketing campaigns are outperforming industry standards.
Tells you where your competitors are falling short — which helps you identify areas of opportunities in the marketplace, and test out new, unique marketing strategies they haven’t taken advantage of.
Learn through customer reviews what’s missing in a competitor’s product, and consider how you might add features to your own product to meet those needs.
Provides you with a benchmark against which you can measure your own growth.

Convinced, yet? Next, let’s dive into how you can conduct a competitive analysis for your own company.
Competitive Analysis in Marketing
Every brand can benefit from regular competitor analysis. By performing a competitor analysis, you’ll be able to:

Identify gaps in the market
Develop new products and services
Uncover market trends
Market and sell more effectively

As you can see, learning any of these four components will lead your brand down the path of achievement. 
Next, let’s dive into 12 steps you can take to conduct a comprehensive competitive analysis.
1. Determine who your competitors are.
First, you’ll need to figure out who you’re really competing with so you can compare the data accurately. What works in a business similar to yours may not work for your brand.
So how can you do this?
Divide your “competitors” into two categories: direct and indirect.
Direct competitors are businesses that offer a product or service that could pass as a similar substitute for yours, and that operate in your same geographic area.
On the flip side, an indirect competitor is one that provides products that are not the same but could satisfy the same customer need or solve the same problem.
It seems simple enough on paper, but these two terms are often misused.
When comparing your brand, you should only focus on your direct competitors. This is something many brands get wrong.
Let’s use an example: Stitch Fix and Fabletics are both subscription-based services that sell clothes on a monthly basis and serve a similar target audience.
But as we look deeper, we can see that the actual product (clothes in this case) are not really the same; one brand focuses on stylish everyday outfits while the other is workout-centric attire only.
Yes, these brands satisfy the same need for women (having trendy clothes delivered right to their doorstep each month), but they do so with completely different types of clothing, making them indirect competitors.
This means Kate Hudson’s team at Fabletics would not want to spend their time studying Stitch Fix too closely since their audiences probably vary quite a bit. Even if it’s only slightly, this tiny variation is enough to make a big difference.
Now, this doesn’t mean you should toss your indirect competitors out the window completely.
Keep these brands on your radar since they could shift positions at any time and cross over into the direct competitor zone. Using our example, Stitch Fix could start a workout line, which would certainly change things for Fabletics.
This is also one of the reasons why you’ll want to routinely run a competitor analysis. The market can and will shift at anytime, and if you’re not constantly scoping it out, you won’t be aware of these changes until it’s too late.
2. Determine what products your competitors offer.
At the heart of any business is its product or service, which is what makes this a good place to start.
You’ll want to analyze your competitor’s complete product line and the quality of the products or services they’re offering.
You should also take note of their pricing and any discounts they’re offering customers.
Some questions to consider include:

Are they a low-cost or high-cost provider?
Are they working mainly volume sales or one-o purchases?
What is their market share?
What are characteristics and needs of their ideal customers?
Are they using different pricing strategies for online purchases versus brick andmortar?
How does the company differentiate itself from its competitors?
How do they distribute their products/services?

3. Research your competitors sales tactics and results.
Running a sales analysis of your competitors can be a bit tricky.
You’ll want to track down the answers to questions such as:

What does the sales process look like?
What channels are they selling through?
Do they have multiple locations and how does this give them an advantage?
Are they expanding? Scaling down?
Do they have partner reselling programs?
What are their customers reasons for not buying? For ending their relationship with the company?
What are their revenues each year? What about total sales volume?
Do they regularly discount their products or services?
How involved is a salesperson in the process?

These helpful pieces of information will give you an idea of how competitive the sales process is, and what information you need to prepare your sales reps with to compete during the final buy stage.
For publicly held companies, you can find annual reports online, but you’ll have to do some sleuthing to find this info from privately owned businesses.
You could find some of this information by searching through your CRM and reaching out to those customers who mentioned they were considering your competitor. Find out what made them choose your product or service over others out there.
To do this, run a report that shows all prospective deals where there was an identified competitor.
If this data is not something you currently record, talk to marketing and sales to implement a system where prospects are questioned about the other companies they are considering.
Essentially, they’ll need to ask their leads (either through a form field or during a one- on-one sales conversation) to identify who their current service providers are, who they’ve used in the past, and who else they are considering during the buying process.
When a competitor is identified, have your sales team dive deeper by asking why they are considering switching to your product. If you’ve already lost the deal, be sure to follow up the with prospect to determine why you lost to your competitor. What services or features attracted the prospect? Was it about price? What’s the prospect’s impression of your sales process? If they’ve already made the switch, find out why they made this decision.
By asking open-ended questions, you’ll have honest feedback about what customers find appealing about your brand and what might be turning customers away.
Once you’ve answered these questions, you can start scoping out your competitor’s marketing efforts.
4. Take a look at your competitors’ pricing, as well as any perks they offer.
There are a few major factors that go into correctly pricing your product — and one major one is understanding how much your competitors’ are charging for a similar product or service.
If you feel your product offers superior features to that of a competitors’, you might consider making your product or service more expensive than industry standards. However, if you do that, you’ll want to ensure your sales reps are ready to explain why your product is worth the additional cost.
Alternatively, perhaps you feel there’s a gap in your industry for affordable products. If that’s the case, you might aim to charge less than competitors’ and appeal to prospects who aren’t looking to break the bank for a high-quality product.
Of course, there are other factors that go into correctly pricing a product, but it’s critical you stay on-top of industry pricing to ensure you’re pricing your product in a way that feels reasonable to prospects.
Additionally, take a look at any perks your competitors’ offer and how you might match those perks to compete. For instance, perhaps competitors’ offer a major referral discount, or a month-long free trial version. These perks could be the reason you’re losing customers, so if it feels reasonable for your brand, consider where you might match those perks — or provide some unique perks of your own, if competitors’ don’t offer any.
5. Ensure you’re meeting competitive shipping costs.
Did you know expensive shipping is the number one reason for cart abandonment?
Nowadays, free shipping is a major perk that can attract consumers to choose one brand over another. If you work in an industry where shipping is a major factor — like ecommerce — you’ll want to take a look at competitors’ shipping costs and ensure you’re meeting (if not exceeding) those prices.
If most of your competitors’ offer free shipping, you’ll want to look into the option for your own company. If free shipping isn’t a practical option for your business, consider how you might differentiate in other ways — including loyalty programs, holiday discounts, or giveaways on social media.
6. Analyze how your competitors market their products.
Analyzing your competitor’s website is the fastest way to gauge their marketing efforts. Take note of any of the following items and copy down the specific URL for future reference:

Do they have a blog?
Are they creating whitepapers or ebooks?
Do they post videos or webinars?
Do they have a podcast?
Are they using static visual content such as infographics and cartoons?
What about slide decks?
Do they have a FAQs section?
Are there featured articles?
Do you see press releases?
Do they have a media kit?
What about case studies?
Do they publish buying guides and data sheets?
What online and offine advertising campaigns are they running?

7. Take note of your competition’s content strategy.
Then, take a look at the quantity of these items. Do they have several hundred blog posts or a small handful? Are there five white papers and just one ebook?
Next, determine the frequency of these content assets. Are they publishing something new each week or once a month? How often does a new ebook or case study come out?
Chances are, if you come across a robust archive of content, your competitor has been publishing regularly. Depending on the topics they’re discussing, this content may help you hone in on their lead generating strategies.
From there, you should move on to evaluating the quality of their content. After all, if the quality is lacking, it won’t matter how often they post since their target audience won’t find much value there.
Choose a small handful of samples to review instead of tackling every single piece to make the process more manageable.
Your sampler should include content pieces covering a variety of topics so you’ll have a fairly complete picture of what your competitor shares with their target audience.
When analyzing your competitor’s content, consider the following questions:

How accurate is their content?
Are spelling or grammar errors present?
How in-depth does their content go? (Is it introductory level that just scratches the surface or more advanced topics with high-level ideas?)
What tone do they use?
Is the content structured for readability? (Are they using bullet points, bold headings, and numbered lists?)
Is their content free and available to anyone or do their readers need to opt-in?
Who is writing their content? (In-house team? One person? Multiple contributors?)
Is there a visible byline or bio attached to their articles?

As you continue to scan the content, pay attention to the photos and imagery your competitors are using.
Do you quickly scroll past generic stock photos or are you impressed by custom illustrations and images?If they’re using stock photos, do they at least have overlays of text quotes or calls-to- action that are specific to their business?
If their photos are custom, are they sourced from outside graphic professionals or do they appear to be done in-house?
When you have a solid understanding of your competitor’s content marketing strategy, it’s time to find out if it’s truly working for them.
8. Learn what technology stack your competitors’ use.
Understanding what types of technology your competitors’ use can be critical for helping your own company reduce friction and increase momentum within your organization.
For instance, perhaps you’ve seen positive reviews about a competitor’s customer service — as you’re conducting research, you learn the customer uses powerful customer service software you haven’t been taking advantage of. This information should arm you with the opportunity to outperform your competitors’ processes.
To figure out which software your competitors’ use, type the company’s URL into Built With, an effective tool for unveiling what technology your competitors’ site runs on, along with third-party plugins ranging from analytics system to CRMs.
Alternatively, you might consider looking at competitors’ job listings, particularly for engineer or web developer roles. The job listing will likely mention which tools a candidate needs to be familiar with — a creative way to gain intel into the technology your competitors’ use.
9. Analyze the level of engagement on your competitor’s content.
To gauge how engaging your competitor’s content is to their readers, you’ll need to see how their target audience responds to what they’re posting.
Check the average number of comments, shares, and likes on your competitor’s content and find out if:

Certain topics resonate better than others
The comments are negative, positive, or a mix
People are tweeting about specific topics more than others
Readers respond better to Facebook updates about certain content
Don’t forget to note if your competitor categorizes their content using tags, and if they have social media follow and share buttons attached to each piece of content. Both of these will a ect engagement activity.

10. Observe how they promote their marketing content.
From engagement, you’ll move right along to your competitor’s content promotion strategy.

Keyword density in the copy itself
Image ALT text tags
Use of internal linking

The following questions can also help you prioritize and focus on what to pay attention to:

Which keywords are your competitors focusing on that you still haven’t tapped into?
What content of theirs is highly shared and linked to? How does your content compare?
Which social media platforms is your target audience using and the most active on?
What other sites are linking back to your competitor’s site, but not yours?
Who else is sharing what your competitors are publishing?
Who is referring traffic to your competitor’s site?
For the keywords you want to focus on, what is the diffculty level? There are several free (and paid) tools that will give you a comprehensive evaluation of your competitor’s search engine optimization.

11. Look at their social media presence, strategies, and go-to platforms
The last area you’ll want to evaluate when it comes to marketing is your competitor’s social media presence and engagement rates.
How does your competition drive engagement with their brand through social media? Do you see social sharing buttons with each article? Does your competitor have links to their social media channels in the header, footer, or somewhere else? Are these clearly visible? Do they use calls-to-action with these buttons?
If your competitors are using a social network that you may not be on, it’s worth learning more about how that platform may be able to help your business, too. To determine if a new social media platform is worth your time, check your competitor’s engagement rates on those sites. First, visit the following sites to see if your competition has an account on these platforms:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Snapchat
LinkedIn
YouTube
Pinterest

Then, take note of the following quantitative items from each platform:

Number of fans/followers
Posting frequency and consistency
Content engagement (Are users leaving comments or sharing their posts?)
Content virality (How many shares, repins, and retweets do their posts get?)

With the same critical eye you used to gauge your competition’s content marketing strategy, take a fine-toothed comb to analyze their social media strategy.
What kind of content are they posting? Are they more focused on driving people to landing pages, resulting in new leads? Or are they posting visual content to promote engagement and brand awareness?
How much of this content is original? Do they share curated content from other sources? Are these sources regular contributors? What is the overall tone of the content?
How does your competition interact with their followers? How frequently do their followers interact with their content?
After you collect this data, generate an overall grade for the quality of your competitor’s content. This will help you compare the rest of your competitors using a similar grading scale.
12. Perform a SWOT Analysis to learn their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
As you evaluate each component in your competitor analysis (business, sales, and marketing), get into the habit of performing a simplified SWOT analysis at the same time.
This means you’ll take note of your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats any time you assess an overall grade.
Some questions to get you started include:

What is your competitor doing really well with? (Products, content marketing, socialmedia, etc.)
Where does your competitor have the advantage over your brand?
What is the weakest area for your competitor?
Where does your brand have the advantage over your competitor?
What could they do better with?
In what areas would you consider this competitor as a threat?
Are there opportunities in the market that your competitor has identified?

You’ll be able to compare their weaknesses against your strengths and vice versa. By doing this, you can better position your company, and you’ll start to uncover areas for improvement within your own brand.
How Does Your Business Currently Stack Up?
Before you accurately compare your competition, you need to establish a baseline. This also helps when it comes time to perform a SWOT analysis.
Take an objective look at your business, sales, and marketing e orts through the same metrics you use to evaluate your competition.
Record this information just like you would with a competitor and use this as your baseline to compare across the board.
Ready to get started with the full ebook and template?Click here to access the complete Competitive Analysis Kit.
Editor’s Note; This post was originally published prior to July 2018 but was updated in November 2019 for comprehensiveness.

In the world of social media marketing, there are hundreds of tools and software with features capable of helping you with different aspects of your social media strategy. These tools — also known as social media management tools — can assist with social media creation, collaboration, planning, scheduling , sharing, analysis, and more.
In this blog post, we’ll cover what social media management tools are, how your team can benefit from them, and 12 of the best options available today.
Let’s get started.
What is social media management?
Social media management is the process of handling (managing) your entire social media strategy. This includes planning, publishing, engaging, strategizing, and analyzing your social media content across the social platforms your business uses. It also entails understanding your social media strategy’s level of success so you can improve upon it.
Get certified in social media strategy with a free social media marketing course.
Social Media Management Tools
As mentioned above, there are a plethora of social media management tools available today. Some are meant to help with a wide array of social media management needs. Meanwhile, other tools are meant for specific types of social media management (e.g. tools for agencies) or facets of social media management (e.g. social listening or analytics). No matter your needs, goals, or industry, there’s a social media management tool for you.
Why use social media management tools?
Social media management tools assist with your social media strategy — typically, they have scheduling, publishing, collaborating, listening, and/or reporting capabilities. They also often have the ability to streamline interactions with followers cross-platform, offer access to all of your social accounts via a single dashboard, and analyze your success. They may also integrate with other tools your team uses such as your Marketing Software or CRM.
The 12 tools below are separated into categories based on what they’re meant for — as you read their descriptions, keep in mind that some of them overlap categories. For example, many of the general tools are great for small businesses — and many of the free tools are too.
Best General Social Media Management Tools
The following tools are ideal for all social media management teams — you can customize them to help you meet your specific needs and goals.
1.HubSpot Social Media Management Software

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HubSpot monitors all interactions, conversations, and audiences on your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles. It allows you to effectively target specific audiences with personalized messaging using context from the contact database in your CRM as well as data from your Marketing Software. Meaning, with HubSpot, you can manage your entire social media strategy — from planning to sharing to analysis — from a single and central location.
Here are some other notable features you’ll get from using HubSpot’s Social Media Management software:

Turn your content offers into social posts.
Schedule social posts weeks in advance on all of your profiles.
Keep up with current trends by monitoring keywords that are important to your brand and audience.
Reply to anyone who commented on your profile or post through HubSpot.

2. Sprout Social

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SproutSocial is a social media management tool that assists with social listening, publishing, engagement, and analysis. The tool streamlines the processes of sharing relevant content on social platforms as well as creating and sending personalized messages to prospects, customers, and followers — all of this support frees up valuable time for social media managers.
Customer service features exist to help you offer assistance to customers on social when they want and need it. With Sprout Social you’ll be able to develop a better understanding of who your audience members are and what they want from you on social as well as how you can improve upon your current strategy.
(Note: Sprout Social’s customer care functionality integrates with HubSpot.)
3. Falcon.io

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Falcon.io is a social media marketing platform with a social media management solution that saves you time by helping you maximize reach, impact, and engagement among your audience.
The software has social listening capabilities to help you identify target audience members and prospects, understand what people are saying about your brand on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, and efficiently respond to any customer comments or concerns.
There’s also a content calendar that makes cross-platform social media planning easy and quick. Plus, you can view and respond to all customer messages and questions on one dashboard so no queries go unresolved.
(Note: Falcon.io integrates with HubSpot so you can easily sync customer data for campaigns, create custom audiences, and offer effective customer service via social media.)
Best Free Social Media Management Tools
Here are some effective free social media management tools. It’s not uncommon for tools to have a free version as well as paid plans that you can upgrade to as you grow and require greater functionality from your tool.
1. Hootsuite

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Hootsuite is a social media marketing and management tool. It has a dashboard through which you can manage all aspects of your social media strategy. Although there are paid plans with more capabilities, Hootsuite offers a free plan that works well if you’re a small business. With the free plan, you can schedule up to 30 social posts in advance.
You’ll also be able to manage three different social profiles from your dashboard with Hootsuite’s free plan. Lastly, this option works for small businesses because only one person has access to the account.
2. TweetDeck

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Although TweetDeck is just for Twitter users, it’s a powerful social media management tool if you’re on the platform. This free tool allows you to simultaneously manage multiple Twitter profiles via a central dashboard.
Schedule Tweets ahead, monitor your competition, set alerts for your most important Tweets and Twitter activity, and manage your lists with ease. You can also customize your timelines as well as view and respond to conversations and Tweets in real-time via your dashboard.
3. Buffer

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Buffer has a free plan that you can move to once you’ve completed your free trial with the software. Similar to Hootsuite, Buffer’s free plan works well if you have a small business with a small social media presence. This plan offers the ability to manage three social channels. You can schedule 10 posts in advance and only one user has access to your Buffer dashboard.
Best Social Media Management Tools for Small Businesses
Here are some social media management tools meant for small businesses.
1. Everypost

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Everypost is a social media tool that allows you to manage multiple profiles and accounts at once. Customize your social posts, schedule them in advance, and share them all via a single platform.
Tailor social content for different platforms and then cross-post it from Everypost to streamline the process of sharing content across profiles. Use the tool to collaborate internally and manage roles — this way, you can delegate content to certain people on your team as needed.
2. Agorapulse

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Agorapulse is a social media management platform that helps you improve social engagement and relationship building across your social profiles.
With this tool, you can schedule your content, interact with followers, and get reports to determine the success of your strategy and ROI of your engagement. There’s also a single inbox through which you can view, share, and respond to customer comments and questions.
Real-time collaboration makes it easy to send different team members customer inquiries and work on content together. Take advantage of the flexible scheduling features to either schedule individual posts or bulk schedule posts.
Additionally, the Agorapulse CRM that this tool automatically comes with tracks followers and their interactions with your brand so you can learn from those engagements now and reference them in the future.
3. Content Cal

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Content Cal is a social media management tool meant for planning and publishing content. There’s an easy-to-use visual calendar you can pair with approval flows to ensure specific posts are shared at the right time.
Pull in content from other tools — such as Facebook, Slack, Google Drive, or Dropbox — to share on social. You can also collaborate with team members and ask for their feedback easily using the tool’s comments feature.
Best Social Media Management Tools for Agencies
The following social media management tools are ideal for agencies.
1. Sendible

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Sendible is a social media management platform specifically designed for agencies. The tool has an interactive and customizable content calendar so you and your team can view and collaborate on all social posts that are created, planned, and shared.
Use the content suggestion feature to get new ideas for content that’s likely to resonate with your client’s audience. There’s also a single-view inbox so you can look at all client messages at once — plus a priority filter option which allows you to filter and prioritize chats.
Lastly, set up user hierarchies and workflows to set permissions for certain team members — this way, certain people have to sign off on client content prior to it going live.
2. Nuvi

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Nuvi is a social media management, marketing, and customer experience (CX) platform. It includes management tools for social listening, planning, publishing, engaging, reporting, and more — all with an end goal of creating an excellent experience for your customers and clients. Add permissions to your workflows so team members at your agency can collaborate and ensure all content is reviewed by the necessary people prior to it going live.
Create, plan, and schedule your content so it goes live when it needs to. Then, measure performance and keep an eye on competitors to understand what social media strategies are working best for them.
The engagement feature will make it easy to prioritize social media engagement and allow you to organize, prioritize, and share those engagements internally with the correct team members. Plus social listening features will ensure you don’t miss a beat across any of your accounts.
3. HeyOrca!

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HeyOrca! is a social media management tool for agencies. The platform allows you to manage all of your social content and clients in a central location so you can offer a seamless and memorable customer experience.
The content calendar allows you to share your plans for scheduled content easily with team members and/or clients. Create multiple content calendars — each with unique team members and social profiles — for each of your clients to keep things organized.
Create mock ups of all content you plan to share on social so your team members and clients can give the go-ahead prior to it being shared. You can also easily share your content with clients via HeyOrca! to get their feedback (and you can choose which versions of that content you want your clients to be able to see or not see).
Lastly, offer clients easy-to-understand reports to show them how successful the content you’re creating for their social media profiles is.
The management tools we reviewed above have the power to help you reach (and exceed) your social media goals. Determine what you need out of a tool to help you identify which option has the capabilities and features needed to help you achieve those goals.

Blogs and podcasts are both powerhouse marketing tools. Company blogs are well-established inbound marketing channels, while business podcasts are the up-and-comers garnering a lot of excitement in the industry.
A few stats in the blog corner:

59% of marketers find business blogging valuable. (DemandMetric)
Prioritizing blogging gave companies 13X the ROI compared with companies that did not prioritize their blogs. (HubSpot)
About 70 million new blog posts are published each month on WordPress alone, with 77 million comments added per month. (WordPress)

And in the podcast corner:

37% of Americans ages 12 and older listened to a podcast in the previous month. (Edison Research)
Podcast listening is more prevalent among younger Americans. 49% of people aged 12 to 34 listened to a podcast in the previous month, followed by 40% of people ages 35 to 54, and 22% of people aged 55 and above. (Edison Research)
The heaviest podcasts users listen while they are away from home; often while at work. (Nielson)

Both blogs and podcasts nurture customer relationships, validate expertise, deepen brand loyalty, capture search, and generate leads. But each tool has benefits and drawbacks, and you probably wonder which will offer your business the most significant ROI.
Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of blogs and podcasts, the audiences for each — and when offering both is best.
Podcast Benefits and Drawbacks
The Pros of Podcasting
1. Podcasts are personable and facilitate connections.
Your podcast host or hosts lend a human voice to your brand. Podcasts put a knowledgeable person from your company in conversation with industry experts to tackle current topics and share advice, often with a touch of lighthearted humor. You can also ask your audience what they want you to cover and whether they have questions they want answered.
2. Podcasts reach younger audiences.
An entertaining and informative podcast is an opportunity to build brand awareness among Millennials and Gen Z.
3. Podcast listeners are growing fast.
The number of people who listened to a podcast at least once increased by 20 million between 2018 and 2019. The number of weekly listeners rose by 14 million in that time.
4. Podcasts increase opportunities to reach your audience.
People can listen to podcasts while driving, working out, or doing the dishes. Reading a blog post requires stopping and reading on a computer or mobile device.
The Cons of Podcasting
1. Podcast tech can be intimidating.
Getting comfortable with podcast technology can feel daunting. Learning the tech and launching a podcast requires time and money, and companies with small marketing teams and budgets can question the ROI.
2. Podcasts take time.
Once you are comfortable, podcast production still requires a significant investment of time. You have to brainstorm topics, reach out to guests, and record, before shifting to post-production and marketing.
3. There’s a call-to-action gap.
People listening to podcasts in their car or on a walk can’t press the CTA button the moment the inspiration hits. Instead, they must choose to return to your website to explore and fill out a form.
Blog Pros and Cons
The Benefits of Blogging
1. Blogs support search engine optimization (SEO).
Including keywords in authoritative and helpful blog posts can drive traffic to your website.
2. Blogs don’t require as much tech knowledge.
For a blog, you need a strong writer and someone who knows how to publish the post to your platform.
3. Blogs draw leads.
Companies that blog earn 67% more leads on average per month than those that don’t.
The Drawbacks of Blogging
1. Blogs face stiff competition.
It’s not enough to pick a topic based on the keywords people are searching in your industry. There are scores of blogs across industries and subject areas. To make your blog stand out you have to go deeper, approach topics from a unique angle, and share must-know expert advice.
2. Blogs must offer value — and it’s no easy task.
With so much pre-existing content online, you have to offer an above-and-beyond return on your reader’s time investment. Then, once you’ve grabbed attention, it’s important to deliver consistent high-value content so your blog becomes a destination for knowledge building rather than a one-time find.
3. Blogs require a strong copy team.
Overcoming the cons of blogging takes a creative group of content strategists, writers, and editors who spot opportunities for engaging blogs that teach and help readers solve real-world problems.
Determine who you need to reach.
Blog readers, podcast listeners, or both? To decide the ideal medium for your content, get clear about who you want to engage with, what they want to know, and how they access their content.
The number of people listening to podcasts on mobile apps increased 60% between 2018 and 2019, and millennials drive that growth. One-third of listeners between ages 25 and 35 pressed play on at least five podcasts per week. Reasons for listening to podcasts range from entertainment, staying updated, and learning something new.
Podcast consumers differ slightly by gender, as well, with 39% of males and 36% of females in the U.S. listening to a podcast in the previous month.
Escape Fitness is an example of a company podcast that knows its fitness-industry audience, and produces audio content that engages. Weekly episodes of the Escape Your Limits podcast feature discussions with entrepreneurs about health, exercise, productivity, and the mindset needed for success.
The HubSpot 2017 Content Trends Survey found that 18% of consumers in the US, Germany, Colombia, and Mexico want blogs from the brands they support. Though that percentage may appear small — it is mighty. Businesses that blog get more website visitors and receive 67% more leads than those that don’t.
Among people who read blogs regularly, 34% read to learn something new, 20% for entertainment, and 12% to learn about news and trends in their job industry.
Because people are there to learn, you should focus on content that makes their life easier at work and beyond. The Grammarly blog does a great job of providing value for students, job-hunters, and people for whom English is a second language. You’ll find to-the-point posts on writing persuasive essays, giving writer feedback, and common writing problems, such as passive voice or run-on sentences.
People skim articles for tidbits of information rather than read them thoroughly. Your blog posts should be easily skimmable with headers that help them understand the topic more deeply, and engaging images or graphics that act as stepping stones from top to bottom. List articles are easy to skim and break your copy into bite-size pieces, and many marketers say they perform well.
When to Consider Both a Podcast and a Blog
Choosing between the two isn’t always necessary, and some companies benefit from offering both, if they have the budget and the time. REI Co-Op has produced four podcasts and has an extensive blog covering the environment, gear, and how-tos.
Here are first-steps to aid your decision making and lay the groundwork for a successful launch whether you share your brand through one or both mediums:
1. Assess your marketing team.
Has someone been pushing your company to create a blog and tossing topic ideas your way for the past year? Maybe they’ve even been writing shorter posts for LinkedIn already.
And perhaps someone else on your team devours podcasts and has heard enough of them from within your industry to understand what works and what doesn’t. Knowledgeable and passionate marketers make developing blogs and podcasts more manageable with a better chance of success.
2. Explore tools and platforms.
If you already have a CMS, such as HubSpot, it’s simple to add a blog. You can focus on building a content calendar, graphic design, and a blog marketing plan.
Recently, podcast platforms to streamline production and releases have also come online. Casted, for example, offers a podcast marketing platform that integrates with a company’s existing customer relationship management (CRM) and content management system (CMS) tools.
The podcast platform also offers a service that helps companies build their podcasts from scratch, so marketers learn the tools while moving production forward.
3. Understand that voice content is here to stay.
You saw those stats above. Like video before it, voice content is fast shifting from nice-to-have to must-have. But if producing a ground-up podcast isn’t in your wheelhouse or the budget, don’t fret; you can make your blog content audio accessible.
For example, Vooozer is an audio marketing solution that extends a blog’s reach with narration by real people and audio players embedded in the blog. People can learn and get advice from your company while they’re driving or on their lunch-break, and the CTA is on the same page to boot.
4. Assess the competition and clarify your value.
You need to know what’s out there so you don’t churn out content that’s already extensively covered. Research long-tail keywords to help you brainstorm niche topics that separate you from the pack on both platforms.
Blogs and podcasts increase your inbound marketing reach and nurture customer relationships. Choose the strategy that makes the most sense for your company, your in-house talent, and your customers, and you’ll see results.

Currently researching marketing automation options – would love to hear from users who have used both Eloqua and Marketo and understand the strengths/weaknesses of each. From what I can tell these are very similar, Marketo ends up having more individual capabilities to licence (ABM, Bizable, etc…) and Eloqua has more capabilities out of the box.
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Talk to any B2B marketer about the pain points of their jobs, and you’ll likely hear a common refrain: proving the success of a campaign. Determining the return on investment of a marketing campaign is often a challenge for marketing teams — leaving them scratching their heads and struggling to quantify their success. 
At Wärtsilä, they knew this struggle all too well. 
Wärtsilä is a global leader in smart technologies and complete lifecycle solutions for the marine and energy markets. Based in Finland, Wärtsilä manufactures and services large engines and other essential equipment for vessels and power plants worldwide. With clients all over the globe investing in Wärtsilä’s services, sales cycles can last years. 
Wärtsilä’s leaders found themselves with massive amounts of data compiled in multiple systems. The lack of unity in the data made it difficult for the team to see the full picture of their campaign efforts and draw insights from the results. Furthermore, the marketing team had trouble attributing sales success to the campaigns they were implementing.
Knowing they needed a way to connect the dots in their data to measure success and uncover better insights, Wärtsilä’s leaders tapped into Salesforce’s integrated service platform and began using Einstein Attribution to obtain AI-powered insights from their marketing campaigns.
Integrating marketing, sales, and service
Wärtsilä’s data was stored in multiple systems, which proved to be a huge roadblock for their team when trying to draw actionable insights from the results of marketing campaigns. The first step toward successful attribution measurement required integration of their marketing, sales, and service efforts.
Salesforce offered a single platform for all of Wärtsilä’s data. With Pardot, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud working together to compile data into one source, the account teams were easily able to connect data from prospects, accounts, and more with Salesforce’s user-friendly interface. 
“Our campaign attribution was much more difficult before Einstein Attribution came into the picture. We used a home-grown model, working with massive data sets across multiple systems,” said Jaime López, General Manager for Marketing Operations at Wärtsilä and a Salesforce Trailblazer. “Salesforce not only allowed us to dig deeper into our data, but made the user experience seamless and easy to use.” 
Now that Wärtsilä’s teams were able to see all of their data in one integrated platform, they could begin to understand the impact of their campaigns, use those insights to boost sales, and prove the value of their marketing efforts.
Measuring ROI and attributing success
Salesforce’s integrated system gave Wärtsilä the strong foundation they needed to start making sense of their data. With the assistance of AI-powered insights from Einstein Attribution, including the new Data-Driven Model, they can better understand the effects of their marketing campaigns and draw actionable and profitable insights. 
Pardot enables Wärtsilä to dive into micro-level insights to uncover detailed findings about their marketing performance. This magnification of detail gives their team the information they need to have more meaningful conversations and spark new ideas.
“Leveraging Pardot’s B2BMA, we now have a much more complete view of ROI and can dive deeper on conversations at a micro level. Salesforce has taken our massive amounts of data across multiple systems and made it all seamless and easy to use . . . This helps us massively in trimming the sails and adjusting our marketing,” said Lopez.
Using Einstein Attribution, Wärtsilä was able to attribute 7x more revenue to various marketing campaigns when compared to the traditional models they had used in the past. The marketing team was also able to credit 8x more leads in Wärtsilä’s pipeline to their campaigns.
And the value of using Salesforce extends beyond their marketing campaigns. Using Service Cloud, Wärtsilä’s customer support team has been able to resolve cases more efficiently. They’re also able to quantify the impact of their customer service operations — even supporting an additional $150k in sales. 
Pardot’s user-friendly, easy-to-use platform meant Wärtsilä was able to quickly train 150+ users in 30+ companies. With more team members accessing the company’s data, they can approach their marketing, sales, and service as a unified front. As a result, Wärtsilä is capitalizing on their marketing campaigns to boost sales and accurately measure their success. 

Learn more about how Pardot’s marketing automation and Einstein Attribution can help define success for your campaigns.

Register for Pardreamin’ to learn how to implement the strategy, content, design assets, and technology you need to take your marketing to the next level. #ParDreamin2020

If you are tossing up between GetResponse vs ActiveCampaign, here’s a comprehensive comparison of features and pricing to help you decide.

For my marketing automation to work (in active campaign), I need the submitted postcode to be the exact same format each time (probably all uppercase without spaces). How do I go about doing this?
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As any marketer will tell you, there are a myriad of benefits to using data to inform your marketing decisions.
For instance, data can help marketers learn from past mistakes and pivot to create increasingly effective campaigns over time.
Additionally, data can provide marketers with insights about their audience and what matters most to both prospects and customers. It also helps marketers earn buy-in from leadership to experiment and test new, innovative strategies for increasing brand awareness and ROI.
Monday.com knows the importance of data all too well. The work OS — used by major brands including Uber, Hulu, and Coca-Cola — has seen incredible growth over the past year, reaching $100 million in revenue and surpassing 100,000 customers.
And, as Rotem Shay, Head of User Acquisition and SEO, told me: “We strongly believe in data-driven decisions for everything we do, from the day-to-day to planning future campaigns.”

Keep reading to learn more from Shay about how monday.com uses data-driven marketing to guide its powerful, effective marketing strategy – and how you might use data in new, unique ways, as well.
Additionally — If you’re a HubSpot customer, take a look at the new powerful integration between HubSpot and monday.com.
4 Tips on Data-Driven Marketing from monday.com
1. Get creative when it comes to the analytics tools your team uses.
Ultimately, data-driven marketing can’t happen without robust analytics tools that enable you to properly measure campaign performance and create A/B tests to ensure you’re providing prospects and customers with the most value.
For monday.com, that analytics tool is homemade: “Our main tool for tracking campaigns is an internal and powerful tool we built here, in-house, called BigBrain.” Shay told me.
“With BigBrain, we’re able to track and centralize all the data in one place so we have one source of truth. We complement BigBrain with Looker, Google analytics 360, HubSpot, and Singular to make sure we don’t miss anything.”
If your company is scaling quickly or demands certain functions that you aren’t finding in one analytics tool, consider how you might combine a few tools or create a unique dashboard to collect the information most critical to your business.
Ultimately, choosing the right analytics tools might take some trial-and-error, but the hassle will be worth it when you find a process that works best for your team. 
2. All metrics matter.
As marketers, it’s easy to focus on a few key metrics and ignore the rest. For instance, HubSpot’s Blog team primarily focuses on traffic and leads. While other metrics — including shares, impressions, and customer lifetime value — still matter greatly to us, it can be easy to become singular in focus to block out the “noise” of various metrics.
However, Shay refutes this kind of thinking. Instead, he suggests: “In marketing campaigns, I believe you need to measure everything and track everything you can — starting from how many impressions you get, until the end of your funnel.”

Shay told me, “In order to make the right decisions, you have to see the whole picture. Sometimes people think that too many metrics or numbers make too much ‘noise’, but I really believe that a marketer should get all the information she can get and, after digesting all the data, clear the ‘noise’.”

Consider how your own marketing team might shift focus to ensure you take the time to gather valuable intel from each potential marketing metric and KPI. Ultimately, each metric contains valuable insights into how your content is reaching and converting leads.
3. Pay attention to both quantitative and qualitative metrics to inform your overall strategy.
It’s critical to remember that you should use data to inform all your future marketing decisions. That includes the types of content you promote on social media, all the way up to the major quarterly campaigns you create to drive revenue for your company.
Of course, there are two different types of data — quantitative and qualitative — and you’ll need to use both to create a more well-rounded picture of both your successes and setbacks.
Shay supports this, mentioning that his team at monday.com uses both types of data when making decisions: “During any brainstorm for future campaigns, we deeply analyze campaign results together with the insights we are gathering from customers’ feedback and user testing. We combine both methods in order to understand and get insights that only numbers can’t give us.”
4. Use data to confirm or disprove hypotheses to ensure you don’t waste valuable resources.
Data doesn’t just tell you how previous campaigns and strategies performed — It can also tell you the potential performance of future campaigns, which can end up saving you both time and resources you might’ve otherwise wasted.
For instance, at monday.com, Shay’s team worried that website visitors perceived monday.com as project management software, and as a result, didn’t feel confident trying out other verticals. His team came to this conclusion through tracking analytics — including homepage user behavior, as well as user activity on the website as a whole.
Shay told me, “We felt that our users weren’t aware that monday.com is both easy to use and robust with additional features. In order to test our hypothesis, we presented different use cases on the homepage using a motion sequence that showed users using monday.com for different verticals, and added a roulette/scroll showing additional use cases.”
The results? A tie, according to Shay’s team’s KPIs — which told them they could continue with the original design of the homepage, rather than making any major alterations. This ultimately saved them from wasting resources re-designing their already successful homepage, and let them focus their energy elsewhere.
Ideally, these monday.com strategies can inspire you to reconsider how you might use marketing analytics in increasingly creative and unique ways. Ultimately, of course, you’ll need to decide for yourself how to use data most effectively for your own needs and goals.
[Note: If you’re a HubSpot customer, take a look at the new powerful integration between HubSpot and monday.com.]

In the first few years of business, small companies come up against a lot of different challenges. Some are harder than others to overcome — and according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of small businesses fail by the end of their first year. By the end of their fifth year, 50% go under; and by the tenth year, that number rises to 80%.
With survival rates like that, it’s easy to understand why folks face the first few years of business with trepidation. But in fact, many common business problems and challenges are actually fixable. Many times, you’ll find you need to take a step back, take the time to understand the pain points you’re feeling, and re-think your strategy.
Here are several challenges every small business faces, along with some tactical advice about how to fix them.

1. Finding Customers
This first one isn’t just a small business problem. The marketers at well-known companies like Apple and Toyota and McDonald’s don’t just sit around waiting for the leads to come in: Even the biggest, most successful companies have people working hard every single day to find new customers.
But for small businesses that aren’t a household name, finding customers can be particularly difficult. For example, there seem to be so many channels you can choose to focus on… How do you know what to prioritize and where to allocate resources?
How to Fix It:
Finding customers starts with figuring how who your ideal customer actually is. Spraying and praying doesn’t work for anybody — you need to make sure you’re spreading the word to the right people.
Craft an idea of what your target customers look like, what they do, where they spend time online by building your buyer personas.
Creating very specific ones can dramatically improve your business results. Once you’ve built your buyer personas, you can start creating content and getting in front of your target customers in the places they spend time online and with the messages that they care about.
2. Increasing Brand Awareness
If your customers don’t know who you are, they can’t buy from you.
It can sometimes seem like today’s biggest brands seemed to have popped up out of nowhere. How did they become a household name? How did they grow that quickly? Can your business grow like that, too?
Of course, most of these companies’ hard work, failures, and rejections happened behind the scenes. But there are strategies for spreading the word about your brand and building a great reputation that you can start right away.
How to Fix It:
There are many ways to spread brand awareness, but the three I’ll touch on here are PR, co-marketing, and blogging.

PR: Public relations is less about paying for a spot in a news blog, and more about focusing your voice and finding your place in the market. I recommend reading this great post from FirstRound Capital on what startups and small businesses often get wrong about PR, which also includes some great, tactical tips on how to figure out who’s covering your industry, building relationships, and working with reporters. You can also download our free public relations kit to learn how to maximize your public relations efforts with inbound marketing and social media.

Co-marketing: Partnering with another brand will help you inherit some of their image and reputation and create brand evangelists outside your circle. It’s a fantastic way to gain a large volume of new contacts alongside your organic marketing efforts. You can read our ebook on how to get started with co-marketing for more helpful information.

Blogging: Running a consistently high-quality blog will also help you build brand awareness. Not only does a blog help drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into leads, but it also helps you establish authority in your industry and trust among your prospects. It’ll also help you build an email list, which brings us to our next point…

3. Building an Email List
In order to move prospects along their buyer’s journey to eventually become your customer, you need to build trust by staying top of mind and providing value consistently. 
That starts with getting prospects into your email list.
As if it isn’t hard enough to build an email list, the average marketing database degrades by about 22.5% every year. 
That means you have to increase your email list by almost a quarter to just maintain it, never mind grow it. It’s the marketing team’s job to find ways to constantly add fresh, new email contacts to your lists.
But what many people call “building an email list” is actually buying an email list — and buying an email list is never a good idea. I repeat: Never a good idea. Not only will your email deliverability and IP reputation be harmed, but it’s also a waste of money. If your current strategy is to buy or rent email lists, then it’s time to regroup and find better places to put those resources.
How to Fix It:
Instead of buying or renting lists, build opt-in email lists. An opt-in email list is made up of subscribers who voluntarily give you their email address so you can send them emails.
The act of opting in necessitates website functionality that captures their email address. This can be achieved with a form builder or other conversion tool (more on that later).
The other piece of the puzzle is creating demand. You can do this by creating great blog content and making it easy for people to subscribe — which, at the same time, will help you increase your online presence, build up search authority, and create evangelists from your content.

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You can also revive older lists that you think are mostly decayed by creating an engaging opt-in message and sending it to your old list encouraging contacts who wish to re-opt-in and promising to remove all contacts who don’t respond.
Growing your email list doesn’t necessarily translate into growing your list of sales-qualified leads, which brings me to my next point…
4. Lead Generation
Another problem most small businesses share is lead generation — specifically, generating enough leads to keep the sales team happy.
But generating leads that are both high quantity and high quality is a marketing team’s most important objective. A successful lead generation engine is what turns website visitors into prospective customers and provides a steady stream of sales prospects while you sleep.
How to Fix It:
To make the lead generation process work for your business, you need to first optimize your existing website for conversions. Your website is the most important tool you have for turning prospects into customers. Look through your website and ask yourself:

Do each of your webpages clearly guide visitors to take action, or do they leave them wondering what to do next?
Do you use a tool that automatically pulls the submissions from your forms and puts them into your contact database, like HubSpot’s free lead generation tool?
Are you creating custom landing pages for every single campaign that you run?
Do you have lead generation CTAs on each of your blog posts? (Do you have a blog at all?)

Prioritize the most popular pages on your website first. Most businesses have a few, specific pages that bring in the majority of their traffic — often the homepage, “About” page, “Contact Us” page, and maybe one or two of your most popular blog posts. Read this blog post to learn how to figure out which pages to prioritize, and how to optimize them.
Then, implement conversion tools such as: 

Pop-ups
Hello bars
Slide-ins

Finally, be sure to take advantage of free lead management software and apps for startups. Affording marketing in general is a big challenge in and of itself, so finding and implementing the most robust free marketing tools can be a game changer.
5. Delighting Customers
Customer satisfaction is a great goal, but customer delight is even better. After all, delighted customers are the ones who buy from you again, write testimonials and agree to case studies, and refer you to people they know. 
In order to achieve true customer delight so that your customers become promoters of your business, you must surpass expectations and deliver an unmatched experience.
How to Fix It: 
It takes work to continue solving for your customer in a way that turns them into raving fans. Here are some steps get you in the right mindset: 

Understand why your customers chose you and what they need
Set concrete expectations at the start of the engagement
Deliver on those expectations (and satisfy your customers’ needs)
Innovate how you can provide unexpected extras that go above and beyond
Continue to measure satisfaction and improve the customer experience

6. Hiring Talented People
None of the above can happen at scale without a fantastic team that understands your vision and supports your efforts.
Hiring is often one of the biggest challenges for small businesses, especially since small business executives tend to feel under-resourced to begin with. Hiring new employees is a big deal and a complex process, and the cost of onboarding is an average of over $4,000 per new employee for most companies. And if you don’t hire well, employee turnover can be very, very expensive.
But, as CEO of 2020 On-site Optometry Howard Bernstein said, it’s impossible to know everything yourself. That’s why finding and hiring the right people — and the people who are really excited about what you’re doing — matters.
How to Fix It:
It’s easy to hire with a short-term mindset: send out a job description, screen applicants, and make a decision. But because of the high costs of hiring right, it’s important to invest a significant amount of time in the hiring process. Don’t settle for good employees when you can find great ones, even if it takes longer. It’s the great employees that will help your company get to the next level.
Just like you create buyer personas for your customers, create candidate personas for your job candidates. Your personas should be different for each new role that you’re hiring for, but will share some underlying traits around company culture.
Next, take ownership of attracting candidates to your company’s brand and make them interested in learning more. This will help you build a recruiting pipeline that will give hiring the same predictability as sales. Then, turn those leads into applicants.
7. Managing Workflow
Once you have the people in place to make the magic happen, the next challenge is managing workflow as you scale. You want to ensure that your team has the processes and tools to do good work and do it efficiently. 
At the same time, you can’t be everywhere at once as a business leader. So how do you focus on the business while ensuring that everyone working in the business has what they need?
How to Fix It:
The best ways to diagnose the roadblocks your team faces and increase efficiency is by creating ways for them to provide feedback. This can be done through: 

Employee satisfaction surveys
Frequent one-on-one meetings with direct reports
Ensuring your direct reports implement one-on-one meetings with their direct reports
Occasional skip-level meetings
Asking about threats to the business and the issues that give them the most “pain” in their roles
Finding the commonalities in the feedback you receive and the bottlenecks

8. Financial Planning
In theory, more resources (whether it’s people, tools, or time) increase efficiency and quality. Creating smooth operations starts by providing all the resources you can to your team. 
It sounds simple in theory, but did you notice the caveat, all … you can? Unfortunately, business leaders have budget restrictions based on revenue and margin. 
It, then, becomes a challenge to improve efficiency while working within certain limitations, investing in your business without over-spending outside your means. This is solved by making good decisions based on solid financial planning.
How to Fix It: 
Every business will be different, but you’ll want to use business credit wisely, cut costs where possible, and manage cash flow by staying on top of invoices and bookkeeping. Business accountants and financial advisors can help you analyze your financial situation and help you make good decisions.
9. Scaling
“There’s this mix of building scalability early, versus doing what you have to do to get it all done,” according to Nick Rellas, co-founder and CEO of Drizly.
This is a tricky one, especially since every situation is different. You’ll see this problem arise in all areas of business: in product development, in marketing and content creation, in hiring, and so on.
For example, many business executives will push growth at all costs. But if you grow your company too quickly, you’ll find yourself having to hire quickly. This can overwhelm your experienced team members because it takes a while to train people. And if you don’t train people well, it can end up backfiring.
How to Fix It:
Unfortunately, there’s no perfect answer here. “Depending where you are in your business’ lifecycle,” says Rellas, “the scale will tip one way or the other, but I do think you need both at different times.”
What it comes down to is not obsessing over every detail, but obsessing over the right details. Obsessing over product perfection, for example, might not be as important as obsessing over customer service. It’s better to put your fears aside and launch a product that isn’t perfect because you can always update and improve it. After all, once your products are in the hands of your customers, you can learn much more quickly what’s working and what isn’t.
Obsessing over customer service, however, is worth the extra effort. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos puts it well in his 2016 letter to shareholders: “There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.”
(“Day 1” is what he refers to as a period of growth and innovation, whereas “Day 2” is stasis, irrelevance, and slow demise.)
While these are just a few of the many business challenges facing small businesses every day, there are many others out there. Many of them can be planned for and mitigated with the proper planning and strategy.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.