Yearly Archives: 2023

Since getting purchased by Elon Musk, Twitter has been in a highly-publicized tailspin.

Between staff cuts, unpopular feature changes, public disputes with reputable media entities, and declining traffic and ad revenue, the platform has had a tumultuous year.

One thing Twitter hasn’t had to deal with in its 17-year history is direct competition. While there are plenty of other popular social media platforms, they all serve different purposes.

Instagram, traditionally a photo-based app, is a place to share visual content. Facebook is for communicating with people you already know and engaging in groups. TikTok has a unique hybrid of video and audio content for entertainment. YouTube focuses strictly on video. But Twitter was the only major platform offering real-time text updates and microblogs from a variety of sources all in one feed.

Until now.

The introduction of daily limits created a sense of urgency for frustrated Twitter users who don’t want to pay for a Twitter Blue subscription to find an alternative. While apps like Mastadon and Bluesky have been on the scene, barriers to entry have prevented Twitter users from migrating to these apps en masse. However, over the past few weeks, a few new standouts have emerged.

Spill: A Black-Owned Twitter Alternative

Spill, a visual-based conversational platform where users can share GIFs and images with up to 90 characters of text overlay, was created by two former Twitter employees. It launched in June 2023 and is currently invite-only for iPhone users. Popular among Black Twitter users, Spill was the top-downloaded free social media app in the app store at the beginning of July.

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With larger font and image-based posts, the app’s feed is more reminiscent of Tumblr than Twitter. Because of the shorter character limits, posts have to be more concise keeping conversations moving fairly quickly.

Though Spill has gained some initial momentum, its early-stage exclusivity doesn’t give us a full picture of how the app will perform at scale.

Then Came Threads, Meta’s Twitter Alternative

Zuckerberg did what he does best, launching a Twitter look-alike app called Threads under the Meta umbrella. So far, audiences are into it — in just under a week, Threads has racked up over 100 million users.

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While crossing the 100 million user mark in under a week is quite impressive, it’s worth noting the app’s clear integration with Instagram played a huge role in its early success. To join Threads, users must have an active Instagram account. They can log in with their Instagram credentials, and their same username, bio, and followers are imported into threads.

The interface of Threads looks very similar to Twitter. The platform encourages conversational posts that can have up to 500 characters. One major difference between Twitter and Threads is the latter’s effort to de-center conversations related to politics and polarizing topics in hopes of creating a more positive user experience (though that may be hard to do as we get closer to major elections).

Now that Threads has launched, a few questions that come to mind are:

• How will the user experience of the app change as advertising enters the mix?
• So far, the Threads launch has been technically smooth, scaling to 100 million users without any major glitches or hiccups. But if we face another #InstagramDown situation, will Threads go down with it?
• While Threads has been able to quickly acquire users, will it be able to retain them?
• Spill feels like a good place to build niche communities through sharing meme-worthy content.
• Threads is better for creating text-based posts to cross-post on Instagram (which is full of Twitter screenshots).
• Threads appears to be the stronger platform for marketers, brands, and content creators who never found their footing with Twitter because they can start with a built-in audience. Allowing their same followers to gain text-based insights into their content can be great for conversation beyond Instagram DMs and overall brand-building.

And most importantly…

Will Spill or Threads fully replace Twitter?

After spending time on both platforms, here’s my general assessment:

While Threads may not fully “replace” Twitter, it’s the best contender for those who are more interested in discourse than visuals. With the launch of Threads, traffic to Twitter has taken a noticeable dip though it’s still too soon to tell how the launch of new competitors will impact Twitter in the long run.

With the uncertainty of the job market, having an updated resume that reflects your experience has never been more critical. As you update your CV, you may wonder how long your resume should be and what it should include.

The length of your resume depends on how long you’ve been working, the types of work you’ve done, and the jobs you’re applying for.

Here, we will guide you on how long your resume should be based on different criteria. That includes your range of experience and how long you’ve been working.

How long should a resume be?

Resume Length Best Practices

How long should a resume be?

While there is no hard and fast rule for how long your resume should be. However, there is helpful guidance based on your experience.

The more concise, the better. If you have 0-5 years of experience, having your resume be one page long should work best.

These rules vary as your career progresses. The length changes based on how much information you need to include for the roles you apply for.

A recent graduate’s resume will look different than that of someone who has been working for 20+ years.

Here, we look at how the lengths may vary due to the roles you’re applying for.

For Entry-Level Roles

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When you’re just starting your career, pulling together a resume can be a daunting task. You may ask yourself many questions about what you should include and how long your resume should be. 

When submitting your resume for entry-level roles, the length of your resume correlates to how many years of experience you have. One page should work fine if you have less than five years of experience. 

Even if you have several jobs or have worked at different companies, you should consolidate your expertise onto a page. You can cut out irrelevant internships or jobs from summers past.

Instead, focus on the roles with more relevant experience and your professional, full-time roles. 

For Mid-Level Roles

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Mid-level roles are tricky, depending on how much experience you have. With 8+ years of experience, you can choose to have a longer than one-page resume, further explaining your roles and responsibilities.

However, many hiring managers prefer to see your qualifications on one page. You can cut out early-career, irrelevant experiences. You can also list these roles with limited bullet points related to your responsibilities.

This leaves you more room to focus on your more relevant roles.

Use your best judgment to tailor the resume to the role. Being selective with the information you include will show off your career path while focusing on your career highlights.

For Senior Roles

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As you go up in the seniority of the roles you’re applying for, you can increase the length of your resume. For senior leadership roles, you can opt for two to three pages.

You may need this extra room to share about your previous manager or leadership roles.

Anything longer than three pages will likely be ignored by recruiters. Even with additional space, you’ll want to focus on the highlights of your career. Include metrics related to your accomplishments that you can expand upon in interviews.

Beyond eight years of experience, you’re likely aiming for a leadership role. In this scenario, Zippia suggests focusing on your last 10-15 years of leadership experience.

For Academic Roles

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Academic resumes differ from traditional resumes. They include information about your studies, coursework, and your publications in peer-reviewed journals.

For academic roles, your resume should be longer than two pages to include all of your licenses, patents, or publications. It’s possible that your academic resume could be up to 15 pages long to reflect the work that you’ve been doing.

Here, you have more freedom with length and can use your best judgment when compiling your resume.

Resume Length Best Practices

Whether you need to add more information or cut down on what you already have, it’s good to look critically at your resume. Here are some resume-length best practices to help guide you in your revision process.

If you would like to freshen up the content of your resume, be sure to read our guide on how to write a resume. If you’re stumped on the layout of your resume or looking to refresh the design, check out a few of our resume templates.

Only include the most relevant information.

We tend to want to write out all of our job functions to prove that we’re capable and qualified when applying. To cut down on the length of your resume, use these questions as a good framework:

• Are all the bullet points on my resume relevant to the job description?
• Do I over-explain any of my job functions in my summary paragraphs?
• Is there any redundant information on my resume?
• Can I remove any bullet points and add this information to the cover letter?
• Can I remove any bullet points and discuss some of my experience in an interview?

Be mindful of white space.

When considering resume length, make sure you strike the right balance in formatting. You‘ll still want margins on your resume, but they can be thin. Avoid double spacing, and consider using a compact font.

You can even make your font smaller, so long as it’s still legible.

You should squeeze all of your information into every possible space. However, be sure to keep things readable and pleasant to look at.

It’s estimated that hiring managers spend only 7 seconds looking at resumes. You don’t want to overload them with information. Keep relevant information.

Ensure there’s enough spacing for the words to stand out and speak for themselves. Don’t crowd your information; the hiring manager might already dismiss your resume.

Tailor your resume to the role you’re applying.

Tailoring your resume is a good general rule when applying for jobs. Reaching the appropriate length for your resume requires only relevant information and experience. Be mindful of the information you’re including.

Ensure you only include relevant roles and descriptions in your resume. If you’re applying for marketing roles, you won’t need to add in an internship.

This takes some extra work, but once you‘ve outlined what’s essential to the job you‘re applying for, you can carefully tailor your resume.

You’ll know what skills or traits to highlight, what keywords to use, and which parts of your background will be most interesting to the hiring manager.

Whether reviewing a resume you already have or starting from scratch, use these best practices to put your best foot forward.

Getting Started

A well-crafted resume should be long enough to effectively outline your skills and qualifications, but not too lengthy or tedious. Typically, one to two pages will work for most job applications.

Ultimately, the key is to strike a balance between depth and conciseness.

Give your resume to a friend to see if you’ve struck the right balance. Sometimes, all you need is a second set of eyes.

Google loves its acronyms. In late 2022, the search giant added an extra wrinkle to their Search Quality Rater Guidelines and introduced “Experience” to their existing Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust (E-A-T) framework.

This addition was part of Google’s ongoing effort to help websites provide users with more helpful, relevant information. E-E-A-T, or “Double-E-A-T,” now emphasizes the importance of including relevant first-hand experience with any subject matter.

What does it mean for publishers? We’ll cover that and more below.

Understanding E-E-A-T Guidelines

Each part of E-E-A-T is essential for great content:

• Experience: Real-world or first-hand experience with the topic.
• Expertise: Extensive formal training or real-world experience.
• Authoritativeness: Certification or the ability to be seen as an authority on a given topic.
• Trust: The overarching element that all the above seek to satisfy.

How does E-E-A-T impact SEO and content rankings? Well, it’s not technically a ranking factor but it can affect how your content ranks in search.

The simplest way to answer this question is that content that ranks well – that satisfies the E-E-A-T part of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines – meets the following parameters:

• It’s helpful content.
• Experts created it.
• It’s posted on an authoritative site.
• It’s trustworthy.
• It sees regular updates.

Google’s embrace of experience dovetails nicely with its existing guidelines and approach to providing users with extra details to answer their questions more accurately.

Consider Google’s example: There’s a big difference between looking for someone to do your taxes and looking for reviews of tax prep software. You want different information.

Google doesn’t see adding experience to the search equation as a new idea. Instead, it’s looking through the lens of understanding the nuance of user search habits – i.e. how and why people are looking for information.

This means that writers who rely heavily on research may need to push further and include quotes from people with experience. Sometimes, that might involve giving full authorship to trusted voices with the chops to back up the written or visual content.

Of course, there’s no magic bullet that will help your content rank well. But meeting the above guidelines – either on your own or with the help of an agency that understands them – can make a big difference in your results.

How to Apply E-E-A-T In your Content Creation Process

Expertise

Expertise shows the degree of knowledge your content displays. To apply that expertise, your content should:

• Provide accurate and up-to-date information. That includes citing reputable sources and studies.
• Highlight credentials, experience, and achievements.
• Provide in-depth analysis and thought leadership on industry trends and topics. Go deeper and present information beyond the “Subject Matter 101” type of blog content when you can.

• Leverage user-generated content from qualified users who know their stuff.

For examples of how expertise helps content shine, look at the articles from insurance industry leader, Policygenius. Their content usually features a by-line from an expert who has either written or reviewed it.

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Experience

Experience is the newest addition to the classic E-A-T concept, but it doesn’t require a full pivot from your existing efforts.

It just refers to the writer’s first-hand experience with the topic. What’s the best way to show that experience? Try the following:

• Have a subject matter expert (SME) write or review your content for accuracy.
• Use quotes and insights from product specialists or experts to support other content.
• Collaborate with other industry experts outside of your business. Think of interviews with industry leaders or co-authored blog posts.

Take Adobe as an example. Their content strategy involves collaborating with creatives who use their products to write Q&A style blog posts. Direct quotes from filmmakers, photographers, and editors demonstrate first-hand experience with Adobe products.

 

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Another example is pet supply company Chewy. They weave experience into their content by including quotes and insights from vets or various animal experts.

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Authoritativeness

Brand recognition isn’t the only measure of authority. Making influential friends works, too.

One of the best ways to represent authority is to create a robust digital PR campaign for your content and site, including backlinks. Building a solid online presence involves more than just publishing hundreds of posts.

Network and collaborate with other experts and influencers, and don’t forget the importance of endorsements and positive reviews from real-life users of your product or service.

Looking for examples? Think about websites that have been around for a long time or have quickly built up their reputations. Maybe it’s the pest library from a company like Orkin.

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Another good example is financial wellness tips from the experts at NerdWallet.

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Need more examples? Consider the following:

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour website is the primary source for all your ticketing and merch info.

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The USDA’s information on beef grades is the most accurate source because they set the guidelines.

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Trustworthiness

Having lots of content that can’t be trusted might be worse than no content at all.

Content is only good if you can trust it. That means it must be current, credible, and accessible. The best way to showcase this credibility is to keep the following in mind as you create your content:

• Be transparent and honest.
• Offer secure, user-friendly website experiences on both mobile and desktop. It’s 2023, after all. All users should have a similar experience no matter their device. That includes focusing on accessibility regarding images.
• Maintain a consistent brand voice across all your content formats, not just the written ones.
• Evaluate and update your content often to ensure it’s accurate, relevant, and informative.

Some of the best websites that apply trustworthiness to their content regularly update it. Wirecutter, for example, is a New York Times-owned reviews site that marries experience, expertise, and trust.

They routinely examine new products and revise their lists to compare the most recent models.

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Their comments section is also a fantastic home to learn about people’s experiences with the reviewed and recommended items.

What Following E-E-A-T Can Accomplish

My agency, NP Digital, recently had the opportunity to put our understanding of E-E-A-T guidelines to the test.

We worked with one client, who previously relied exclusively on user-generated content. Because a lot of the content was deemed spammy, irrelevant, and low-quality, it was impacting their search rankings.

We worked with this client to take ownership of their organic content strategy with a comprehensive content hub.

Within seven months, we supplied them with more than 450 pieces of fresh content while ensuring our content supported queries with high search demand and adhered to best practices for SEO and E-E-A-T. What happened next?

We saw exciting success within months, including the following benchmarks:

• 1.6 million average monthly organic impressions from our newly developed content, a 32% increase over UGC pages.
• A 28% increase in organic clicks, surpassing their previous UGC pages in under six months.

• Almost 7,000 new backlinks to the pages we created, boosting their domain authority by 28%.
• A 20% increase in the total number of keywords ranking in the first three positions on Google.

The takeaway here is when in doubt, focus on the fundamentals.

Expert Tips for Mastering E-E-A-T

Mastering E-E-A-T will be an ongoing process as Google changes its algorithm and creates new products. Even though that’s the case, the following best practices should always lead you in the right direction:

• Listen to customer feedback, reviews, and social media to uncover pain points. Then build content that speaks to them.
• Switch up your content formatting to offer different solutions to different audiences. Infographics, blog posts, webinars, podcasts, videos, and social media posts all have their place.
• Include SMEs in your content process. Let them write, provide quotes, or peer review your work. Credit them when the content goes live!
• Regularly audit your content to make sure it’s accurate and timely.

• Don’t forget about structured data. Schema markup enhances your search visibility, so use it.
• Collaborate with other reputable websites and influencers to get more eyes on your content.
• Avoid black hat SEO tactics.
• Make videos – they’re a great way to repurpose content and display your expertise, authority, and personality.

Keeping Up with Google

E-E-A-T may feel like a new version of the guidelines, but it’s really just building on the foundation Google set down years ago: Create good content that helps people.

Leverage the knowledge of your SMEs to provide that extra bit of authority, and always strive to learn about content best practices from reputable marketing professionals and agency partners.

If you want people to easily find your content, put the extra energy into satisfying the E-E-A-T guidelines for it and everything else on your site.

When diving into content creation, most upcoming creators tend to focus on the materials they need, such as cameras, lighting, and an optimal place to record.

All that is crucial to creating high-quality content, but there is one more thing creators need — a personal brand. What makes you stand out as a content creator?

How do you create a content creator brand audiences can trust?

We will explore what a personal brand is, why it’s essential, and how to create a content creator brand.

What is a personal brand?

A personal brand is how you present yourself as a content creator and the identity, personality, and characteristics that encompass everything you do as a creator.

Your personal brand is what makes you unique and what entices people to engage with your content and come back for more.

Why Content Creators Need a Personal Brand

There are about 207 million content creators worldwide, ranging from streamers to bloggers to YouTubers to TikTok creators and more.

A personal brand is crucial to differentiate yourself from the millions of creators and influencers vying for audience attention and brand deals.

Furthermore, a retable personal brand helps you build trust with your audience.

According to Business Wire, 61% of consumers find relatable personalities the most appealing when choosing to follow an influencer or creator on social media.

Crafting Your Content Creator Brand: Expert Tips

Content creator Sundas Khalid knows a lot about crafting a personal brand. She runs a YouTube channel covering the latest in data science and tech in a way that is accessible and authentic.

Here are a few tips Sundas has for creators looking to craft their own brand.

Be yourself and share your story.

“Stay true to yourself, and be authentic,” Sundas advises. “When you try to be somebody else, it will become tiring. You’re going to be exhausted at some point.”

Khalid says staying true to herself, and her story helps her form a tight bond with her audience.

“I come from a very unique background, and the part that people relate to a lot is that I’m an immigrant, English is not my first language, and I come from where a girl’s education is not prioritized,” she explains. “My story is relatable to many people who follow me.”

In fact, shortly before our interview, Khalid reached out to her followers via Instagram Stories to learn their perspectives on her brand.

“This person said, ‘We can relate to your content, and it seems to answer our confusion, maybe because you’re a self-taught data scientist yourself,” Khalid says, reading a response from a follower, “‘ and you’re able to share struggles and tips that are relevant and practical.'”

Authenticity is more than just an excellent way to connect with your audience. Khalid says it can also make a huge difference when faced with burnout.

Burnout is a common issue creators come across at some point in their careers. While there are many ways to remedy burnout, Sundas says a lack of authenticity can make combating it even more difficult.

“Content creation is a space in which there is such a big rush, and you get so energized creating content, but at some point, you’re going to burn out,” she says. “If you’re trying to be somebody else, it’s going to be harder for you to come back from that.”

Be consistent.

“People want to see you over and over and over agan on social media because there are hundreds of creators out there,” Khalid says. “If you’re not consistent, somebody else is going to take that real estate.”

To stay consistent and top of mind with her audience, Khalid batches and pre-plans her content. To batch your content means to record multiple pieces of content that will be published periodically over time.

“For example, this month I am very exhausted, but I have batch-created content so that I can take a break this month, get off whatever I’m going through, and be back on social media without actually being gone,” she explains.

Consistency doesn’t just extend to how often you post as a creator; consistency also means creating stylistically similar content.

“My content follows a pattern, so there’s a lot of consistency,” Khalid says. “For instance, I like to share a lot of opinion videos, and my opinion videos follow a very similar format.”

Her opinion videos, like the one below, usually consist of large images relevant to the topic.

“And I’ll share my opinion based on my experience in the industry,” she says. “And I do it repeatedly, which translates to consistency with my branding.”

If you follow some of your favorite creators, you might notice a distinct pattern in their content.

For example, Beyond the Bot is a group of content creators who discuss anime and manga. Each video follows a sci-fi aesthetic and features calm Lofi music in the background.

When creating your content, think of ways to make your content interesting, unique, and stylistically related. This could mean using a consistent color pallet, music, or specific format.

Find your niche.

“Find your niche and share it in a way that feels true to you, and then experiment,” Khalid suggests.

“Eventually, you will figure out what your audience finds value in. Based on your content, you’ll figure out your personal brand — you can continue building on it.”

And if you’re concerned your niche is over-saturated, or other creators have already covered your favorite topic, Khalid says not to feel discouraged.

“Actually, people want to hear from your perspective,” she says. “Somebody else may have already created a video on your topic, but how you say it will be different.”

Essentially, the key to creating your personal brand is creating content and engaging with your audience as your most authentic self. Furthermore, you have to be consistent in both how often you publish and how you relay information.

If you consistently show up as yourself, your brand will come naturally to you.

The dominant story of 2023 for salespeople, marketers, and content creators has been the rise of generative AI.

ChatGPT, the application based on OpenAI’s Large Language Model (LLM), now has the fastest adoption rate in history, reaching 100 million daily active users within two months of launch.

Yet most sales reps and marketers still use generative AI tools on an ad hoc basis to generate content — from email drafts to talking points, and ad copy to new product designs. And many haven’t yet experimented with generative AI at all.

There’s a major, often overlooked area of opportunity when it comes to AI: Becoming a more customer-centric organization.

Here, we’ll explore how three organizations used generative AI to achieve enhanced customer-centricity, and how your own business can, too.

Keep reading, or jump to a specific section: 

• How the Generative AI Revolution Will Evolve Over Time
• How Three Companies Leveraged AI to Become More Customer-Centric [And How You Can, Too]
• How AI Helps Your Team Become More Customer-Centric

What if the real generative AI superpower is enhanced customer-centricity?

If you’re a sales rep, a marketer, or a leader of an SMB, you can’t afford to ignore the generative AI revolution.

But you also can’t afford to get generative AI adoption wrong. And that means thinking about your people, your processes, and your organizational goals and capabilities as much as — or more than — the technology itself.

Generative AI has the potential to level the playing field for smaller businesses when it comes to customer-centricity.

With far less money, time, and specialized expertise than ever before, organizations can listen to their customers at scale, develop actionable insights about them, and then engage them to drive growth and profitability.

How the Generative AI Revolution Will Evolve Over Time

Despite all of the frenzy around ChatGPT (and, to a lesser extent Bard, Bing, Midjourney, Adobe Generative Fill, etc.), the future of generative AI within sales and marketing functions is still very much up for grabs.

The first wave of adoption has been overwhelmingly individual, ad-hoc, and designed to save time on a process-by-process basis.

The real impact of generative AI will come with the second wave, and will require an approach that is team-based, planned, and designed to enhance capabilities and processes.

The third wave of adoption will be transformational and will demand approaches that are organization-wide, enable continuous learning (via iterative feedback loops), and designed to shape new capabilities and processes.

	Wave 1	Wave 2	Wave 3
Who?	Individual	Team	Organization
How?	Ad-Hoc	Planned	Continuous Learning
Why?	Saving time	Adding value to processes	Transforming processes

Right now, we’re still solidly in the midst of Wave 1. The real battle will be for marketing and sales functions to accelerate their transitions to Waves 2 and 3 faster and more strategically than the competition.

Unlike experimentation by motivated individuals, team or organization-wide adoption will run into barriers like organizational inertia, employee concerns about possible job loss, data privacy and security constraints, data integration challenges, and of course, knowledge and capability gaps.

A Better Approach

Here at Glimpse we’re strong believers in the potential of AI to revolutionize sales, marketing, and market research. In fact, long before ChatGPT fever, we were already working on a custom NLP (Natural Language Processing) model to help our users understand — and then extract actionable insights from — human language responses to open-ended survey questions.

We thought about how we could harness the power of generative AI to help our users with the most important task facing any business: Understanding their customers, employees, stakeholders, and audiences better. Paradoxically, relying more on generative AI in this context can actually supercharge human understanding and connection.

Glimpse users can now summarize and capture the essence of open-ended responses with the touch of a button, and derive invaluable insights instantly like “top negative story”, “most newsworthy ideas”, or “suggested text for a blog post”. They can also filter by any audience segment or demographic/behavioral attribute. Learn more about our AI-powered offerings here.

Next, let’s jump into three examples of how companies leverage AI to hyper-charge their customer centricity.

How Three Companies Leveraged AI to Become More Customer-Centric [And How You Can, Too]

1. Gaming Communities for an Agency

Along with our friend, client, and trusted partner, Jocelyn Harjes, from Ayzenberg, an ad agency in the video gaming space, we used generative AI to listen to the experiences and concerns of female-identifying, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ gamers at scale.

Here’s a look at what we discovered:

The story isn’t all negative. Lots of gamer respondents offered positive lessons about how to deal with and respond to toxic behavior online. Here’s a Positive Story instantly created by our dashboard’s generative AI integration based on 500 open-ended responses:

Impact

With the help of generative AI, the agency and some of its gaming publisher clients will be using AI-enabled data and insights from the study to:

• Grasp the full range of toxic experiences, from slurs to organized harassment
• Demonstrate that toxic behavior was leading to a ‘leaky bucket’ and gamer churn, causing game companies to miss out on revenue opportunities
• Gather suggested strategies for dealing with personal attacks
• Draft recommendations for game publishers to build more inclusive digital communities

Though this study focused on gamers within digital communities, the same approach could be applied to any audience, about any topic.

2. Black Holiday Traditions for Retailers

In another example, an agency focusing on Black consumers wanted to bring fresh insights about the diversity of Black identity and holiday traditions to their retail clients.

But they faced an array of challenges:

• The usual close-ended survey questions just weren’t working for discovery. Respondents chose from the typical census categories to describe their identities but the agency knew “Black” concealed lots of differences that mattered to their retail clients in terms of messaging.
• Focus groups and In-Depth-Interviews (IDI’s) were too slow, expensive, and unrepresentative to rely on. And the coding process would require skilled employees to determine things like sentiment.
• Social listening tools were useful but they could only access third-party data passively on a few platforms. They tended to register the ‘loudest voices in the room’ and were hardly representative. And of course it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ask anyone direct questions.

The agency launched a series of studies to a total of 3,000 Black Americans on our platform. Open-ended questions about shopping habits and holiday traditions revealed a host of new insights about spending power, present-giving, and holiday meal planning.

Even more interesting were the responses to the question about identity, where people wrote honestly and poignantly about their heritage, how they fit into their communities, and how they were seen by others.

While this type of data is priceless and valuable to brands, it’s prohibitively slow and expensive to code a sample 3,000 responses like this.

With generative AI integrations, our client was able to organize, categorize, and instantly capture summaries of open-ended responses by segment.

Generative AI in Action

Here’s the top Positive Story our dashboard instantly generated based on 1,000 of those open-ended responses to the question about identity, along with supporting verbatim quotes from actual respondents:

And here’s a deeper dive into what the first response looks like, along with respondent-selected emojis representing her emotional reaction to the question:

Impact

The retailers will be using AI-enabled data and insights from the study to:

• Align mental (advertising communications) and physical (products on the shelves, channel and packaging strategy, etc.) availability for this important consumer group
• Craft holiday campaigns and messaging to authentically and powerfully connect with Black communities
• Tailor shopper marketing initiatives to better match the shopping habits, rhythms, and needs of Black communities

3. B2B Machine Learning in Agriculture Startup

When a large tech company placed a big investment on a startup that used machine learning tools to help save the planet and feed the world, that startup worked with our team to shape core aspects of its product and commercialization strategy.

At first glance, ML/AI adoption is a straightforward feature and benefits calculus, but the startup knew that understanding buyer emotions, hopes, and anxieties about ML/AI-driven disruption would be equally central to its success.

With our platform, the company surveyed hundreds of ML/AI decision-makers and users — from enterprise farms in Argentina and Brazil, to off-takers in Canada and Germany.

With the help of generative AI, the startup discovered opportunities to educate buyers with approaches tailored to the differing needs of various markets, job roles, and industries. They were also able to identify opportunities across particularly promising national markets, and opportunities to target firms within a specific size range.

Generative AI in Action

Here are Newsworthy Ideas our dashboard instantly generated based on open-ended responses:

And here’s a sample blog post the dashboard used generative AI to instantly create, again based on open-ended responses. (Of course the post is only intended as a starting draft for human writers to contextualize, edit, and bring to life!):

The start-up is currently using AI-enabled data and insights from the study to:

• Shape product design and development priorities
• Educate buyers–with approaches tailored to the differing needs of various markets, job roles, and industries
• Spot opportunities in particularly promising national markets
• Discover why and how to target client firms within specific size and revenue ranges
• Craft brand awareness messaging to connect with these buyers
• Plan subsequent rounds of studies to further test product and marketing strategies in a more agile manner

Next, let’s dive into four opportunities to become more customer-centric thanks to the power of AI.

How AI Helps Your Team Become More Customer-Centric

Here are four tips for your organization to adopt generative AI successfully. They apply regardless of firm size, industry, or market. And they definitely apply regardless of the tech stack you’ve chosen.

1. AI enables you to become more agile.

Generative AI allows us to adopt an agile approach, not only to social listening, but also to the collection and analysis of first-party data. And it allows smaller companies and start-ups without huge research or insights functions to get in the game.

Rather than developing customer or audience insights at the beginning of an annual strategic planning process, listen more regularly and course-correct constantly. Test your assumptions, your product innovation vision, your sales approaches, your campaigns, and your content on a regular basis. You’ll achieve higher ROI on your marketing and sales investments and you’ll connect more effectively with your customers.

2. AI helps you track changes over time.

Generative AI can help us spot emerging patterns, opportunities, and risks. But change only becomes visible if we’ve established baseline data to figure out what ‘normal’ looks like. With Generative AI, historical data is even more valuable than ever before. It allows us to train our models to become more nuanced and effective within the context of our own business challenges.

For instance, many Glimpse clients are now shifting to an ‘always-on’ approach to gathering and analyzing survey data. They’re looking at the relationships between categories, brands, or products and particular audiences. Our AI-enabled dashboard allows them to get ahead of change by tracking trends over time.

For instance, if you want to know whether an economic downturn or a new public health scare is likely to change the purchasing behavior of your customers, generative AI-enabled first party research is a great option.

Until now these kinds of brand tracking studies were often prohibitively expensive for all but the largest organizations. But generative AI helps keep costs down and opens the field for the rest of us. And even if you do have an existing brand tracking study, you can use a generative AI-powered module looking at open-ended responses to explain why a number went up or down, and help discover the best path forward for your business.

3. AI enables you to adopt a holistic approach.

Generative AI can be applied to any data source to find patterns, spot opportunities or warning signs, and help develop insights. Though generative AI can provide the most value, relatively speaking, when it comes to unstructured data (like human language), it can also look at relationships between data sources, like social listening, first-party customer or sales data, and the kind of agile first-party survey data that Glimpse provides.

Without first-party research, all the social intelligence in the world will never give you a complete picture of what audiences are thinking or feeling, or aware of. It’s time to think more holistically by integrating generative AI-powered first-party data approaches into all of your data collection and strategic planning processes.

4. AI helps you become more future-oriented.

The issue isn’t whether or not you should explore generative AI adoption for your organization. You should! Rather the issue is the best approach to adoption. Here are some questions you can ask yourself and your team to get started:

• What’s our policy on generative AI right now? Whether you know it or not, your people are already using generative AI for work tasks. It’s time to get ahead of change by offering flexible guidelines instead of fixed rules. These guidelines should cover attribution/acknowledgement of AI assistance, the need to double check AI-generated answers for factual accuracy, the rule-of-thumb that no AI-generated text should be pasted directly into a client email or ad copy without human editing, and so on.
• Do we have the skills/capabilities/talent on our team right now to use generative AI effectively? If not, consider sponsoring training or supervised experimentation before you conclude that you need to hire to fill the capability gap. With rare exceptions, you won’t be building your own Large Language Models (LLMs) or doing much technical work; instead, you’ll be making common sense applications of existing generative AI platforms and APIs. And you’ll inevitably be faced with a build/buy/tailor decision regarding AI tools and capabilities. For most companies, the best decision will be to license existing tech and then tailor it in smart ways to meet their needs. But along the way, they’ll need to understand and track the incredibly fast-moving universe of AI platforms and models.
• Does process or team structure need to evolve? The answer to this question — eventually, anyway – is almost certainly, “yes.” In order to take advantage of generative AI-driven approaches to data gathering and analysis, you’ll have to lean even more heavily into cross-functional teams, with marketers, salespeople, and data experts frequently testing hypotheses about the market, customers, products, campaigns, and more. Rather than a waterfall approach to customer insights, where they get created once a year by an agency or by a few specialists, you’ll want to foster an ongoing, iterative process to learn about the audiences that matter most for the success of your business.

It’s time to take seriously the idea that the greatest, least examined application of generative AI is actually customer understanding, support for human insight creation, and the ability to learn and predict more rapidly and more accurately about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to audience engagement.

We now have a whole new set of questions to ask, and a whole new set of opportunities to pursue. And those opportunities require marketers and salespeople — equipped both with human judgment and knowledge of AI as a tool — to pursue them. We can glimpse (see what I did there?) a new horizon for customer understanding and connection. But to get there, we’ll have to do some work together.

One thing is clear: The most effective sales and marketing teams of the future will embed generative AI into the fabric of everything they do.

In recent years, there’s been a common misconception that Gen Z and millennials are essentially the same.

When companies discuss reaching younger audiences, many often lump Gen Z and millennials into the same group and create one campaign strategy that they believe fits both groups.

Sure, many millennials and Gen Zers are considered “young adults.” Both generations are highly connected to technology and the internet. It might seem effective to run one campaign aimed at both generations, but is this really the right move?

To investigate, I decided to start by letting consumers weigh in on whether or not the same marketing strategies will engage both age groups.

In a Lucid poll, I asked 350 people to tell me if, “The same marketing tactics that persuade millennials also work on Gen Z,” was a true or false statement. And if you think consumers — the people who are being marketed to by brands — would sway one way or another, you’ll be slightly surprised by the results below:

Data Source: Lucid Software

Although 56% of those polled thought the two generations could be marketed to the same way, nearly half disagreed.

As a marketer specializing in audience growth, I sway with the 44% of people who think the same tactics won’t work on both groups — at least not forever.

But is either group of consumers right about their perceptions? In this blog post, I’ll share the cold, hard facts researchers have discovered about generational similarities and differences between millennials and Gen Zers, while occasionally weighing the raw data against the way everyday consumers perceive the two generations. And if you’re in a pinch, jump straight to the info you need:

• Factors that Differentiate Millennials and Gen Z
• How to Market to Millennials
• How to Market to Gen Z
• How to Market to Both
• Tips for Knowing Your Audience

When you think about the generational differences on the largest possible scale, the oldest millennials are in their early 40s, might be settled down, and could be making larger purchases like cars or homes. The youngest members of Gen Z are 11 years old, might love children’s shows, and won’t be directly making purchasing decisions any time soon.

Aside from the obvious age differences above, here are six more factors that make these two generations fundamentally different.

Factors That Differentiate Millennials and Gen Z

1. They have different attitudes about technology and money.

Understanding the era an age group grows up in can help you identify generational commonalities like motivations, spending or saving habits, or pain points that they all share.

Two things that differentiated each generation’s childhood era included technology and the economy:

Technology

The most obvious difference between the eras each generation was raised in is the presence of technology. Millennials grew up using DVD players, giant personal computers, cell phones with tiny screens, and dial-up internet. At that time, we thought these technologies were groundbreaking.

Now, most children and teens within Gen Z have access to iPads, smartphones, endless Wi-Fi, or streaming services that put our prized DVD players to shame. Many members of this generation might have also grown up in households with early smart home technology.

While millennials watched innovation begin, Gen Z was immersed in it from day one.

But although Gen Z never had to know a time where they didn’t have a cool gadget to solve basic problems, the impact of technology, the internet, and social media has still taken a toll on the group.

Research shows that Gen Z — which has been called the “socially-conscious generation — deals with far more body image, mental health, and cyberbullying issues than any other age group has in the past. Experts have also called Gen Z the loneliest generation despite all of their digital connectivity options.

Economy

Millennials and Gen Z also have different attitudes around money. While they both care about their finances and invest in things that can improve their careers — like higher education.

Both generations are known for improving on financial habits of past generations, however, millennials put their money into buying more products or services that will give them a positive experience, while Gen Z is more focused on savings and practical products.

Millennials in the U.S. built up their own finances shortly after the Recession, which ended in 2009. For many years up until 2019, despite financial woes caused by the poor economy, rising home costs, and high unemployment levels, millennials remained optimistic about their future and finances. However, some studies state that millennials’ financial optimism is dwindling due to post-pandemic inflation, recession, and market slump prevalent in 2023.

Gen Z was born at the beginning of the economic downturn. As the oldest members of Gen Z have entered adulthood, research shows that their past experience of living in the Recession are leading them to make more practical spending decisions.

If you’re marketing to these generations, you’ll want to remember these attitudes about money.

For example, if you want millennials to buy your product, you’ll want to focus on building a brand that offers a pleasant or entertaining customer experience, as well as marketing products or services that give instant gratification. If you’re marketing to Gen Z, you’ll want your campaigns to clearly demonstrate how or why your product will be valuable or practical to them in their daily lives.

2. Gen Z is more likely to make mobile purchases.

By now, you might know that both of these generations are heavily connected to the internet and social media, While millennials watched the internet develop, Gen Z has used it since a very young age.

Each day, millennials spend around 7.5 hours online while Gen Z surfs for nearly 10 hours.

Both millennials and Gen Z also go online primarily with mobile devices, but a big difference between these generations is that Gen Z was practically raised with smartphones. According to YPULSE, 12 is the average age Gen-Z received their first smartphone, five years younger (on average) than millennials.

Source: YPULSE

Gen Z’s mobile-first mindset also impacts how they shop. Members of the generation are twice as likely to make a mobile online purchase than millennials. However, millennials still do shop a lot on mobile devices. In fact, 71% say they do most of their online shopping with a mobile device.

Regarding online content consumption, millennials and Gen Z spend most of their time watching videos and visiting social media sites.

According to a recent study, millennials watch online videos for 1.5 hours per day while Gen Z averages over three hours. Meanwhile, both generations are thought to spend hours daily on social media.

While you might have already known that mobile optimization and video marketing are a key digital strategies, these stats prove that it can help you zone in on young adult generations. If you really want to attract attention from both Gen Z or millennials, you’ll want to create mobile videos, mobile ecommerce sites, or other phone-based experiences that cater to them. You should also be sure to market yourself on platforms that’re already mobile, such as major social media apps.

3. Both spend a lot of time on social media, but the platforms they use are quite different.

To understand how people perceived each generation’s social media usage, I asked the same group of 350 people noted in the Lucid poll above to weigh in on which group they thought spent more time on social media. Here’s what they said:

Data Source: Lucid Software

The poll results above were fairly split between millennials and Gen Z. However, 27% of participants say both generations are “always logged on.”

So, who’s actually the most tuned in to social media? Let’s see what studies on these groups reveal.

The World Economic Forum reports that millennials are logged on to social media for an average of two hours and 38 minutes daily while Gen Z logs on for more than four hours each day.

Aside from the time spent on social media per day, the platforms each generation uses are also slightly different.

While my generation thrived on MySpace and Tumblr and now enjoys platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, Gen Z has zoned in on video-based platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and — more recently — TikTok.

A recent Business Insider survey that polled the oldest half of Gen Z found that participants used Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat most often.

Although TikTok seemed less popular in the Business Insider survey, this one-year-old platform is one of the fastest-growing social media apps due to booming global Gen Z users.

Gen Z and millennials do have a few social platform preferences in common. One, for example, is Instagram. While Instagram is older and more established than apps like TikTok or Snapchat, it’s also pulled in millennials and video-loving Gen Z members.

YouTube is also a social network that both generations are prominently using. While YouTube was launched when most millennials were children, 96% of Gen Z users have accounts on the video-sharing platform. The video platform is also the second-most used search engine and a platform where many in Gen Z and millennial generations go for product research, as 57% of YouTube’s audience consists solely of the two generations.

4. Millennials pay attention to ads for a longer amount of time.

Each generation’s habits align well with its average attention span when it comes to content consumption.

While millennials will pay attention to content for 12 seconds, Gen Z will only focus on it for eight seconds. Furthermore, Gen Z enjoys quick or short-form video content, like that of Snapchat or Instagram Stories, while millennials value long-form content, such as detailed videos or podcasts.

This means that those advertising or marketing to millennials can get away with slightly longer or more in-depth content while those marketing to Gen Z will want to get their value proposition out as quickly and seamlessly as possible in their campaigns.

As I’ve mentioned above, most of today’s social and online platforms are becoming more video-driven. This mirrors the fact that video usage is growing quickly amongst both generations.

Whether you’re creating long-form content for millennials or short-form clips for Gen Z, you’ll want to embrace mobile-optimized video when promoting your brand to either audience.

Branded Content

When it comes to learning about brands or products on social media, each generation also has its own unique preferences. For example, Gen Z prefers to learn about products through social media-based videos and influencer marketing, while millennials will respond to a variety of promotional strategies including more traditional online ads, social media marketing, and branded podcasts.

Additionally, a recent survey shows that 87% of Gen Z prefers ads or marketing content that shows actual people discussing products. When it comes to millennials, only 37% prefer to see people discussing products in ads or marketing content.

Aside from embracing video and mobile optimization, if you’re marketing to Gen Z, you’ll also want to focus on content that feels more informative and less like an ad. This generation has actively rejected traditional advertising tactics. For example, 84% of Gen Z will skip video ads as quickly as possible, while 65% have downloaded some type of ad-blocker on their mobile devices or computers.

5. Both generations purchase less than past generations.

A common myth about millennials and Gen Z is that both generations are financially illiterate. Because this seems to be a hot topic online and throughout pop culture, I conducted one more Lucid poll, asking the same group noted above to choose which generation they thought spent more money on products.

The Lucid poll below demonstrates this myth and perception as many participants said that they believed both generation spend a lot of money:

Data Source: Lucid Software

Additionally, 36% of survey respondents said millennials spent the most on products, while the same percentage said both generations spend a lot of money. However, less than 20% pointed to Gen Z.

According to various studies, both generations actually spend less than past generations while the oldest Gen Z members are focused on responsible spending.

Most of Gen Z doesn’t even have much buying power yet. But research from multiple sources, including Vice, Insider, and Adobe say that Gen Z aims to spend money pragmatically as compared to other generations. Some analysts suggest that Gen Z’s saving approach is routed in budgeting lessons that the generation learned from the U.S. Recession.

When it comes to the Gen Z members who are old enough to make purchases, research shows that they do less online shopping than millennials. A recent study from Ernst & Young noted that 74% of millennials and only 49% of Gen Z buy products online more than once a month.

But, while Gen Z buys less online, they expect more added service from a brand when they make purchases. The same E&Y study found that 80% of Gen Z valued free delivery. The study also found that 74% of Gen Z values brands that give out discounts or coupons over other businesses.

While millennials are slightly less frugal than Gen Z, the idea that the older generation is more frivolous is also a huge misconception. While many millennials buy their fair share of products, they also earn more annually than most older generations, are the most educated age group, and are notably optimistic about their futures.

6. They have different career motivations.

Both generations have in common that they have placed importance on investing in school or skills training.

While older generations could afford both homes and education, millennials find housing out of financial reach and have mainly focused on paying high costs of tuition.

Despite increasing educational costs, the trend of investing in education isn’t expected to change for either generation. While 10% of Gen Z teens are saving for college, millennial parents are putting more into their children’s college funds than past generations.

Looking at each generation’s work habits can give you a sneak peek into what their finances and daily motivations might be in the future.

While both millennials and Gen Z are driven by higher education and career growth, they still have a few slight differences that you might want to know about, especially if you’re a marketer in academic or B2B fields.

Today, many millennials are working or are enrolled in higher education. For the entire decade between 2020 and 2030, millennials will comprise the largest share of the workforce, representing 40% of the global working-age population by 2030.

But, although most of Gen Z is still in school, they are also very career-minded.

When it comes to looking for jobs, Gen Z adults are more financially motivated than the millennial generation. In fact, 65% of Gen Z employees value salary over other job perks as 74% 2023 US graduates surveyed said they prioritize stability and salary from employers, outweighing factors including a known employer brand, a fast-growing field, or overall benefits. Those in the age group also say they’ll invest in skill training if it means they make more money.

Gen Z also applies for jobs more aggressively than past generations. Only 10% of the generation starts their job search after college while most Gen Z students begin scouting out job options between freshman and sophomore year.

So, what does this mean for your marketing strategy? Both of these generations are hard workers, highly educated, and might earn more than past generations.

However, Gen Z is more driven to make and save money. This means that to persuade Gen Z, you might need to take extra time to brainstorm campaigns that show how your product will help them and why it is worth their money. Odds are, they will be more persuaded by the practicality of a product than the “trendiness” of it.

How to Market to Each Generation

Yes, both generations have a lot of things in common.

And while there are opportunities to market to both generations at once, it might be more beneficial to brainstorm creative campaigns that zone in on one generation or the other. To help you develop a strategy that gains attention from the appropriate audience, here are a few takeaways related to each generation:

Marketing Campaign for Millennials

By now, you might be most familiar with marketing to millennials. Luckily, they’re also a great generation to market to. They’re on the most prominent social media networks today and prefer to consume multiple different styles of multimedia content, from videos to podcasts. They’re also old enough to make purchasing decisions, are more educated than previous generations, and spend considerable time in the research stage before buying a product.

Essentially, many different formats of marketing content will engage millennials because they are regularly looking to be enticed by a new product that will help them in their daily lives.

Because millennials have a slightly longer attention span than Gen Z, you can also get a bit more creative by testing out longer-form content like longer marketing videos or branded podcasts.

The best types of marketing campaigns will inform millennials about how your product can make their lives easier or how it can solve their day-to-day problems. Focusing your strategy on social media or online platforms like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, where many adults go to research products can also be beneficial to your strategy,

Marketing Campaign for Gen Z

To successfully persuade Gen Z to buy your product, you’ll want to make content that quickly cuts to the chase and explains why your product will provide value to them.

As mentioned above, Gen Z loves to use video to learn about products and spends most of their online time on mobile phones. So be sure to leverage short-form video formatting and mobile-optimized content in your campaigns.

You’ll also want to zone in on the niche social media platforms that they commonly use, such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok on Snapchat. If you’re not on one of these platforms, but still want to gain brand awareness there, consider sponsoring an influencer who knows the audience and create content that discusses your product.

Marketing Campaign for Gen Z and Millennials

If you absolutely can’t budget pinpointed campaigns for millennials and Gen Z, but know you want to market to young adults, focus on the cusp of both generations by creating a campaign for 18 to 34-year-olds. This will allow you to zone in on young and slightly older adults that can actually make purchasing decisions.

While a campaign with this age target might be slightly more favorable to millennials between 27 and 42, there’s still a chance you could grab attention from older teenagers who will soon be able to make more purchases if they can’t already.

Despite the differences between these two generations, there are also two big similarities: both love social media and instant gratification. Be sure that your campaign clearly explains why your product will be valuable to the age group you’re pitching it too, and leverage the social media networks that the age group you’re targeting has in common.

For example, if you’re focused on promoting your product to people in the 18 to 34 range, you’ll want to be on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, because most members of this age group are using all three of them on a regular basis.

If you can create a campaign that leverages key social networks accordingly while highlighting why your product is so instantly gratifying and useful, you might attract interest from both groups fairly quickly.

Tips for Knowing Your Audience

As you create campaigns around a specific audience or age group, it’s important to do digging to learn what motivates this group of people, what their purchasing habits are, where they spend the most time, and what they’re looking for in a product. Here are a few tips that can help you in this research:

• Identify specific demographics: Try not to be too specific or too broad. Pick an audience you can learn a lot about quickly that well aligns with your product and start researching that demographic.
• Learn about their work and education backgrounds: This will give you insight on what motivates them and how much they’re able to spend on a product.
• Find out which social platforms they use: Once you do this, you can research each platform and leverage it appropriately during your campaign.
• Consider writing a buyer persona: A buyer persona is a fictional character that has a very similar lifestyle to your ideal buyer. Having a persona in mind can help you quickly think about campaigns and strategies that they’ll engage most with. It’s also a handy place to organize all of your detailed research findings into one simple place.

Want to learn more about Gen Z or millennials specifically? Check out this blog post on marketing to Gen Z or this piece on millennial marketing.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in December 2019 and has since been updated for comprehensiveness.

You’ll need a solid technical marketing strategy if you sell a complex product or service.

This type of marketing requires a firm understanding of the technical aspects behind your product. You’ll also need to communicate complex processes clearly. Without technical expertise, your marketing team will have a difficult time developing content that resonates with your core audience.

In this post, we’ll look at why technical marketing is so important, as well as the skills necessary to succeed in a technical marketing role.

Table of Contents

• When to Use Technical Marketing
• Technical Marketing Best Practices
• 7 Tips to Kickstart Your Career in Technical Marketing

What is technical marketing?

Technical marketing refers to a specific type of marketing focusing primarily on an offering’s specifications and technical aspects.

Technical marketing communicates and simplifies complex information, usually about specialized products.

When to Use Technical Marketing

Technical marketing is a crucial part of any marketing strategy. It’s particularly important to use when consumers are very knowledgeable about the subject matter and have a detailed understanding of the product or service.

A general overview may work for some industries or products. But for someone who knows the ins and outs of your industry already, they’ll want more in-depth information.

A few industries that benefit from technical marketing the most include:

• Software
• Manufacturing
• Healthcare
• Aerospace
• Electronics

Within these industries, there are some scenarios when technical marketing is most beneficial in helping marketing teams communicate with customers, generate quality leads, and meet their business goals.

User Manuals

Technical marketing details how a product or service works. These marketers specifically focus on how the offering will benefit the user.

This is typically more necessary in technical fields where the products are more complex, such as engineering or electronics.

A user manual, also referred to as a user guide or instruction manual, is documentation that provides a user with a detailed explanation of how to use a product or service.

Software Programs and Applications

Another crucial use case for technical marketing is creating documentation for software programs and applications.

This can include documentation for developers, as well as customer-facing documentation for product-savvy consumers.

Assembly Instructions

If you’ve ever had to build a piece of IKEA furniture, then you know that simplifying complex processes can significantly affect the user experience.

This use case is unique to products that need to be constructed or assembled, such as manufacturing parts, electronics, or furniture.

Help Articles

Help center articles, product walk-through videos, and anything else that provides in-depth instruction all fall under how-to content.

You’ll need technical writing experience, critical thinking skills, and product insights to produce this technical marketing content.

Technical Marketing Best Practices

Understand your audience.

Marketing is all about understanding your audience’s needs and pain points to navigate them toward a useful solution.

Yet typically, this form of marketing will require an even greater dose of creativity, with a need to continually search for new avenues to make technical and complex products and services easy to understand.

Whether you’re a technical marketing manager or a technical writer, you will need a complete understanding of a product or service’s USPs, capabilities, and benefits. And this should outweigh the customer’s understanding. No questions should be left unanswered.

Technical marketing requires in-depth audience research and critical thinking. You must be able to think like your customer so you know how to communicate with them in a way that will resonate, educate, and drive leads.

Sharpen your industry knowledge.

To excel in technical marketing, it’s essential to understand the ins and outs of the industry. Stay on top of the latest developments, trends, and tools. Then, you’ll know what your audience is consuming.

Sharpening your industry knowledge is beneficial in helping you better understand your customer and position your brand as an expert in your field.

This can also give your online presence a boost. How?

Google’s latest update — referred to as EEAT — prioritizes content that demonstrates four things:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

This is a huge opportunity for technical marketers to use content to build their brand’s authority on a certain topic or product.

Create content that covers technical aspects of a service or product and demonstrates your company as an expert in the space. If it’s done properly, then this will improve your search rankings.

Get product training.

When you’re new to your role or company, the first thing you should do is get in-depth training on your company’s product.

Meet with someone on the product or engineering team to walk through the product’s front end and back end since you’ll want to experience the product as both a user and as an internal member.

By walking through the user experience, you can identify any technical aspects that could use better marketing or more thorough communication.

On the flip side, it’s also essential for a technical marketer to fully understand how a product or process works in order to translate that information to the end user throughout your marketing efforts.

Lean into storytelling.

While technical marketing may revolve around data, detailed specifications, and thorough instruction, that doesn’t mean you can’t also infuse storytelling elements into your content.

Lean into the “marketing” aspect that goes into technical marketing. Don’t be afraid to get creative when crafting your content.

Put yourself in the user’s shoes to better understand their perspective and help you tell a story. Telling a story not only helps communicate complex topics, but it’s also a great way to help users visualize themselves using your product.

7 Tips to Kickstart Your Career in Technical Marketing

So what does it take to have a successful technical marketing career? There are certainly some key characteristics necessary for this role, and some definite skills to hone.

Here are seven tips to help kickstart your career as a marketer in a technical field.

1. Choose the role you want to focus on.

If you’re thinking about a career in technical marketing, there are several roles you can hone in on.

Whether you’re experienced in the strategy side or consider yourself more of a technical wordsmith, here are a few roles you can expect to find in a technical marketing career path.

Technical Marketing Manager

This role encompasses all of the technical marketing activities for an organization. It’s essential that a technical marketing manager has wider business knowledge to understand the ROI for the specific product, as well as the product’s use cases.

Broad industry knowledge is also a must, with an understanding of complementary or substitute products on the market.

For example, if you think about your prospect’s existing subscriptions or tool stack, a detailed overview of the specifications and limitations of your product will highlight where your offering will complement or overlap with their existing tools.

Technical Content Marketer

This role focuses more specifically on ways to use content to communicate your technical message.

Technical Marketing Writer

A technical marketing writer is responsible for communicating the overall marketing and messaging strategies to paper (or video, as the case may be).

As a writer, your content will be the driving force behind generating more qualified leads. It’s essential to understand the industry jargon your customer uses.

2. Harness your public speaking skills.

This may be unexpected, but public speaking is an incredibly important skill in technical marketing.

Given that the content that tends to perform well are conferences, videos, and presentations, a technical marketer must be able to communicate technical aspects in this thought leadership setting.

Whether you need to walk through the product for a demo or you’re hosting a webinar for potential customers, get yourself used to speaking (even if it’s in a virtual environment) if you want to succeed in technical marketing.

3. Improve your business sense.

It’s essential that a technical marketing manager or strategist has wider business knowledge. This helps you understand the ROI for the specific product but also the product’s use cases.

Wider industry knowledge is also a must, with a particular understanding of complementary or substitute products on the market.

For example, if you think about your prospect’s existing subscriptions or tool stack, a detailed overview of the specifications and limitations of your product will highlight where your offering will complement or overlap with their existing tools.

With more involvement in business operations, your concrete understanding of your product’s specifications will be necessary to better explain where the features are adding value.

Best for: If you want to lead a technical marketing team and equip them with the budget and resources needed to get results, you have to get buy-in from executives. This means you must be able to communicate the value of your program and be able to show how it’s impacting the company’s business goals and bottom line.

4. Become a problem solver.

Ultimately, technical marketing is all about helping consumers solve their problems.

To succeed in a technical marketing career, it’s important to be consultative and empathetic. This allows you to explore and further advise a prospect’s decision-making processes by continually looking at specific needs.

Best for: If you have your sights set on a management or leadership role at some point in your marketing career, then you have to improve your problem-solving skills.

5. Improve your communication skills.

From writing in-depth user guides to crafting video script copy for demos, technical marketers must always work on their communication skills to succeed in this career — particularly when it comes to written communication.

As we mentioned, you need to understand your personas from a content platform perspective, but you’ll also need to know how to write for them.

This includes tone of voice: is it appropriate to write it simplistically? Or will it be more fitting to include industry jargon?

Your brand’s content needs to live and breathe the product or service it’s related to and the audience that desires it. Whether this be through product descriptions, web pages, or more general industry-related content that will drive traffic, excellent communication skills are essential.

Best for: If you want to pursue a role in technical writing, then excellent communication skills are a must.

6. Hone your research skills.

To kickstart your technical marketing career, you’ll also need strong research skills. Being an excellent researcher is important for a couple of reasons.

For one, research helps you gather the most up-to-date knowledge on wider market trends. Being a researcher also helps you with the ability to retain and communicate your learnings to consumers, and showcase it in communication such as user guides.

Pro tip: Join online communities and discussion forums to connect with people in the industry and stay on top of the latest conversations.

7. Be open to training.

Another content form that lends itself well to technical marketing is training courses on the products and services offered. If your company wants to produce this type of content, then great training skills are necessary, both for online and in-person technical training.

Practice your training skills by producing video walk-throughs and getting comfortable explaining complex processes or products in person instead of on paper.

Pro tip: You should also receive regular training on your company’s product and industry-related topics. Attending training sessions or courses can help you better refine your own training skills.

Taking the Technical Marketing Leap

Ultimately, technical marketing can be a really important component of your content marketing strategy if your industry or products and services lend themselves to it.

Technical marketing can help you attract more qualified leads and showcase your company as an expert in the industry.

Create a clear technical marketing strategy so that you can cut through the marketing noise and deliver an exciting and engaging message to your well-informed audience.

If you’ve ever come across a valuable article or website that can help improve your skills as a marketer, you probably want to save it and come back when you can dedicate more time to it.

With social bookmarking, you can save those articles or resources you want to revisit in one central location.

Let’s review:

• What is Social Bookmarking?
• How Social Bookmarking Works
• Benefits of Social Bookmarking
• Top Bookmarking Sites
• How to Use Social Bookmarking

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When I was working at an agency, it was important to learn everything I could about SEO and drive results for our clients. But I was no SEO expert.

In order to keep our SEO tactics competitive, I kept this SEO definitive guide bookmarked so I could come back to it whenever I was strategizing for a client’s SEO. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this was a form of social bookmarking.

Bookmarks can be public, private, or shared with specific groups. Social bookmarking sites can also be used like social search engines. You can search and browse to see popular and recently added web pages. Users can comment and vote for web pages they like, making it easy to see what articles are most valuable.

Want to learn more about improving your skills as a marketer? Check out our list of online marketing classes.

How Social Bookmarking Works

Social bookmarking works by clipping or tagging a web page using a platform or tool so that you can come back to it later. We’re familiar with using bookmarks in our search browsers, but social bookmarking allows us to instead keep the collection of web pages accessible from any device online, as long as we have a connection to the internet. It’s like having your own highly curated search engine.

On social bookmarking platforms, topics are organized into specific groups or threads where users can follow content that’s most relevant to them. Once you opt to follow a particular topic thread or piece of content, you’ll be notified when new information or updates appear.

This efficient categorization makes it easy to discover new content of interest or share content of your own.

Social Bookmarking Benefits

For marketers, social bookmarking offers another avenue to not only get out branded content, but discover trends, too. In addition to following threads, you can search by words or phrases, plugging in information most relevant to your brand.

For example, if your brand is in the wellness industry, you can use social bookmarking discussions to see what users are talking about in that space. Plus it gives an opportunity to interact with users who fit your target audience and publish content of your own.

Other benefits include:

• An SEO opportunity to earn backlinks from a platform with a high domain authority to give your content a boost in the SERPs.
• Opportunities to network with influencers or collaborators to help grow your online presence and attract the attention of potential new customers.
• Ability to easily distribute content, examples, and ideas to your team for inspiration.

While social bookmarking platforms are an excellent avenue to use to get the word out about your brand, spamming links is frowned upon. Going overboard can result in the platform penalizing you and losing credibility with your audience. Only share links when they are actually of use to your audience.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s check out the top social bookmarking sites to get started.

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1. Pinterest

Price: Free

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Pinterest is a social media network that operates like a social bookmarking site. You can create boards and save content (called pinning) to come back to later. For example, if you are getting married, you can have a “Wedding Hair” board and save pins that you find for different hair styles.

A unique feature with Pinterest is that they collaborate directly with sellers, so you can buy the products you find directly through Pinterest. Users enjoy Pinterest because they can save content and ideas for parties, events, recipes and gifts.

2. Reddit

Price: Free

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Reddit is one of the top most visited sites and it’s also one of the best social news aggregators around. Reddit users join discussions and submit content to the site which is then voted either up or down by members.

With this platform marketers should take extra care not to spam links. Too much commercial or self-promo will result in being shadowbanned. Use Reddit the way regular members would and you shouldn’t have any problems.

3. Pocket

Price: Free; paid options available

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Pocket is a social bookmarking site that lets you save articles, videos, or stories from any publication or web page. With the paid version of Pocket, you can annotate, highlight, and add notes to pieces you’re reading.

A unique feature of Pocket is that you can pick up right where you left off. It saves your place and brings you right to the section of the article you were reading before closing out. Additionally, articles are saved in Pocket even if the web page or article gets taken down. You will still have that article in your database.

4. Digg

Price: Free

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Digg is a news aggregator site that features articles in science, technology, and current events. With each article, you can like, bookmark, or share on social media. You can also publish your own articles on Digg to share with the community. Additionally, Digg curates content by top stories, so you can see what’s trending online.

5. Mix

Price: Free

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Mix is a social bookmarking site where you can save content for later. To get started, you choose things you’re interested in, such as travel, pop culture, or food, and then it curates content for your feed.

Additionally, you can also follow people you know or coworkers so the articles they save show up on your feed. This is a great way for colleagues to share resources and see what coworkers recommend reading. With your profile, you can create collections to organize your saved posts by category.

6. Scoop.it

Price: Free; paid options available

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Scoop.it is a social bookmarking site that specializes in researching and publishing content for individuals and businesses. A unique feature is how Scoop.it works with businesses.

You can publish on your websites and blogs, newsletters, and social media directly through Scoop.it. It will aggregate curated content for you across multiple WordPress blogs. Additionally, the private hubs allow employees to share articles privately. Scoop.it will also suggest content for you based on your previous interaction.

7. Medium

Price: Free; paid options available

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Medium is an online publishing platform and social bookmarking site where you can publish and save posts to read later. On Medium, you can favorite different topics, writers, and publications to personalize your feed. Below an article, you can clap for it (like favoriting it), and find out more about the author and organization associated with the piece.

8. Slashdot

Price: Free

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Slashdot is similar to Reddit in that it is designed as a social news site. It features news stories on current events and industries including entertainment, science, and technology. Users can comment and save each story. Stories are tagged, so you can filter through and search for stories on a particular topic.

In addition to these seven social bookmarking sites, there are also plenty more options to consider. Below is our list of honorable mentions:

1. Dribbble

2. We Heart It

3. Folkd

4. A2Z Bookmarks

5. Feedly

6. Crazybacklink

7. Skybacklinks

8. Zypid

9. Metafilter

10. BizSugar

11. Flipboard

12. Sociopost

13. Disqus

14. Trendiee

15. Blinklist

16. BibSonomy

17. Diigo

18. SiteBar

19. Pearltrees

How to Use Social Bookmarking Sites

1. Content Curation

As a marketer, especially in social media, one of your duties is to curate content to share with your audience. People look to your brand for resources and expertise in your industry. With a social bookmarking site, you can save articles or resources you find online so you never run out of content to share with your audience. Social bookmarking saves time and gives you the ability to schedule content ahead of time.

For example, below is content I have curated on my personal Pinterest page for recipes. If any of my followers are looking for recipes (especially keto or low-carb), I have an entire board dedicated to curating content in that category.

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2. Organize and Save Resources

A benefit to social bookmarking sites is that you can organize and save content that you want to revisit later. As a marketer, it’s important to keep track of resources that help you develop professionally. Using a site where you can keep these resources organized is helpful, so you won’t lose valuable content.

3. Tag Content

With most social bookmarking sites, you can “tag“ content, meaning you can label it. For example, if there’s a blog post that is about YouTube SEO strategies, you can “tag” that content as “YouTube.” Then, when you want to go back and look for that article or you need resources for YouTube, you have a section in your social bookmarking account tagged YouTube. This keeps the resources you save organized and readily available.

4. Share Resources

Another way to use social bookmarking tools is to share content with your team. As a marketer, if you find an article about social media strategy, you can tag the content as “Social Media” so your social media team can find it. Plus, if everyone on your team has access to the social bookmarking site, they can regularly check in to find the resources they need. This is helpful for employees to continue developing their career and also share things they learn with their colleagues.

For example, in Pocket, you can “tag“ content. On the left-hand side of your profile, you can click the “Tags” category to pull up specific articles.

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5. Build Backlinks

Social bookmarking sites can be a great addition to your link building strategy. You can use your profile to bookmark resources on your website. However, you shouldn’t only add bookmarks to your site.

Use social bookmarking as you normally would, bookmarking other resources you come across, but sprinkle in a post or two from your own site. While social bookmarking shouldn’t be your sole link building strategy, it can round out your current strategy.

6. Promote Your Mentions

Besides bookmarking articles on your own site, you can also use social bookmarking to link to articles or blog posts that mention your company. However, your social bookmarking profile should contain a variety of self-promotion versus unbranded content.

7. Drive Traffic to Your Site

Social bookmarking sites can drive traffic to your site. If people bookmark your post and vote for it, it will show up in searches, and lead to traffic to your site.

Besides sharing your own posts on your social bookmarking profile, you also want other people to bookmark your content. To make this easy for users, you can add social bookmarking buttons to your blog so readers can bookmark your content with the click of a button.

In the example below, writer Nicole Peeler drives traffic to her website through the content she creates on Medium. Below her post, she has her website, her Medium profile, and the organization profile linked. If users like her post, they can easily find out more information with the links below the article.

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8. SEO

Search engines often list results from social bookmarking sites. When a site is bookmarked on a social bookmarking site, a link is made and indexed by search engines. This earns credibility with search engines. Content that is voted for and bookmarked a lot by users on social bookmarking sites tends to show up higher in search engine results.

Social Bookmarking Aids Marketing Efforts

Social bookmarking can help develop your team and keep your marketing skills sharp in an evolving industry. Plus, it can also be used as a strategy for your team to gain more traffic and credibility with Google.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Lots of times, when marketers want to make a big impact on their marketing, they focus on going after a big project: big email campaigns, big website redesigns, big social media plans, big everything.

But while big projects can have big payoffs, you don’t have all the time in the world to execute them. You’ve got lots of other things on your plate — the only free time you have left in your day is the 43 minutes on Wednesday between scarfing down your bagged lunch and your weekly 1:00 p.m. client call. 

Yeah … not a lot of time for those big campaigns, huh? 

The good news is you don’t need them to make a big impact on your marketing — often, a smaller tweak can work wonders. And one of the smallest changes you can implement with the biggest splash is call-to-action (CTA) revamps. On our own CTAs, we’ve seen small changes yield 30% increase in conversion … which is no chump change. 

So if you only have a few minutes in your week to optimize your conversion rates, souping up your out-of-date and gnarly looking calls-to-action is the way to go. To be sure you aren’t forgetting any crucial components of CTAs, be sure to follow along with the checklist below. 

11 Essential Elements of an Effective Call-to-Action

To help demonstrate the anatomy of a well-crafted CTA, we’re going to pick apart the primary CTA we recently featured in a blog post about the biggest problem in your PR. 

1) Use actionable language. 

HubSpot’s CTA tool helps you create click-worthy CTAs.

In grade school, you were probably told that writing in the second person (writing to “you”) wasn’t ideal. 

Forget that lesson immediately. 

When you’re designing CTAs, effective copy all boils down to using action-oriented, second-person verbs. Use verbs like “discover, unearth, find” instead of ones like “be smarter.” In the CTA below, notice how we began sentences with “Learn” and “Download.” Besides empowering your readers a tad to click on your CTA, you’re also shortening your copy — which all boils down to a more effective and concise call-to-action. 

According to AJ Beltis, Senior Content Marketing Manager for HubSpot’s Acquisition team, succinctness pays off for CTA copy. “I’ve found that direct CTA copy tends to perform better than lengthier CTA copy. Succinctly pitching the value of what you’re linking out to on a page with an abundance of copy and visual distractions can act as an unambiguous directive on what readers should do once on the page.” Create authoritative and click-worthy CTAs with HubSpot’s CTA tool. 

2) Align CTA copy with landing page copy.

When you’re creating CTA copy, you also want to make sure your CTA copy and your landing page copy align. The name of the thing you are promoting — whether it’s a free ebook, whitepaper, template, guide, crash course, or presentation — should align with the name of it on the landing page.

You should also be calling the offer the same thing on both the CTA and the landing page. For example, if you mention that people can download a crash course on Facebook advertising on the CTA, you shouldn’t call it an ebook on the landing page. It may seem like small potatoes, but those details matter. 

On the landing page that goes with the CTA above, we did both of these things — notice how the title of the offer and how we position it is the exact same as the CTA. This way, when people get to the landing page, they aren’t confused about what we’re offering and click away. 

3) Include a clear value proposition.

Each call-to-action you create is unique to your business — it’s your offer, service, or product you’re trying to promote. But that’s not how users perceive it. When they come in contact with your CTAs, they wonder why they should download that very offer from you at this specific moment. They might wonder if they’ve already downloaded something similar from your competitor. Or maybe they are just confused about value you’re going to bring to them in exchange for their email. 

Either way, you’ve got to quell these suspicions by making the benefit of clicking on the CTA super clear. On your CTA, give a quick description of what happens when they click on it — will they magically become better at their job? Will they save time? Will they end up saving humanity from a pack of zombies? Regardless of what you want them to do, it should be very what is going to happen when people click.

On our CTA below, you can see this principle in action. In both the headline and the description, we describe what people will get when they click and how they will be able to use it — which helps readers trust us and differentiate us from other companies’ offers. 

4) Play up its time-sensitivity.

People are busy online. While they are browsing your website, blog, or social media accounts, they’re also probably fielding emails, taking a client call, and maybe drafting a tweet of their own. With all of these potential distractions, you want to keep your readers focused on clicking your CTA. 

The best way to do that is to tap into the element of urgency and tell people to do something right now. One way to do that is to add words like “now” or “today” to your CTA button (that’s what we did in the example below). Just reminding people to do something now can increase the chance of them actually doing it now. 

5) Make it big. 

In the land of calls-to-action, the motto is go big or go home. You can’t make a tiny little button that appears at the bottom of the page and hope that people will click on it — chances are, people are going to miss it when they’re glossing over your site in an F-shaped pattern.

To make sure that people notice your CTA, you’ve got to have it large and in charge on your site. For example, the CTA we’re talking about here is the full width of the blog post body column — about 650 pixels wide. That way, there’s no way in hell you’re going to gloss over it. That being said, there’s no industry standard for the smallest size a CTA can be, so you’ve got to test how the size affects conversions on your own.

6) Create a highly contrasting design.

Another way to attract your visitors’ attention is through the actual design of your button. You can forget another lesson here: calls-to-action shouldn’t blend in with the rest of your website design. Yes, you can use similar styling — fonts and colors can still match your style guide — but the way you combine these elements should make the design pop from the rest of the page. 

Check out our CTA to see what I mean. We use our brand colors (orange, slate grey, white, and blue) and our font family (Proxima Nova) to make the CTA look like it’s part of the HubSpot family … but the way we put the CTA together makes it pop. The blue CTA background contrasts nicely against a white blog post background, and the grey button with white text and outline on top of it all grabs your attention even more. These contrasting elements were strategically chosen to help our readers notice this CTA.

7) Make the button look clickable.

Most things you can click online look like they can be clicked. Usually, they have some sort of shading or contouring that makes them look like a button you could press in real life. So if you want your CTAs to be clicked, it makes sense to make it look like something people are already familiar with clicking … right? Use your design program to add shadows and borders to not only give your CTA an extra design finish — but also make it look functional. 

We did that in our CTA in the “Download Ebook + Template Now” button. Notice how the button looks almost 3D? That’s because of a nifty little tool in PowerPoint that adds depth to 2D objects. Definitely experiment with which “clickable designs” work best for your CTAs — they could drastically improve your conversion rate.

8) Add alt text.

Despite the web becoming more and more reliant on visuals to communicate, lots of people still have problems displaying images in their browsers. Sometimes, they just have errors loading your images in your browser, while other times, they may purposefully block them from appearing — and in either instance, you need to have a backup plan. Alt text allows you to display text whenever a CTA doesn’t appear properly in a website or email. (Bonus: Because alt text is, you know … text, search engines can actually read it — spelling additional SEO juice for you.)

In our CTA below, we’ve included the alt text “inbound pr cta” to help direct those who can’t view images. Granted, it’s probably not the most engaging alt text, but it does give people and search engines an indication of what should have appeared in that image’s place. 

9) Place your CTA prominently on your website.

Once you’ve finished all the copy and design, it’s time to start putting that baby to work on your website. Whether you’re placing it above the fold (where it generally will get more clicks and conversions) or below the fold (where you can get higher quality of leads converting), you want your CTA to be noticed. So put it where it can get noticed — heck, draw even more eyeballs to it by adding directional cues so you get more clicks and conversions.

In the example we’ve been using, our primary call-to-action is featured at the bottom of every blog post. Notice how the size and design go hand-in-hand with placement — because it’s placed at the bottom of the post, we really need to ramp up the size and eye-catching design components. See how much more prominent it is compared to the paragraphs above it?

Beltis adds that the CTA should not be buried. “If the CTA is hidden too far below-the-fold or blends in with the rest of a page’s contents, it’s likely the CTA may be overlooked. That’s why in some situations it’s appropriate to have multiple CTAs,” he said. “The key here is to find the right balance of CTA placements to ensure an optimal conversion rate without coming off as spammy, hurting your brand, or detracting from the user experience.”

10) A/B test multiple CTAs to find the best performer.

Once you’ve got one CTA set, don’t stop. Chances are, you have even more opportunities to convert leads and customers through your CTAs — even if you’ve optimized them using the tips in this blog post. So keep tweaking copy, design, sizing, placement, etc. until you find a CTA that performs above the rest. 

To be honest, we didn’t A/B test this specific CTA because we were focusing on optimizing it per the next action item, but we frequently A/B test new CTAs on the blog and in emails. Let’s say we did A/B test it though — below is an example of a test we could run.

Version A:

Version B:

11) Personalize CTAs for different segments of your audience.

Besides A/B testing, you can also tailor CTAs to only appear to select audiences. For example, your visitors can see one thing, your leads can see another, and your customers can see something else altogether. To be honest, you’ll need the right software to do this (HubSpot customers: You’ve covered on this point if you’re a Pro or Enterprise account) but if you have the software, you’re golden. 

We do this all the time on our blog — if you look at the CTA below, you might see a CTA for creating CTA templates (meta, I know) or a CTA for demoing HubSpot’s landing pages. So the example CTA we’ve been using is no different. 

What leads see:

What everyone else sees:

Ultimately, by testing and optimizing and testing again, you’ll figure out which CTA best practices work for you — and which don’t — all in the sliver of time you have free each week.

What have you learned while optimizing CTAs on your own website? Share your insights with us in the comments!

Image credit: D+J+

Your customers, leads, and audience members want valuable content from your business. And that content needs to reach audience members in a way that feels natural and organic versus being disruptive. Content marketing helps businesses do this, and it describes the process of attracting, engaging with, and delighting your target markets.

By honing in on effective content marketing, you can do just that — and as a result, increase conversions, improve brand awareness, boost revenue, establish yourself as an industry leader, and more.

Whether you’re just starting to devise a strategy or you’re refreshing your existing one, it never hurts to re-assess your process and come up with new ways to create and share the content your audiences want. In this guide, we’ll give you a birds-eye-view of content marketing, types of content marketing, content marketing examples, and how to get a strategy going.

Content Marketing

The definition of content marketing is simple: It’s the process of publishing written and visual material online with the purpose of attracting more leads to your business. These can include blog posts, pages, ebooks, infographics, videos, and more.

However, content marketing isn’t just publishing a thin piece of content and hoping people will find it. It’s about purposefully tailoring your pages, videos, ebooks, and posts to your target audience so that they find you the inbound way rather than the outbound way.

Today, outbound marketing strategies (or anything that interrupts your audience members) aren’t as effective at resonating with and converting audience members as they once were.

Today, your content needs to reach your audience in a way that feels natural (a.k.a. inbound). A common way of doing this is by creating a narrative for your content — or telling a story. In doing so, your content will feel more authentic, engaging, and tailored to your audience.

So, what defines content marketing anyway?

Why is content marketing important?

2022 HubSpot research says that 70% of companies use content marketing.

Content marketing is valuable because it:

• Educates your leads and prospects about the products and services you offer. According to 2023 HubSpot research, 29% of marketers use a blog or website for lead attraction and conversion.
• Boosts conversions.
• Builds relationships between your customers and business that result in increased loyalty, and 30% of marketers are creating content that reflects brand values.
• Shows your audience how your products and services solve their challenges
• Creates a sense of community around your brand.

Now let’s look at the various types of content marketing.

Types of Content Marketing

There are many types of content marketing that you may choose to incorporate into your strategy — here are some of the most common:

1. Online Content Marketing

Online content marketing refers to any material you publish online, but more specifically, it refers to your web pages. A strong online content marketing strategy will help you rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and get you in front of the right people at the right time.

HubSpot’s home page is one example, immediately engaging visitors with specific content about our products.

2. Social Media Content Marketing

With over 4.5 billion global social media users, it’s easy to understand why so many businesses invest in social media marketing. There are many platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat) to work with, and several ways you can create and share content on each of them (such as photos, live videos, pre-recorded videos, stories).

Featured Resource: Social Media Content Calendar

3. Infographic Content Marketing

Infographics display content, information, and data in an easy-to-understand, graphic format. With a mix of simple wording, short statements, and clear images, infographics are a great way to effectively communicate your content. They work well if you’re trying to simplify an educational or complex topic so all audience members can understand it.

Featured Resource: 15 Free Infographic Templates

4. Blog Content Marketing

Blogs are a powerful type of inbound content and allow for a lot of creativity in terms of their purpose and topic. With a blog, you can do things like promote other internal and external content and blog articles with links, add social share buttons, and incorporate product information.

Featured Resource: Start a Successful Blog

5. Podcast Content Marketing

More than 60 million people listen to podcasts across the Spotify and Apple Podcasts platforms. For this reason, many businesses and media outlets have begun creating and sharing their own podcasts.

Podcasts allow for a lot of creativity as they can be about any topic of choice. Additionally, you decide other factors related to the podcast such as cadence of episodes, who’s on the podcast, where you advertise the podcast, and how long episodes are.

Featured Resource: How to Start a Podcast

6. Video Content Marketing

According to Wyzowl research, 73% of consumers say they prefer to learn about a brand’s product or service through video. Additionally, video marketing can boost conversions, improve ROI, and help you build relationships with audience members. You may choose to share your video content on social media platforms, landing pages, or on a co-marketer’s website.

Featured Resource: The Ultimate Video Marketing Starter Pack

6. Paid Ad Content Marketing

Paid ads can help you reach a broad audience and allow you to position yourself in all the places you want to be seen — paid ads are especially beneficial when paired with inbound marketing. There are many places you can share paid ads including on social media, landing pages, banners, and sponsored content.

Featured Resource: The Ultimate Google Ads PPC Kit

Next, let’s talk about how content marketing works, and look at some content marketing examples.

How does content marketing work?

Content marketers attract an audience with compelling stories and by sharing valuable information. They also use content channels to build community.

So, content marketing for business isn’t just a technique or strategy, but a unique form of communication. With that in mind, people have different needs at different stages in the buying process. To make sure that your content meets a need at every stage, you’ll want to think about your conversion funnel.

Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

At the top of the funnel, you want to build awareness with your content. Your target audience might know they have a problem, but they aren’t sure how to solve it. At this stage, you can focus on brand awareness, broad pain points, and common questions.

TOFU content should pull potential customers in to help them better understand a specific problem. This gives you a relevant opportunity to introduce them to your solution.

Common challenges for TOFU content include competition, balancing educational and promotional content, and tracking ROI.

To address these issues, create a content strategy that grabs the attention of a specific audience. Your strategy will also help you create a plan that aligns content topics and formats with business goals. Then, create a list of KPIs to track your content performance.

Useful content types at the top of the funnel include:

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Short-form video
• Podcasts
• Infographics
• Checklists
• Ebooks
• Webinars
• Video Ads

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

Once a prospect passes to the middle of the funnel, they’re considering your product. They may have visited your site more than once or they’re engaging with your social media. They might have signed up for your email newsletter.

MOFU content should build a relationship with that person. At this point, they understand their problem and are comparing possible solutions. So, your content should educate them on the specifics of your solution and show how it meets their unique needs.

This is also an important moment to build trust. A prospect might not be ready to buy, so pay attention to changes in user behavior. It can be tempting to make assumptions or go for a quick conversion, but that can damage the relationship. Instead, offer in-depth information and value to nurture your lead.

Great middle-of-funnel content types include:

• Email newsletters
• Product demos
• Landing pages
• White papers
• Case studies
• Longer-form videos
• Blog posts
• Interactive content
• Webinars

You may have heard that social media is just top-of-funnel content. But more users are making purchases on social media, and it’s also a popular channel for customer service and support. So, be sure to create MOFU social posts and let prospects know that you’re ready to help them on this channel.

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

Bottom-of-funnel content helps your prospect make a decision and ideally, convert. This stage focuses on conversion. So, BOFU content should make it easy to test a product, understand pricing, and make a purchase. Content that converts should drive action and create a sense of urgency. Prepare to respond to common objections and other blockers that can impact sales with your content.

Personalization can add to the impact of your content at this stage. Creating powerful CTAs is also important.

Bottom-of-funnel content types include:

• Personalized emails
• User-generated content, like customer testimonials
• Case studies
• Pricing pages
• Competitor comparison blog posts
• Video demos
• White papers
• Remarketing campaigns

Check out this post for more on how to align your content with the buyer journey.

Now, let’s look at some content marketing examples.

Content Marketing Examples

The following examples will give you a better understanding of how you can incorporate content into your greater marketing strategy.

1. Example of Instagram Content Marketing

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Glossier’s Instagram account is on-brand and complements the rest of its marketing content — even if the page didn’t say “Glossier” anywhere on the profile, customers would likely still know the profile belongs to this brand.

The Instagram page shares the Glossier product line, displays different products, and shows how each product can be used. The profile feels and looks uniquely Glossier, and depicts members of their wide customer base.

2. Example of Infographic Content Marketing

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IBM created an infographic for the future of identity. Their infographic is on-brand, well-organized, and easy to read. It clearly shares data and information about online security and how customers feel about it. It also tells audience members how they can download a more detailed report.

3. Example of Blog Content Marketing

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Expedia has a blog that shares travel-related information including hotel recommendations, great places to visit, and travel-related activities you can take part in around the globe.

Expedia regularly publishes its blog content to keep readers interested and engaged. It includes a wide range of topics related to any type of trip you could imagine.

The blog is on-brand and all articles relate to the travel technology company’s goal and mission of gaining customers and boosting brand awareness. They do this by linking to their services and writing about customers who have already had positive experiences with the company.

4. Example of Podcast Content Marketing

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Harvard Business Review (HBR) has a weekly podcast called HBR IdeaCast which features industry leaders in both business and management. You can either subscribe to consistently receive their hundreds of podcasts or pick and choose which ones you want to listen to.

The podcast is on-brand and complements the rest of HBRs published content. It also serves as a great way for HBR to connect with their target audience, enhance brand awareness, and gain a following of audience members through a medium that differs from their typical work (e.g. podcast versus HBR article).

5. Example of Video Content Marketing

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Much of Dollar Shave Club’s video content has gone viral. Their marketing efforts are on-brand, humorous, and entertaining. By establishing a name for itself via online video content, Dollar Shave Club has experienced impressive growth and brand recognition.

6. Example of Paid Ad Content Marketing

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Revolve — a clothing and accessories company — uses paid and sponsored ads on social media (like this one on Facebook) to reach their target audience while they browse their news feeds.

The content ads feature some of their products as well as details about their free shipping and return policy to drive target audience members to their site (and, hopefully, convert them into paying customers).

7. Example of Twitter Content Marketing

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HubSpot uses Twitter to market software as well as create a community among customers, target audience members, and industry leaders and experts.

HubSpot shared product information, relevant tips, industry knowledge, and original research on Twitter. HubSpot also interacts with users and makes sure anyone in need of customer support knows exactly where to go for help.

8. Example of TikTok Content Marketing

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Chipotle is an active brand on TikTok — the company uses the platform to reach and engage its customers and target audience members. In addition to reacting to others’ Chipotle-related TikTok content, the brand posts TikToks of their menu items, recipes, people enjoying their food, their restaurants, and more. They have over 2.2 million followers and over 52 million likes.

9. Example of Viral Content Marketing

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This viral content marketing example was one that came from a TikTok video — Nathan Apodaca’s original TikTok video included him sipping Ocean Spray cranberry juice while skateboarding and listening to “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac.

As a result of the viral video, TikTok used part of Apodaca’s video in their ads, Ocean Spray used Apodaca in their ads, Ocean Spray saw a bump in sales and brand awareness, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was number one on iTunes, and there were thousands of videos posted by other TikTok users who bought the cranberry juice and recreated Apodaca’s original video.

Now, let’s cover your content marketing strategy. By implementing a strategy, your content marketing efforts will be impactful and effective in converting leads and reaching your target audience.

Let’s dive into the steps you’ll want to work through in order to develop an effective content strategy.

1. Find your target audience.

Creating content for the broadest possible audience sounds like a good idea. But it’s hard to stand out with content that appeals to everyone.

Instead, focus on a niche of people with specific interests and needs. This can help you build a community with your content. To get started, take a look at your buyer personas.

Then, answer the following questions about your target audience to help you narrow down the right types of content for them:

• What do they need from you?
• What challenges are they looking to overcome?
• Why do they need your product or service?
• How can you help them succeed?
• Where do they spend their time?

2. Set SMART goals.

The next part of your content marketing strategy is to set SMART goals. These should be specific to your business — they’ll likely complement your broader marketing strategy and company goals.

Here are some SMART goal examples and SMART goal templates to help you get started. 

3. Determine your KPIs.

Next, set key performance indicators (KPIs) for your SMART goals. KPIs are quantifiable data points you can use to measure your actual performance against your goal.

smart goal	related kpi
Brand awareness	Site traffic, social media followers, subscription sign-ups, mentions (by customers and partners)
Revenue	Daily sales, site traffic
Conversions	Conversion rate, shopping cart abandonment rate, associated shipping rate trends, competitive price trends
Brand loyalty	Returning customers, promoters, product reviews, referrals
Customer engagement	Likes, shares, follows, mentions, backlinks
Rapport and trust	Returning customers, promoters, followers, mentions
Strategic partners	New partnerships, mentions, backlinks

4. Decide on the type of content and content formats.

Next, you want to choose the type of content you’ll create and your top content formats.

Types of content are the broad categories of content you plan to produce. Content formats are the specific presentation methods within a content type. For example, blog posts are a content type, and a blog can include content formats like listicles, how-tos, thought leadership, product reviews, and more.

To get started, run a content audit to see what kind of content is already resonating with your customers.

You may also want to do some competitive analysis and take a look at industry trends. This research can help you figure out what content strategy will work best for your business.

Then, take a look back at the various types of content we reviewed earlier and your target audience research to decide on content types and formats.

5. Choose your content channels.

Once you’ve decided on the type of content you’ll market with, it’s time to choose your specific content channels. Where will you share your content? Where will it live and be shared from?

For some of the content types, the channel you need to work with will be obvious. For example, if you’re creating Facebook content, your channel will be the social platform itself.

6. Set a budget.

Now, set your budget. Think about the type of content you’re creating and which channels you’re marketing that content on.

Then, ask yourself the following questions to figure out your budget:

• Do you need to purchase any software or technology to create the content (such as graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop, a subscription to Canva, a camera to take high-quality photos and videos)?
• Do you need to hire any content marketers or designers (such as artists, writers, editors, designers)?
• Do you need to pay for ad space?
• Do you need access to specific tools or resources to enhance or measure your specific type of content?

Make note of how your responses impact your budget — whether that’s an increase or decrease in what you may have already estimated.

7. Create a content publishing schedule.

To ensure you’re consistently producing content and sharing it with your prospects and customers, use a social media calendar or an editorial content calendar.

This will help your team stay on top of all the content your team is creating as well as allow you to schedule it ahead of time.

Use a free editorial calendar to schedule and optimize your marketing content and help boost conversions.

6. Create and distribute the content.

Create and distribute your content so your audience members can consume it — and possibly convert.

This step is about more than creating high-quality content. Keep learning to make your content as useful and engaging as you can. Practice writing headlines, make the most of the latest content trends, and build skills in the media that your audience favors.

Next, optimize your content so it’s easy for your audience to find. SEO is a useful skill for searchability. And every social media platform is unique, so check out tips to succeed on channels like Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

Finally, promote your content on email, social media, and more. Connect with influencers, build co-marketing partnerships, and post ads to get more eyes on your best-converting content.

9. Analyze and measure results.

Lastly, analyze and measure your results so you can make any necessary changes to enhance your content marketing efforts and reach more audience members.

Look at your SMART goals and KPIs to track the success of your content marketing strategy. Did you achieve your goals and KPIs? Were you close to reaching them, or were you off in your estimations?

Here are some tools to help you with your content marketing strategy analytics and results:

• HubSpot Marketing Analytics Software
• HubSpot Social Media Management Software
• Mention
• SharedCount
• Sprout Social
• Google Analytics

Now, how can you ensure your strategy will be effective? Let’s find out.

Traits of Effective Content Marketing

With so many companies creating and publishing content online, it’s essential to go beyond your standard industry fare. A secret? HubSpot strives to meet the following criteria to make sure all our content meets your and other readers’ needs. The result? Millions of visits to our blog posts and web pages per month.

You can achieve similar results for your company if your content:

1. Provides value beyond your product offerings.

Content marketing isn’t just about sharing your products’ virtues to get readers to become a customer. It’s important to offer value that empowers your customers to do something more efficiently, such as making their businesses more profitable or shortening their morning routine.

Whatever the case may be, strive to create content that gives a solution for your customer’s most urgent needs. Your product may be a solution, but if you’re not explicitly writing a product page, you should only incorporate product mentions if they make sense.

In the blog post below, hair care brand Curlsmith helps readers understand how to reach the right balance between high-protein and high-moisture products. It doesn’t mention its products until the very end, instead educating the reader first.

2. Targets readers’ specific buying journey stage.

Providing value and answering customers’ needs is only a part of the story. In each piece of content, you should also target your customers’ specific buyer’s journey stage.

Generally, there are three stages of the buyer’s journey: Awareness, consideration, and decision. In the awareness stage, buyers are still researching their issue. In the consideration stage, they’re researching solutions. In the decision stage, they’re about to pick a provider.

If you’re writing a “What is [X]?” post, then the person who’s reading that article is likely not ready to make a decision about their provider. They are still in the awareness stage, completing research so that they can find out who offers a solution.

Conversely, if you’re writing a product page, then the reader who visits that page has already researched potential products and found you as a possible provider. That means you should pitch your product at every turn, reiterating your value proposition and differentiating yourself from the competition. You shouldn’t be shy about your products’ most valuable features.

3. Demonstrates a consistent brand voice and image.

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No matter if you’re creating a blog post, web page, or ebook, your visitors should be able to tell who you are immediately upon consuming your content. Your brand shouldn’t sound as if ten different people are writing for you, even if that may be the case.

That’s why it’s critical to create both a writing style guide and a brand style guide. Both of these documents will confirm that:

• Your brand visuals look the same across all platforms and devices.
• Your brand tone and voice sound the same across all written communications.

Once you create both of these, share them with both your content writers and your freelance or in-house designers. Your content marketing publications will be much more cohesive and consistent, which will keep readers coming back to you as a resource and make you look more polished and professional.

4. Is timely and engaging.

Do your customers typically plan their financials at the start of the year? If you’re a finance startup, you might publish a blog post in January about budgeting quarter-over-quarter to prevent clerical errors and avoid overspending.

At the end of the post, you might include a prompt to check out your software, or lead users to a template they can download after providing their email.

This is one example of content marketing that is timely and engaging. If you know your customer’s behavioral and spending patterns throughout the year, it’s critical to capitalize on that. Publish blog posts and offers that capture them at the right time and answer their immediate needs. You’ll be ahead of the companies that publish similar content later on — and oftentimes, being first is all you need to win a customer over.

Now that we’ve seen the top traits of effective content marketing, let’s dive into the best resources you can use to learn more about it.

There are hundreds of thousands of tools available today that qualify as excellent content marketing resources. For the sake of this article, we’re going to keep things simple by providing a handful of our favorite options today.

1. HubSpot Academy for free education on how to become an effective content marketer.
2. HubSpot’s Free Content Creation Resources for access to resources that will propel your content marketing strategy toward success.
3. Content Marketing Institute for access to some of the best content marketing online education, print, and events available today.
4. Blog articles on content marketing, trends, strategies, and tips by industry experts (like HubSpot).
5. Podcasts about content marketing, such as This Old Marketing, or business trends, such as HBR IdeaCast, to inspire your content marketing strategy.
6. Google Trends, which allows you to search for trends across broad topics like content marketing or for niche topics within content marketing.
7. Ebooks and case studies about content marketing or content marketing strategies, like this one by Mention.
8. Latest content marketing statistics by a reputable database source like Statista.
9. Easy to use visual content and design software, such as Canva.
10. Free or paid social media management tools, such as HubSpot, Buffer, or Sprout Social, to help you create and share your social content.
11. Free or paid content and project management tools, like Trello or Asana, to plan and organize your content marketing strategy.
12. Free or paid marketing software to connect your content marketing team, plan, strategy, and results to your greater marketing plan (and even your CRM).
13. Free or paid email marketing software, like HubSpot or Mailchimp, to handle all aspects of your email campaigns and content.
14. Your network, on platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn, where you can connect with those in your industry to discuss relevant trends, answer each other’s questions, and provide or ask for feedback.

And speaking of tapping into your networks on sites like Twitter and LinkedIn, here’s some inspiration from a few of the greatest content marketers to follow on both platforms today.

3 Marketers to Follow on LinkedIn

1. Luvvie Ajayi Jones

Luvvie Ajayi Jones is a best-selling author, digital strategist, podcast host, and speaker. She’s known for combining humor with her experiences and background in marketing, communications, and new media. Her LinkedIn is sure to inspire you whether you’re thinking about/working on culture, authenticity, leadership, content, marketing strategy, and more.

2. Zontee Hou

Zontee Hou is a digital marketer and strategist, speaker, and consultant. She works with scaling companies to help them establish effective marketing strategies that work for their unique goals and audiences. On her LinkedIn profile, Hou shares her expertise in content marketing, social media marketing, marketing analytics, and digital marketing.

3. A. Lee Judge

A. Lee Judge is a co-founder and digital marketing strategist at Content Monsta. He’s also a podcast and video producer, speaker, and rev ops practitioner. On his LinkedIn profile, he covers a wide range of topics related to lead generation, social media marketing, how to apply marketing analytics and data, digital experiences, multi-channel marketing, the importance of sales and marketing alignment, and more.

3 Marketers to Follow on Twitter

4. Ann Handley

Ann Handley, Head of Content at MarketingProfs, is a bestselling author and speaker. She offers education and training around marketing that businesses can learn from and apply. She offers in-person and virtual training for companies on content marketing, storytelling, lead generation, and branding – topics she also discusses and shares content about on her Twitter page.

5. Neil Patel

Neil Patel is a bestselling author, marketing expert, speaker, and website and SEO consultant. He’s a thought leader and industry expert in content and digital marketing. His Twitter page includes information about his trainings and services, industry trends, marketing strategy tips and resources, and questions/conversational topics meant to engage followers and other industry experts.

6. Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki is a marketing strategist, author, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcast host, and the chief evangelist of Canva. On his Twitter account, Kawasaki asks followers thought-provoking business questions as well as provides links to, and information about, new podcast episodes, industry trends, marketing strategy tips, and insights based on his experiences.

Engage Your Target Audience With Content Marketing

With effective content marketing, you can reach your target audience and increase conversions. There are several ways to market with content to boost revenue, grow your brand awareness and recognition, and build relationships with your prospects and customers.

And don’t forget to extract more value from every piece of content you create.

To get started, decide which type of content works best for your business and audience and develop a content marketing strategy to begin boosting your bottom line today.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.