Yearly Archives: 2023

Artificial intelligence is getting a lot of traction in the marketing world. According to Statista, 80% of industry experts integrate some form of AI into their online marketing activities.

However, if you’re like me and are unfamiliar with AI beyond what you’ve seen in science fiction stories like I, Robot or Black Mirror — you’re probably wondering what AI is and how to use it in marketing.

Is AI really what it looks like in the movies? This article will explore the definition of AI, the different types of AI, and how AI can improve marketing processes.

What is artificial intelligence?

How does AI work?

What are the four types of artificial intelligence?

How Marketers Can Use AI

The Pros and Cons of AI

The Future of AI in Marketing

So now you know what AI is, let’s explore how it functions.

How does AI work?

AI combines large sets of data with intelligent, repetitive processing algorithms to learn from patterns and features within the data being analyzed. The AI continuously processes and learns from the data.

Within each round of data processing, the AI system tests and measures its own performance to gain additional expertise.

AI can run through thousands, even millions, of tasks repeatedly — improving its performance in a short amount of time. However, there are multiple kinds of AI, each with its capabilities and limitations.

What are the four types of artificial intelligence?

The four types of artificial intelligence are reactive, limited memory, theory of mind, and self-awareness.

Reactive

A reactive AI can only use its intelligence to react and reply to the world around it. It can’t store memory; therefore, it can’t rely on past experiences to inform real-time decision-making or problem-solving.

Reactive machines can only complete a finite amount of specialized tasks. Though this may sound like a drawback, it has its perks. A reactive AI will react the same way to the same stimuli every time — making it reliable and trustworthy.

One of the most famous examples of reactive AI is Deep Blue, a supercomputer created by IMB in the 1990s that won a chess match against chess champion Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue could identify the chess board pieces and how each piece could move based on the game’s rules.

However, the AI could not try to anticipate its opponent’s next move, nor could it think of ways to put its piece in a better position.

Limited Memory

Limited memory AI stores previous data and predictions and uses it for decision-making — looking into past data to predict the future. Limited memory AI is when a machine learning model is continuously trained to analyze and use new data.

Limited-memory AI consists of six steps to follow.

1. Create the training data.
2. Create the machine learning model.
3. Enable the model to make predictions.
4. Have the model receive human or environmental feedback.
5. Store the feedback as data.
6. Repeat all the above steps in a cycle.

Examples of limited memory AI are self-driving cars. Self-driving cars identify civilians crossing the street, traffic signals, and other data to make better driving decisions and avoid future accidents.

Another example of limited memory AI is HubSpot’s adaptive testing tool. The adaptive testing feature splits traffic evenly between page variations at first.

As HubSpot learns how these variations are performing, we adjust the traffic automatically, so optimal-performing variations are shown more than the poorly-performing ones.

Theory of Mind

Theory of mind AI is as it sounds — theoretical. AI has not yet advanced to this type, so theory of mind is still in its innovation stage. This type of AI interacts with the thoughts and emotions of humans. Theory of mind will better understand the entities they interact with so they can understand their needs, beliefs, feelings, and thought processes.

For example, we now know that self-driving cars are a form of limited mind AI. If these autonomous cars could analyze and understand their drivers’ mental and emotional states to improve safety, they would evolve into Theory of Mind AI.

Self-awareness

Once theory of mind is a reality, the next type of AI to emerge will be self-awareness. At this point, machines won’t just be aware of humans’ emotions and mental states — they’ll also be aware of their own. A self-aware AI will have a human-like consciousness and understand its existence in the world and with others.

How Marketers Can Use AI

AI can perform parts of the marketing process — such as task automation, campaign personalization, and data analysis — so you can spend less on repetitive tasks and more on strategy.

For example, our HubSpot mobile app has a business card scanner that uses AI to pick out the name, email address, and other contact information on a business card and map them to your HubSpot properties. Instead of spending time manually entering this data yourself, the AI automates the process for you.

 

The Pros and Cons of AI

So, now you know what AI is, how it works, and the four types of AI — let’s get into the pros and cons of AI technology.

The Pros of Artificial Intelligence

Fewer errors

Humans can make mistakes, miss deadlines, misspell words, and get the math wrong. Sometimes we’re distracted or going through burnout; it’s human nature. By implementing an AI-ran automated system, you’re lessening the risk of errors.

24/7 Uptime

AI also doesn’t need rest and can run 24/7. AI’s can run constantly and consistently for as long as it’s programmed to. This makes AI more ideal than humans for repetitive tasks, allowing marketers and business owners to focus their efforts elsewhere.

Can analyze large data sets quickly

As I mentioned earlier, humans sometimes make mistakes — especially when processing large data sets. A solution would be to work slower to prevent errors, but time is money in marketing.

Fortunately, AI machines can quickly process large amounts of information and data, making them more efficient than humans in a deadline crunch.

The Cons of Artificial Intelligence

Lack of creativity

AI is programmed to react to stimuli based solely on data from the past, meaning they’re not currently suitable for creating innovative solutions. Data from the past can help predict future outcomes, but data alone isn’t always enough to address a never-before-seen variable.

Therefore, AI would be better suited for “grunt” or mundane work. From a marketing perspective, humans can develop a creative marketing strategy, while AI can take care of the repetitive tasks that implement the plan.

Impersonal

Sometimes, human connection is the best way to forge a closer relationship with your audience. While a self-aware AI is possible in the future, current AI machines cannot perfectly mimic the human experience.

From a marketing perspective, implementing AI in every customer interaction can create a rift between you and your audience. I mean, there’s a reason many of us can recall shouting, “speak to a representative!” when we’re tired of speaking to a robot on the phone.

The Future of AI in Marketing

According to Grand View Research, the global AI market is expected to reach $1,811.8 billion by 2030, up from $136.6 billion in 2022.

Artificial intelligence, theory of mind, and self-aware machines all sound like things from a distant future. Still, the reality is AI is here now, and its impact across industries will likely grow in the years to come.

While AI has pros and cons, it’s important marketers stay tuned in to its advancements and be open to using AI to streamline certain processes to keep up with competitors.

 

A new social network has taken the internet by storm, and it goes by the name of Mastodon. Having amassed a following of almost two million active users by this January, the platform is described as an alternative to Twitter.

So what does this new name have to offer marketers? And can your brand benefit from having a presence on it? In this post, we’ll break down what Mastodon is and how to leverage it — according to an experienced and trusted marketing partner here at HubSpot.

Image Source

What can you do on Mastodon?

On Mastodon, users can explore different servers according to their favorite topics of interest or industry spheres. When you find a forum you’re interested in, you can join in and engage with whomever you like — more or less like you would on Twitter. You can:

• Follow users
• Reply to other people’s posts
• Engage in or begin your own conversations

You can build a feed tailored to what you want to see and use features like an explore tab to find new and exciting content.

Tips for New Mastodon Users

We asked Crystal King, one of HubSpot’s very own Senior Marketing Managers and Principal Inbound Professor, if she had any useful tips for people new to the platform. Here’s what she had to say.

1. Put yourself out there and join a variety of servers.

“Like any new social platform you might join, there is a learning curve with Mastodon. The hardest thing to get used to is the idea that not everyone is on the same server as you are, but that you can still talk to them.

“It doesn’t really matter what server you are using, but if you want to find a topic-specific server to join then it may mean your local feed is slightly more curated toward that topic, but it’s not a necessity to do so.”

No one’s an expert at something when they first begin. When you join Mastodon, don’t feel you belong on only one or two servers. Everyone has a place to share their thoughts and opinions just as much as the next person.

Mastodon has much more freedom of choice regarding the content you’re given. While it can recommend conversations and servers to you, it won’t crowd your personalized feed with content you haven’t followed, like Instagram or Twitter — where recommended, sponsored, or related content can clutter your feed.

2. Find your favorite accounts from Twitter and find where they reside in Mastodon.

“One thing you can do to find your Twitter followers that are also on Mastodon is to go to Twitter and search for the word ‘Mastodon.’ Then, click the three dots to the right of the search bar and click ‘Search filters.’ That narrows down the search to only people you follow, and by doing this you can often see tweets where they have shared their Mastodon profiles.”

If you’re lost on where to start, look at who you already follow on Twitter. Chances are that if they’re a full-time influencer or a frequent poster, they may have already made their way to Mastodon — and can help you identify which servers you’d enjoy the most.

3. Don’t expect visuals, expect conversations.

“Mastodon is a text-heavy platform, and you won’t see many moving .gifs, videos, or big images. Those things are present, but you usually have to click through to see them. Instead, focus on creating and having conversations. Share interesting information. Ask great questions to get people talking. And engage with others. That’s where you’ll find the most value.”

King recommends that new users focus on contributing insightful conversations to gain traction in the platform. While Twitter and Instagram prioritize visual-heavy content, Mastodon will display trending conversations and forums where visuals are more of an added detail than a priority.

Why would a brand want to use Mastodon?

According to King, Mastodon allows marketers to get creative with their digital marketing.

“Brands may feel skeptical about using Mastodon. After all, there are no ads. There aren’t any rewards for having a certain number of followers. There aren’t any algorithms to push content to more people. In short, it feels like Twitter without all the things that made Twitter great for marketers.

“And that’s sort of the point — people don’t typically like to be marketed to, and that’s what the platform’s creators had in mind when developing it. But that doesn’t mean brands can’t or shouldn’t use it. You just can’t think about the platform as a replacement for Twitter. It’s something different. Mastodon is a place to share information and engage with an audience. And brands that can do that will find a niche on the platform.”

Marketers can’t rely on paid or promoted ads to reach targeted audiences. Instead, they can use Mastodon to provide value, insight, or content that engages prospects — rather than sell to them.

“The engagement rate on Mastodon is much higher than that of Twitter. Plus, there’s a heavy journalist presence on the platform as well, which bodes well for your brand’s visibility. If you are a brand that loves chatting with your audience, it may be a great place for you. The best way to find out is to develop a test of three to six months and see how it works for you. Just don’t expect it to look or act like Twitter, because it’s not.”

You can’t approach Mastodon expecting the same results as you’ve gotten from previous social media channels. If anything, King is saying that brands can position themselves for better brand visibility on the platform if they focus on thought leadership — delegating designated content marketers or journalists to post about buzzing conversations and news.

See All the Possibilities Mastodon Has to Offer

With the rise of new social media channels, marketers can use new greenspace to attract prospects. While Mastodon itself isn’t directly optimized for paid advertising, there are many ways to grow a following and engage with your target audience.

A couple years ago, artificial intelligence still seemed like a somewhat far-off, sci-fi version of reality. And it certainly didn’t seem like something that would completely transform how marketers work within the next few years.

But in 2023, generative AI is officially here, and it’s only growing. In fact, the generative AI market size accounted for over 7 billion USD in 2021, and it’s projected to occupy more than 110 billion USD by 2023 — growing at a CAGR of 34.3%.

All of which is to say: Generative AI is poised to completely disrupt — and elevate — business’ content strategies in 2023 and beyond.

And disruption of any kind can be scary. What does generative AI mean for the future of marketing? Will it replace us, or elevate us? And what about SEO? Will Googling be replaced with AI chatbots — and what does all that mean for content creation?

Here, I spoke with Samyutha Reddy, Jasper’s Head of Enterprise Marketing, to explore her perspective on whether AI will replace content creators, as well as SEO, in the future.

Let’s dive in.

Will AI Replace Marketers?

AI Augments The Human Experience — but It Doesn’t Replace the Human Within That Experience

Generative AI can research virtually any topic across the internet, and distill that research into original content. It can format that content as a blog post, email, Facebook ad, or something else, depending on the query.

Generative AI is still in its early stages, and it has some issues. The information it collects can be biased or simply false, and it doesn’t have the discernment of a real human to catch those inaccuracies.

But as generative AI continues to learn and grow, it makes sense that marketers are concerned. In the future, rather than needing a team of five or ten content creators, will you just need one — someone to fact-check the AI’s content?

Fortunately, Samyutha isn’t worried. In fact, even though her team currently uses generative AI on a daily basis, she’s still actively hiring and growing her team.

As she puts it, “AI augments the human experience, but it doesn’t replace the human within that experience. We value writers in our society because they’re able to give us a thought-provoking human perspective on the world. It isn’t just about summarizing facts that are out there. It’s about humans sharing opinions on very real topics that help build your perspective on how you feel about something. So an AI could really never replace that human perspective.”

However, AI Will Force Content Creators to Re-skill

Samyutha does acknowledge that AI will force content creators to re-skill, as aspects of their roles become more automated.

She told me, “I think it’ll force content creators to re-skill. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that’s what every big shift in technology has done for humans.”

She adds, “I’ve never met a content creator who has said, ‘Wait. I really want to spend more time doing all the rote tasks of reading everything I need to know on the internet about a given topic.’ AI will give marketers more time to be creative, form an opinion, and incorporate more data sources into their perspectives.”

Rather than thinking of AI as a content creator replacement, it’s better to think of AI as a marketer’s efficient side-kick.

Consider this: A marketer decides she wants to write a topic about SWOT analysis. Rather than spending her morning chugging coffee and reading up on what SWOT analysis means, effective SWOT analysis examples, and how SWOT analyses can help businesses grow, she can simply plug the query into an AI chatbot.

Once she’s confirmed the sources the chatbot used to pull that information are accurate, she can quickly skim through the AI’s response and learn everything she needs to begin writing about the topic. She can even use the AI’s response as a first draft, and strengthen it with her own unique tone and perspective.

From there, she can leverage the AI’s proofreading skills to edit her final copy.

Additionally, if the marketer has written a piece of content that she’d like to turn into an entire campaign, she can use AI to re-format her blog post into corresponding ad copy and creative, which she can hand over to her sales and paid ad teams.

As Reddy puts it, “I can effectively hand over to sales an entire drip campaign, an entire outbound sequence, complete with landing pages, with the ads that people will click and see. And it really allows me to take control back on what it means to execute a campaign. It enables me to truly be a project manager and a strategist, versus someone who is waiting on other people to deliver their end of the bargain.”

Marketers Will Need to Become Experts in Select AI Platforms

Freelancing platform Upwork recently announced it added a new category, ‘Generative AI’, as a specialty within their marketplace.

This means business leaders can now hire freelance content creators who have expertise with a specific AI platform — and Reddy isn’t surprised.

She says, “AI has biases deeply embedded within its models that people are working on. AI has the tendency to hallucinate and start talking about random things when you’re asking it for outputs, so it would be really tough to just completely remove a human from the process.”

She continues, “Similar to how a marketer can level-up by becoming HubSpot or Salesforce certified, I think we’ll soon see marketers who demonstrate their value by saying, ‘Hey, I’m skilled in using generative AI platforms.'”

AI Will Eliminate Portions of the Creation Process – But it Will Also Elevate Marketers

Reddy admits, “I do think it will eliminate some portions of the content creation process.”

However, she’s quick to add, “I think AI will focus on elevating folks, and I think the angle you take matters on this whole generative AI front. If you’re a writer, content creator, or a marketer, you’ll want to ask yourself, ‘Am I going to be someone that embraces technology and figures out how to upskill myself and actually become the cream of the crop in terms of talent? Or am I going to be someone who pushes technology away, refuses to believe it’s happening, and clings onto an old way of life?’“

For Reddy, she sees marketers at the forefront of a tool that will ultimately upend all roles within a business, and she believes there’s great privilege in being the first to adopt it.

As she puts it, “I think there’s a certain power here that marketers can reclaim, and instead of being the victims in this story of ‘generative AI is coming for marketing’, I think we really reposition it as saying, ‘generative AI has landed in the most innovative portion of the enterprise: marketing.'”

She continues, “And we are now the stewards of this technology and how it’ll be used within the enterprise, and we get to pilot it and see how it can supercharge our work. And the folks who lean into being the stewards of this powerful technology will reap its benefits. I consider myself and our industry extremely lucky to to be in this position.”

Will Generative AI Replace Search Engines?

As more marketers and consumers use AI chatbots to get quick answers to common queries, it stands to reason that they’ll be leveraging search engines less often.

Reddy doesn’t see search engines going away, particularly since the information supplied on search engines is what powers generative AI results — but she does see it drastically changing.

As she puts it, “Search can help battle AI’s inaccuracies. For instance, Jasper has a function where you can toggle on Google search results. So if I say, ‘Jasper, help me write a paragraph about XYZ,’ it’ll write the paragraph, and at the bottom it’ll put in the Google search results it used while it helped me create that output. So I have factual links which I can cite, and fact-check to ensure they’re the most reliable piece of content on a given topic.”

She continues, “I don’t see search going away. I do see a future where I don’t necessarily want to type things into a search bar, and instead, I want to use chat functionality. That, I think, is imminent. And I think we’re already seeing that with the virality of Chat GPT. In just a couple of days, it’s become the fastest-growing consumer app.”

Ultimately, my conversation with Reddy felt positive and uplifting. As marketers, we don’t need to fear AI: We need to embrace it as technology that will help us do our jobs better.

And, personally, I’m all for any tool that minimizes the amount of time I spend researching, so I can get back to what really matters: creating content with the intention to move, inspire, or challenge readers’ to think differently.

It feels like Instagram, more than any other social media platform, is evolving at a dizzying pace. As it continues to roll out new features, updates, and algorithm changes, it can be hard to keep up.

That’s where the Instagram stats comes in. There’s a whole lot of research out there about Instagram — everything from the demographics of its users and its reach, to how negative space affects the performance of your posts (hint, hint: #68).

Read on to uncover more social media stats that’ll help you get ideas and improve your own Instagram posting strategy.

80+ Instagram Stats

Click on a category below to jump to the stats for that category:

1. Instagram’s Growth
2. Audience & Demographics
3. Brand Adoption
4. Instagram Post Content
5. Instagram Posting Strategy

Instagram’s Growth & Usage

1. Instagram is expected to reach 1.44 billion users by 2025. (Source)

2. The Instagram app has over 78 million monthly active users. (Source)

3. 22% of marketers say Instagram has the most growth potential in 2023 than any other platform. (Source)

4. Instagram saw a 48% increase in ad reach from January 2020 to January 2022. (Source)

5. Almost a quarter of marketers (23%) predict that Instagram will offer brands the biggest potential to grow their audience in 2023. (Source)

6. Instagram is the most-used platform for influencer marketing in the U.S. (Source)

7. Marketers say Instagram is the social media platform they know how to use best. (Source)

8. There are an estimated 143 million Instagram users in the United States in 2023. (Source)

9. As of January 2023, India has a total of 229 million Instagram users, the largest Instagram audience in the world. (Source)

10. As of January 2022, Instagram was the fourth most popular social media platform in the world in terms of user numbers. YouTube and WhatsApp ranked in second and third place. (Source)

11. On average, U.S. adults spend 30.1 minutes a day on Instagram in 2022. (Source)

12. As of February 2023, the most-liked post on Instagram is a carousel of Argentine footballer Lionel Messi and his teammates celebrating the 2022 FIFA World Cup win. (Source)

13. Between January and June 2022, the fastest-growing content creator on Instagram was influencer Jorge Gomez, with 573% growth in six months. (Source)

14. Other than Instagram’s own account, the most-followed Instagram account as of January 2023 is professional soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo. (Source)

15. As of May 2022, Instagram’s own account has 504.37 million followers. (Source)

Audience & Demographics

16. More than half of the global Instagram population is 34 years of age or younger. (Source)

17. As of January 2023, almost 17% of global active Instagram users were men between the ages of 18 and 24 years. (Source)

18. Millennials ranked Instagram as their favorite social media app in 2022. (Source)

19. Gen Z-ers also ranked Instagram as their favorite social media app in 2022. (Source) 

20. TikTok and Instagram are the most used social media apps among Gen Z women. (Source)

21. In December 2022, 55% of Instagram users in the United States were women and 44% percent were men. (Source)

22. Only 7% of Instagram users in the U.S. belong to the 13 to 17 year age group. (Source)

23. Only 4.7% of Instagram users in the U.S. are 65 plus. (Source)

24. As of 2022, 82% of Instagram users also use Facebook. (Source)

25. 47% of U.S. Instagram users make more than 75,000 per year. (Source)

26. Instagram users worldwide spend an average of 11 hours per month on the Instagram app on Android phones. This number drops to 7 hours for U.S. users. (Source)

27. 72% of teens use Instagram, and 57 million U.S. teenagers say Instagram is their preferred social media platform. (Source)

28. 500 million+ accounts use Instagram Stories every day. (Source)

29. 35% of music listeners in the U.S. who follow artists on Facebook and Instagram do so to connect with other fans or feel like part of a community. (Source)

30. The average Instagram user spends 30 minutes a day on the app. (Source)

31. 45% of Instagram users live in urban areas. (Source)

Brand Adoption

32. 72% of marketers work with influencers/creators on Instagram. (Source)

33. 29% of marketers plan to invest the most in Instagram out of any social media platform in 2023. (Source)

34. In terms of brand safety, 86% of marketers feel comfortable advertising on Instagram. (Source)

35. 53% of marketers say Instagram has high ROI. Only 7% of marketers say Instagram has low ROI. (Source)

36. 70% of shopping enthusiasts turn to Instagram for product discovery. (Source)

37. Marketers saw the highest engagement rates on Instagram out of any other platform in 2022. (Source)

38. 32% of marketers say Instagram is the easiest platform for working with influencers and creators. (Source)

39. 1 in 4 marketers say Instagram has resulted in the highest ROI out of any platform in 2022. (Source)

40. 27% of marketers plan to use Instagram the most for working creators and influencers in 2023. (Source)

41. More than half of marketers plan to increase their investment in Instagram in 2023. (Source)

42. In 2022, marketers saw the highest engagement rates on Instagram for user generated content. (Source)

43. Only 8% of marketers plan to decrease their investment in Instagram in 2023. (Source)

44. 36% of marketers plan to leverage Instagram for the first time in 2023. (Source)

45. 90% of people on Instagram follow at least one business. (Source)

46. 50% of Instagram users are more interested in a brand when they see ads for it on Instagram. (Source)

47. When it comes to posting organic content, 27% of marketers say Instagram offers the highest ROI for this type of content. (Source)

48. 1 in 4 marketers say Instagram provides the highest quality leads out of any social media platform. (Source)

49. Nearly a quarter of marketers (23%) say Instagram is the most effective platform for brands looking to build a social media strategy for the first time in 2023. (Source)

50. 46% of marketers leverage Instagram Shops. Of the marketers who leverage Instagram Shops, 50% report high ROI. (Source)

51. 41% of marketers leverage Instagram Live Shopping. Of the marketers who leverage Instagram Live Shopping, 51% report high ROI. (Source)

52. In a 2021 report, the higher education industry currently has the highest engagement rate of any other industry per post on Instagram, at 3.19%. Second was sports teams at 1.79%, and third was influencers at 1.42%. (Source)

53. 67% of users surveyed have ‘swiped up’ on the links of branded Stories. (Source)

54. 130 million Instagram accounts tap on a shopping post to learn more about products every month. (Source)

Instagram Post Content

55. Engagement for static photos has decreased by 44% since 2019, around the time Reels made its debut. (Source)

56. The average engagement rate for photo posts is 1.18%. (Source)

57. The average engagement rate for carousel posts is 3.15% (Source)

58. As of January 2022, #love is the most popular hashtag on Instagram. Over two billion posts use this hashtag. (Source)

59. Marketers rank Instagram as the platform with the best in-app search capabilities. (Source)

60. The most popular Instagram Reel has 289+ million views. (Source)

61. Marketers rank Instagram as the platform with the most accurate algorithm, followed by Facebook. (Source)

62. A third of marketers say Instagram offers the biggest ROI when selling products directly within the app. (Source)

63. As of 2021, 9 out of 10 users watch Instagram videos weekly. (Source)

64. A third of marketers say Instagram offers the best tools for selling products directly within the app. (Source)

65. 995 photos are uploaded on Instagram every second. (Source)

66. The median posting cadence across all industries is 4 posts per week. The median posting frequency declined by just 8% this year compared to last. (Source)

67. On Instagram, photos showing faces get 38% more Likes than photos not showing faces. (Source)

68. On Instagram, images with a high amount of negative space generate 29% more Likes than those with minimal negative space. (Source)

69. On Instagram, images featuring blue as the dominant color generate 24% more Likes than images that are predominantly red. (Source)

70. This is so much so that the latest Instagram statistics show that an average Instagram post contains as many as 10.7 hashtags. (Source)

71. Image posts received 27.55% more likes than permanent video posts. (Source)

72. An average image on Instagram gets 23% more engagement than one published on Facebook. (Source)

73. The most geo-tagged city in the world is Los Angeles, California and the tagged location with the highest engagement is Coachella, California. (Source)

Instagram Posting Strategy

74. The best time to post on Instagram is Friday between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. in your respective time zone. (Source)

75. Posts with a tagged location result in 79% higher engagement than posts without a tagged location. (Source)

76. 20% of users surveyed post to Instagram Stories on their business account more than once a week. (Source)

77. 44% of users surveyed use Instagram Stories to promote products or services. (Source)

78. One-third of the most viewed Stories come from businesses. (Source)

79. More than 25 million businesses now use Instagram to reach and engage with audiences. (Source)

80. 69% of US marketers plan to spend most of their influencer budget on Instagram. (Source)

81. The industry that had the highest cooperation efficiency with Instagram influencers was Health Care, where influencer posts were 4.2x more efficient than brand posts. (Source)

82. Instagram is now the most popular social platform for following brands. (Source)

With a recession looming, many brands are tightening up their budgets, and often, marketing is one of the first ones to go.

If you’re marketing without a budget, find below some free marketing strategies with high ROI. Plus, get some advice from HubSpot marketers who specialize in working with startups.

Below, let’s review the top tactics to implement when you’re marketing without a budget.

• Develop a content marketing strategy.
• Seek out co-marketing opportunities.
• Invest in your social media presence.
• Increase community engagement.
• Offer free trials or free resources.
• Arrange giveaways.
• Encourage user-generated content.
• Host a webinar.
• Invest in SEO.
• List your company on business directories.

1. Develop a content marketing strategy.

Looking for sustainable growth at a low cost? Content marketing is the way to go, according to Janelle Apaydin, head of marketing at HubSpot for Startups.

“A strong content marketing strategy allows you to educate your customers and keep your business top of mind while increasing organic search volume over time,” she says.

Don’t know where to start? Consider videos – specifically short-form videos.

Short-form video is currently used by roughly 33% of marketers surveyed in our 2023 Marketing Trends report, making it the most popular trend among marketers. What’s more, respondents also say it’s the most effective and has the highest ROI.

Next up, blogs – they’re a great way to reach your audience, generate organic traffic on your site, and gain leads.

“Identify your target audience and their pain points. Write blogs that address their pain points with at least one key takeaway,” said Vana Korrapati, a digital marketing strategist. “This helps you build a list of leads that could turn into sales.”

HubSpot owes a lot of its success to blogging, as it became a go-to source for marketers, customer service specialists, and sales leaders to get valuable industry insights.

Another one to consider is podcasting. This one might cost a few bucks to set up but the cost to get up and running is low. If you already have a blog, you can repurpose that same content into exciting podcast episodes that take your storytelling to the next level.

One key thing to remember in all of this: quality over quantity.

“It’s not about pumping out 60 blog posts out there or YouTube videos with low quality and hoping that you’re going to get traffic,” says Mina Behrooz, Head of GTM Partnerships at HubSpot for Startups Canada. “All you need is maybe 3 to 5 really high-quality blog posts or a YouTube video that you know is going to stand the test of time.”

From there, Behrooz says, promote them as much as possible and be patient.

To help you get started, marketing software like HubSpot’s Marketing Hub can make this a seamless process.

2. Seek out co-marketing opportunities.

Co-marketing involves partnering with another brand that overlaps with your target audience. Senior marketing manager on the HubSpot for Startups team, Tricia O’Brien, says it’s a great way to pool resources when budgets are tight.

“Together, you can create content that adds value to your prospects and highlights your products or services,” she says. “Through the partnership, each company is able to tap into a new audience of prospective customers while sharing the cost.”

Want inspiration, read this article on a co-marketing campaign HubSpot ran a few years ago.

3. Invest in your social media presence.

Social media has continued to be a prevalent marketing tactic for any company. In fact, it’s one of the main ways that Gen Z discovers new brands and products.

As long as you have a phone and a camera, you can dominate on social media by focusing on community building and engagement, and storytelling.

@qmdsuite We try our best not to keep our patients waiting and we love when our patients extend the same courtesy!
#blackdentist
#blackdentistsmatter
#blackdentistswhitecoats
#dentalhumor
#queensdentist
#smile
♬ original sound – A Bored Human

With that said, don’t assume you have to be everywhere.

“I always tell startups, ‘Choose your top three.’ You don’t need to be everywhere, work with what’s free and build your authority there,” says Behrooz.

To decide, figure out where your audience lives. Are you targeting Gen-Z? Then, TikTok should be a priority. Focusing on Millennials? Maybe your top three could be Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Looking for gamers? Go on Twitch or Discord.

To get started, consider using social media software like HubSpot’s Social Media Management Tools.

4. Increase community engagement.

According to our 2023 Social Media Trends report, social media marketers are seeing now more than ever the importance of building an active social community. 90% of those surveyed say building an active online community is crucial to a successful social media strategy in 2023.

This is reflected by data we collected in our Consumer Trends survey, in which 20% of social media users said they joined an online community within the last three months and 22% reported actively participating in one.

Image Source

All this is to say that building a successful brand doesn’t happen without building a community. Doing so doesn’t have to cost money.

With limited funds, you can start online through Facebook Groups, email lists, and Discord channels.

It all depends on where your audience lives online. If you have a budget to work with, you can host or sponsor community events that bring you closer to your target audience.

5. Offer free trials or free resources.

While this might seem like a corporate or financial decision, offering a free trial period is actually a great marketing tactic.

“Free trials are a great way to prove value to your customers while on a budget,” says Apaydin. “If you believe in your product’s ability to sell itself to its customer, offering a free trial allows you to show them how you are solving their problem before they fully commit.”

Apaydin shares that by using free trials as an incentive to share their information with you, you can capture the lead and continue to nurture them until they are ready to purchase.

“You should let the customer have one foot into your product to experience how amazing it is. You’ll pamper them so much they’ll never want to leave,” Korrapati said.

Even if some don’t buy into your premium product, Korrapati adds, you’ll gain valuable feedback. Plus, you’ll discover pain points you didn’t know before – without spending additional money on market research.

A trial isn’t the only thing you can offer, you can also give information through ebooks, guides, white pages, case studies, and reports. Those are fantastic value-adds that build trust with your prospects and gain you leads – otherwise known as lead magnets.

6. Arrange giveaways.

According to O’Brien, giveaways are a powerful tool to sweeten the deal and incentivize prospects to convert or purchase. The best part? They don’t have to cost you anything.

“A common misconception is that you need a big budget to run giveaways. If cash is tight, companies can run giveaways with goods or services already in their possession,” she says. “For example, one hour of your time to provide consulting services in your area of expertise or a free trial of your services.”

Katey Gold, senior partner marketing manager at HubSpot, echoes this and adds that it all comes down to how you package it.

“If you’re asking your customer to take action to receive something, look at how you’re asking,” says Gold. “You need to make sure the customer believes they’re getting a sweet deal and not simply filling in another form to receive a gift that is available to all.”

7. Encourage user-generated content.

UGC is one of the best gifts a brand can get. Why? It serves as social proof, it’s reusable, and it can require little effort on your part.

UGC can look like:

• A video testimonial from a customer
• A social media post from a customer
• A feature on a blogger’s or influencer’s website

With everyone having a phone with a camera and a microphone at their fingertips, user-generated content like customer testimonials no longer require a budget, says O’Brien.

“Adding testimonials from real customers can add credibility to your marketing and provide social proof that customers are happy with your offering,” she adds.

Gold recommends thinking about how to incentivize your customers to create this content that will serve your company.

“While offering gift cards or swag usually does the trick, it’s worth thinking long-term,” she says. “How can you incentivize customers without having to spend money? It may be as simple as sharing a customer’s review on social media while tagging them in the post – you get UGC, while the customer gets recognition from your followers.”

You can also leverage user-generated content as part of a larger campaign.

For example, Lay’s has done a “Do Us a Flavor” campaign for years, where its audience submits new chip flavor ideas. It’s fun, engaging, and builds more visibility for the brand.

8. Host a webinar.

Inbound marketing is all about using helpful tactics to solve your audience’s problems and attract leads to your company. One way to do this is through webinars.

“Webinars are a great (and cheap) way to educate your customers across various stages of the funnel,” says Apaydin. “They require little to no financial investment and can often be hosted by your team as subject matter experts”

However, Behrooz says there’s one thing you should keep in mind when hosting one.

“You don’t want your webinar to be a sales pitch, you want your webinar to be something that’s educational,” says Behrooz. “[Otherwise], your audience will lose engagement.”

Apaydin echoes this sentiment and recommends starting with a problem your customers are facing.

“Panel discussions featuring your customers and/or partners help drive more interest in the event and also make it more engaging,” she says.

Additionally, you can use webinars to gather leads and build your email list. It’s a win all around.

9. Invest in SEO.

Want your audience to find you organically without paying for ads? Then you need to invest in your SEO strategy.

Building an SEO strategy can seem daunting but one way to simplify it is by focusing on two things: Your audience and Google.

The former because you’ll need to know which keywords to target to make sure you’re showing up when your audience is searching for you. And the latter is to make sure your website is formatted in a way that Google can read it.

A few pillars of SEO are:

• Keyword research and analysis
• Link building
• Site architecture

Learn more about SEO here.

10. List your company on business directories.

Online directories like Yelp, Google My Business, and Facebook are where many consumers discover companies and it’s imperative that you maintain your listing.

Consumers not only find your company information, like name, address, and website but will also read reviews about your business.

Updating these directories is a free and quick way to optimize your online presence and make sure your audience finds you when they’re looking.

Ultimately, marketing doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. You can use several tactics with a tighter budget. In fact, most of the strategies above only require the staff it takes to produce the content.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness. 

List three things you’ve done this year that pertain to search engine optimization (SEO).

Do these tactics revolve around keyword research, meta descriptions, and backlinks?

If so, you’re not alone. When it comes to SEO, these techniques are usually the first ones marketers add to their arsenal.

While these strategies do improve your site’s visibility in organic search, they’re not the only ones you should be employing. There’s another set of tactics that fall under the SEO umbrella.

Technical SEO refers to the behind-the-scenes elements that power your organic growth engine, such as site architecture, mobile optimization, and page speed. These aspects of SEO might not be the sexiest, but they are incredibly important.

The first step in improving your technical SEO is knowing where you stand by performing a site audit. The second step is to create a plan to address the areas where you fall short. We’ll cover these steps in-depth below.

Pro tip: Create a website designed to convert using HubSpot’s free CMS tools.

Technical SEO vs. On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO

Many people break down search engine optimization (SEO) into three different buckets: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. Let’s quickly cover what each means.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO refers to the content that tells search engines (and readers!) what your page is about, including image alt text, keyword usage, meta descriptions, H1 tags, URL naming, and internal linking. You have the most control over on-page SEO because, well, everything is on your site.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO tells search engines how popular and useful your page is through votes of confidence — most notably backlinks, or links from other sites to your own. Backlink quantity and quality boost a page’s PageRank. All things being equal, a page with 100 relevant links from credible sites will outrank a page with 50 relevant links from credible sites (or 100 irrelevant links from credible sites.)

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is within your control as well, but it’s a bit trickier to master since it’s less intuitive.

Why is technical SEO important?

You may be tempted to ignore this component of SEO completely; however, it plays an important role in your organic traffic. Your content might be the most thorough, useful, and well-written, but unless a search engine can crawl it, very few people will ever see it.

It’s like a tree that falls in the forest when no one is around to hear it … does it make a sound? Without a strong technical SEO foundation, your content will make no sound to search engines.

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Let’s discuss how you can make your content resound through the internet.

Understanding Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a beast that is best broken down into digestible pieces. If you’re like me, you like to tackle big things in chunks and with checklists. Believe it or not, everything we’ve covered to this point can be placed into one of five categories, each of which deserves its own list of actionable items.

These five categories and their place in the technical SEO hierarchy is best illustrated by this beautiful graphic that is reminiscent of Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs but remixed for search engine optimization. (Note that we will use the commonly used term “Rendering” in place of Accessibility.)

Source

Technical SEO Audit Fundamentals

Before you begin with your technical SEO audit, there are a few fundamentals that you need to put in place.

Let’s cover these technical SEO fundamentals before we move on to the rest of your website audit.

Audit Your Preferred Domain

Your domain is the URL that people type to arrive on your site, like hubspot.com. Your website domain impacts whether people can find you through search and provides a consistent way to identify your site.

When you select a preferred domain, you’re telling search engines whether you prefer the www or non-www version of your site to be displayed in the search results. For example, you might select www.yourwebsite.com over yourwebsite.com. This tells search engines to prioritize the www version of your site and redirects all users to that URL. Otherwise, search engines will treat these two versions as separate sites, resulting in dispersed SEO value.

Previously, Google asked you to identify the version of your URL that you prefer. Now, Google will identify and select a version to show searchers for you. However, if you prefer to set the preferred version of your domain, then you can do so through canonical tags (which we’ll cover shortly). Either way, once you set your preferred domain, make sure that all variants, meaning www, non-www, http, and index.html, all permanently redirect to that version.

Implement SSL

You may have heard this term before — that’s because it’s pretty important. SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, creates a layer of protection between the web server (the software responsible for fulfilling an online request) and a browser, thereby making your site secure. When a user sends information to your website, like payment or contact info, that information is less likely to be hacked because you have SSL to protect them.

An SSL certificate is denoted by a domain that begins with “https://” as opposed to “http://” and a lock symbol in the URL bar.

Search engines prioritize secure sites — in fact, Google announced as early as 2014 that SSL would be considered a ranking factor. Because of this, be sure to set the SSL variant of your homepage as your preferred domain.

After you set up SSL, you’ll need to migrate any non-SSL pages from http to https. It’s a tall order, but worth the effort in the name of improved ranking. Here are the steps you need to take:

1. Redirect all http://yourwebsite.com pages to https://yourwebsite.com.
2. Update all canonical and hreflang tags accordingly.
3. Update the URLs on your sitemap (located at yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml) and your robot.txt (located at yourwebsite.com/robots.txt).
4. Set up a new instance of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for your https website and track it to make sure 100% of the traffic migrates over.

Optimize Page Speed

Do you know how long a website visitor will wait for your website to load? Six seconds … and that’s being generous. Some data shows that the bounce rate increases by 90% with an increase in page load time from one to five seconds. You don’t have one second to waste, so improving your site load time should be a priority.

Site speed isn’t just important for user experience and conversion — it’s also a ranking factor.

Use these tips to improve your average page load time:

• Compress all of your files. Compression reduces the size of your images, as well as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files, so they take up less space and load faster. 

• Audit redirects regularly. A 301 redirect takes a few seconds to process. Multiply that over several pages or layers of redirects, and you’ll seriously impact your site speed. 

• Trim down your code. Messy code can negatively impact your site speed. Messy code means code that’s lazy. It’s like writing — maybe in the first draft, you make your point in 6 sentences. In the second draft, you make it in 3. The more efficient code is, the more quickly the page will load (in general). Once you clean things up, you’ll minify and compress your code.
  
• Consider a content distribution network (CDN). CDNs are distributed web servers that store copies of your website in various geographical locations and deliver your site based on the searcher’s location. Since the information between servers has a shorter distance to travel, your site loads faster for the requesting party.

• Try not to go plugin happy. Outdated plugins often have security vulnerabilities that make your website susceptible to malicious hackers who can harm your website’s rankings. Make sure you’re always using the latest versions of plugins and minimize your use to the most essential. In the same vein, consider using custom-made themes, as pre-made website themes often come with a lot of unnecessary code. 

• Take advantage of cache plugins. Cache plugins store a static version of your site to send to returning users, thereby decreasing the time to load the site during repeat visits. 

• Use asynchronous (async) loading. Scripts are instructions that servers need to read before they can process the HTML, or body, of your webpage, i.e. the things visitors want to see on your site. Typically, scripts are placed in the <head> of a website (think: your Google Tag Manager script), where they are prioritized over the content on the rest of the page. Using async code means the server can process the HTML and script simultaneously, thereby decreasing the delay and increasing page load time.
  
  Here’s how an async script looks: <script async src=”script.js“></script> 

If you want to see where your website falls short in the speed department, you can use this resource from Google.

Once you have your technical SEO fundamentals in place, you’re ready to move onto the next stage — crawlability.

Crawlability Checklist

Crawlability is the foundation of your technical SEO strategy. Search bots will crawl your pages to gather information about your site.

If these bots are somehow blocked from crawling, they can’t index or rank your pages. The first step to implementing technical SEO is to ensure that all of your important pages are accessible and easy to navigate.

Below we’ll cover some items to add to your checklist as well as some website elements to audit to ensure that your pages are prime for crawling.

1. Create an XML sitemap.

Remember that site structure we went over? That belongs in something called an XML Sitemap that helps search bots understand and crawl your web pages. You can think of it as a map for your website. You’ll submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools once it’s complete. Remember to keep your sitemap up-to-date as you add and remove web pages.

2. Maximize your crawl budget.

Your crawl budget refers to the pages and resources on your site search bots will crawl.

Because crawl budget isn’t infinite, make sure you’re prioritizing your most important pages for crawling.

Here are a few tips to ensure that you’re maximizing your crawl budget:

• Remove or canonicalize duplicate pages.
• Fix or redirect any broken links.
• Make sure your CSS and Javascript files are crawlable.
• Check your crawl stats regularly and watch for sudden dips or increases.
• Make sure any bot or page you’ve disallowed from crawling is meant to be blocked.
• Keep your sitemap updated and submit it to the appropriate webmaster tools.
• Prune your site of unnecessary or outdated content.
• Watch out for dynamically generated URLs, which can make the number of pages on your site skyrocket.

3. Optimize your site architecture.

Your website has multiple pages. Those pages need to be organized in a way that allows search engines to easily find and crawl them. That’s where your site structure — often referred to as your website’s information architecture — comes in.

In the same way that a building is based on architectural design, your site architecture is how you organize the pages on your site.

Related pages are grouped together; for example, your blog homepage links to individual blog posts, which each link to their respective author pages. This structure helps search bots understand the relationship between your pages.

Your site architecture should also shape, and be shaped by, the importance of individual pages. The closer Page A is to your homepage, the more pages link to Page A, and the more link equity those pages have, the more importance search engines will give to Page A.

For example, a link from your homepage to Page A demonstrates more significance than a link from a blog post. The more links to Page A, the more “significant” that page becomes to search engines.

Conceptually, a site architecture could look something like this, where the About, Product, News, etc. pages are positioned at the top of the hierarchy of page importance.

Source

Make sure the most important pages to your business are at the top of the hierarchy with the greatest number of (relevant!) internal links.

4. Set a URL structure.

URL structure refers to how you structure your URLs, which could be determined by your site architecture. I’ll explain the connection in a moment. First, let’s clarify that URLs can have subdirectories, like blog.hubspot.com, and/or subfolders, like hubspot.com/blog, that indicate where the URL leads.

As an example, a blog post titled How to Groom Your Dog would fall under a blog subdomain or subdirectory. The URL might be www.bestdogcare.com/blog/how-to-groom-your-dog. Whereas a product page on that same site would be www.bestdogcare.com/products/grooming-brush.

Whether you use subdomains or subdirectories or “products” versus “store” in your URL is entirely up to you. The beauty of creating your own website is that you can create the rules. What’s important is that those rules follow a unified structure, meaning that you shouldn’t switch between blog.yourwebsite.com and yourwebsite.com/blogs on different pages. Create a roadmap, apply it to your URL naming structure, and stick to it.

Here are a few more tips about how to write your URLs:

• Use lowercase characters.
• Use dashes to separate words.
• Make them short and descriptive.
• Avoid using unnecessary characters or words (including prepositions).
• Include your target keywords.

Once you have your URL structure buttoned up, you’ll submit a list of URLs of your important pages to search engines in the form of an XML sitemap. Doing so gives search bots additional context about your site so they don’t have to figure it out as they crawl.

5. Utilize robots.txt.

When a web robot crawls your site, it will first check the /robot.txt, otherwise known as the Robot Exclusion Protocol. This protocol can allow or disallow specific web robots to crawl your site, including specific sections or even pages of your site. If you’d like to prevent bots from indexing your site, you’ll use a noindex robots meta tag. Let’s discuss both of these scenarios.

You may want to block certain bots from crawling your site altogether. Unfortunately, there are some bots out there with malicious intent — bots that will scrape your content or spam your community forums. If you notice this bad behavior, you’ll use your robot.txt to prevent them from entering your website. In this scenario, you can think of robot.txt as your force field from bad bots on the internet.

Regarding indexing, search bots crawl your site to gather clues and find keywords so they can match your web pages with relevant search queries. But, as we’ll discuss later, you have a crawl budget that you don’t want to spend on unnecessary data. So, you may want to exclude pages that don’t help search bots understand what your website is about, for example, a Thank You page from an offer or a login page.

No matter what, your robot.txt protocol will be unique depending on what you’d like to accomplish.

6. Add breadcrumb menus.

Remember the old fable Hansel and Gretel where two children dropped breadcrumbs on the ground to find their way back home? Well, they were on to something.

Breadcrumbs are exactly what they sound like — a trail that guides users to back to the start of their journey on your website. It’s a menu of pages that tells users how their current page relates to the rest of the site.

And they aren’t just for website visitors; search bots use them, too.

Source

Breadcrumbs should be two things: 1) visible to users so they can easily navigate your web pages without using the Back button, and 2) have structured markup language to give accurate context to search bots that are crawling your site.

Not sure how to add structured data to your breadcrumbs? Use this guide for BreadcrumbList.

7. Use pagination.

Remember when teachers would require you to number the pages on your research paper? That’s called pagination. In the world of technical SEO, pagination has a slightly different role but you can still think of it as a form of organization.

Pagination uses code to tell search engines when pages with distinct URLs are related to each other. For instance, you may have a content series that you break up into chapters or multiple webpages. If you want to make it easy for search bots to discover and crawl these pages, then you’ll use pagination.

The way it works is pretty simple. You’ll go to the <head> of page one of the series and use

rel=”next” to tell the search bot which page to crawl second. Then, on page two, you’ll use rel=”prev” to indicate the prior page and rel=”next” to indicate the subsequent page, and so on.

It looks like this…

On page one:

On page two:

Note that pagination is useful for crawl discovery, but is no longer supported by Google to batch index pages as it once was.

8. Check your SEO log files.

You can think of log files like a journal entry. Web servers (the journaler) record and store log data about every action they take on your site in log files (the journal). The data recorded includes the time and date of the request, the content requested, and the requesting IP address. You can also identify the user agent, which is a uniquely identifiable software (like a search bot, for example) that fulfills the request for a user.

But what does this have to do with SEO?

Well, search bots leave a trail in the form of log files when they crawl your site. You can determine if, when, and what was crawled by checking the log files and filtering by the user agent and search engine.

This information is useful to you because you can determine how your crawl budget is spent and which barriers to indexing or access a bot is experiencing. To access your log files, you can either ask a developer or use a log file analyzer, like Screaming Frog.

Just because a search bot can crawl your site doesn’t necessarily mean that it can index all of your pages. Let’s take a look at the next layer of your technical SEO audit — indexability.

Indexability Checklist

As search bots crawl your website, they begin indexing pages based on their topic and relevance to that topic. Once indexed, your page is eligible to rank on the SERPs. Here are a few factors that can help your pages get indexed.

1. Unblock search bots from accessing pages.

You’ll likely take care of this step when addressing crawlability, but it’s worth mentioning here. You want to ensure that bots are sent to your preferred pages and that they can access them freely. You have a few tools at your disposal to do this. Google’s robots.txt tester will give you a list of pages that are disallowed and you can use the Google Search Console’s Inspect tool to determine the cause of blocked pages.

2. Remove duplicate content.

Duplicate content confuses search bots and negatively impacts your indexability. Remember to use canonical URLs to establish your preferred pages.

3. Audit your redirects.

Verify that all of your redirects are set up properly. Redirect loops, broken URLs, or — worse — improper redirects can cause issues when your site is being indexed. To avoid this, audit all of your redirects regularly.

4. Check the mobile-responsiveness of your site.

If your website is not mobile-friendly by now, then you’re far behind where you need to be. As early as 2016, Google started indexing mobile sites first, prioritizing the mobile experience over desktop. Today, that indexing is enabled by default. To keep up with this important trend, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly test to check where your website needs to improve.

5. Fix HTTP errors.

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, but you probably don’t care about that. What you do care about is when HTTP returns errors to your users or to search engines, and how to fix them.

HTTP errors can impede the work of search bots by blocking them from important content on your site. It is, therefore, incredibly important to address these errors quickly and thoroughly.

Since every HTTP error is unique and requires a specific resolution, the section below has a brief explanation of each, and you’ll use the links provided to learn more about or how to resolve them.

• 301 Permanent Redirects are used to permanently send traffic from one URL to another. Your CMS will allow you to set up these redirects, but too many of these can slow down your site and degrade your user experience as each additional redirect adds to page load time. Aim for zero redirect chains, if possible, as too many will cause search engines to give up crawling that page.
• 302 Temporary Redirect is a way to temporarily redirect traffic from a URL to a different webpage. While this status code will automatically send users to the new webpage, the cached title tag, URL, and description will remain consistent with the origin URL. If the temporary redirect stays in place long enough, though, it will eventually be treated as a permanent redirect and those elements will pass to the destination URL.
• 403 Forbidden Messages mean that the content a user has requested is restricted based on access permissions or due to a server misconfiguration.
• 404 Error Pages tell users that the page they have requested doesn’t exist, either because it’s been removed or they typed the wrong URL. It’s always a good idea to create 404 pages that are on-brand and engaging to keep visitors on your site (click the link above to see some good examples).
• 405 Method Not Allowed means that your website server recognized and still blocked the access method, resulting in an error message.
• 500 Internal Server Error is a general error message that means your web server is experiencing issues delivering your site to the requesting party.
• 502 Bad Gateway Error is related to miscommunication, or invalid response, between website servers.
• 503 Service Unavailable tells you that while your server is functioning properly, it is unable to fulfill the request.
• 504 Gateway Timeout means a server did not receive a timely response from your web server to access the requested information.

Whatever the reason for these errors, it’s important to address them to keep both users and search engines happy, and to keep both coming back to your site.

Even if your site has been crawled and indexed, accessibility issues that block users and bots will impact your SEO. That said, we need to move on to the next stage of your technical SEO audit — renderability.

Renderability Checklist

Before we dive into this topic, it’s important to note the difference between SEO accessibility and web accessibility. The latter revolves around making your web pages easy to navigate for users with disabilities or impairments, like blindness or Dyslexia, for example. Many elements of online accessibility overlap with SEO best practices. However, an SEO accessibility audit does not account for everything you’d need to do to make your site more accessible to visitors who are disabled.

We’re going to focus on SEO accessibility, or rendering, in this section, but keep web accessibility top of mind as you develop and maintain your site.

Renderability Checklist

An accessible site is based on ease of rendering. Below are the website elements to review for your renderability audit.

Server Performance

As you learned above, server timeouts and errors will cause HTTP errors that hinder users and bots from accessing your site. If you notice that your server is experiencing issues, use the resources provided above to troubleshoot and resolve them. Failure to do so in a timely manner can result in search engines removing your web page from their index as it is a poor experience to show a broken page to a user.

HTTP Status

Similar to server performance, HTTP errors will prevent access to your webpages. You can use a web crawler, like Screaming Frog, Botify, or DeepCrawl to perform a comprehensive error audit of your site.

Load Time and Page Size

If your page takes too long to load, the bounce rate is not the only problem you have to worry about. A delay in page load time can result in a server error that will block bots from your webpages or have them crawl partially loaded versions that are missing important sections of content. Depending on how much crawl demand there is for a given resource, bots will spend an equivalent amount of resources to attempt to load, render, and index pages. However, you should do everything in your control to decrease your page load time.

JavaScript Rendering

Google admittedly has a difficult time processing JavaScript (JS) and, therefore, recommends employing pre-rendered content to improve accessibility. Google also has a host of resources to help you understand how search bots access JS on your site and how to improve search-related issues.

Orphan Pages

Every page on your site should be linked to at least one other page — preferably more, depending on how important the page is. When a page has no internal links, it’s called an orphan page. Like an article with no introduction, these pages lack the context that bots need to understand how they should be indexed.

Page Depth

Page depth refers to how many layers down a page exists in your site structure, i.e. how many clicks away from your homepage it is. It’s best to keep your site architecture as shallow as possible while still maintaining an intuitive hierarchy. Sometimes a multi-layered site is inevitable; in that case, you’ll want to prioritize a well-organized site over shallowness.

Regardless of how many layers in your site structure, keep important pages — like your product and contact pages — no more than three clicks deep. A structure that buries your product page so deep in your site that users and bots need to play detective to find them are less accessible and provide a poor experience

For example, a website URL like this that guides your target audience to your product page is an example of a poorly planned site structure: www.yourwebsite.com/products-features/features-by-industry/airlines-case-studies/airlines-products.

Redirect Chains

When you decide to redirect traffic from one page to another, you’re paying a price. That price is crawl efficiency. Redirects can slow down crawling, reduce page load time, and render your site inaccessible if those redirects aren’t set up properly. For all of these reasons, try to keep redirects to a minimum.

Once you’ve addressed accessibility issues, you can move onto how your pages rank in the SERPs.

Rankability Checklist

Now we move to the more topical elements that you’re probably already aware of — how to improve ranking from a technical SEO standpoint. Getting your pages to rank involves some of the on-page and off-page elements that we mentioned before but from a technical lens.

Remember that all of these elements work together to create an SEO-friendly site. So, we’d be remiss to leave out all the contributing factors. Let’s dive into it.

Internal and External Linking

Links help search bots understand where a page fits in the grand scheme of a query and gives context for how to rank that page. Links guide search bots (and users) to related content and transfer page importance. Overall, linking improves crawling, indexing, and your ability to rank.

Backlink Quality

Backlinks — links from other sites back to your own — provide a vote of confidence for your site. They tell search bots that External Website A believes your page is high-quality and worth crawling. As these votes add up, search bots notice and treat your site as more credible. Sounds like a great deal right? However, as with most great things, there’s a caveat. The quality of those backlinks matter, a lot.

Links from low-quality sites can actually hurt your rankings. There are many ways to get quality backlinks to your site, like outreach to relevant publications, claiming unlinked mentions, providing relevant publications, claiming unlinked mentions, and providing helpful content that other sites want to link to.

Content Clusters

We at HubSpot have not been shy about our love for content clusters or how they contribute to organic growth. Content clusters link related content so search bots can easily find, crawl, and index all of the pages you own on a particular topic. They act as a self-promotion tool to show search engines how much you know about a topic, so they are more likely to rank your site as an authority for any related search query.

Your rankability is the main determinant in organic traffic growth because studies show that searchers are more likely to click on the top three search results on SERPs. But how do you ensure that yours is the result that gets clicked?

Let’s round this out with the final piece to the organic traffic pyramid: clickability.

Clickability Checklist

While click-through rate (CTR) has everything to do with searcher behavior, there are things you can do to improve your clickability on the SERPs. While meta descriptions and page titles with keywords do impact CTR, we’re going to focus on the technical elements because that’s why you’re here.

Ranking and click-through rate go hand-in-hand because, let’s be honest, searchers want immediate answers. The more your result stands out on the SERP, the more likely you’ll get the click. Let’s go over a few ways to improve your clickability.

1. Use structured data.

Structured data employs a specific vocabulary called schema to categorize and label elements on your webpage for search bots. The schema makes it crystal clear what each element is, how it relates to your site, and how to interpret it. Basically, structured data tells bots, “This is a video,” “This is a product,” or “This is a recipe,” leaving no room for interpretation.

To be clear, using structured data is not a “clickability factor” (if there even is such a thing), but it does help organize your content in a way that makes it easy for search bots to understand, index, and potentially rank your pages.

2. Win SERP features.

SERP features, otherwise known as rich results, are a double-edged sword. If you win them and get the click-through, you’re golden. If not, your organic results are pushed down the page beneath sponsored ads, text answer boxes, video carousels, and the like.

Rich results are those elements that don’t follow the page title, URL, meta description format of other search results. For example, the image below shows two SERP features — a video carousel and “People Also Ask” box — above the first organic result.

While you can still get clicks from appearing in the top organic results, your chances are greatly improved with rich results.

How do you increase your chances of earning rich results? Write useful content and use structured data. The easier it is for search bots to understand the elements of your site, the better your chances of getting a rich result.

Structured data is useful for getting these (and other search gallery elements) from your site to the top of the SERPs, thereby, increasing the probability of a click-through:

• Articles
• Videos
• Reviews
• Events
• How-Tos
• FAQs (“People Also Ask” boxes)
• Images
• Local Business Listings
• Products
• Sitelinks

3. Optimize for Featured Snippets.

One unicorn SERP feature that has nothing to do with schema markup is Featured Snippets, those boxes above the search results that provide concise answers to search queries.

Featured Snippets are intended to get searchers the answers to their queries as quickly as possible. According to Google, providing the best answer to the searcher’s query is the only way to win a snippet. However, HubSpot’s research revealed a few additional ways to optimize your content for featured snippets.

4. Consider Google Discover.

Google Discover is a relatively new algorithmic listing of content by category specifically for mobile users. It’s no secret that Google has been doubling down on the mobile experience; with over 50% of searches coming from mobile, it’s no surprise either. The tool allows users to build a library of content by selecting categories of interest (think: gardening, music, or politics).

At HubSpot, we believe topic clustering can increase the likelihood of Google Discover inclusion and are actively monitoring our Google Discover traffic in Google Search Console to determine the validity of that hypothesis. We recommend that you also invest some time in researching this new feature. The payoff is a highly engaged user base that has basically hand-selected the content you’ve worked hard to create.

The Perfect Trio

Technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO work together to unlock the door to organic traffic. While on-page and off-page techniques are often the first to be deployed, technical SEO plays a critical role in getting your site to the top of the search results and your content in front of your ideal audience. Use these technical tactics to round out your SEO strategy and watch the results unfold.

 

One of the worst feelings in the world is forgetting a great idea. All you had to do was write it down, but you were confident that you’d never be able to forget something so compelling. When it slid out of your mind, though, the easy loss of such an insightful thought nearly crushed your soul.

Taking the time to jot down your ideas right when they pop into in your head is one of the best ways to remember them and, ultimately, bring them to life.

But if your idea has a lot of moving parts, like a big project, you need to do more than just write your vision down on a piece of paper — it’ll be too scattered and disconnected. The best way to brainstorm, structure, and implement a vision is by visually organizing its data and information.

Looking at concepts, rather than just reading about them, has always been the best way to learn and remember. In fact, humans can process visual information two times faster than the blink of an eye

To visually flesh out almost any multi-faceted or complex concept, ranging from product launches to organization charts to the list of Oscar-nominated movies you haven’t seen yet, mind maps are your best tool.

Most mind mapping software is also cloud-based and collaborative, so if you want to enhance your project’s clarity, cooperation, and execution, check out this list of the best mind mapping software, ranked by G2Crowd.

14 of the Best Mind Mapping Software for Brainstorming Better Ideas

1. MindGenius

Visual cues help us process and retain information better than text. Using MindGenius, you can structure your ideas in a visually appealing way with an assortment of colors and photos from their built-in image library.

The software also has a collection of mind map templates with different visual styles, so you can brainstorm and implement your plans faster than you could starting from a blank canvas.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.9/5.0 (16 Reviews)

Price:

Subscription Plan – $232 for first year and $56 for second year onwards

One-Time Cost Plan – $392

2. MindManager

MindManager is like a virtual whiteboard. You can easily add ideas, place them wherever you like, and draw connections between them. You can also track the progress of your projects by adding its due dates, priorities, and resources.

MindManager’s most helpful feature is its dashboard map, which integrates all of the data related to your idea or project in one place for everyone on the project to view and access.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.6/5.0 (27 Ratings)

Price:

One-Time Cost of $349 on Windows

One-Time Cost of $179 on Mac

3. ClickUp Mind Maps

ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity tool for individual users and teams across industries to manage projects, collaborate smarter, and work together in one place. Known for its feature-rich experience, ClickUp is designed to help you act on your ideas instantly. ClickUp offers also over 15 ways to view your work including its highly visual Mind Maps to organize the flow of projects, ideas, and tasks in an outline that automatically updates as you progress. Build your Mind Map from scratch or with a template and draw connections between tasks to create a detailed diagram that can be easily edited at any time.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.7/5.0 (4,431 Ratings)

Price:

Free plan available, paid plans starting at $5/month (full pricing options here)

4. Venngage Mind Map Maker 

Venngage is already known as an infographic maker and design software, but they’ve recently ramped up their range of mind and diagram templates to help you visualize your strategies in an appealing way. The key differentiator between Venngage’s Mind Map Maker and other diagramming tools is the emphasis placed on communicating complex information in a captivating way.

There are a wide range of professionally designed templates to choose from, and also access to 24-hour support.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.7/5.0 (49 Ratings)

Price: 

$49/Month for a business plan (full pricing options here)

5. Miro

Miro’s interactive Mind Map tool enables distributed and remote teams to collaborate, brainstorm, and build on shared digital canvas. Their product creates a convenient, centralized hub for teams to organize assets, strategize, stay aligned, and work together in real time. 

With hotkeys, color coding, and marketplace integrations, all of your team’s files and project information can live in one place so you can quickly capture, organize and visualize your ideas. 

Price: Free plan available, paid plans starting at $8/month (full pricing here)

6. Creately

With more than 50 types of diagrams and thousands of examples and libraries, Creately lets you quickly flesh out your ideas using their templates. But if you want to create a mind map from scratch, you can still visualize your ideas in a timely fashion by leveraging features like click-to-create, drag-and-drop, and smart shapes, which adapt its size to its location on your map.

Some of Creately’s most useful features are its importing and sharing capabilities. Importing Microsoft Visio files into the software is seamless, and when you’ve finished your project, you can embed private diagrams on your wiki pages and export them into Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape for further modification.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.5/5.0 11 Ratings)

Price:

Public Plan – Free For 5 Public Diagrams

Personal Plan – $5 per month

5 User Team Plan – $25 per month

10 User Team Plan – $45 per month

25 User Team Plan – $75 per month

7. XMind8 Pro

XMind 8 is one of the most popular mind mapping software, featuring a decade-long market presence and millions of users. In the software, you can make your mind maps look more engaging with different themes, fonts, and over 60,000 icons, easily collaborate with others by saving your mind maps to Evernote, and present your mind maps by turning them into slideshows.

One of XMind 8’s main advantages over other mind mapping software is that you can track your project’s progress with its Gannt View, which shows you the start date, end date, and development of each project.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.4/5.0 Rating (24 Ratings)

Price:

One-time cost of $129

8. Lucidchart

Lucidchart is an intuitive, collaborative, and secure mind mapping software. With drag-and-drop functionality, group chat and comments, and revision history, your team can easily create and edit your mind maps.

If your team plans to map out sensitive ideas that need an extra layer of privacy, Lucidchart also offers more security options than other similar software. They partner with Amazon Web Services and leverage data encryption to protect, backup, and secure your data.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.2/5.0 (12 Ratings)

Price:

Single User Basic Plan – $4.95 per month

Single User Pro Plan – $9.95 per month

Team Plan – Starts at $27 per month

Enterprise – Contact Sales

9. MindMup

By helping users structure their stories and measure their projects’ cost and progress, MindMup is arguably the best mind mapping software for marketers. In the software, you can create storyboards, post your maps to social media, and calculate the cost of your projects by adding measurements to your map nodes.

MindMup maps are also compatible with Google Drive, so you can conveniently create your maps right in the app and manage them like any other Google Drive file.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.2/5.0 (5 Ratings)

Price

Free User Plan – Free 

Personal Gold Plan – $2.99 per month

Organisational Gold – $100 per year

10. Cacoo

Just like other mind mapping software, Cacoo provides a lot of collaboration tools to improve your team’s workflow. But Cacoo offers more robust organization tools, like Folders, which can save and store updates and comments to your team’s assets directly in the software.

You can also enhance your productivity with Cacoo by leveraging their integrations with Backlog, Typetalk, Google Drive, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Confluence.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.1 / 5.0 (20 Ratings)

Price:

Single-user Plan – $4.95 per month

Team Plan – Starts at $18 per month

Enterprise Plan – $600 per year

11. SmartDraw

With over 4,500 templates, 70 different diagrams, and availability in 100 languages, Smartdraw is a mind mapping software catered for a lot of different countries and almost every industry. But even though it’s one of the most robust mind mapping software, its automation and user-friendly interface make it intuitive and easy to use.

SmartDraw also integrates with the most popular tools in the workforce, like Microsoft Office, G Suite, Confluence, Jira, and Trello, helping you collaborate with your team across the tools you’re already using.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.1/5.0 (19 Ratings)

Price:

Single User Plan – $9.95 per month

5+ Users Plan – Starts rom $5.95 per month

12. Bubbl.Us

Bubbl.us is a simpler mind mapping software than most, but since it offers all the essential mind mapping features at such an affordable price, its a steal.

With Bubbl.us, you can create and edit mind maps on any device, use templates, add colors, share them and collaborate with colleagues, and export them as images or presentations.

If you work on a small team and need an affordable yet dependable mind mapping software, Bubbl.us could be an ideal solution.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.1/5.0 (15 Reviews)

Price:

Free – Free

Premium – $4.91 per month

13. MindMeister

MindMeister is completely web-based, so you can develop your ideas from any computer, share, and collaborate with as many colleagues as you want, all in real time. There’s also an integrated chat tool that lets you vote on ideas and discuss changes within the tool

MindMeister’s most powerful feature is probably its presentation mode, where you can visually communicate your ideas and plans to colleagues or customers by turning mind maps into slideshows, exporting the slides as PNGs, and embeding presentations into your website.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.0/5.0 (6 Reviews)

Price:

Basic – Free

Personal – $4.99 per month

Pro – $8.25 per month

Business – $12.49 per month

14. Coggle

Coggle is a web-based mind mapping software that lets you visually breakdown your ideas with your colleagues. Just like Google Docs, Coggle makes sure you’ll never lose any of your valuable ideas by letting you see all the change made to your mind map, make a copy of any iteration, and revert the diagram to any of its previous versions.

G2Crowd Rating:

4.0/5.0 (5 Reviews)

Price

Free – Free 

Awesome – $5 per month

Organization – $8 per member per month

Enterprise – Contact Sales

Slack changed workplace communication. It can be a helpful tool or an amusing diversion — and this makes Slack tips essential to cut through the noise.

Slack is capable of so much that it’s hard to uncover what features you really should be using. To help, we put together some of the best Slack tips and tricks below.

From creating to-do lists to customizing your theme, these pro tips are worth showing off to your team. Scan the full list of Slack tricks or jump to the section you’re looking for:

• Why You Need Tips for Using Slack
• Handy Slack Tips and Tricks
• Best Slack Tips for Productivity
• More Slack Tips and Tricks

Why You Need Tips for Using Slack

Any tool can make your workday more effective and productive. That’s the goal. But it doesn’t always work out that way.

In 2020, offices around the world went through a series of seismic changes. Many teams went remote for the first time. And workplace leaders found themselves looking for digital solutions that could help workers:

• Build and keep social bonds
• Answer quick questions
• Check in on each other
• Hold social workplace events
• Send quick thank yous
• Share updates

Slack was an answer to these questions and more.

This platform organizes chat conversations into channels. It makes it easy to have informal conversations or organized group conversations. This helps in-office and remote teams trade ideas and make decisions together. It can also give teams at-a-glance knowledge of office status, connect docs from different tools, and offer helpful reminders.

Slack is a great way to connect and collaborate. But it can take time to learn the most helpful features. A beginner’s guide to Slack is the best place to start.

Once you have the basics down, the tips below can help you advance your Slack game for more productivity, fun, and connection.

Best Slack Tips for Productivity

1. Sort Slack channels for easy scanning.

The larger your organization is, the more channels your team will have. This seems fine at first, and it lets teams create distinct conversations for work and play. But as channel notifications grow, so will the possibility of Slack overwhelm.

Businesses using Pro, Business+, or Enterprise Grid plans on Slack can add channels, direct messages, and apps to custom sections in the sidebar. Custom sections are just for you, and won’t impact anyone else on your team, so you can organize them in a way that works best for you.

To create a custom section, click the + at the top right of your top channel in the left navigation menu. Then select “Create a new channel” or “Create a new section.” You can select from the current options or add a unique emoji and name for a custom section.

Note: You can only create custom sections on a desktop computer. But once you’ve added them you’ll be able to use them on both desktop and mobile.

2. Pause notifications for focused work time.

Different work cultures have different expectations for availability on Slack. But there are times when employees need some uninterrupted work time. So, instead of closing a door or hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign, pause your notifications.

This gives a simple signal to your team so you can get the focused time you need. To pause your notifications, click on your profile. Then, scroll to “Pause notifications” and choose the amount of time that’s best for you.

You can also set a notification schedule. This is extra helpful for teams that work across different time zones. It helps everyone understand when you’re available to respond quickly, and when getting a response may take more time.

3. Pin messages and links for easy recall.

Slack can also be the digital bulletin board at the center of your office. When you “pin” a message, you’re saving it for the full team in that conversation or channel. This makes it easy for everyone to revisit important learning, documents, and comments.

To pin a message, hover over the message, then click on the three dots in the top right-hand corner. Then, scroll down to “Pin to channel.” The selected message background will change color, and display a message at the top that says “Pinned by [your name].” You can also use the top bar to search for pinned posts.

4. Adjust your sidebar to show unread channels only.

As the number of channels you subscribe to grows, you may be looking for strategies to cut down on overwhelm. Some choose to mute channels, but that can mean missing important communication. Others make an update to the “Channels” section to highlight what they haven’t read yet.

To make this update, head to the “Channels” section in your left-hand sidebar. Hover over Channels, click the three dots to the right, then scroll to “Show” > “Unread channels only.”

5. Connect your tools to Slack.

Another feature of Slack that helps you ramp up productivity is its connectivity. Whether you’re sharing sensitive documents or running a fun icebreaker with your team, there are over 2000 Slack integrations you can use.

For example, many teams are already using Google Drive to create and store files online, so why not get the best of both worlds? When you connect your Google Drive with Slack, you have the ability to read and index imported files, and quickly search for them whenever you need them.

There are two ways to connect your Google Drive to Slack:

If you have a Google Drive link you want to share, simply paste it into a message box. This will prompt Slackbot to deliver the following message:

Click “Yes” to grant Google Drive permission to read the file.

If you don’t have a file you’re ready to share, but want to connect Google Drive for future use, visit the Google Drive app page. From here, click “Configure” next to your team name, then click “Authenticate your Google Drive Account” > “Allow.”

HubSpot customers: If you want to integrate Slack even deeper into your office processes, check out this article that shows you how to make the most of your Slack integration.

6. Use the /remind commands to create a to-do list.

Set a Slackbot reminder to help you keep track of what you need to get done. To get started, simply enter /remind into the text box, followed by your task. (Note: Only you will be able to see the command and the reminder.)

You can schedule a reminder for a specific time or set a date using the MM/DD/YYYY format. Slack recommends this structure for a reminder: /remind [@someone or #channel] “[what]” [when].

If you want to review your list of reminders, simply use the command /remind list. From there, you can mark certain tasks as complete or delete the ones you no longer need.

7. Quickly send a private message using the /msg command.

Sometimes we find ourselves with questions that call for the attention of everyone in a specific channel. You know, important things such as, “Does anyone have a stapler?” or “Who’s free for lunch?”

After you ask a question, avoid any further disruption by following up with people with a private message. For example, once you know Steve is free to grab a bite to eat, use the following command to quickly open up a private message to hash out the details: /msg @user [your message].

8. Jump to recent conversations in seconds.

If you’ve got a really big team, it’s likely that you’re involved with quite a few Slack channels. To quickly and easily switch from a channel to a private message back to a different channel, hit ⌘ + K (Mac) or Ctrl + K (Windows and Linux).

A pop-up will appear where you can begin typing a person or channel and select the correct option to open the conversation.

9. Create a to-do list using Saved Items.

Saved items on Slack are a way to mark a task as important, like pinned messages. But only you can see your saved items, so they can be useful for personal reminders.

To save an item, simply move your mouse to a message or file and select the flag outline to make it turn red. Then, to view your saved items, click Saved items at the top of the left navigation menu.

Saving requests and files that you need to work on makes it easy for you to create a to-do list on the fly.

10. Conduct advanced searches.

One of the great things about Slack is that messages and files are easily searchable. Because channels move so fast, you can use these advanced search commands to pull up exactly what you’re looking for without wasting any time.

Channels and Direct Messages

• in:channelname – Searches only the messages and/or files in a specific channel.
• in:name – Searches your direct messages with a specific user.

Messages or Files From a Specific Person

• from:username – Limits your search to messages from a specific person in any channel or direct message.
• from:me – Searches only messages you’ve sent, anywhere in Slack.

Links, Saved Items, and Emoji Reactions

You can narrow your search to messages that contain a URL, messages you’ve saved, or messages that contain a specific emoji using search results filters.

Dates and Times

• before: Use the pop-up to search for messages sent at a specific time.
• after: Use words like “week,” “month,” or “year.”
• on: or during: Use specific dates and range keywords, such as “Monday,” “February,” or “2023.”

Pro tip: To use specific dates, use the MM/DD/YYYY (United States) or YYYY/MM/DD (International) format.

11. Add notifications for keywords and phrases.

Managing a specific project? Trying to keep tabs on a department or activity? Adjusting your settings to enable custom notifications can be a huge time saver.

To get notified when a specific word or phrase is mentioned, start by selecting your name from the top left corner. Then, click “Preferences” from the drop-down menu. From there, select “Notifications” and scroll down to “My keywords.” In the text box, add words or phrases that you’d like to be notified about (making sure to separate them by commas).

12. Create naming conventions for channels.

Naming your channels in a way that’s simple and consistent helps you engage more users. No more sending an email, texts, AND Slack for every message. Instead, you’ll be able to trust that people on your team are seeing the content you need them to see.

To make this happen, make sure channel names are consistent with what your team already knows. Clever names and inside jokes can seem fun at first, but over time they can create confusion.

Instead, name channels for major departments and topics. Then, use Slack’s default prefixes as a guide when it’s time to add channels for new and more specific channels and sections.

For more productivity tips, check out this guide to being more productive.

More Slack Tips and Tricks

13. Toggle between statuses using /away or /active commands.

If you have to step away from your computer or head to a meeting, make it clear by adjusting your status. To quickly toggle between “away” and “active,” use the /away command.

For more quick commands, type /shortcuts to open the keyboard shortcuts panel.

14. React with a GIF.

Let’s face it: We all love GIFs. And thanks to the Giphy integration, you can share hilarious GIFs with your coworkers using the /giphy [emotion, word, or phrase] command.

To set up the Giphy app, visit this page. From here, all you’ll have to do is click “Install” next to your team name, then click “Add Giphy Integration.”

Note: Giphy can be a hit or miss. Sometimes the GIFs are NSFW or not quite right for the situation. But, if you don’t mind gambling with the results, this hack is easy to set up.

15. Create quick polls with emoji reactions.

Words are hard. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to let our coworkers know how we feel by reacting with an emoji. And on Slack, it’s easy. Simply hover over a message and select the smiley face icon with the plus sign to select an emoji.

Want to take things a step further? Reaction emojis make it really easy to quickly poll your team. Here’s a fun example:

16. Add text and link formatting to your Slack messages.

Want to call out text, make edits, display a link, or share code? Reference the following syntax:

• Slack link formatting: To share a link with a preview image, just send a URL in a message. Slack will automatically create a preview unless a user has their preview settings turned off.
• Emphasis: To create bold text, surround your word or phrase with *asterisks.* To italicize text, place _underscores_ around a section.
• Strikethrough: To strike out certain words, use ~tilde~ to surround the text.
• Lists: To create lists, select “Shift” + “Enter” to add a new line. To add bullet points, select Opt+8 (Mac) or Alt+0149 (PC).
• Insert a paragraph break: If you want to break up words without using a list, use a soft return. Instead of hitting enter at the end of a sentence, which will send the message, hold shift and tap the enter key to start a new line.
• Blockquotes: To add angle brackets at the start of your message for indents and quotes, type “>” to indent a single line.

17. Edit messages you’ve already sent.

We’ve all said things we wish we could take back. And with Slack, you can — kinda. To quickly edit a message you’ve sent in a conversation, press the ↑ arrow key, edit your message, then press “Enter.”

This feature is especially useful when you do something terribly embarrassing, like use the wrong form of “their”:

18. Customize your Slack theme.

Whether you use Slack for different groups and want to stay organized, or you just want to personalize the look and feel of your account, you can adjust your theme by selecting your name in the top left corner.

From the drop-down menu next to your name, select “Preferences” > “Themes.” From here, you can explore and select themes or scroll down to “Custom Theme” to put in your own HTML color values.

19. Create your own emoji.

To get started, click the emoji icon in any Slack chat window. Then, click the “Add Emoji” button on the bottom left-hand side.

Fill out the form to create your custom emoji. First, you’ll need to upload an emoji image. Then, provide a name for the icon — this is what you will enter to display the emoji.

Slack asks that you use a square image no larger than 128px in width or height, with a file size smaller than 64K. To remove the background from the image (as seen in the Ryan Gosling example below), check out this tutorial.

20. Pull swatches using HTML color codes.

Collaborating with another team member on a design project? Make quick color suggestions using HTML color codes. When you type out a code — #F7761F, for example — you’ll see a tiny swatch appear, like this:

21. Shake it off with a shruggie.

Don’t know the answer? Made a little mistake? Need to signal to your coworker that you actually have no idea what’s going on at this meeting? Send ’em a shruggie.

Serving as the “default Internet feeling,” a shruggie will say everything you need to say without saying anything at all. To pull it up, enter the /shrug command.

22. Update your profile to show when you’re OOO.

Whether you’re OOO on vacation or out on parental leave, you can signal this to your coworkers by adjusting your status on Slack.

To edit your status, click your profile in the top right corner. Then, click the “Set a Status” button to choose a status option or create a unique status with the “What’s your status?” box at the top. Select your status, then click “Save.” This will open a second pop-up window where you can set the timing for your status. Click “Save” again, and you’re all set.

23. Use the /collapse and /expand commands to open and close files.

Weeding your way through a sea of GIFs to get to the comment you’re looking for? You can collapse all inline images and video by using the /collapse command.

When you need to reference the visuals again, simply enter /expand to make them reappear.

24. Try /mute to limit distractions.

Maybe you’re new and want to learn about a department, but don’t need to participate. Maybe you’re curious about a new channel, but aren’t sure how much time you’ll have to join the conversation. To update your channels so you have easy access but don’t get distracted by constant notifications, mute the channel.

To mute, click on the channel name. Then, click on the “Get Notifications” button in the center at the top of the pop-up. Scroll down and select “Mute channel.” You can also type /mute to silence a channel or DM, or type /unmute to activate it again.

25. Play games on Slack for remote team building.

Games and icebreakers are a way to bring members of a team together. They can help people loosen up, preparing them for creativity and collaboration. You can use apps like Polly to create trivia games or other apps to play chess, rock-paper-scissors, and more.

Want to learn more about Slack?

When the HubSpot team first made the switch to Slack, it was hard to get used to. But once we got more comfortable with the platform, we started to realize just how powerful it really is.

The more we used Slack, the better our discoveries got — GIFs, reminders, files — they were all just a click or two away.

We hope the 25 handy Slack tips above help you make your conversations more productive, efficient, and fun too.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Welcome to HubSpot Marketing News! Tap in for campaign deep dives, the latest marketing industry news, and tried-and-true insights from HubSpot’s media team.

Are rewards programs keeping airlines afloat? They just might be.

Delta Airlines is taking a different marketing approach in its latest video called “Grow Your World With Every Mile” highlighting its SkyMiles program.

The program was initially launched as the “Delta Airlines Frequent Flyer Program” in 1981 and was renamed SkyMiles in 1995. The recent ad spot marks Delta’s first major investment in marketing the loyalty program. Why the recent focus on marketing a 42-year-old program?

Unsurprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic.

How Airlines Are Creating Their Own Banks

Though travel demand and spending decreased due to the pandemic in 2020, Delta was able to generate cash by raising $6.5 billion through the SkyMiles program and payouts from its co-branded credit card partnership with American Express.

Delta isn’t alone in using this approach — United used a similar strategy to generate cash from its loyalty program during the pandemic, and recent reports have found that some popular rewards programs are worth more than the airlines.  

In late 2020, Delta created its subsidiary SkyMiles IP Ltd. which essentially serves as the company’s own “bank” that it can purchase miles from to use as financial leverage.

With this move, the success of the SkyMiles program is now integral to the success of Delta, so investing in the program’s growth is a no-brainer for the company. The more miles it can award loyal customers, the more potential capital the airline can leverage if travel demand dips again.

“Grow Your World With Every Mile” may have been the first piece of content we’ve seen promoting Delta SkyMiles, but it certainly won’t be the last.

Marketing Snippets

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The latest marketing news and strategy insights.

Twitter announced it will limit two-factor authentication to Twitter Blue subscribers.

Meta introduced a paid verification option and is testing the subscription in Australia and New Zealand.

YouTube is testing podcast management capabilities in its creator studio.

Instagram rolled out a broadcast channels feature to help creators connect with their audiences.

TikTok is launching a Creativity Program Beta to help users foster creativity and generate revenue on the platform.

Spotify is introducing a TikTok-inspired vertical feed.

Have you ever had to hype yourself up to send an email? We have too.

Writing compelling professional emails is a superpower that most professionals would love to have. Email is the most common form of professional communication, and sending bad emails can make or break your career.

This article will provide some tips to help you improve the overall quality of your emails. Once you’ve applied these simple strategies to your writing, you should be able to confidently send emails to anyone and get rid of that post-send anxiety.

But first, let’s talk about your goals. What purpose do you want your email to achieve?

Define your email goals.

Writing Effective Emails

How To Write An Effective Email

1. Use a professional email address.

2. Have a compelling subject line.

3. Start with an appropriate greeting.

4. Have a strong attention grabber.

5. Keep your message concise.

6. Be consistent with your font.

7. Check the tone of your message.

8. Write a simple closing.

9. Use a professional signature

10. Use CC and BCC fields wisely.

11. Schedule your emails.

12. Do a final spelling and grammar check.

13. Schedule a follow-up reminder.

Email Writing Tips for International Teams

Imagine receiving the email you’re writing.

Write like you talk.

Get email etiquette right for each work situation.

Define your email goals.

Writing an email is like creating a meal. Just as a chef needs to carefully select and prepare ingredients to create a delicious dish, you need to carefully choose your words and organize your thoughts to create a clear and effective email.

Before you start writing the email, it might help to define your email goals first. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What purpose do you want to achieve with this email?

• What are the main points you want the reader to understand?

• How can you get readers to understand those points concisely?

• What is the appropriate email etiquette or tone for this recipient?

Defining these elements can help you write quick, effective, and compelling emails.

Think about the last time you received a poorly written email. You might have had to read it a few times to understand it. The message then kicks off a long back-and-forth email thread that could have been avoided if the first email had been properly planned.

That is why we recommend taking the time to plan your communications goals first. It helps you, the sender, come across as a strong communicator while saving the reader’s time.

When you have defined your goals, then you can start crafting the email. Let’s begin.

Writing Effective Emails

Writing an effective email hinges on many factors:

1. You have to get the recipient to open the email.
2. Your email must make the intended impression on the reader while successfully relaying the intended message.
3. It must drive the recipient to take the desired action.

Failure at any point could hurt the email’s effectiveness. So, how can you prevent this? Let’s dive in.

1. Use a professional email address.

The first thing the recipient sees is your email address. First impressions matter. Sending an email from “[email protected]” to a hiring manager might give them the wrong impression about you and might create a bias against you. Always ensure that you send professional emails from a professional email address.

2. Have a compelling subject line.

Subject lines can make or break your email’s success. It’s often the deciding factor on whether someone will open your email.

Unfortunately, a lot of people struggle with this part.

Take a look at this example.

This particular subject line (real-life example by the way) is vague, indirect, and does not hint to me at all what the content of the email will be about.

The result? I might delete or ignore it altogether.

Here’s a better option.

It’s descriptive, specific, and tells me that this is an introduction.

Subject lines are especially important if you’re reaching out to someone for the first time. The recipient doesn’t know who you are, and can only judge you from your subject line.

Even if you’re sending emails internally at your company, it still pays to write a great subject line so your recipient has an idea of what to expect. Like any busy person, your teammates receive a ton of emails every day, and would certainly appreciate the extra effort of a descriptive subject line.

So, how do you write a good subject line?

Be clear, direct, and describe the content of your email. Don’t be afraid to take up the whole subject line. Here are some great examples of subject lines.

• [Action Required] Monthly Marketing Meeting
• FYI/Informational
• Request for [Insert here]
• [Reminder] Survey to Complete | Will Take 2 Minutes
• [Name] suggested I reach out to you
• I’m going to be in town next Tues — are you available?

If you’re sending a promotional email, avoid deceptive subject lines like:

• RE:
• FWD:
• Urgent
• Order confirmation
• Account Status

There’s no need to resort to sneaky tricks or clickbait titles just to induce an open. They make recipients feel cheated and tricked, according to a Litmus survey. You’ll lose trust and may end up in their junk mail as a result.

You want to associate positive feelings with your email, not anger and disappointment.

If you are sending promotional emails or newsletters, we recommend that you test different subject lines to see what works best for your audience. This can help you fine-tune your email strategy and improve your results over time.

3. Start with an appropriate greeting.

To kick off the email, you should begin with an appropriate greeting. There are two components to the greeting: the salutation and the opening sentence.

The appropriate salutation actually depends on the situation. If you’re writing a formal email to a bank or government institution, it would be better to start off with “Dear [X].”

If you’re sending an email to someone you know, or work in a casual environment, then it is perfectly fine to go with a “Hi [Name]” or “Hello [Name].”

There’s also “To Whom It May Concern,” when you’re sending an email to a group email and not sure who will be reading it.

One thing you want to avoid is using gendered and non-inclusive terms like “Hi guys” and “Mr./Ms/Mrs.” in your salutation.

To help you out, here is a list of salutations you can use in your emails.

• Dear [First Name]
• [Name]
• Good morning/afternoon
• Hi team
• Hey
• Hi there

Pro tip: When you are sending an email to a person for the first time, we recommend personalizing the email by addressing the recipient by name. Also, include specific details about their company and make sure to introduce yourself.

This shows that you have done your research and are genuinely interested in them. It can also help you build rapport with them and set the tone for future interactions.

4. Have a strong attention grabber.

Once you’ve gotten the salutation out of the way, it’s time to start your email.

While the subject line determines whether your email is opened, your opening sentence determines whether your email is read till the end.

Author and business coach Daniel Pink recommends using the “20-second rule” when writing emails. This means that you should try to make your main point within the first 20 seconds of the email, as this is the amount of time many people will spend reading it.

If it’s an introduction, you can open with something you know will interest your recipient. You can find this out through a little research on their social media profiles. Perhaps they Tweeted something interesting or recently posted something on LinkedIn you can reference.

This will help you build rapport and show that you’re not sending a generic email to multiple people.

Of course, this is not necessary if you’re emailing a colleague or someone you know. Instead, establish some kind of context so that they know what’s happening.

With a colleague, start with the “why.”

No one has the time (and patience) to guess what an email is about. The sooner you answer the “why,” the faster you’ll capture their attention.

Quick tip: If you’re sending out sales emails and need inspiration on exactly what to say, take a look at HubSpot’s free email templates. With this tool, you can access a library of built-in templates designed for each stage of the customer journey.

5. Keep your message concise.

We send and receive roughly 319 billion emails a day worldwide, according to Statista.

This statistic makes one thing very clear: We spend a lot of time reading emails. And because of this, many people simply scan emails to get the essence of the message and move on to the next.

With this in mind, you want to optimize your email for readability and scannability. This includes:

• Keeping paragraphs short.
• Adding bullet points.
• Using visuals to break up the text.
• Utilizing formatting tools, such as bolding or italicizing, to help draw the reader’s attention to important points.
• Using active language and avoiding jargon or technical terms that may not be familiar to the reader.

No one is eagerly awaiting a three-page essay to arrive in their inbox. Think about it this way: What’s the main takeaway from your email and is there a particular action you want your recipient to take?

From there, draft your email and when you re-read it, make sure every line you add is helping you meet this goal. If it’s not, remove it.

When you need to include a lot of information in an email, it’s probably better to suggest a phone call or a meeting instead. You can use this free meeting tool to schedule your meetings faster.

6. Be consistent with your font.

If I get an email like this, I’m immediately deleting or assuming it’s a scam.

This is an example of what not to do. There are several fonts used in the email, different font sizes along with different colors. As a result, the eye doesn’t know where to go and it’s a bit overwhelming.

Furthermore, the message gets lost, as your recipient is too distracted by all these elements fighting for their attention.

So, as a rule of thumb: Stick to one font. If you want to use a secondary one, use it sparingly. Follow the same rule for color.

If you’re using a non-English keyboard, your fonts may not show up properly on the other person’s device. Instead, use web-safe email fonts like:

• Arial.
• Courier.
• Georgia.
• Helvetica.
• Lucida Sans.
• Tahoma.
• Times New Roman.
• Trebuchet MS.
• Verdana.

In fact, this is the exact list Gmail gives.

This will ensure that your recipient will receive your message in a regular font, regardless of device or operating system.

7. Check the tone of your message.

The tone is an essential element of a professional email. It’s always helpful to start the email off in a friendly, positive tone. Here are some examples:

• “It was a pleasure meeting you at [X event].”
• “I hope you had a great weekend.”
• “Thanks for your contributions today in [X meeting].”

However, you will also want to avoid overuse of things like exclamations points and emojis, which can come across as unprofessional to certain audiences. It’s important to know the seriousness of the content and the person you are addressing to decide the tone of your email.

For example, you’ll use different tones for a thank you email after a final interview versus a status update to a peer colleague.

By reading through your email before sending it, you can ensure that the tone of voice you have used fits with your message and intended audience.

8. Write a simple closing.

Once you’re done with the content of your email, it’s time to close it off.

You don’t have to make it fancy — just keep your closing simple and straightforward.

So, nothing like this.

Instead, stick to the safe, proven closing lines and you should be good.

You can choose from some of the most common closing lines below.

• Sincerely
• Best regards
• Best
• Warm regards
• Warm wishes
• Kind regards
• Kind wishes
• Thank you
• Take care

Make sure to use a strong call-to-action (CTA) to clearly convey what you want the recipient to do next. This could be scheduling a call, filling out a form, or visiting a specific webpage.

9. Use a professional signature

Try to add a professional signature to the end of your email. Use an email signature that specifies your full name, your role, and the company you work for. You can include your company’s website and social media links.

For example, see the email signature below.

Make sure that you use simple signatures when the initial email turns into a long thread.

If you are sending an email to a coworker you should probably skip the company website and social media handles. You can make it easy on yourself by saving 2 or 3 signature templates and using the relevant ones in the emails you send.

10. Use CC and BCC fields wisely.

The more people that get added to an email chain, the more complex and tricky it can be to navigate. Remember proper etiquette when using CC and BCC fields in an email. Here’s a quick reminder:

• If you want a contact to view and respond to an email, use the CC field.
• If you are sending an email that doesn’t need a response to a wide list, use the BCC field.
• Use can also use BCC if you think the recipient won’t need to be involved in future conversations.

The main thing to consider when using these fields is the relevance to the recipient. You want to ensure that the proper stakeholders have the information they need without overwhelming them with email communications.

11. Schedule your emails.

A survey by Sleep Advisor found that around 54% of Americans check their work email immediately after or within an hour of waking up.

Another study by Litmus on the State of Email Engagement in the United States supports this. In fact, the most popular time for reading emails is in the morning. Open rates start around 6 a.m. but usually peak between 9 a.m. and noon local time.

Given this information, you can follow one of two strategies: Send your email in the morning when you know they’re scrolling, or wait for a less busy time.

On one hand, your email runs the risk of being buried if you send it in the morning. However, if you wait for a later time, your email may never get opened.

It takes trial and error to figure out what works best when emailing your team.

If you’re writing an email to someone in another state or country, factor in time zones. Noon for you may be 7 pm for someone else. As such, keep in mind who your recipient is and when they would be most receptive to your email.

Pro tip: You can use our free email scheduling tool to ensure that your emails are sent at the right time.

12. Do a final spelling and grammar check.

You’re almost there. Don’t fumble in the home stretch.

Imagine spending time crafting a perfect message, only to be ignored because the email is riddled with spelling and grammar errors.

Once you finish drafting your email, copy and paste it into Microsoft Word or Google Docs to give it a quick grammar, phrasing, and spelling check.

Alternatively, you can also use free checkers like Grammarly to automate the process while you’re drafting.

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Next, read the message out loud to make sure the sentences aren’t too long, sound clunky, or robotic. You want your email copy to sound human.

All of these tips help the reader focus on your message, not the other elements of your email.

Pro tip: Change the “undo send” option to 30 seconds. We tend to catch our mistakes seconds after the email is already sent. Extending the “undo send” option time helps to eliminate the possibility of sending a bad email.

This is a standard setting that you can change in all of the email apps. Instead of the default time period, update to 30 seconds to minimize risk.

13. Schedule a follow-up reminder.

A thoughtful follow-up email can help make sure your email gets read. Working professionals are often very busy juggling a variety of meetings, deadlines, and obligations. It’s not abnormal to forget to respond to an email promptly.

However, don’t follow up too soon. Wait a few days unless the message is urgent.

Email Writing Tips for International Teams

Most people won’t tell you this, but crafting a good email begins even before you put down a single word. It starts with your mindset.

When you’re in the correct frame of mind, you’ll be able to write effective emails that communicate and persuade.

Sounds logical … but how do you enter the “correct frame of mind”? Well, there are two ways: Put yourself in the recipient’s shoes and write the way you talk.

More on that below.

Imagine receiving the email you’re writing.

Have you ever received an email that was so incoherent you couldn’t even finish reading it, let alone even consider replying? Or included a completely irrelevant proposition?

One of the biggest problems when it comes to email writing is the lack of empathy for the recipient. Ask yourself these questions:

• Why am I emailing this person?
• Is this the right person to contact, considering what I’m trying to achieve?
• Is my message clear and to the point?
• Would this be better discussed in a meeting?
• Does each line help or hurt my goal?

This is especially important when emailing someone new but still valuable when contacting a colleague.

Write like you talk.

If you’re not a native English speaker, it’s normal to feel like you should be more formal when it comes to your email writing.

However, this results in emails that are too formal, and come off as awkward or stiff. For example:

Native English speakers write more informally. Their writing sounds like one person talking to another.

Here is a quick grammar tip that will always help you sound more native: Write in an active voice and avoid the passive voice.

An “active voice” shows that a subject is performing the verb’s action. For example, “Marilyn mailed the letter.”

In contrast, the “passive voice” shows that the verb is acted upon by the subject. In this case, “The letter was mailed by Marilyn.”

Instead of writing “your feedback would be much appreciated”, try saying “I would appreciate your feedback.” Instead of writing “your request has been received”, try “I received your request.”

Notice how writing in an active voice sounds more human.

Composing an email is like having a conversation. Just as you would consider the tone in a face-to-face conversation, you should consider the tone and style of your emails to make sure they are respectful and appropriate for the recipient.

Get Email Etiquette Right For Each Work Situation

Different work situations require different types of correspondence. Yes, all of the other rules still apply, but every situation is different.

For example, let’s say you interviewed for a job and you want to send a follow-up email after the interview. How do you go about it?

First, you personalize the email by addressing the recipient by their first name, then you express your gratitude for their time, put some emphasis on your interest in the job, and ask about the next steps in the hiring process. For instance:

Dear [interviewer’s name],

I hope your day is going well. Thank you again for the opportunity to interview for [ job title] with [ company name]. It was a pleasure to meet you and the team.

I’m following up to see if there are any updates regarding [ job title] from my interview on [date]. I’m really excited about the opportunity. If you need any more information, please let me know.

Thank you again for your time and consideration. I hope to hear from you soon!

Best regards,

[Your name]

This outline works great after an interview. However, the format would change for a different request. For example, you would use a different tone if you were asking your boss for some time off.

Be sure to familiarize yourself with professional email etiquette to help you craft the perfect message each time.

Writing an email shouldn’t be daunting. By following these simple tips, more of your messages will get read. Soon, you’ll have a reputation as a top communicator at work.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in July 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.