Category: Marketing Automation

Is there someone on staff who sits there and codes HTML for emails? Do you use an external service that has a more user friendly interface for newsletters than Marketo has? Do you outsource to someone?
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This post is written by Daniel Englebretson. Daniel is a Salesforce Trailblazer and co-founder and VP of client services for Khronos, an agency that specializes in account-based marketing, B2B marketing, enterprise marketing, and growth marketing.
In 2020, 79% of businesses reported a decline in pipeline tied to the pandemic, and many B2B marketers are turning to account-based marketing (ABM) to redefine their go-to-market approach. Those who have built successful ABM programs have realized huge gains in ROI, win-rates, pipeline velocity, and customer retention.  
In this blog post, we’ll dive into what ABM is, why its popularity surged this year, and how marketers should think about ABM as they plan for 2021.
Defining Account-Based Marketing
Like any good marketing, ABM requires a deep understanding of your target audience and how they make purchase decisions. What makes today’s ABM different from traditional marketing is:

the wide variety of readily available target customer data
the unprecedented access to individual buyers
the scale that technology can bring to your ability to act on data 

When done well, ABM aggregates target customer data, unlocks insight, and leverages technology to facilitate the ideal buying experience for your ideal customer.
Put more simply: the account-based approach focuses your efforts on saying the right thing to the right people at the right time.
The Foundations of ABM: Data, Content, and Alignment
The success of any ABM strategy depends on having the following in place:
Data (the right people)
A strong ABM program is built on the accessibility of clean, organized account data. You can’t say the right thing to the right person if you don’t know who that person is or what their experience with your brand has been. 
Content (saying the right thing)
The goal of an ABM content strategy is to balance the most relevant experience that you can afford, while maximizing payback. Carefully consider the buyer’s journey and the ideal experience that your brand would like to deliver along that journey. 
Alignment (at the right time)
Traditional demand generation often suffers from a fundamental disconnect between what marketing and sales consider to be a qualified lead. ABM works to overcome this disconnect by encouraging cross-functional account selection, collaborative buyer journey design, and a unified definition of a qualified lead.
The Implications of Shifting to ABM
The two most significant implications of a shift to ABM are the organizational structure required to react to the output and the reconfiguration of the technology stack to support an account-based focus.
Org structure
It would be easy to look at the shift to ABM as a marketing-led initiative, but in reality, it’s a market-driven initiative.
B2B buyers are demanding a more personalized, relevant, and connected experience. This has led to a rise in behavior-driven interpretation of buying intent, and the birth of high-touch, outbound roles focused on human-to-human communication. These roles are distinctly different from traditional inside sales and place a heavy focus on high-touch, multi-channel outreach.
Tech stack
The ABM conversation is often dominated by tactical approaches to delivering  personalized messages to a target audience. There’s been an explosion of new technology vendors with exciting new capabilities, but implementing them takes time and money. This can complicate your martech stack, extend the time it takes to launch, and leave less time to deliver payback. 
Starting with a clean view into your target accounts – who they are, who you know, and how you’re engaging with them – will go a long way toward defining your tech strategy. But before evaluating new technologies, start by clearly defining the problems you’re trying to solve.
What does 2020 tell us about 2021?
A shift to remote work, tighter budgets, declining pipelines, and the elimination of most in-person events went a long way to shaping B2B marketing in 2020. I expect to see these trends hold true in 2021.
Freezes in hiring, growing skill gaps, and the traditional “sales versus marketing” conflict have driven personal challenges for many organizations. Gaps around ABM media management, lack of a business development function (BDR), and ABM data/reporting/analytics have become increasingly more prominent. 
While identifying how to maximize return on investments will vary across organizations, if you haven’t yet staffed your first BDR, take the time to fully understand what you’re missing out on. Technology is rapidly advancing to solve many of the tactical gaps, but technology can’t replace the human touch.
One of this year’s most surprising trends was the organizational willingness to reallocate event budgets into new initiatives. The pandemic has left significant dollars in the budget and a significant gap in lead generation efforts via traditional channels. Working with your sales team to understand which types of accounts are suffering the most from the lack of events, and then building a plan to target and engage those accounts via alternative channels, is a powerful opportunity for marketers to add value. 
The rapid rise of work-from-home and its impact on the efficacy of high-volume tactics like direct mail and outbound calling has been particularly interesting. It’s clear that the remote-work trend has had an impact on the ability to engage specific roles at specific accounts. As a result, there’s been a huge shift toward social media marketing. LinkedIn has solidified its place within the ABM stack, behind CRM and marketing automation, with 60% of ABM teams deploying LinkedIn.
But perhaps the farthest-reaching marketing shift is the degree to which enterprise-grade technology is becoming easier to use and more accessible by all businesses. Advanced concepts like predictive and AI are now at your fingertips, reinforcing the need to simplify your tech stack and consolidate data for advanced manipulation.
What ABM marketers need in 2021
Despite the advances, data challenges remain a critical hurdle for ABM. As a marketing leader, you should be able to answer these questions:

How big is your total addressable market?
What is your ideal customer profile?
What percentage of that audience do you currently have access to? 

These answers can help you better align your efforts, set your targets, and allocate resources. And few things build sales alignment faster than clear data on who you’re targeting, why you’re targeting them, and how well it’s going.
But no amount of data will overcome a lack of alignment. Equipping your teams with the right tools to collaborate on a unified view of your target accounts is table-stakes for the modern revenue team.  

Register for our Nov. 17 Pardot-Like-a-Pro webinar featuring Daniel Englebretson to learn more about building a world-class ABM martech stack.

Hear Daniel’s thoughts on what it takes to target the right accounts for your ideal customer profile on the Salesforce Marketing Cloudcast.

An art.
Not a process, method, or technique. Storytelling is described as an art … the “art” of storytelling.
And — like art — it requires creativity, vision, skill, and practice. Storytelling isn’t something you can grasp in one sitting, after one course. It’s a trial-and-error process of mastery.
Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is, and rightfully so because storytelling has become a crucial component of the most successful marketing campaigns. It sets apart vibrant brands from simple businesses and loyal consumers from one-time, stop-in shoppers.
It’s also the heart of inbound marketing.
Storytelling is an incredibly valuable tool for you to add to your proverbial marketing tool belt. That’s why we’ve compiled this guide, to help you discover and master storytelling and weave gorgeous, compelling tales for your audience.
Pick up your pen, and let’s dive in.

While this definition is pretty specific, stories actually resemble a variety of things. This graphic from ReferralCandy helps outline what stories are and are not.

Storytelling is an art form as old as time and has a place in every culture and society. Why? Because stories are a universal language that everyone — regardless of dialect, hometown, or heritage — can understand. Stories stimulate imagination and passion and create a sense of community among listeners and tellers alike.
Telling a story is like painting a picture with words. While everyone can tell a story, certain people fine-tune their storytelling skills and become a storyteller on behalf of their organization, brand, or business. You might’ve heard of these folks — we typically refer to them as marketers, content writers, or PR professionals.
Every member of an organization can tell a story. But before we get into the how, let’s talk about why we tell stories — as a society, culture, and economy.

Why Do We Tell Stories?

There are a variety of reasons to tell stories — to sell, entertain, educate or brag. We’ll talk about that below. Right now, I want to discuss why we choose storytelling over, say, a data-driven powerpoint or bulleted list. Why are stories our go-to way of sharing, explaining, and selling information?
Here’s why.
Stories solidify abstract concepts and simplify complex messages.
We’ve all experienced confusion when trying to understand a new idea. Stories provide a way around that. Think about times when stories have helped you better understand a concept … perhaps a teacher used a real-life example to explain a math problem, a preacher illustrated a situation during a sermon, or a speaker used a case study to convey complex data.
Stories help solidify abstract concepts and simplify complex messages. Taking a lofty, non-tangible concept and relating it using concrete ideas is one of the biggest strengths of storytelling in business.

Take Apple, for example. Computers and smartphones are a pretty complicated topic to describe to your typical consumer. Using real-life stories, they’ve been able to describe exactly how their products benefit users … instead of relying on technical jargon that very few customers would understand.
Stories bring people together.
Like I said above, stories are a universal language of sorts. We all understand the story of the hero, of the underdog, or of heartbreak. We all process emotions and can share feelings of elation, hope, despair, and anger. Sharing in a story gives even the most diverse people a sense of commonality and community.
In a world divided by a multitude of things, stories bring people together and create a sense of community. Despite our language, religion, political preferences, or ethnicity, stories connect us through the way we feel and respond to them … Stories make us human.
TOMS is a great example of this. By sharing stories of both customers and the people they serve through customer purchases, TOMS has effectively created a movement that has not only increased sales but also built a community.
Stories inspire and motivate.
Stories make us human, and the same goes for brands. When brands get transparent and authentic, it brings them down-to-earth and helps consumers connect with them and the people behind them.
Tapping into people’s emotions and baring both the good and bad is how stories inspire and motivate … and eventually, drive action. Stories also foster brand loyalty. Creating a narrative around your brand or product not only humanizes it but also inherently markets your business.
Few brands use inspiration as a selling tactic, but ModCloth does it well. By sharing the real story of their founder, ModCloth not only makes the brand relatable and worth purchasing, but it also inspires other founders and business owners.

Source: ModCloth

What makes a good story?

Words like “good” and “bad” are relative to user opinion. But there are a few non-negotiable components that make for a great storytelling experience, for both the reader and teller.
Good stories are …

Entertaining: Good stories keep the reader engaged and interested in what’s coming next.

Educational: Good stories spark curiosity and add to the reader’s knowledge bank.

Universal: Good stories are relatable to all readers and tap into emotions and experiences that most people undergo.

Organized: Good stories follow a succinct organization that helps convey the core message and helps readers absorb it.

Memorable: Whether through inspiration, scandal, or humor, good stories stick in the reader’s mind.

According to HubSpot Academy’s free Power of Storytelling course, there are three components that make up a good story — regardless of the story you’re trying to tell.

Characters. Every story features at least one character, and this character will be the key to relating your audience back to the story. This component is the bridge between you, the storyteller, and the audience. If your audience can put themselves in your character’s shoes, they’ll be more likely to follow through with your call-to-action.

Conflict. The conflict is the lesson of how the character overcomes a challenge. Conflict in your story elicits emotions and connects the audience through relatable experiences. When telling stories, the power lies in what you’re conveying and teaching. If there’s no conflict in your story, it’s likely not a story.

Resolution. Every good story has a closing, but it doesn’t always have to be a good one. Your story’s resolution should wrap up the story, provide context around the characters and conflict(s), and leave your audience with a call-to-action.

Now that you know what your story should contain, let’s talk about how to craft your story.

The Storytelling Process

We’ve confirmed storytelling is an art. Like art, storytelling requires creativity, vision, and skill. It also requires practice. Enter: The storytelling process.
Painters, sculptors, sketch artists, and potters all follow their own creative process when producing their art. It helps them know where to start, how to develop their vision, and how to perfect their practice over time. The same goes for storytelling … especially for businesses writing stories.
Why is this process important? Because, as an organization or brand, you likely have a ton of facts, figures, and messages to get across in one succinct story. How do you know where to begin? Well, start with the first step. You’ll know where to go (and how to get there) after that.
1. Know your audience.
Who wants to hear your story? Who will benefit and respond the strongest? In order to create a compelling story, you need to understand your readers and who will respond and take action.

Before you put a pen to paper (or cursor to word processor), do some research on your target market and define your buyer persona(s). This process will get you acquainted with who might be reading, viewing, or listening to your story. It will also provide crucial direction for the next few steps as you build out the foundation of your story.
2. Define your core message.
Whether your story is one page or twenty, ten minutes or sixty, it should have a core message. Like the foundation of a home, it must be established before moving forward.
Is your story selling a product or raising funds? Explaining a service or advocating for an issue? What is the point of your story? To help define this, try to summarize your story in six to ten words. If you can’t do that, you don’t have a core message.
3. Decide what kind of story you’re telling.
Not all stories are created equal. To determine what kind of story you’re telling, figure out how you want your audience to feel or react as they read.
This will help you determine how you’re going to weave your story and what objective you’re pursuing. If your objective is to …

… incite action, your story should describe a how a successful action was completed in the past and explain how readers might be able to implement the same kind of change. Avoid excessive, exaggerated detail or changes in subject so your audience can focus on the action or change that your story encourages.

… tell people about yourself, tell a story that features genuine, humanizing struggles, failures, and wins. Today’s consumer appreciates and connects to brands that market with authenticity and storytelling is no exception.

… convey values, tell a story that taps into familiar emotions, characters, and situations so that readers can understand how the story applies to their own life. This is especially important when discussing values  that some people might not agree with or understand.

… foster community or collaboration, tell a story that moves readers to discuss and share your story with others. Use a situation or experience that others can relate to and say, “Me, too!” Keep situations and characters neutral to attract the widest variety of readers.

… impart knowledge or educate, tell a story that features a trial-and-error experience, so that readers can learn about a problem and how a solution was discovered and applied. Discuss other alternative solutions, too.

4. Establish your call-to-action.
Your objective and call-to-action (CTA) are similar, but your CTA will establish the action you’d like your audience to take after reading.
What exactly do you want your readers to do after reading? Do you want them to donate money, subscribe to a newsletter, take a course, or buy a product? Outline this alongside your objective to make sure they line up.
For example, if your objective is to foster community or collaboration, your CTA might be to “Tap the share button below.”
5. Choose your story medium.
Stories can take many shapes and forms. Some stories are read, some are watched, and others are listened to. Your chosen story medium depends on your type of story as well as resources, like time and money.
Here are the different ways you can tell your story.

A written story is told through articles, blog posts, or books. These are mostly text and may include some images. Written stories are by far the most affordable, attainable method of storytelling as it just requires a free word processor like Google Docs … or a pen and paper.

A spoken story is told in person, like  a presentation, pitch, or panel. TED talks are considered spoken stories. Because of their “live”, unedited nature, spoken stories typically require more practice and skill to convey messages and elicit emotions in others.

An audio story is spoken aloud but recorded — that’s what sets it apart from the spoken story. Audio stories are usually in podcast form, and with today’s technology, creating an audio story is more affordable than ever. (For a great story-driven podcast, check out The Growth Show!)

A digital story is told through a variety of media, such as video, animation, interactive stories, and even games. This option is by far the most effective for emotionally resonant stories as well as active, visual stories … which is why it’s also the most expensive. But don’t fret: video quality doesn’t matter as much as conveying a strong message.

6. Write!
Now it’s time to put pen to paper and start crafting your story.
With your core message, audience objective, and call-to-action already established, this step is simply about adding detail and creative flair to your story. Read more about our storytelling formula to help you with this step.
7. Share your story.
Don’t forget to share and promote your story! Like with any piece of content, creating it is only half the battle — sharing it is the other.
Depending on your chosen medium, you should definitely share your story on social media and email. In addition, written stories can be promoted on your blog, Medium, or through guest posting on other publications. Digital stories can be shared on YouTube and Vimeo. While spoken stories are best conveyed in person, consider recording a live performance to share later.
The more places you share your story, the more engagement you can expect from your audience.

Storytelling Resources

Storytelling is a trial-and-error process, and no one tells a story perfectly on the first try. That’s why we’ve collected these resources to help you fine-tune your storytelling skills and learn more about the different ways a story can be told.
For a Written Story

OEDb’s writing resources
HubSpot’s list of writing tools

For a Spoken Story

The TEDx Speaker Guide

For an Audio Story

HubSpot’s guide on How to Start a Podcast

For the Digital Story

Vimeo’s Video School
Animoto

Over To You
Storytelling is an art. It’s also a process worth mastering for both your business and your customers. Stories bring people together and inspire action and response. Also, today’s consumer doesn’t decide to buy based on what you’re selling, but rather why you’re selling it.
Storytelling helps you communicate that “why” in a creative, engaging way. Plus, isn’t storytelling more fun?

According to a recent U.K. survey, bloggers have ranked as the third most trustworthy source of information, following only friends and family. That’s right — bloggers are trusted more than celebrities, journalists, brands, and politicians.
But how do you get people to fall in love with your blog in the first place? (Aside from remarkable content, of course.)
Well, just as your website homepage is like the front door to your business, your blog’s design — much like a welcome mat — is the front door to your business blog.
If you’re not attracting people visually, how will you get them to take the next steps to actually read (and, hopefully, subscribe to) your content? Once you’re done creating the quality content, you still have the challenge of presenting it in a way that clearly dictates what your blog is about. Images, text, and links need to be shown off just right — otherwise, readers might abandon your content, if it’s not showcased in a way that’s appealing, easy to follow, and generates more interest.
That’s why we’ve compiled some examples of blog homepages to get you on the right track to designing the perfect blog for your readers. Check ’em out, below.

Beautiful Blog Examples to Inspire You

Help Scout
Microsoft Stories
Pando
Design Milk
Fubiz
Webdesigner Depot
Mashable
Brit + Co
Tesco Living
Crew
Innocent Drinks
500px
Pixelgrade
BarkPost
Goodwill Industries International
charity:water
Johnny Cupcakes

17 Inspiring Examples of Beautiful Blog Homepage Design

1. Help Scout

Sometimes, the best blog designs are also the simplest. Help Scout, makers of customer service software, uses a unique but minimalist design on its blog that we love — it limits the use of copy and visuals and embraces negative space.
What we particularly like about this blog is its use of featured images for all posts, including a banner one at the top that highlights a recent or particularly popular entry. These icons are set in front of bright, block colors that catch the readers’ eye and signal what the post is about. And it works — everything about this blog’s design says “clean” and “readable.”

2. Microsoft Stories
Full disclosure: We’ve totally gushed over Microsoft’s “Stories” microsite before. We can’t help it — what better way to revitalize an old-school brand than with a blog that boasts beautiful, interactive, and inspiring branded content? Plus, the square layout of these stories is reminiscent of the Microsoft logo, which achieves a valuable brand consistency.
Microsoft Stories is also a prime example of how a business blog can be a major asset for an overall rebrand. In recent years, Microsoft has worked to humanize its brand, largely in response to a rivalry with Apple. The “Stories” microsite has a simple tagline — “Get an inside look at the people, places and ideas that move us.” It’s the softer side of Microsoft, so to speak. 
When you’re trying to convey a certain brand message, your blog can be used to communicate it — both aesthetically, and content-wise.

3. Pando

An important aspect of a well-designed blog is a consistent color scheme and style — after all, 80% of consumers say that color boosts their recognition of a brand.
It’s interesting to see how color consistency can unify the more diversified elements of design. Pando, a blog that explores the startup cycle, incorporates blue tones in several sections of its site — the background, highlight bars, and certain areas of text. But it also uses several different fonts — all of which manage to look seamless together, when tied together by a cohesive color scheme.

4. Design Milk

Design Milk, an online contemporary design outlet, uses a very simple layout to highlight its posts. The sidebar to the right — which remains visible when a blog post is opened to read — is perfect for showcasing thumbnail images for new articles. That’s an internal link strategy, which helps to encourage readers to remain on the site longer.
The social icons at the top are a pleasant addition to the overall look and feel of the site — they’re easy to spot, and make it easy to share Design Milk’s content. (And to learn more about adding social buttons to your blog, check out this post.)

5. Fubiz
Fubiz, an art and design blog, is an example of a really sleek design that also includes some cool personalization.
Near the top of the blog’s homepage, readers can side-scroll through “highlighted” posts. Below that is the Creativity Finder, where visitors can select their chosen personas — from “Art Lover” to “Freelance” — location, and the type of content they’re looking for. From there, readers can browse content specifically catered to them. 
We can’t help but love the header image, too. It uses something called “blue mind” psychology, which has found that the sight of open water can naturally draw us in. By using it in a design scheme, Fubiz is able to visually attract visitors to its content.

6. Webdesigner Depot

With a name like “Webdesigner Depot,” it’s no wonder that this design news site is visually appealing.
One thing that we particularly like is the way Webdesigner Depot has incorporated social sharing icons on each individual post. While we of course suggest actually reading each piece, having those links readily available helps visitors immediately share a headline they find interesting. And check out those navigation arrows on the right — never before has it been so easy to scroll to the top or bottom of a page.
What’s more, the color scheme, background, and fonts are all consistent — which keeps this blog looking professional, but still distinct from the basic blog templates we might be used to seeing.

7. Mashable

I mean, just look at that header image. The bold colors, the wiring overlay, the gripping pupil and the contrasting text. It absolutely catches the reader’s eye — no pun intended.
Mashable breaks its content into three noticeable sections on the homepage: New posts are listed on the left in the smallest sized thumbnails. “What’s Rising” posts are displayed in the center column as large thumbnails, and the “What’s Hot” posts are shown to the right, also as large thumbnails. This three-pronged approach to displaying content can help readers decide which kind of news matters to them the most — the attention-grabbing top story, or other posts that are currently trending.
Plus, we like that the number of shares is displayed in each post preview — that’s a great form of social proof.

8. Brit + Co

Everything about the Brit + Co homepage says “clean,” “warm,” and “welcoming.” It’s free of clutter, making the content more digestible, and the layout is extremely organized.
We dig the seasonality of the site, too. I mean, avocado jack-o’-lanterns on the dawn of October? Adorable, and replete with a colorful, fun photo to illustrate the story’s content.
The subtle “trending” header also serves as a nice way to promote popular content, without being too in-you-face about it. Plus, with such great visuals, we took note of the nod to Pinterest — that icon is important to include when your blog incorporates attractive imagery.

9. Tesco Living
We love the colorful, consistent design of Tesco Living, the blog site of British grocery chain Tesco. 
Remember how we keep harping away at brand consistency? Check out the rhombus-like designs in the top banner — that reflects the same ones that appear in Tesco’s logo.
What Tesco Living has achieved is a great balance of simplicity and boldness. The layout is extremely minimal, but it isn’t dull. Warm and welcoming shades underscore each content category, and the photos add dashes of colors throughout the site. It’s a great example of how the right imagery can achieve an appealing “less-is-more” appearance, especially if that fits in with your overall brand concept.

10. Crew
Crew Backstage, the blog of the Crew platform for designers and developers, has a fabulously minimalist blog design, but quiet a unique one.
Notice that, above the fold, it features one blog post with a large title, subtitle, and call-to-action to read more.
To the left, there’s an equally minimalist call-to-action that makes it easy for readers to connect with Crew, or learn more. Plus, there’s that consistency again — everything above the fold is the same shade of blue, which has been shown to invoke brand trust.

11. Innocent Drinks

Not only are the folks at Innocent Drinks great copywriters, but the design of its blog is also a great reminder that blog designs don’t have to get super fancy.
Notice how the logo — displayed in the upper left — is simple, cartoonish, and almost delightfully child-like. It works for Innocent Drinks (hint: childhood innocence), and that brand presence is maintained throughout the company’s blog.
The colorful fonts, for example, match the logo and stay in line with the brand’s casual, playful voice. We also like the easily-navigable archive links on the left, which are complemented by the geometric social sharing buttons on the right.

12. 500px

Much like Crew, the photography blog, 500px, leads with one featured article and a big, bold, high-definition photo to draw the reader in. That makes is pretty clear what the blog is about — it boasts valuable content on photography with gripping photography.
Plus, how cool is it that the social links are right there, obviously displayed above the fold? They keep readers engaged with the content, and make it easy to share the photography — and, content with images is up to three times as likely to be shared on social media.

13. Pixelgrade

Pixelgrade is a design studio that creates stunning WordPress themes for all sorts of creative people and small businesses. 

 

Their blog page does a great job of highlighting one of their most recent or popular blog posts, alongside a clear call to action and a short excerpt. What I like best is that the design of the page is 100% in line with their brand and how they communicate on other channels as well, like
Instagram
,
Facebook
, or
Twitter
.

 

You will have no problem in identifying their blog posts, among other content you might come across while scrolling on social media.

14. BarkPost

It’s no secret that we kind of like dogs here at HubSpot. So when a blog dedicated to life as a dog owner came across our radar, it got our attention.
BarkPost, the blog of canine subscription box company BarkBox, is a great example of design for a number of reasons. First, look how easy it is to subscribe — the call to action is right there, above the featured content. The social share icons are easily noticeable, too — and, of course, all in the brand-matching, trustworthy blue.
We also like that BarkPost draws attention to its sister companies, all of which are owned under the Bark & Co portfolio of brands. But at the same time, the blog doesn’t hock its own products — rather, it serves as an informational resource to dog parents and lovers alike.

15. Goodwill Industries International

Who says nonprofit organizations can’t blog? Nay, they should — and Goodwill’s clean, colorful navigation (again — the trustworthy blue) draw the reader to the important elements of this blog.
The posts are also neatly positioned and easily accessible to readers. And, visitors can pick the type of information that matters to them the most by choosing a topic from the drop-down menu on the top right.
Finally, we love that there’s a collaborative call to action in the introductory text that invites readers to contribute content to the Goodwill blog. After all, the organizations services have reached 37 million people — here’s a way for them to share their stories, or invite donors to write about why they chose to support Goodwill.

16. charity: water

Keeping the nonprofit blogging train going is charity: water, which makes excellent use of high-quality photography.
Recently, the organization redesigned its blog with a lengthy post dedicated to its 10-year anniversary. Using that opportunity to share its impact over the past decade, charity: water maintained a simplistic design with concise text and bright images from the anniversary event.
Plus, there’s a clear CTA to donate at the top of the page. Placing that above a story about charity: water’s impact is a double-edged sword, by both inspiring people to contribute to the cause while making it easy to do so.

17. Johnny Cupcakes

To clear up any confusion, Johnny Cupcakes doesn’t actually make cupcakes. It makes clothing. But the company has done a great job of playing up its brand’s association with baked goods — its blog uses the subdomain “kitchen.”
Plus, the folks at Johnny Cupcakes know a thing or two about brand consistency across channels. Its blog’s simple color scheme and matching fonts help to create a unified user experience from the shop to general content, all the while throwing in bold, colorful images to catch readers’ attention.
Also, visit the website and have a scroll — we think it’s pretty cool how the background images vary, but stay positionally static for each entry.

Here are 15 more award-winning website design examples.

A blog is a critical component of your inbound marketing strategy — it’s the vehicle for driving traffic, generating leads, and establishing authority and trust… All in the early or middle stages of the buyer’s journey.
But how do you know if it’s working?
With all that content, traffic, and leads you’re generating, are you aware that you’re sitting on a gold mine of valuable data? Enter… Blog analytics.
In this post, we’ll cover:

What blog analytics are
Why they matter
What metrics to measure

How to measure them (Hint: With tools!) 

By measuring performance based on data, you can identify what’s working, what’s not working, and why. 

Why Blog Analytics Matters
Let’s say a key stakeholder in your company comes to you with this question: “How is the blog contributing to our goals?” They want to craft the marketing budget and put their dollars toward the activities that make the most difference to the bottom line.
Responding to their question with “Trust me” will not sway that individual to continue celebrating and investing in content marketing. By gathering and analyzing blog data, you can get a pulse on your blog’s:

Search presence (such as impressions, clicks, and click-through rate)

Traffic performance (based on total views and visits, individual post performance, and by referral source)

Authority in your online niche (based on number of inbound links)

Readership engagement (by measuring time on page, bounce rate, social shares and comments, and subscriber count)

Lead generation (by measuring CTA click-through rate, goal conversion rate, number of leads, and lead-to-customer conversion rate)

All of this data is leverage as you prove the ROI of the blog and improve the performance of your blog content. You just have to know how to use it!
Let’s dive deeper on this…

Blog Analytics Metrics and Insights
Let’s break down the individual blog metrics you should be tracking so you can start making incremental improvements and generate even more traffic and leads… based on data that’s right under your nose.

1. Organic Search Impressions
An “impression” is the number of times your post or page has been seen in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The higher your blog posts rank in the SERPs, the more visibility (and, as a result, traffic) your blog can earn through organic search. 
If you have a low number of impressions, your search presence may not be strong enough to get the organic traffic numbers you’re after, and it’s your job to then implement SEO best practices and create content around queries that people are searching for. 

2. Organic Clicks
It’s not enough to simply be present on the SERPs, which is what impression data measures. Your content must be compelling enough to compel the searcher to click. The more organic clicks your content earns, the more traffic your blog receives. 
If you’re finding that your clicks are low, first check your impressions. If impressions are low too, you must work on increasing your impressions.
On the other hand, your impressions could be lower if your content is targeting a low-volume query (i.e. you can’t change search behavior and make people search for something more).
However, if you’re finding that your SERP positions and impressions are high and your clicks are low, you may have to work on your title (blog headline) and meta-description to gain attention and earn more clicks. 

3. Organic Click-Through Rate
Comparing organic impressions to clicks can be hard, but that’s where organic click-through rate comes in. This metric is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click. 
The higher the percentage, the more bang you get for your impressions buck. You can even have posts that get little traffic (because of low keyword volume) that rank highly, get a lot of impressions, and earn a high share of clicks from those impressions. 
At the same time, you could rank lower for a high volume query yet still drive a lot of traffic with a low click-through rate. 

4. Total Views and Visits
A visit measures the number of times your website was seen by a user. Page views refer to the number of times a page was seen by a user. It’s important to keep in mind that there can be multiple page views for every visit since users can browse multiple pages in a single session. 
These overall metrics can tell you: 

Whether blog traffic is trending up or down
Average number of page views per visit (i.e. whether a user is engaging with multiple pieces of your content when they do visit)
Average views per post (how far your content goes on average) 

(And more…)

5. Individual Post Performance
The number of views for individual blog posts can give you more granular data about how your audience responds to the different topics you’re blogging about.

Do you notice that posts about certain topics aren’t doing as well as others? This is likely an indication that those topics aren’t as important to your audience. If this is the case, you might want to publish fewer posts on those topics and more on topics that truly resonate with your target audience.
Blog post views can also help you identify other patterns and cues in your blog content. Does a certain title structure work better than others? Do posts that are more pontificating generate a better reaction than how-to type posts? Use all of these insights to inform your future posts to increase the value of your blog and generate better results.

6. Traffic Referral Source
Your blog’s referral sources will tell you where (which sites) users are coming from and give you a sense of how people are finding your blog. Use this information to identify deficiencies in your blog’s visibility and to help diagnose why you may have low traffic to your blog.
Is the bulk of your traffic coming from social media sites per your heavy social media promotion but few visitors are coming in from organic search — or vice versa?

Make sure you’re optimizing your blog content with the keywords your target audience is searching for so it gets found in search engines, and allocate some resources to promoting your blog on the sites your audience tends to populate.
Continue to track your referral sources as you ramp up promotion in certain channels so you can determine the ROI of leveraging one channel over another. A lot of focus on social media promo that yields few visitors might not be the best use of your time when another channel is a better driver of blog traffic, for example.

7.  Number of Inbound Links
“Inbound links” refer to the links that your blog earns from other sites. Inbound links, or links from other websites and blogs pointing to your blog content, can indicate how authoritative your blog is.
Think of inbound links as votes of confidence. If someone thought your blog content was worth linking to within their own content, it’s a good indicator that content is an authoritative resource on the subject.
Inbound links can also show you how effectively your blog is contributing to your website’s overall SEO, since inbound links are one of the most powerful factors impacting search engine optimization. They can even help you generate blog traffic from the referring website and expose you to brand new audiences.
Individual inbound links will also help you identify some of your blog’s top content that you might consider using as fodder in social media updates, new blog posts, or ebooks.

8. Time on Page
“Time on page” measures how long a user stayed to engage with the content once arriving on the page. It can* be a good indicator of how engaging the content is to your blog visitors. The idea is that the longer they stay, the more time they took to read the information rather than skim and bounce away (more on that later). 
*However, take this metric with a grain of salt. Shorter posts take less time to read and, as a result, have shorter time on page averages. Also, if you take time in making your posts easy for the user to navigate and find what they’re looking for, you may get shorter times for this reason (and that’s okay!).

9. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate will tell you how frequently visitors leave your blog without visiting other pages on your blog. While this is a great indicator of the quality of your content and the stickiness of your blog overall, don’t be fooled by some implications of bounce rate. While you’d probably want visitors to stick around and read other articles on your blog, you probably wouldn’t consider it a bad thing if a visitor clicked on a CTA at the end of your post and headed over to one of your landing pages to fill out a lead-capture form, right?
That being said, if people are quickly leaving your blog for a completely different website, you’ll want to take some measures to increase the quality of your content.
To help decrease bounce rate, consider adding a sidebar widget to your blog that features your blog’s best-performing posts and switching up the homepage of your blog to show a preview of your 5 most recent posts rather than a full view of your most recent post. This will give visitors the ability to choose to read more posts that cater to their individual needs, enticing them to stick around.

10. Social Shares and Comments

Comments and social shares are good supplementary metrics to indicate the likeability of your content and the sentiment of your audience’s perception of it. In addition, comments and social shares can be a great way to identify strengths and weaknesses in your content and help you generate ideas for new content.
If you’re noticing few social shares of your content, make sure you have social sharing buttons installed on every blog article you publish. Be sure that you’re also spending time promoting on social media.

11. Subscriber Count
Your blog’s RSS subscriber and email subscriber count can indicate how much your blog’s stable community of readers is growing over time.
Visitors who subscribe will likely make up your blog’s solid readership, and it usually indicates your content’s true fan base. These readers are most likely to share your content with their own networks, expanding your blog’s reach, so you’ll want to do some work to build up your subscriber count and track its growth over time.
Make sure you display email and RSS subscribe buttons prominently near the top of your blog’s sidebar to encourage new visitors to subscribe to your content.

12. CTA Click-Through Rate
A view on your blog post or a social share is not the end-all be-all. You actually want your blog to make a meaningful impact on revenue… and traffic is only part of that equation.
With that in mind, if no one is clicking through from your blog to your landing pages, you’ll never generate any leads. That’s where CTA click-through rate comes in.
CTA click-through rate measures the percentage of visitors who clicked on your blog’s CTA. 
The higher the CTR, the more effective your CTA is for the traffic your blog is currently generating.
But a low CTR could mean a few things:

The offer in your call-to-action isn’t compelling or relevant enough (blog readers are there for a reason, and the offer doesn’t meet their needs or excite them)
The CTA has not been placed in a prominent enough location for visibility
The CTA design just isn’t attractive or prominent enough to warrant a click (whether it be because of the aesthetic design, or ineffective button copy)

To improve your blog’s click-through rate, make sure the offer you’re presenting aligns with the content of your posts as closely as possible, uses compelling button copy that clearly demonstrates the value of the offer, creates a sense of urgency, and that the button utilizes an attention-grabbing design. Conducting some A/B tests is a great way to optimize for the best calls-to-action for your blog to improve click-through rate.

13. Number of Leads
Obviously, the number of leads generated will tell you how effectively your blog is supporting lead generation. Is it trending up or down? Are they the right kind of leads?
To make sure you have your bases covered here, tell your readers what action you want them to take. Make sure that:

Every post you publish includes a call-to-action for a relevant offer
The homepage of your blog itself features your best-performing CTAs in its sidebar/top bar
You include anchor text links to landing pages within the text of your blog posts

Knowing the number of leads attributed to your blog can also help you diagnose other deficiencies in your blog’s performance.

14. Goal Conversion Rate
The goal conversion rate measures whether your blog readers completed the action you wanted them to (the goal) to convert from a visit to a lead. As opposed to the number of leads metric which tells you how much you’re generating leads for your business, conversion rate tells you how effectively you’re doing it.
Keep in mind that conversion rate is highly dependent on your existing traffic. So if you have low traffic but an amazing conversion rate, you might generate leads at the same rate as you would with high traffic but a low conversion rate. Coupled with the knowledge of your blog’s CTA click-through rate, you can gather some pretty awesome insights.
For example, if you have a high click-through rate but a low conversion rate, this means that while you’re getting visitors to click on your CTAs, they’re abandoning your landing pages before completing the form to convert into a lead. If this is the case, you likely have a conversion problem that can be due to a number of things: the messaging in your CTAs don’t align with the messaging on their landing pages or you could have a number of very landing page-specific problems. Start first with testing better alignment between your CTAs and their landing pages, and if that doesn’t do the trick, dive into landing page optimization testing.

15. Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate
Your blog’s lead-to-customer conversion rate will tell you how effectively the leads you generated from your blog turned into customers. This insight becomes valuable when you’re examining and comparing the effectiveness of your multiple marketing channels against each other. If your blog is one of your top customer-producing channels, it might make sense to allocate more time and human resources to it. If it’s not, the opposite might be a better approach.
Now, all of the above are fantastic metrics to measure the performance of your blog. But how do you get the data? Below are blog analytics tools that can help you gather and analyze blog data. 

1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps website owners measure and analyze their presence on Google. Based on the data that is provided by Google themselves, you’ll be able to track: 

Organic impressions from Google
Number of clicks from Google
Click-through rate
Positioning (the ranking position on Google SERPs)

Google Search Console also provides the ability to segment based on individual pages, individual queries, countries, and devices. You’re also able to compare date ranges to show change over time.
The only thing you need to do to get access to this data is enable it is sign up and verify ownership of your site. 
2. SEMrush

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SEMrush is a third-party tool for measuring search presence and rankings. You can use it to track positioning changes over time, monitor your inbound link profile, and optimize content for SEO. 
What makes it different is that SEMrush goes beyond providing the data and into helping you uncover actionable insights. You’ll be able to do keyword research and uncover strategies to help your blog perform better, and you can also do competitive analysis to understand what your competitors’ search presence is like.
3. Arel=”noopener” target=”_blank” hrefs

Arel=”noopener” target=”_blank” hrefs is a similar tool to SEMrush for tracking search performance and performing keyword research and competitive analysis. With this all-in-one SEO tool, you’ll have access to keyword data, site auditing, and rank tracking. What makes Arel=”noopener” target=”_blank” hrefs special is its SERP feature tracking, helping you understand exactly what your users are seeing when they perform a particular query.
4. Google Analytics

Whereas Google Search Console helps you understand and measure your positioning and performance on the SERPs, before users get to your site, Google Analytics helps you understand what happens after they get to your site.
It’s a free tool. In order to implement Google Analytics, you must set up an account and implement the Tracking ID with a JavaScript tag. Once this tag is in your site’s code and functioning properly, it can then gather data about your site’s users from that point forward (i.e. no back data is available previous to the script being installed).
Google Analytics can help you understand: 

Audience – Who came to your site? Where are they located? What are their demographics? What device did they use?

Acquisition – Where did they come from? What referring sites sent them?

Behavior – Where did they land (which page or post)? What did they do once they got here? How long did they stay? How did they navigate the site? What page did they exit from?

Conversions – Did they do what you wanted them to? 

There are many metrics to look at within these larger buckets, and Google Analytics also provides ways to filter, segment, and compare various metrics. This can help you determine if you’re getting the right traffic, if that traffic is trending up or down, and if they’re navigating and converting how you want them to.
5. HubSpot

HubSpot is a CRM platform that also has marketing, CMS, sales, and service tools to help your business grow better. The advantage of using HubSpot for blogging is that you can monitor the performance of your posts and tie that data into CRM records, helping your team see all of their marketing interactions. This helps you be able to track the complete customer lifecycle from initial blog view to becoming a customer and beyond.
6. StoryChief

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StoryChief is a tool for centralized content management ranging from publishing to blog analytics and content insights. Its analytics, reporting, and data management features help you analyze your data, track trends on top-performing content, and guide you to insights for creating buzz-worthy content. The edge it has over something like Google Analytics is its intuitive interface. (Fun fact: It also integrates with HubSpot.)
7. Tableau

Tableau is a data management software that can help you create data visualizations that can lead you to valuable insights. It works by integrating multiple sources of data and allowing you to drill-down, filter, and build graphs and dashboards to spot trends and forecast opportunities.
Whatever tools you decide to use as you focus on the metrics that matter to your blogging efforts, keep in mind that data alone is not enough to create an actionable strategy. It’s important to understand the context of the data and be able to interpret insights into the inbound marketing activities that will generate ROI.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2012 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

As you browse and maneuver around the internet, you visit landing pages all the time.
A landing page can be the designated page you’re taken to when you click on an ad. It can also be the page that follows a call-to-action button or serve as the homepage of a website.
Regardless of how you “land” on a landing page, its purpose is to encourage you to convert to a lead or customer. For that reason, landing pages are uniquely powerful components of a business’s digital marketing strategy.

What is a landing page?
A landing page is a website page with a specific purpose — the objective of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads. While there are many types of landing pages the intent the same — get more leads.
Landing pages contain lead forms that ask visitors for their contact information in exchange for something of value, otherwise known as an offer.
The video below will help drive that definition home.

Now, think about how protective you are of your personal information. What would make a person want to give up their contact information over the internet?
Well, that’s where landing page best practices come in. A targeted, well-crafted landing page with a solid format and sound copy will get almost anyone to submit their information.

First, why do you need a landing page?
Why would you create a special page just for people to fill out a form? Why not just use your homepage or about page? Great questions.
After reading this article, you’ll likely be able to answer those questions yourself, but the short answer is this: A landing page eliminates distractions by removing navigation, competing links, and alternate options so you capture your visitor’s undivided attention. And complete attention means you can guide your visitor where you’d like them to go, i.e., to your lead form. In sum, landing pages are specifically designed to create conversions.
Now that you understand their importance, let’s cover landing page best practices to make sure your pages are set up to convert.

Was that a lot? We’ll break down these landing page best practices below.
1. Craft a benefit-focused headline.
For every 10 people that visit your landing page, at least seven of them will bounce off the page. To keep that number low, your visitors need to know (and understand) what’s in it for them within seconds of arriving. Your headline is the first thing they’ll read, and it should clearly and concisely communicate the value of your landing page and offer.
2. Choose an image that illustrates the offer.
Yes, an image is mandatory, and it should represent your target audience. The purpose of your image is to convey a feeling — it should illustrate how your visitor will feel once they receive your offer. Certain images may work better than others, so you should always split test your options (which we’ll cover below).
3. Write compelling copy.
Don’t spend all that time crafting the perfect headline and finding your ideal image to fall flat when it comes to the words that will actually sell your call-to-action. Your copy needs to be clear, concise and should guide your visitor to the action you want them to complete. Compelling copy also speaks directly to the visitor by using “you” and “your” to make them feel engaged. We’ll go more in-depth on copy tips below.
4. Include the lead form above the fold.
Your lead form needs to be readily accessible should your prospect want to convert right away — you definitely don’t want them searching and scanning your landing page to find your offer. “Above the fold” just means that visitors don’t have to scroll to get to the form — that it’s in view as soon as someone hits the page. This could be a form or an anchor link to the form. Even better: Design your form to scroll with the user as they move down the page.
5. Add a clear and standout call-to-action.
The call-to-action (CTA) is arguably the most important element on your landing page — it’s one of many elements that encourage conversion. The CTA button needs to stand out, meaning you should use a color that contrasts with other elements on the page. Be clear about what you want visitors to do, that is, use an action verb that spells it out for them, like “submit”, “download”, or “get it now”. More on CTA best practices below.
6. Give away a relevant offer.
Think of your landing page as a part of your lead’s journey to your ultimate offer — your product or service, that is. Your offer is the thing you give in exchange for your lead’s personal information. Not only should it be compelling enough for your visitor to provide their contact info, but it should also be relevant to your business. Say you sell horseshoes.
Your offer might be something like “10 Simple Ways to Size Your Horse’s Hooves,” because, ultimately, you’re going to ask that lead to buy your horseshoes. You wouldn’t hook them with an offer about organic farming because that puts them on a completely different path. We’ll talk more about how compelling offers below.
7. Only ask for what you need.
You want to gather as much information as possible about your lead, but how much you ask for depends on several factors: how well acquainted they are with you, where they are in their buyer’s journey, and how much they trust you. Ask for as little info as you need in your lead form to create a low barrier to entry. A name and an email are more than sufficient to nurture a new lead.
8. Remove all navigation.
Your landing page has one objective and one objective only: to convert visitors into leads. Any competing links — including internal links to other pages on your website — will distract from that goal. Remove any other links on your page to draw all of your visitors’ attention to your call-to-action.
9. Make your page responsive.
Just like every other page on your website, your landing pages need to be responsive to accommodate every viewing experience. The last thing you need is for your form to fall out of view on mobile devices. Give your visitors every possible opportunity to convert, no matter how they’re viewing your page.
You can use tools to help accomplish this. For example, HubSpot’s drag-and-drop landing page editor, available in Marketing Hub Starter, makes it easy for you to create mobile optimized landing pages and forms effortlessly.
10. Optimize for search.
Sure, you’ll be driving visitors to your landing page through email blasts, social posts and other marketing methods, but your page should also be optimized with target keywords for your paid campaigns and organic search. When someone searches for your key phrase, they should find your landing page. Similarly, when you target a keyword with paid ads, those words should exist on your landing page.
11. Remember to use a thank you page.
A thank you page is where you send leads once they’ve completed your form. Now, you could just show a thank you message on the same page or ditch the thank you altogether, but there are many reasons why that’s not the best option.
A thank you page serves three important purposes:

It delivers the offer that you promised (usually in the form of an instant download)
It gives you an opportunity to interest your new lead in additional relevant content
It serves as a chance to thank them for their interest, which goes a long way in promoting them to a customer down the line.

How to Design Your Landing Page
Often times, design means creativity, colors, and pretty pictures. For the purpose of a landing page, we take design a step further to mean functional, direction-oriented, and effective. So, to craft a well-designed landing page, you’ll have to tap into both your right and left brain. But don’t get me wrong — you still need great imagery and attractive colors to convert your visitors. We’ll touch on how to incorporate all of this below.
Landing Page Structure
The good news is you don’t need to get too creative here. Most landing pages follow a very similar structure because it’s been proven to work. You can infuse your creativity through branded elements and images, but stick to a landing page format that people are used to seeing.
A good landing page has five elements (check out the landing page example below to see these elements in practice):

Headline that grabs the visitors attention

Relevant image that is relevant to your audience

Lead form that sits above the fold to capture visitors’ information

CTA that is action-oriented and compelling

Copy and description that informs and entices your visitor to complete your form

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Can your landing page include more than this? Absolutely. (Think social share buttons that visitors can use to spread the word about your offer). This is simply the bare minimum. You need to know your audience, where they are coming from and where they are in their buyer’s journey to know how much you need to include. The rule of thumb is to include as much information as you need to get people to convert.
Landing Page Layout
This may come as a surprise, but most people don’t read every word of your cleverly-crafted copy. Instead, they skim through and pull out the most important tidbits. Your job is to make those tidbits stand out so your visitor doesn’t miss anything important.
That means a few things …

Keep the most important information above the fold so your visitor doesn’t need to scroll to get to it.

Perform a blink test on your page, meaning a visitor should be able to gather the main message in less time than it takes them to blink, i.e., less than five seconds.

Use white (or negative) space to keep your visitor engaged, focused, and to help them comprehend your message.

Write with bullets and short paragraphs to make your copy easy to digest.
Try to work the important copy into an F-pattern, which is the direction that most people scan a page online. Work with the flow of visual patterns to drive people to the key points that will get them to convert.

Landing Page Colors
The design of your landing page — including the colors you use — should reflect that of your website. You’re aiming to form a long-term relationship with the people who visit your landing page, and that means they need to become familiar with your branding colors and unique style. The more they recognize your brand, the more they trust you (and the more they trust you, the easier it is to get them to do what you want them to do).The areas where you should consider using alternate colors are on the elements of your page that need to stand out — ahem, your CTA button. Contrast is the name of the game here. Say your branded colors are mostly green … you’ll want to choose a color that can draw users attention, say purple.
Wondering what colors perform well? We did a little research for you to determine which colors convert best.
Landing Page Images
The image on your landing page is one the first things people see, and since people process visuals far quicker than they do text, it sets the tone for their entire experience. But how can you possibly choose between millions of stock photos and that company photo shoot that’s taking up all the space on your computer?
Let’s narrow down the selection with a few important questions:
Who is my target audience?
What does your persona look like? How old are they? How do they dress? What are they interested in? The answers to these questions are important in determining what image you’re going to place front and center on your landing page. If it’s going to appeal to your audience, then it needs to represent them in some way.
Where on my landing page do I want them to look?
This might seem like an odd question, but really it’s based on the idea that people follow directional cues, like where someone is looking or pointing. If you want visitors to fill out a form, consider an image that drives their attention toward that form.
Will this image reinforce my message?
Every element on your landing page serves an important purpose. Since your image is one of the first things that people see, it should help clarify what the visitor can expect from your page. Make sure that your image adds value.
Here are some other important things to consider when creating great landing page images.

Call-to-Action (CTA)
We’ve discussed your CTA a few times so far, but since it’s the most important part of your landing page, it’s worth mentioning again. When it comes to the design of your CTA, there are a few tricks will make it so alluring that visitors feel compelled to click. To clarify, your CTA includes the button and the copy you use to draw attention to it; these tips cover both.

Give your CTA a vibrant and contrasting color
Focus your CTA copy on the benefit to your visitor
Get to the point — try using no more than five words
Tell your visitor what you want them to do using action verbs, e.g. Get, Download, Click
Make your button large enough to stand out on the page
Give it some negative space — don’t crowd the area around your CTA
Follow the flow of the page and place your CTA where your readers’ eyes will go, such as to the right of or below the copy
Test your button shape, test your copy … as a matter of fact test everything (we’ll cover how to do this below)

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Mobile Landing Page
More than half of website traffic comes from mobile devices, therefore, the user experience should be the same no matter the device visitors are using. By making your landing page responsive, you give them every opportunity to view and convert, whether they’re on a desktop, phone, tablet, or otherwise.

Landing Page Copywriting Tips
After design comes great copy. Your objective is to be compelling, instructive, likable, concise, effective, trustworthy and informative all at once. How? Keep reading.
1. Cover the main points.
No matter how you position it, there are a few main points that you need to hit with your copy. Those main points are your persona’s pain point, the solution to that pain point, how your solution works (features), how your solution will improve their situation (benefits), and verification that it works (social proof).
The majority of what you write needs to address how you can help your prospect, not how awesome you are (because that’s implied). Let’s go more in-depth on these points.
The Pain Point
The pain point that you focus on should be the one that your offer solves. Not to sound negative, but it’s important to touch on the problem your persona is facing so they know you understand what they’re going through. Empathy is an effective way to build trust. And if they know you get their problem, then they’re more likely to trust your solution.
Your Solution
The solution to their pain point is what you’re offering in exchange for their information. Illustrate a clear path between their problem and how your solution is the remedy they need.
Features
Just knowing what your solution is may not be enough to convert leads, so you need to mention what’s included in that solution. If it’s an ebook, what are the subjects your cover? If you’re promoting a webinar, how will it work and what will you teach? If it’s a service, what can they expect? Give your potential lead all the information they need to make a decision.
Benefits
Your copy should be heavy with benefits to the user because that’s what they really care about — what’s in it for them. While features list what your offer has, benefits tell visitors how their situation will be improved as a result. It paints a vivid picture of how much better their life could be by using your solution.
Social Proof
Studies show that social proof is effective for persuading people to take a desired action. Social proof comes in the form of logos of brands you’ve worked with, testimonials from previous clients, reviews of your product, or confirmation that others have purchased your service. In essence, people want to know that others are have used and benefited from your solution, too. By including social proof on your landing page, you’re validating your offer without even saying anything.

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Touching on each of these points will provide you with well-rounded copy that answers all of your visitors’ questions … which brings me to my next point.
2. Preemptively respond to objections.
A key part of writing persuasive copy (copy that gets people to convert) is dismantling objections before they even come up. Now, this takes some skill … or at least some help from a friend.
Once you’ve laid your foundation by addressing all the main points, put yourself in the mind of your prospect and think about where they might protest or challenge you as they read. For instance, if you say “We’ve helped Fortune 500 companies bring in customers,” your reader might scoff or doubt it unless you follow up that statement with social proof.
Do this exercise for every section of your page (or ask an unbiased friend to help) until you’ve covered every possible objection you can think of. When you get questions from people who’ve visited your landing page, use that as feedback to sharpen your copy even further. Better yet, seek out constructive criticism from your first few converted leads to ensure your landing page is meeting every need.
3. Build trust with your prospect.
Say you were reading a sales page and the company wrote, “Our product has helped 100 people and it might work for you, too!” Meh. I’d probably pass and find a company that has a solution that can definitely work for me. Your goal is to build trust with your visitor and the way to do that is to come across as an authority.
Besides using social proof, some other ways to build trust are:

Write in the way that you speak and address your prospects as you would a live customer.
Cite statistics that support your message.
Use case studies that highlight customers similar to your target.
Be relatable. Show your audience that you’re human by admitting failures, opening up about doubts you’ve had, and being honest. The caveat is you should only share what is relevant to their struggle; don’t just divulge anything.

4. Use click triggers.
Click triggers are designed to eliminate that last bit of doubt before a visitor converts. You can think of them as lick Probability Enhancers (… yes, I made up that term). They are essentially copy positioned next to your CTA that pushes your prospect over the edge by easing their mind and mitigating the risk of converting.
Below are some effective ways to employ click triggers:

Money-back guarantee
Easy unsubscribe
Quote from a successful or happy customer
Blurb on “what to expect”
Price slashing
Privacy policy
Some other creative method

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Whatever you choose, click triggers will give your conversions the boost they need.

A/B Testing Your Landing Page
Everything we’ve discussed until this point is great … in theory. But your business is different from others, and your target audience is unique. How do you know if the copy you chose is working? Or if your CTA placement is right? Or what colors perform best? Or which image to choose?You test it. That’s how. Split testing (or A/B testing) is probably nothing new to you as a marketer, and split testing your landing page is just one more experiment to add to your list.
Let’s briefly go over how to best A/B test your landing pages.
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing is simply splitting your traffic to two (or more) variations of a page to see which performs better. While you could do this manually by launching one variation for a period of time, then another for the same amount of time, it’s far more efficient to use a software that allows you to split test and can track your results.
The main components of an A/B test are variants, or the two versions of the page, the champion, or the original page, and the challenger, or the page that you modified to test against the original.
How to A/B Test
The most important trick to split testing is to make very small tweaks with each experiment. For instance, you don’t want to split test your headline and your image at the same time because you won’t know which element garnered the results. For this reason, stick to testing one element at a time. The “winner” becomes your champion, then you can create a new challenger to test the next element. You repeat this cycle until you reach a conversion rate that you’re happy with (and that falls within realistic expectations, which we’ll cover below).
What should you test?
You can test virtually anything on your landing page. But while that’s possible, you may want to limit your test to a few of the most impactful elements of your page, like:

Headline copy
Image
CTA color
Click triggers
Copy on the page
Lead form length and fields

These tests will have the biggest impact on your conversion rates. Try starting with the simplest change first, like a headline or CTA color, then work your way to the larger undertakings, like your page copy.

Landing Page Metrics to Track

Metrics will tell you everything you need to know about how well your landing page is performing as well as give you some insight on how to improve it. It’s hard to know exactly what will work when you launch a page. Measure and track meticulously in the beginning until you reach a relatively good conversion rate, then you can track your metrics less frequently.
Page Visits
How many visits are you getting on your landing page? The more visits, the more you increase your probability of conversions. Try adjusting your paid strategy or redefining your keywords to drive more traffic to your page. You can also let your current followers know about your offer through emails, social media, and on your website.
Traffic Source
Knowing where your traffic is coming from will let you know where you should double down on or ditch your efforts.
Submission Rate
This is the number of people that complete your lead form and land on your thank you page. There are many tweaks you can make to your page to increase this number, but make sure to A/B test so you know what’s working.
Contacts
Contacts refer to the number of leads that you generated from your form. The reason this is different from submissions is because duplicate contacts are only counted once, meaning if a current lead fills out your form to get your offer, they don’t affect the count.
Heat Mapping
This is more of an observation of how people interact with your page as opposed to a metric. Heat mapping can show you where people scroll, what they read, and how they engage with your page. This is all useful data when thinking about your page layout and structure.
Bounce Rate
If visitors are coming to your page and immediately leaving, then you need to examine whether the content is aligned with the offer. Does your copy capture visitors’ attention and do visitors automatically know what to do when they land on your page? Is your page a reflection of the copy you used to get people to visit it?
Form Abandonment
This metric tells you how many people start filling out your form but don’t complete it. If this number is particularly high, some adjustments to consider are introducing new click triggers, shortening your form, or making it more clear what you want your visitor to do.
Benchmarks
You need to judge your landing page against industry norms and across a similar audience to know if it’s performing as expected. Check out some industry benchmarks to set as your baseline, but don’t be discouraged by other company’s results.
No matter what’s going on, it’s possible to diagnose and heal your landing pages if you pay attention to the metrics.

How to Make Your Landing Pages More Effective
There are always tweaks you can make to boost landing page performance. Below are a few great tips (if I do say so myself) to get your landing pages leveled up.
Optimize your landing page.
Optimize is such a confusing word, isn’t it? I mean, are we talking about imagery, copy, keywords, or UI? The answer is yes — we’re talking about all of it. Optimize just means to make your landing page the best it can be, and that can include a myriad of modifications. If you want to know everything you could do to optimize your landing page, you’ll need a pretty expansive guide. And, guess what, we have one here.

Present a really good offer.
You could argue that anything free qualifies as “good,” but that isn’t exactly true. Not only should your offer be free (we’re not talking sales pages here) but it also has to be good enough to warrant a stranger giving you their personal information. Let’s face it — there are a lot of companies competing for your audience’s attention, asking for their information and soliciting them via email. So, what’s going to make you stand out from the pack? An outstanding offer, that’s what.
Here are a few questions to determine if you have a compelling offer or not:

Does my offer solve a pain point for my target audience?
Is there a clear benefit that a lead can gain from this offer?
Can my offer rival the competition?

Decrease page load time.
A single second delay in page load time means 7% fewer conversions and 11% fewer page views. Slow page load times can also result in customer dissatisfaction and frustration.
Needless to say, landing page load time is a metric to take seriously. If you need some tips, check out this resource on decreasing page load time.
Keep the buyer’s journey in mind.
Since you’re driving traffic to your landing page, you should have a clear idea of where your visitors are in their buyer’s journey. That means you’ll know if they’re trying to diagnose a problem (awareness), looking for a solution to their problem (consideration), or are ready to close (decision). Your copy and offer should reflect this if you want to convert. It’s no different from any other marketing materials — meet your visitors where they are.
Create a seamless experience.
No one should be surprised when they arrive on your landing page. It should be exactly as advertised, meaning be consistent with your copy. Use the same words on your landing page that you used to get people to arrive there, whether it was a paid ad, social post, blog CTA, or email. You need to avoid the bait and switch at all costs if you want people to stick around.
Create a clear path to conversion.
There should be no guesswork involved in navigating your landing page. Once someone arrives on your page, it should be clear what you want them to do — submit their info to your lead form. Your goal is to guide visitors to your form using creative directional cues.
Here are some ways to point your visitor to a conversion:

Choose an image of a person that is either gazing in the direction of or pointing to your form
Make your CTA a contrasting color to draw attention to it
Use arrows that point to your lead form
Insert anchor text that brings people back to the form when clicked
Give your CTA some negative space on the page
Frame your lead form with a bold color or outline

Add scarcity to your offer.
Few emotional marketing tactics work as well as fear … and the fear of missing out (more formally known as FOMO). Consumers don’t like to lose their ability to choose, and once you make it clear that your offer is in high demand and/or short supply, they’re going to clamber to get it. (Here’s a cool study on cookie jars if you want to geek out on the psychology of scarcity marketing.)
The other reason why this technique works is because people want things that are hard to obtain — that signifies value and exclusivity.
To show scarcity, mention how little of your offer is left, include a countdown timer, use words like “ends soon” or “last chance”. Obviously, we want you to be genuine, so only employ tactics that are true for your business. Bottom line: there are many ways to use and benefit from this technique.
Use video.
Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular for good reason. Not only do customers prefer to see video from companies, but 88% of video marketers say that video gives them positive ROI. The key is to create an effective video that doesn’t distract visitors from your ultimate goal: the call-to-action.
If you’re on the fence about using video, here are some reasons that might push you over the ledge.
Video …

Increases conversion rates
Is a more personable way to share a message and connect with prospects
Can be more engaging than an image and will get visitors in the habit of clicking (and converting)
Can reduce the number of support calls or tickets you receive
Is processed 60,000 times faster than text

If you do plan to employ this tactic, VidYard has some helpful landing page video guidelines to follow.
Are you excited yet about all the ways you can improve your landing pages? Sure, there are quite a few but that just means that a poor-performing landing page doesn’t have to stay that way. Take it one tactic at a time and build as needed.
What to Do Post-Conversion: Lead Nurturing
So, you have an optimized landing page that converts like a charm. Now what? You don’t want to leave those leads hanging. Instead, you want to nurture them into becoming customers, then nurture them some more. Here’s how.
Optimize your thank you page.
I hope you’re not tired of optimizing yet. Your thank you page is the first thing someone sees after they convert, so it serves as a great opportunity to delight your new lead even more than you already have. Your objective is twofold: deliver your promised offer and get them interested in something else on your site.
Your thank you page should:

Thank your new lead (go figure)
Provide links to relevant content on your site
Invite your lead to follow you on social media
Ask your lead to subscribe to your blog
Automate a follow-up email with the offer

Guide them along their buyer’s journey.
Your new lead is going to make their way to the decision stage with or without you. You want to be the one to help them get there. You’ve gathered some valuable information about your lead, which means you can anticipate what they need next. Provide content or resources to bring them to the subsequent stage of their journey, and you just might be their option for the decision stage. After all, we know that prospects buy from companies that they know, like, and trust.
Form a relationship.
Once someone signs up to receive information from you, they become a potential customer with whom you should work hard to build a relationship and connection. The good thing is you already know what they’re interested in and what their pain points are, so you can target them with additional, helpful content and personalized marketing.
If you’re still stuck, get some inspiration from some of the best landing pages we could find.
Grow Better with Landing Pages
Landing pages will account for a majority of your new leads, so they demand your attention. With the vast number of tweaks, additions, and variations you can implement, there’s no reason why you can’t have a landing page that converts well.
As long as you’re following the best practices we covered above, you’ll be on your way to a high-performing landing page … and if you need some additional guidance, we’re always here as a resource.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

In college, I interned at a MarTech company that sold email marketing optimization software. With their software, brands could finally gain visibility into their email program’s deliverability rate or inbox placement, which most email service providers, like Constant Contact or MailChimp, can’t do.
The business’ largest revenue stream was a channel partner program that enabled email service providers to sell my old company’s software to their own customers. And one day, at an all-hands meeting, our CEO showed us a slide that listed every single email service provider we partnered with and the amount of customers they all had.
He told us this was our total addressable market. Then, he showed us a slide of how much of the market we had captured — it was a single digit percentage. Even though we generated $100 million in revenue per year, we were shocked at how little of the market we had secured. But it also helped us realize that we still had plenty of room to grow, which motivated us to win as much of the market as possible.

Whether you want to start a new company and gauge its industry’s profit potential or forecast a realistic revenue growth goal for your business, measuring your total addressable market is a crucial first step you must take. To help you do this, we’ve put together a guide that’ll teach you exactly what total addressable market is and the best way to calculate it.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)
Total addressable market or TAM refers to the total market demand for a product or service. It’s the most amount of revenue a business can possibly generate by selling their product or service in a specific market.

Unless they’re a monopoly, most companies can’t capture the total addressable market for their product or service. Even if a company just has one competitor, it would still be extremely difficult for them to convince an entire market to only buy their product or service.
That’s why most companies also measure their serviceable available market to determine how many customers they can realistically reach with their marketing and sales channels. Additionally, they gauge their share of market to understand the size of their actual target market.
However, total addressable market is still useful because businesses can use TAM to objectively estimate a specific market’s potential for growth.
How to Calculate TAM
There are three ways to calculate your business’ total addressable market.
1. Top-Down
The top-down approach uses industry data, market reports, and research studies to identify the TAM. In this approach, you might use industry data from Gartner or Forrester to identify which subsections of your industry align with your goals and offering — and just how big those subsections are.
However, there are limitations here. Data generated by industry groups may not always be kept up to date and may not reflect niche elements of your market. You may want to hire a market research consulting firm to conduct fresh research that is focused on your need areas.
2. Bottom-Up
The bottom-up approach to TAM calculation is based on previous sales and pricing data. First, multiply your average sales price by your number of current customers. This will yield your annual contract value. Then, multiply your ACV by the total number of customers. This will yield your total addressable market. Let’s see what this looks like in an example.
Say you sell scuba fins to dive shops in the state of California. You might sell an average of 60 pairs of fins, at $35/pair, to dive shops in California. 60 multiplied by $35 equals an ACV of $2,100. Then, you’d multiply your ACV ($2,100) by the total number of dive shops in California (125) for a total addressable market of $262,500.
3. Value-Theory
The value-theory approach is based on how much value consumers receive from your product/service and how much they’re willing to pay in the future for that product/service.
To return to our scuba example, let’s say you manufacture a type of fin that’s lighter than your competitors and has patented technology that makes them easier to get off than anything else in the market. You’d identify your value-theory by estimating how much dive shops would be willing to pay to carry your superior product. If normal fins are being sold at $35 a pair, would dive shops pay $40 or even $45 for a pair of your ultra-lightweight fins?
After you calculate your total addressable market, it’s time to determine whether it’s worth entering the industry or not.
An industry with a market size ranging from $30 million to $200 million per year might be worth entering. However, if the industry’s market size is under $5 million per year or over $1 billion per year, it’s probably not.
In both situations, it’d be challenging to persuade investors to back your company — an industry with a market size of $5 million per year would likely be too niche and an industry with a market size over $1 billion would likely be too saturated.
Know Your TAM Before You Take Action
Starting a business or projecting next year’s revenue growth is always thrilling. But if you want to follow a realistic path toward success, you need to first understand what’s actually possible. So let your total addressable market be your North Star and guide you through a journey that’s rooted in reality, not hype.

Companies often use their blogs as sales vehicles for their company. This is the wrong approach. It ends up turning off your audience and reducing the impact your blog can have on your company. Why is it Bad to Heavily Promote Your Company in Your Blog Posts? If you step back and look at your…
The post Educate Your Content Marketing Prospects First, Then Sell Them appeared first on Benchmarkemail.

Let’s say you’ve come to the difficult realization that quite frankly your brand — if you can even call it that — is all over the place. Or perhaps worse, you have a defined brand, but you’re noticing that it just doesn’t seem to mesh with who you really are and what you really do.
Don’t panic.
Before you get all hung up on what shade of green to use for your logo or what tone you’re going to use when engaging with people on Twitter, you need to step back and take a look at the big picture.
What is Brand Strategy?
Brand strategy is a plan that encompasses specific, long-term goals that can be achieved with the evolution of a successful brand — the combined components of your company’s character that make it identifiable.
(We’ll get into that more in a bit.)
A well-defined and executed brand strategy affects all aspects of a business and is directly connected to consumer needs, emotions, and competitive environments.
First, let’s clear up the biggest misconception about brand strategy: Your brand is not your product, your logo, your website, or your name.
In fact, your brand is much more than that — it’s the stuff that feels intangible. But it’s that hard-to-pin-down feeling that separates powerhouse and mediocre brands from each other.
So to help you rein in what many marketers consider more of an art and less of a science, we’ve broken down seven essential components of a comprehensive brand strategy that will help keep your company around for ages.

7 Components for a Comprehensive Branding Strategy
1) Purpose
“Every brand makes a promise. But in a marketplace in which consumer confidence is low and budgetary vigilance is high, it’s not just making a promise that separates one brand from another, but having a defining purpose,” explains Allen Adamson, chairman of the North America region of brand consulting and design firm Landor Associates.
While understanding what your business promises is necessary when defining your brand positioning, knowing why you wake up every day and go to work carries more weight. In other words, your purpose is more specific, in that it serves as a differentiator between you and your competitors.
How can you define your business’ purpose? According to Business Strategy Insider, purpose can be viewed in two ways:

Functional: This concept focuses on the evaluations of success in terms of immediate and commercial reasons — i.e. the purpose of the business is to make money.

Intentional: This concept focuses on success as it relates to the ability to make money and do good in the world.

While making money is important to almost every business, we admire brands that emphasize their willingness to achieve more than just profitability, like IKEA:

Source: IKEA
IKEA’s vision isn’t just to sell furniture, but rather, to “create a better everyday life.” This approach is appealing to potential customers, as it demonstrates their commitment to providing value beyond the point of sale.
When defining your business’ purpose, keep this example in mind. While making money is a priority, operating under that notion alone does little to set your brand apart from others in your industry.
Our advice? Dig a little deeper. If you need inspiration, check out the brands you admire, and see how they frame their mission and vision statements.
2) Consistency
The key to consistency is to avoid talking about things that don’t relate to or enhance your brand. Added a new photo to your business’ Facebook Page? What does it mean for your company? Does it align with your message, or was it just something funny that would, quite frankly, confuse your audience?
In an effort to give your brand a platform to stand on, you need to be sure that all of your messaging is cohesive. Ultimately, consistency contributes to brand recognition, which fuels customer loyalty. (No pressure, right?)
To see a great example of consistency, let’s look at Coca-Cola. As a result of its commitment to consistency, every element of the brand’s marketing works harmoniously together. This has helped it become one of the most recognizable brands in the world.
Even on the surface of its social media accounts, for example, the seamlessness of its brand is very apparent:

To avoid leaving potential customers struggling to put the disconnected pieces of your business together, consider the benefits of creating a style guide. A style guide can encompass everything from the tone of voice you’ll use to the color scheme you’ll employ to the way you’ll position certain products or services.
By taking the time to define and agree upon these considerations, your brand will benefit as a whole.
3) Emotion
Customers aren’t always rational.
How else do you explain the person who paid thousands of dollars more for a Harley rather than buying another cheaper, equally well-made bike? There was an emotional voice in there somewhere, whispering: “Buy a Harley.”
But why?
Harley Davidson uses emotional branding by creating a community around its brand. It began HOG — Harley Owners Group — to connect their customers with their brand (and each other).

Source: HOG
By providing customers with an opportunity to feel like they’re part of a larger group that’s more tight-knit than just a bunch of motorcycle riders, Harley Davidson is able to position themselves as an obvious choice for someone looking to purchase a bike.
Why? People have an innate desire to build relationships. Research from psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary best describes this need in their “belongingness hypothesis,” which states: “People have a basic psychological need to feel closely connected to others, and that caring, affectionate bonds from close relationships are a major part of human behavior.”
Not to mention, belongingness — the need for love, affection, and being part of groups — falls directly in the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which aims to categorize different human needs.
The lesson to be learned? Find a way to connect with your customers on a deeper, more emotional level. Do you give them peace of mind? Make them feel like part of the family? Do you make life easier? Use emotional triggers like these to strengthen your relationship and foster loyalty.
4) Flexibility
In this fast-changing world, marketers must remain flexible to stay relevant. On the plus side, this frees you to be creative with your campaigns.
You may be thinking, “Wait a minute, how am I supposed to remain consistent while also being flexible?”
Good question. While consistency aims to set the standard for your brand, flexibility enables you to make adjustments that build interest and distinguish your approach from that of your competition.
In other words, “effective identity programs require enough consistency to be identifiable, but enough variation to keep things fresh and human,” explains president of Peopledesign, Kevin Budelmann.
A great example of this type of strategic balance comes from Old Spice. These days, Old Spice is one of the best examples of successful marketing across the board. However, up until recently, wearing Old Spice was pretty much an unspoken requirement for dads everywhere. Today, it’s one of the most popular brands for men of all ages.
The secret? Flexibility.
Aware that it needed to do something to secure its place in the market, Old Spice teamed up with Wieden+Kennedy to position their brand for a new customer base.

Source: Works Design Group
Between new commercials, a new website, new packaging, and new product names, Old Spice managed to attract the attention of a new, younger generation by making strategic enhancements to its already strong brand.
So if your old tactics aren’t working anymore, don’t be afraid to change. Just because it worked in the past doesn’t mean it’s working now.
Take the opportunity to engage your followers in fresh, new ways. Are there some out-of-the-box partnerships your brand can make? Are there attributes about your product you never highlighted? Use those to connect with new customers and remind your old ones why they love you.
5) Employee Involvement As we mentioned before, achieving a sense of consistency is important if you wish to build brand recognition. And while a style guide can help you achieve a cohesive digital experience, it’s equally important for your employees to be well versed in the how they should be communicating with customers and representing the brand.
If your brand is playful and bubbly through Twitter engagements, then it wouldn’t make sense if a customer called in and was connected with a grumpy, monotone representative, right?
To avoid this type of mismatched experience, take note of Zappos’ approach.
If you’ve ever been on the line with a customer service representative from Zappos, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, check out this SlideShare which details some of its most inspiring customer support stories.
Zappos is so committed to ensuring that not only its brand, but all brands, remain consistent across digital and human interactions that they’ve dedicated an entire department to the cause called Zappos Insights.

Come join us and learn the Zappos WOW approach to customer service! Learn more about the Zappos School of WOW: https://t.co/g3tU4179q9 pic.twitter.com/eRkpcfYAKD — Zappos Insights (@ZapposInsights)
August 21, 2017
By holding all Zappos employees to its core values
and helping other companies implement the same approach, Zappos has built a strong reputation for solid, helpful, and human customer service.
6) Loyalty
If you already have people that love you, your company, and your brand, don’t just sit there. Reward them for that love.
These customers have gone out their way to write about you, to tell their friends about you, and to act as your brand ambassadors. Cultivating loyalty from these people early on will yield more returning customers — and more profit for your business.
Sometimes, just a thank you is all that’s needed. Other times, it’s better to go above and beyond. Write them a personalized letter. Sent them some special swag. Ask them to write a review, and feature them prominently on your website. (Or all of the above!)
When we reached 15,000 customers here at HubSpot, we wanted to say thank you in a big way, while remaining true to our brand … so we dropped 15,000 orange ping pong balls from our fourth-floor balcony and spelled out thank you in big metallic balloons:

And while it may have seemed a little out of the ordinary to some folks, for those who know our brand, the gesture made perfect sense.
Loyalty is a critical part of every brand strategy, especially if you’re looking to support your sales organization. At the end of the day, highlighting a positive relationship between you and your existing customers sets the tone for what potential customers can expect if they choose to do business with you.
7) Competitive Awareness
Take the competition as a challenge to improve your own strategy and create greater value in your overall brand. You are in the same business and going after the same customers, right? So watch what they do.
Do some of their tactics succeed? Do some fail? Tailor your brand positioning based on their experience to better your company.
A great example of how to improve your brand by learning from your competitors comes from Pizza Hut:

@TheRealElysium You know our vote. ^AB — Pizza Hut (@pizzahut)
March 20, 2016

When a pizza lover posed this question to his Twitter following, Pizza Hut didn’t miss a beat, and playfully responded in minutes, before Domino’s had a chance to speak up.
If Domino’s is keeping an eye on the competitors, they’ll know to act fast the next time a situation like this arises.
For HubSpot customers, keeping tabs on your competitor’s social mentions is easy using the Social Monitoring App. Check out this article to learn more about how to set up custom social streams.
And while staying in tune with your competitor’s strategies is important if you want to enhance your brand, don’t let them dictate each and every move you make.
Sure, you probably sell a similar product or service as many other companies, but you’re in business because your brand is unique. By harping on every move your competitor makes, you lose that differentiation.

 

Editor’s Note: Spam filters have become much more sophisticated than the subject line triggers listed in this post. For a more up-to-date guide to email marketing, check out our free guide to creating email newsletters people actually read here.
Writing the subject lines for your emails can be one of the most stressful steps of email marketing. Is it engaging? Too short? Too long? Too boring? Will people click ‘delete’ because of it? Or will they open it? Will it even get to them, or will it trigger SPAM filters? It’s the last of these concerns that we’re here to help with today. 
SPAM filters can be triggered for a variety of reasons, causing your email to skip recipients’ inboxes and land straight in their SPAM box. One of easiest ways to avoid SPAM filters is by carefully choosing the words you use in your email’s subject line. Trigger words are known to cause problems and increase the chances of your email getting caught in a SPAM trap. By avoiding these words in your email subject lines, you can dramatically increase your chances of getting beyond SPAM filters.
Next time you sit down to write an email subject line, consult the exhaustive list below and make sure you aren’t using any words that will get you in trouble. In fact, you might want to bookmark this list so you can refer back to it every time you craft an email subject line. Back off, SPAM filters!
Email Spam Words to Avoid

Commerce 

As seen on
Buy
Buy direct

Buying judgments
Clearance
Order

Order status
Orders shipped by
shopper

Personal

Dig up dirt on friends 
Meet singles 
Score with babes

Employment  

Additional Income
Be your own boss
Compete for your business

Double your
Earn $
Earn extra cash

Earn per week 
Expect to earn 
Extra income

Home based
Home employment
Homebased business

Income from home
Make $
Make money

Money making
Online biz opportunity
Online degree

Opportunity 
Potential earnings 
University diplomas

While you sleep 
Work at home 
Work from home

Financial – General

$$$
Affordable
Bargain

Beneficiary
Best price
Big bucks 

Cash
Cash bonus 
Cashcashcash

Cents on the dollar 
Cheap
Check

Claims
Collect
Compare rates

Cost
Credit
Credit bureaus 

Discount
Earn
Easy terms 

F r e e
Fast cash
For just $XXX

Hidden assets 
hidden charges
Income

Incredible deal
Insurance 
Investment

Loans
Lowest price 
Million dollars

Money
Money back
Mortgage

Mortgage rates 
No cost
No fees 

One hundred percent free 
Only $ 
Pennies a day 

Price
Profits 
Pure profit

Quote
Refinance
Save $

Save big money
Save up to
Serious cash

Subject to credit
They keep your money — no refund! 
Unsecured credit

Unsecured debt
US dollars
Why pay more? 

Financial – Business

Accept Credit Cards
Cards accepted
Check or money order 

Credit card offers 
Explode your business
Full refund 

Investment decision 
No credit check 
No hidden Costs

No investment
Requires initial investment
Sent in compliance

Stock alert 
Stock disclaimer statement 
Stock pick 

Financial – Personal

Avoid bankruptcy
Calling creditors
Collect child support

Consolidate debt and credit
Consolidate your debt
Eliminate bad credit 

Eliminate debt
Financially independent
Get out of debt

Get paid 
Lower interest rate
Lower monthly payment 

Lower your mortgage rate
Lowest insurance rates
Pre-approved

Refinance home 
Social security number 
Your income

General

Acceptance
Accordingly
Avoid

Chance
Dormant
Freedom

Here
Hidden
Home

Leave
Lifetime
Lose

Maintained
Medium
Miracle

Never
Passwords
Problem

Remove
Reverses
Sample

Satisfaction
Solution
Stop

Success
Teen
Wife

Greetings

Dear [email/friend/somebody] 
Friend
Hello

Marketing

Ad
Auto email removal 
Bulk email

Click
Click below
Click here

Click to remove 
Direct email 
Direct marketing 

Email harvest 
Email marketing 
Form

Increase sales 
Increase traffic 
Increase your sales

Internet market
Internet marketing
Marketing

Marketing solutions 
Mass email 
Member

Month trial offer
More Internet Traffic
Multi level marketing

Notspam
One time mailing 
Online marketing

Open
Opt in
Performance

Removal instructions
Sale
Sales

Search engine listings
Search engines
Subscribe

The following form
This isn’t junk 
This isn’t spam 

Undisclosed recipient
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