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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the internet and social media helped us connect with others during times of isolation. However, these digital spaces didn’t quell our desire to explore the world — that’s where the metaverse came in.

Soon, we started hearing more buzz than ever about futuristic virtual reality worlds that could allegedly supplement or expand on our own. As a marketer, you may wonder if this virtual world is worth leveraging.

In this post, I’ll walk you through what “the metaverse” really is, how you can access all sorts of virtual worlds, and where the brand potential lies in this emerging space.

What is the metaverse?

What is the purpose of the metaverse?

Metaverse Statistics Marketers Should Know

Does Meta own the metaverse?

What happens in the metaverse?

Metaverse Terms to Know

3 Popular Metaverses (And What You Can Do in Each)

5 Early Opportunities for Brands in the Metaverse [+Examples]

Should you invest in the metaverse?

 

 

What is the purpose of the metaverse?

The metaverse aims to have a virtual world where users from all over can interact and do almost everything they can do in real life and then some.

Users can explore new worlds, shop, and trade. Metaverses like Roblox even allow users to build their own games within its world. Buying real estate within the metaverse is also possible— something companies like Gucci and Warner Music Group have already done.

Metaverse Statistics Marketers Should Know

• The metaverse’s value is expected to reach $678.8 billion by 2030.
• The metaverse has over 400 million monthly active users with 230 million coming from Roblox, 165 million from Minecraft, and 85 million from Fortnite.
• 36% of online adults are interested in using the Metaverse.
• 25% of people will spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse by 2026.
• 32% of market growth in the metaverse comes from North America.
• 67% of metaverse users see it as an extension of reality.
• Of those who ever visited a metaverse, 67% own virtual items, 54% own virtual currency, and 44% own land.
• 36% of consumers say the metaverse is the future of technology.

Does Meta own the metaverse?

Because Facebook changed its name to Meta, and has a thriving virtual reality platform, you might think the company owns “the metaverse.” In reality –- and virtual reality — Meta owns one of many metaverses.

While Meta’s VR universe is called Meta Horizon Worlds, and is accessed through the company’s Meta VR headsets (formally titled Oculus), there are many other metaverses that early adopters have been using for years.

What happens in the metaverse?

To explain what happens in the metaverse, we’ll dive into a few types of metaverses and explain what you or your brand can do in each. But, before we dive deeper, here are some definitions you’ll want to remember (and links to more context, courtesy of the HubSpot Blogs and our partners at The Hustle):

Metaverse Terms to Know

• NFT: The much-buzzed-aboutnon-fungible token is a finite or unique digital token, such as digital art, avatar clothing, or VR-based objects, that you can purchase ownership of or stake in.
  Deep in its blockchain-based coding, there’s a certificate saying that you own or have ownership in the item. (And, yes. There’s much more complexity herethan a quick definition can explain.)
• NFT Real-Estate: A non-fungible digital house or piece of land in the metaverse that can be invested in, sold, or even rented out. Buyers get a digital deed or certificate saying they own the real estate.
• Blockchain: A digital ledger of transactions, certificates, and contracts.
• Cryptocurrency:Digital money that you can invest in, sell, or use to purchase products online or in a metaverse. Each type of digital coinage has different values. Popular examples include Bitcoin, Ether, and Dogecoin.
• Open-source: Open to all users for editing and not usuallycontrolled by a brand or single entity.

Open-source metaverses can be founded by developers who market and do maintenance on the world, but might not have an obvious company owning them — or customer service when something goes wrong.

However, they often allow much more freedom to the users.

Now that you have those quick definitions, let’s take a look at some of the most discussed metaverses out there.

3 Popular Metaverses (And What You Can Do in Each)

While there are many metaverses out there, and we’d love to talk about them all, I’ve focused this post around the three metaverses that are most buzzed about today.

And, because many metaverses have a lot of similar opportunities for brands, I’ll break down brand opportunities (and show you examples of them) in the following section.

Meta Horizon Worlds

Meta’s universe can be accessed by Meta headsets sold by the company (which were previously called Oculus headsets).

While this universe can only be accessed by headsets at the moment, Mark Zuckerberg has already discussed trying to expand the experience to contact lenses and even holographic experiences in the far term.

Although this metaverse is potentially the most well-known to late adopters and marketers, it is one of the newest major metaverses.

Once you enter Horizon Worlds, you can do almost anything that all earlier metaverses allowed users to do, including:

• Creating your avatar or virtual likeness.
• Talking to other people in the Meta Horizons world.
• Playing games with other Meta Horizons users.
• Asking a Meta support rep (also in the metaverse) questions.
• Teleporting to different locations and experiences within the universe.
• Purchase digital products, such as virtual clothing, from the Horizons Marketplace.

Two key things that make Horizon Worlds different from other major metaverses we’ll discuss below are:

1. That it’s centralized,which means it has a known owner, limitations of how the platform can be used, and rules that users must agree to. When you’re in Horizon Worlds, you agree to terms of use and must follow rules or you can be ejected.

   Meanwhile, other decentralized metaverses have minimal rules, management, and regulations since they usually have initial creators or developers, but tha owners step away from site on the platforms and give freedom to the users.

   In fact, to ensure that users are behaving and learning how to use the Horizon Worlds space, virtual Meta staffers are usually present in each public space:

2. You can’t buy land or monetize your brand in Horizon Worlds just yet. While Horizon Worlds does offer a general marketplace, there are no other clear ways to generate revenue on the platform. Meanwhile, on other metaverses that we’ll discuss below, one major goal of users is to buy, sell, or monetize virtual real-estate.

The Sandbox

The Sandbox is one of the oldest decentralized gaming metaverses. Created as a video game in 2018, it has quickly evolved into the metaverse it is known as today and has gained interest from metaverse and NFT investors.

Once you enter this metaverse, your character can buy and build on land with crypto called SAND or LAND. From there, you can sell your land, rent it out, meet people, make connections, and even get paid and buy more land via Sandbox jobs — like architect or landlord.

Sandbox, which is desktop-based, reminds me of an extreme LEGO universe with Minecraft features. Here’s a quick preview reel to give you an idea of what it looks like.

Because of its age and credibility in the metaverse space, Sandbox is home to many affluent early adopters who already own real estate there. The adopters include major gaming companies like Attari, clothing companies like Adidas, and the rapper Snoop Dogg.

Additionally, because land plots and the number of SAND tokes that will be created in the game are considered “finite,” the price of the real estate and tokens in this metaverse have skyrocketed in recent years.

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Decentraland

One of the most popular metaverses that early adopters have explored and invested in is Decentraland.

Created in Argentina by developers Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano, has been notable for its vast cities and millions of dollars in virtual land and NFT real estate.

As its title would hint, Decentraland is also decentralized, meaning that anyone can create in this virtual open platform. Unlike Horizon Worlds, it can only be accessed by personal computers.

A lot of information to consider and unsure where to start? Below is a comparison chart to help.

Metaverse Comparison Chart
Name	Meta Horizon Worlds	Decetraland	Sandbox
Years Active	Less than 2 years	6 years	10+ years (launched as a video game)
Estimated Number Users	100K reported users(unknown daily users)	300K reported users (8,000 reported daily users)	2 million+ reported users
Owner	Meta	Developers run the platform but it’s mostly decentralized.	Pixowl (Land ownership is decentralized)
Availability	US and Canada for 18+ users only	Global	Global
Equipment Needed to Access	A Meta or Oculus VR headset	Personal computer	Personal computer
Cost to Access	Accessed with an Oculus or Meta headset (prices vary)	Free to access, but users need a digital wallet with tokens called MANA and LAND to access most experiences.	Free to access with an account, but users need a digital wallet with tokens called SAND to access most experiences.
Gaming Opportunities	Various free team and individual games	Users can play and create games.	Users can play and create game.
Social interactions with other users	Yes	Yes	Yes
NFT Art/Product Shopping	Not yet.	Yes	Yes
NFT Real Estate	Not yet.	Yes	Yes
Virtual Events	Yes	Yes	Yes
Virtual customer service available?	Yes	No	No
Crypto-currency and USD conversion (as of March 2022)	You can’t make purchases in Horizon Worlds.	MANA (1 MANA = $2.69 USD at time of post	SAND (1 SAND = $3.49 USD at time of post

5 Early Opportunities for Brands in the Metaverse [+Examples]

While each virtual world has slightly different experiences, environments, and audience targets associated with it, many of them host a handful of opportunities for brands that want to embrace emerging marketing strategies.

Here are just a few ways brands can leverage some of the metaverses that exist today:

1. Virtual Events

While virtual events are still being developed for general businesses on Horizon Worlds, Decentraland, Sandbox, and other virtual worlds host many landowners that will to rent out their virtual space for events or virtual parties.

Similarly, some companies and entrepreneurs have also built their own lands with the goal of using them for events like NFT art shows, conferences, or meetups.

If you can afford to run, host, or even sponsor part of an event, you can gain crypto revenue or awareness from users who are interested in the topic, while also gaining awareness for your product or service.

For example, here’s a video of a TikTok user who attended an Afro Tech conference in a metaverse.

While INBOUND and HubSpot haven’t hosted a conference in a metaverse just yet, we too are embracing the possibility of virtual events by building out a similar platform for INBOUND 2023‘s hybrid attendees.

If you’d like to get a virtual conference experience without committing to a metaverses digital currency or platform, consider registering for our event.

If you don’t have the budget for creating virtual events just yet, you can still consider attending, buying a ticket for one, or even speaking at one.

While there, you can use it as a networking opportunity to get to know others in your industry or potential prospects who might even buy your product outside of VR.

2. Influencer and Community Marketing

In any metaverse, you could potentially talk to a handful of people at once, while casually mentioning your product or even wearing NFT clothes with your logo.

You could also pay people who are familiar with their metaverse or selling in the metaverse to continue to spread the word about your brand or services for you.

But, influencer and community marketing might not just stop there.

If you find that your metaverse has an audience of users that are interested in your product, service, or industry, you can work to bring them together – even if you can’t afford or figure out how to schedule a virtual event.

For example, you could host a meetup on your brand’s virtual land or in a free-to-access metaverse space for those who want to chat about topics rated to your industry or product.

And, while you’re there, you could just open the door to casual conversation. Or, you could all join a fun game and bond, then get to know each other in a less active space.

Not only will you network, show credibility, and spread the word about your product, but you’ll build a group of people that are interested in your industry, similar topics, or your brand.

3. Owning Branded Locations, Games, Avatar Fashion, and/or Shops

In many metaverses, including Decentraland and the Sandbox, brands with a solid budget can buy and brand real estate, such as art galleries or stores where you can purchase NFT products.

While Meta Horizon Worlds doesn’t allow this opportunity yet, it will no doubt be an expanded feature eventually, but might be more structured than decentralized worlds that have fewer limitations.

One experiential example is the prospect of Welmart stores in Meta Horizon Worlds.

In 2021, Walmart released a demonstration of how they envisioned a metaverse store that helps people in VR order physical Walmart products that would then be shipped to their actual home addresses:

Horizon Worlds is just exploring how to monetize experiences for businesses.

However, Decentraland and Sandbox, among other metaverses, have had digital shops (primarily for buying NFTs), car and teleportation device dealerships, art galleries, and paid brand experience locations for years.

4. Advertising on or Sponsoring Metaverse Content

While this might be more challenging and a tad riskier in decentralized metaverses, brands can provide money to creators, events, games, experiences, shops, and galleries to get their products, logos, or NFTs featured or mentioned.

One way to get started could be by researching NFT land owners with a history of advertising, which can be done on the web, as well as in VR. One business I came across while doing research for this piece was NFT Plazas.

The brand claims to own NFT real-estate and plazas where many avatars spend time and will project ads, QR codes, or special digital experiences on their buildings or plaza signs.

Here’s a reel that highlights some of its work in Decentraland:

This is a great way to spread the word about your brand if you need the means to build your virtual land.

However, you’ll ideally want to make sure you know who the creators are in the natural, non-virtual world, ensure you trust them, look out for scams, and use easy-to-understand paper trails or contracts whenever you can.

Remember, when you’re in a decentralized world, there won’t always be a customer service rep or legal entity to contact if you provide coinage to avatars that can’t be found later.

5. Inbound Sales and Networking

Today, many marketers and sales reps find ourselves messaging, zooming, and emailing prospects to tell them about our product or service. And, rarely, we might go to a networking event or meeting where we talk face-to-face.

Now, imagine doing all of this – but digitally with avatars. In almost all metaverses, you can explore a place and talk to other users for free.

If you sell or market a B2C product, you could casually discuss the product in conversation, as you would with anyone else you’re networking with, and then tell users where they can learn more.

While you still might not be able to send them to a branded experience, virtual shop, or have them click a link to your website just yet, you can still spread the word to multiple people on a more personal level than an email without leaving your seat.

If you work in the VR or metaverse space, you could also leverage sales more extremely by selling NFT items, like art, real estate, or virtual cars.

While it seems many virtual salespeople don’t record transactions and post them for the world, here’s a video of someone buying a car from a dealership salesperson. wrong in a metaverse.

If you’re wondering, “Where could I go to ensure I’m talking to the right people?” one opportunity is attending virtual events, which I’ll discuss next.

Should you invest in the metaverse?

Today, metaverse audiences are still growing, there’s still a learning curve for users, and some brands and audiences will only able to afford virtual world investments shortly.

But, it’s important to remember that the metaverse is getting the same skepticism as social media did when MySpace and Facebook began to launch.

In a world where technology is quickly evolving and improving, what’s not accessible to all today will be used by most people in the future.

If you’re an enterprise brand that can afford to take risks and explore emerging virtual worlds, it might be worth considering the marketing strategies above. You may even want to create a task force to determine if the metaverse is a worthy investment for you.

For other brands, it might be a while before you really need to start considering metaverse opportunities. But that doesn’t mean you should wipe it from your emerging trend radar completely.

In the coming year, a few things could really change the game for brands in the VR space, including:

• New Meta Horizon Worlds Features. Every time Meta has launched or purchased a platform, its next major step has been figuring out how to monetize the content and build brand tools for it. Horizon Worlds could be no different.

  And, because Meta platforms have been a trusted source for ad revenue and brands for years, expect to see brands flocking here when and if monetization tools are launched.

• Metaverse competition:Like social media platforms, there are also new metaverses popping up all the time, and their creators (even if we don’t know them) all want them to be superior to pull in more users.

  This could create metaverse competition and these worlds could see new features aimed to pull in more users and more monetization opportunities for all sorts of brands. Similarly, large companies that specialize in VR might opt out of using decentralized worlds and might follow-suit of Meta by developing their own worlds.

• More accessible technology: Currently, VR users must have an incredibly strong internet connection and a computer, while Horizon Worlds users must have an Oculus or Meta headset (starting at $300).

  While most people around the globe can access the internet, millions still struggle to access high speeds that would allow for VR. But, as VR gains more interest and we see the launch of technology like 5G and Web3 in many global regions, these experiences could require less machinery and lower finances to access.

Ultimately, the metaverse is vast, complex, and growing. And although we’ll do our best to keep you up to date, you’ll need to do some digging and understand your persona to know if investing time, money, or crypto in it is right for your brand.

 

Whatever your niche or industry, there’s no debate: Effective communication —both internal and external — is critical to your company’s success. With more technology available than ever before, you’d think it would be easy to master.

But new data published by Project.co reveals that businesses in 2023 are still struggling to effectively communicate — with serious implications for the customer experience.

In this article, we’ll dive into the data.

Current State of Business Communication

While 99% of consumers say it’s important that a business communicates well with them as a customer, a mere 7% of businesses rate their communication as “excellent.”

More than double this number rate themselves as “below average” or “poor.”

And the impact on the customer experience is clear: More than two-thirds of people say poor communication has led them to stop dealing with a company and jump ship to a competitor.

Brands know they need to do better – and customers demand that they do better. But when it comes to brands actually doing better – it seems that’s far easier said than done.

So what’s going on?

What does great communication look like?

Perhaps the best place to start here is to look through the lens of the customer.

What is it that they want from companies? What does great communication actually look like?

For a start, customers want to be informed. In fact, 94% of customers surveyed say it’s important they know (or can find out) updates related to their purchase or project, such as its status and the next deliverable.

Customers also want companies to note and remember details so they don’t have to repeat themselves. 87% of people say they’ve had to repeat themselves to the businesses they buy from, and 79% find this annoying.

Full, thorough communication makes a big difference. We all know, from our own experiences as customers, that errors and delays can often be forgiven as long as they’re clearly communicated and explained.

Beyond this, there’s been plenty of research around response speed, particularly how quickly companies are able to go back to messages and what customers expect.

A SuperOffice study showed that nearly half of all customers (46%) expect companies to respond to their messages in less than four hours.

Yet, the average response time, based on a sample size of 1,000 companies, was more than three times this – and the slowest response time was eight days.

In essence, it seems that great communication boils down to:

• Visibility: A thorough overview of where things are up to.
• Organization: Information stored and distributed in an organized way, available to be called upon when needed, with no need for customer follow-up.
• Attitude: Conscientious, thorough, and honest messaging.
• Efficiency: Fast and timely responses.

The Impact of Poor Communication

Communication sound simple, but the price of not delivering on it is steep.

When businesses were asked how communication issues had affected their business, here’s what they said:

• 68% said they’d wasted time.
• 53% had missed messages.
• 42% had experienced burnout, stress, or fatigue.
• 35% had lost files.
• 30% felt the customer experience had directly suffered.
• 12% had lost customers to competitors.
• 10% said they’d lost employees.

Clearly, that’s a broad spectrum of crucial metrics hampered by an inability to get communication right.

So why are brands getting it wrong?

If the core pillars of effective communication – visibility, organization, attitude, and efficiency – are so simple and there are more tools available than ever before to help, then why are so many companies still in such a mess?

The truth is, companies just haven’t found a way to adapt. The data suggests that they’re using technology – but often flawed technology with no central source of truth.

It suggests a particular over-reliance on email. When asked how they primarily communicate with their co-workers, 31% of people said email — the most commonly cited answer.

For client communication, it’s even more dominant, being used by nearly two-thirds of businesses and dominating over every other channel.

Email has plenty of benefits, of course. It’s fast, easy, and simple. But when it comes to collaborating and trying to create in-sync teams, it can often make things more confusing and decrease opportunities for spontaneous brainstorming.

Communication inevitably becomes siloed, happening in private inboxes away from the rest of your team and beyond the view of management — which sometimes results in crossed wires, confusion, lost files, and wasted time.

What did Person A promise the client three weeks ago? What was that crucial note the client told Person B by email before the project got started? Where did Person C put the brand guidelines the client emailed over?

Information isn’t shared effectively – and that’s where problems begin.

And what about the impact on work-life balance?

With increasing access to work emails outside the office, there’s a pervasive sense for many that the work never really ends. For many, the temptation — or worse, requirement — to check email off-hours is eating into family and leisure time, resulting in stress and anxiety.

According to Teamstage, 40% of employees use their devices for work outside office hours, to do over a quarter of their work. This lack of division between work and leisure time can only hinder productivity, not to mention health and well-being.

Client and Customer Communication: Two Sides of the Same Coin

While we tend to treat client communication and internal team communication as entirely separate things, the reality is that they’re inextricably linked. Poor internal communication directly affects customer communication.

When team members don’t have the information they need, it’s impossible for them to share it with customers – leaving the customer uninformed and unhappy.

Poor organization, missed messages and lost files create additional work for team members – which creates unnecessary, avoidable delays for the customer.

When teams communicate poorly internally, they often spend huge amounts of time fixing problems, correcting mistakes, and looking for information.

And it all means a less efficient team, and less time to focus on the customer experience. In the end, no amount of relationship-building can make up for not delivering the basics.

The Changing World of Work

On the surface, it seems that many of these issues are exacerbated by the rise of remote work.

Business leaders and pundits have been quick to question the impact of working remotely on a business’s ability to communicate effectively.

Although hybrid working has established itself to some extent, 44% of people surveyed by Project.co are still working fully remotely, with less than one in five back in the office full-time.

The thing is, office-based working was never a solution for communication, and it still isn’t.

Project.co found that, when people use a project management tool to communicate with clients, customers, or both, they were significantly more effective.

What’s more, using a project management tool to communicate with clients is strongly associated with:

• Better internal efficiency
• Better customer experience
• Increased rate of project success
• Better employee wellbeing

Using a project management tool for co-worker communication has a similar range of benefits with an even stronger correlation.

Across every data point, people find it easier to communicate effectively, measure project progress, and keep information organized and accessible when they use an online tool.

Click here to see all the data from the Project.co Communication Statistics 2023 survey.

Wrapping up

So, there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news is businesses have a lot of work to do. The numbers suggest they’re aware of this, but perhaps too overwhelmed by the task to take meaningful action.

These problems won’t simply resolve themselves, however, without positive action from managers and strong buy-in from teams.

It takes strong, decisive leadership to identify the need for change, explore to find the right systems, tools, and software, and then drive change throughout the organization.

But the good news — as this data shows — is that taking this action is the start of a road that leads to satisfied customers, reduced customer and employee churn, and a happier, healthier team.

Is it a challenge? Of course. But it’s one well worth facing down.

Running a website requires input and strategy from your whole business team (developers/engineers, marketers/UX, sales, etc.). Using Content Management Software (or CMS) helps you deliver a great product to your customers while granting easy code access for your developers/engineers.

Without a good integration between your content management software and your other systems, something as simple as successfully sending a follow-up email after a form submission can become a massive time suck.

Let’s explore the characteristics you need for any content management software tool and the ten best content management software tools for marketers. Feel free to use the following jump links to navigate or just scroll.

• Content Management Software Tool Characteristics

• Best Content Management Software Tools

Characteristics of the Best Content Management Software Tools

Here are some features marketers should feel good about in a content management software tool.

1. A powerful, flexible editor.

As marketers, we need to be able to do things like quickly produce a landing page for a Facebook campaign, make simple layout changes to a page (like adding a column or testimonials module), and easily edit the content on existing pages (like changing some of the text of your homepage to promote your upcoming annual conference).

A powerful WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editor is critical, so if you can, ensure you’re comfortable making changes within the content management software tool.

2. The ability to test.

It’s crucial you’re able to understand what’s working, so you can do more of the good stuff. You need to be able to efficiently run tests on outcomes for different headlines, layouts, and more. It’s especially critical when doing something like a paid campaign, where maximizing results is tied directly to spending.

3. The opportunity for increased collaboration.

Chances are, you have a team of people working on one website.

You may have a developer who works on complex design pieces and integrations, a marketer who runs the day-to-day and manages campaigns, and content creators who write blog posts.

The ability to collaborate within the content management software tool and set permissions makes life a lot easier — and ensures issues don’t arise like your social manager accidentally overwriting the developers’ code.

4. Accessibility to support.

Oftentimes, your developer can fill this need — but that can get expensive if you’re paying by the hour. It’s maybe not mission critical, but it sure is nice to have a support team you can call for help when you need it, especially when it’s halting your ability to launch a campaign.

5. Ability to integrate with the rest of your tools.

Last but probably most importantly, you need your content management software to integrate with the rest of your tech stack. Generally, the best choices here will be open platforms or all-in-one solutions.

Ideally, it should at least be able to integrate forms with a mailing tool (for lead/ mailing list collection), as well as your CRM or some kind of database, so you can personalize content. Additionally, you’ll want to integrate with your CRM to customize pages and add pages quickly and easily.

Now that we’ve explored five critical components of any content management software tool let’s explore our ten favorites.

1. CMS Hub

CMS Hub by HubSpot is more than just a content management software tool since it lives on your CRM.

HubSpot’s content management software tool has nice features like A/B testing, but it’s particularly powerful regarding features like personalized content and smart content. If you’re using HubSpot’s marketing platform, it also works seamlessly with forms, your email list, and database management.

For instance, you want a list of everyone in your database who visited your pricing page in the last 30 days. This is incredibly easy to do with HubSpot’s content management software and CRM.

It also scores well on the design side — like any content management software tool, it offers predesigned templates, a developer platform, and a network of partners certified in the content management software.

There are also some great out-of-the-box features designed to help with content creation — like the ability to natively host video and add forms and calls-to-action in the video using the native editor, along with video analytics and a YouTube analytics integration.

Some of the features marketers will love on a platform level are the ability to partition content, so it’s easier for teams to work together. Additionally, you can publish content behind passwords and easily personalize content. Best of all, its high-quality security and hosting take the worry out of the technical side. And, of course, you get top-notch analytics since everything works together.

2. Squarespace

Squarespace offers beautiful out-of-the-box designs with tons of customization options. You can easily download any theme and change colors, fonts, and other design elements. It seems geared more toward the end user than the developer, so most edits are made in a WYSIWYG design editor.

Behind the scenes, they boast high-quality, secure hosting — something that isn’t always top of mind when selecting a content management software tool but probably should be. It also allows for unlimited bandwidth and storage, which isn’t always the case if you’re buying hosting on its own.

It’s also nice to have a support team, and Squarespace has a team that answers support tickets, so you’re not totally on your own or stuck calling a developer for every question. Additionally, it offers incredibly useful help documentation.

Squarespace offers tons of modules and integrations, although you might want to check their built-in integrations to make sure the rest of your tech stack will play well with Squarespace.

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3. Wix

Wix has many templates and a free plan that gives you unlimited pages. If you need to get an online presence up and running right away, it’s a great choice.

They also have paid plans that give you additional features, including increased storage, the ability to add forms, a calendar, and access to VIP Support.

It’s important to note Wix is a bit tougher to customize — they don’t give access to CSS, although they do say you can “take full control of your website’s functionality with JavaScript and Wix Code API’s.”

Additionally, inserting third-party code (like tracking code) can be challenging, so eventually, as your business grows, you or your developer may want something with a bit more customization capability.

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4. WordPress

And next, we come to WordPress. WordPress is everywhere — it’s a popular platform and has a large ecosystem of developers, designers, and plenty of others who are familiar with it.

The content management software tool itself is free, although you’ll need to pay for hosting and probably a template at the very least, and more likely a developer or designer to help you get it up and running.

Your ease of use here will likely depend on how it’s set up and which theme you use — some have simple WYSIWYG editors, while others are more complex. You’ll want to discuss this with your developer since once it’s built, there isn’t much you can change.

It’s also incredibly customizable. There are a ton of plugins and add-ons you can use to help with anything from SEO, speed, automatic image resizing, and more.

WordPress also implements automatic background updates that help reduce any security issues that may arise.

On the hosting side, we recommend a hosting platform specializing in WordPress, like WP Engine, since the support teams are well-versed in WordPress — which means they can help with questions and offer additional resources. Using a popular theme with plenty of existing help documentation or a support team can make a huge difference.

It’s important to note the openness of the platform results in a vulnerability to hacking (this is another reason to get a good host). Be aware that addressing security should be part of the initial plan and not be an afterthought to design since security breaches are hard to fix and require technical expertise.

However, WordPress addresses this issue by having frequent, automatic background updates. Security issues are usually because hackers prey on old software. With automatic background updates, this is a significantly reduced issue.

5. Joomla

While these are ten popular choices for marketers, many more are out there. The options are endless for content management software tools. Ultimately, you must consider your workflow, your team, and the workflows you have in place to help you make the best decision.

 

Did you know you could schedule your Instagram posts in advance? Or optimize your bio to appear in the Explore tab?

There are countless lesser-known Instagram features, settings, hacks, and search options to help take your Instagram game to the next level. And we’ve compiled them all, here.

Whether you’re a recruiter looking to showcase company culture, a eCommerce marketer, or just an individual looking to use Instagram in the best ways possible, here are Instagram tips and features for you to use.

Note: Before getting started, make sure you’re operating on the latest version of Instagram. At the time of publishing this guide, the latest version is 273on iOS and on Android. Please also note that although this article might demonstrate each tip below using an iPhone or Android device, all items on this list are available for both operating systems and can be enjoyed using the same step-by-step instructions.

Table of Contents:

• Instagram Account Features
• Instagram Design Features
• Instagram Optimization Features
• Instagram Reels Features
• Instagram Stories Features
• Instagram User Preferences Features
• Instagram User Search Features

41 Hidden Instagram Hacks, Tips, and Features

Instagram Account Features

1. Add and manage multiple accounts from the same device.

Have a separate account for your dog? Don’t be embarrassed; stand by your puppy profile. In fact, whether it’s a pet account or a business account, you can add and manage this one right alongside your personal account.

Here’s how:

1. From your profile, tap the gear icon. To find this icon on an Android device, you’ll first need to tap the three horizontal lines to the top right of your screen.
2. Scroll to the very bottom and tap “Add Account.”
3. Add your other account by username and password, and you’re all set.

To toggle between both profiles, hold down your profile picture in the navigation bar to view all connected accounts.

2. See all the posts you’ve liked.

Ever wanted to see the post you’ve liked all in one place? All you have to do is go to your profile, click the three lines on the top right (on Android and iOS), tap “Your Activity,” tap “Interactions,” and then click “Likes.”

With this, you can see 300 of the last posts you’ve liked.

To un-like any posts you’ve Liked, simply go to the post and deselect the “heart” icon below it. Don’t worry — the user won’t be notified that you’ve un-Liked the post.

3. Hide, delete, or disable comments and likes on your posts.

Twitter may carry a more “anything goes” culture of commentary, but your Instagram is your domain — and it’s much easier to control who says what on your content. This is especially important if you manage a business account.

To Filter Comments by Keyword:

Navigate to Settings and tap “Privacy,” then “Hidden Words.” You can toggle “Hide comments” to filter general offensive words or click “Manage custom words and phrases for messages, comments, and posts” to add custom filters.

To Delete Comments:

Tap the speech bubble icon below the comment you’d like to delete, and swipe lightly to the left over this text. Select the garbage can icon that appears to delete this post. You can also do this to your own comments.

To Disable Comments Entirely:

To clarify, you can’t turn off comments across your entire profile; you can only disable them for individual posts.

To do so, start posting an image on which you’d like nobody to comment. When you reach the page to add a caption, tags, and location, tap “Advanced Settings” at the very bottom. This will open a screen where you can easily switch on an option labeled “Turn Off Commenting.”

4. Clear your Instagram search history.

To clear your Instagram search history (on Android and iOS), go to your profile, tap Settings, then “Your activity.” Tap “Recent searches” and click “Clear all.”

5. Add another Instagram account to your bio.

Perhaps your company has more than one Instagram account for different aspects of your brand. For instance, HubSpot has a verified HubSpot account, a HubSpot Life account, a HubSpot Academy account, and a HubSpot Partners account.

To draw awareness back to its main company page, then, HubSpot links to the @HubSpot account in its other account bios, like in @HubSpotLife’s account:

Fortunately, you have the option to include another Instagram account in your Instagram bio. To do so, simply type the “@” sign into your Bio, and then select the account you’d like to tag. Then, click “Done.”

6. Communicate with your audience using Instagram Broadcast channels.

Broadcast Channels is Instagram’s newest feature, and it is a messaging tool for creators to engage directly with a large group of followers.

Creators can share updates and behind-the-scenes content as text, video, voice notes, and images. Followers can’t send messages but can enjoy the content, react to content, and vote in polls.

As of February 2023, the feature is currently in Beta mode for U.S. creators only.

Instagram Design Features

7. Add special fonts to your bio.

Here’s an Instagram bio hack that can truly make your profile stand out. You can already add emojis to the bio beneath your profile photo, but your keyboard limits your creativity right there.

Using a couple of basic third-party websites, you can copy over some more special fonts not often found in the Instagram community. Here’s how.

To Add a Special Font to Your Bio via Mobile:

Add a new font to your Instagram bio via your mobile device using a website like LingoJam. Open the site on your phone, type your desired bio text in the lefthand text box, and you’ll see the same bio text in different typefaces appear on the right.

Carry your chosen font over to your Instagram bio by tapping it and selecting “Copy.” Then, open your Instagram app, navigate to your profile, select “Edit Profile,” tap the “Bio” section and paste your chosen font into the empty field.

To Add a Special Font to Your Bio on Desktop:

If you’re editing your Instagram profile on your laptop or desktop, Font Space has a library of fonts you can download and copy into your bio in seconds. To do so, Find a font you like and select “Download” beneath the font’s sample image, as shown below.

Downloading this font will open a folder on your desktop where you can pull a “.ttf” file that carries the various versions of this font. The file will look something like the screenshot below.

Once you have this font copied to your computer’s clipboard, open your internet browser and log onto Instagram.com. Select “Edit Profile” and paste your downloaded font into your bio field. You can then edit the sample text that came with your font to write your new bio as you see fit.

8. Add special characters to your bio.

Not only can you customize your bio with a special font, but you can also add atypical characters that distinguish you or your brand — but that you wouldn’t find on your smartphone’s normal keyboard. These include§,†, or even™ if your Instagram name features a trademarked product name.

To Add Special Characters From Mobile

Using your mobile device, install a free mobile app likeCharacter Pad, which catalogs nearly every character and symbol you might need but won’t find in the 26-letter English alphabet.

Open the app and find the character you want to add to your Instagram bio. In Character Pad, you’ll simply double-tap the picture of your chosen symbol to paste it into a text box, as shown below. Then, copy this character to your phone’s clipboard. (For our purposes, I double-tapped the half moon icon.)

Once you have your symbol copied to your clipboard, open Instagram, navigate to your bio, and tap “Edit Profile.”
Hold down your finger on the field of your bio you want to insert your special character until “Paste” appears as an option, as shown below. Tap “Paste” and then “Done” you’ll be all set.

To Add Special Characters From a PC

You can also insert special characters and symbols through Instagram’s web client on a desktop or laptop computer. The easiest way is to use Microsoft Word’s “Symbol” insertion icon, as shown below.

Select your desired symbol or character and copy it to your computer’s clipboard. Then, navigate to Instagram.com and follow the steps above to paste your character into a particular part of your bio.

You might be tempted to simply Google search the special character you want, and at times it might work just as well as the steps above. But keep in mind not all special characters you copy from the internet are “clean” when you paste them into Instagram — some of them might become corrupted or not show up correctly.

9. Reorder filters to set your favorite filters at the front.

If you use Instagram a lot, chances are, you have a few favorite go-to filters, and others you never touch. To make editing photos easier, you can reorder the filters in your editing window.

To reorder filters, add a new post and begin editing it. When you get to the filters page, hold down on a filter you’d like to move, and then drag it to your preferred location.

10. Use Instagram as a photo editor (without having to post anything).

Perhaps you love Instagram’s filters and editing capabilities, but aren’t quite ready to post the photo to your account — right now, or ever. To use Instagram as a photo editor without posting anything, all you need to do is publish a picture while your phone is on airplane mode.

First, be sure you have “Save Original Photo” turned on in your Instagram settings.

Next, follow the normal steps to post a photo to Instagram: Upload the photo, edit it, and press “Share.” An error message will appear saying the upload failed, but you’ll be able to find the edited image in your phone’s photo gallery.

11. Insert line breaks into your bio and captions.

When you write a caption in Instagram, you’ll see the keyboard doesn’t give you an option to press “Enter” or “Return.” The same is true for your bio. So how do all those people put line breaks in there?

It turns out that all you have to do is press the “123” key in the bottom left corner of the keyboard, and the “Return” key will appear on the bottom right.

I know this tip sounds simple, but a lot of people miss it — myself included, until a colleague clued me in. We’ve seen some elaborate solutions out there for hacking through this problem, like writing the caption copy in another app, then copying and pasting it into Instagram. Thankfully, it’s much simpler than that.

Instagram Optimization Features

12. Pin important content to the top of your Instagram Grid.

f you have an Instagram post that you want to call attention to, you can pin it to the top of your profile grid.

To do this, pick the Reel or image post you want to pin.In the top right corner of the post, tap the three dots and click “Pin to your profile.”

The post will now show up at the top of your grid.

This is a valuable tool to share ongoing partnerships with your followers, draw attention to popular content, and make sure new followers or browsers can immediately see the most important content you want to share with them.

13. Optimize your Instagram bio to appear in the Explore tab.

Your friends, family, and coworkers might be your first group of Instagram followers, but growing your audience takes more than the people who already know you. One key way to do this is to get your profile to appear in Instagram’s Explore page.

The Explore page, accessible using the magnifying glass icon shown above, is a browsing page that sorts the entire Instagram community by topic and keyword. These include “Fitness,” “Style,” “Science,” and more.

Hashtagging your posts with these words can expose your content to the people browsing these topics, but you can also use them in your Instagram name and bio to promote your profile.

If Jane Doe is a marketing consultant, for example, she might want to make her Instagram name “Jane Doe Marketing,” rather than simply “Jane Doe.” Then, in her bio, she can include all of her specialties, such as “SEO,” “blogging,” “email marketing,” etc.

14. Drive traffic to an external website.

One of the biggest frustrations people have with marketing on Instagram is that clickable URLs aren’t allowed anywhere except the single “website” box in your bio. If you put a URL in a photo caption it’ll appear as plain text, meaning users would have to painstakingly copy the URL, open a web browser, and paste or type it in there.

One sneaky way to get people to visit your Instagram profile, which is where that one clickable URL is allowed, is to use your photo captions to encourage people to visit your profile for a link. Then, update that URL frequently to point to your latest blog content, YouTube video, product, or offer.

Check out the example below from the food magazine Bon Appétit, where it includes a link in its bio that draws people to external Bon Appétit content.

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If you have a verified Instagram account, you can also add links to your Story. Read more about this feature here.

15. Sell products from Instagram using Shoppable Posts.

You might already know you can tag people in your Instagram posts as (or after) you post new content. Now, you can tag products — and direct your viewers to a product page to buy what they saw.

To Add an Instagram Business Account

You’ll need an Instagram Business account to publish shoppable posts. You can get one by selecting “Edit Profile” on your Instagram profile and tapping “Try Instagram Business Tools,” as shown below.

To Tag a Post With Products

Once you’ve launched an Instagram Business account, you’ll need to enable product tags to use them on a post that depicts a product. Navigate to your settings using the gear icon from your profile page, and select “Products.” Tap “Continue” and follow the prompts to connect a “product catalog” to your business profile.

With product tags enabled on your Instagram Business account, you can now upload new posts and tag your photo with products you find from your product catalog. Here’s what a shoppable post can look like:

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16. Create an auto-complete quick reply for standard responses.

Responding to user comments and questions is incredibly timely, but fortunately, there’s a hack to streamline the process and make it more efficient. (Note: This only works on Instagram Business accounts.)

You can simply create a one-to-two word phrase that can act as your shortcut to a longer standard response you might send often. To do this, click “Business” in your Settings, and then “Quick Replies” — or, click the three-dot chat bubble icon on bottom of screen, and then click “New Quick Reply”.

Add a shortcut you can enter for the response. For instance, you might type “returnpolicy” as the shortcut for a longer response, i.e.: “Hey there. We’re sorry you don’t love your purchase. Fortunately, we permit 30-day returns, no questions asked. Please send us your order confirmation number to get the process started.”

Once you’ve added a shortcut, you can either type the shortcut “returnpolicy” into the comment box when you want it to auto-generate, or you can tap the three-dot chat Quick Replies bubble icon at the bottom of your screen to choose from a response you’ve created. (Read more about Quick Replies here.)

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17. Pin your Instagram post to Pinterest.

Instagram doesn’t have a natural integration with many social networks (except Facebook, its parent company) for publishing Instagram posts to other social accounts.

But with respect to Pinterest, image-loving platforms stick together. Here’s a backdoor way to Pin your latest Instagram Story to Pinterest:

On the Instagram mobile app, tap a post to view it in full, then tap the three dots to the top-right of the image. Select “Copy Share URL” to attach the picture’s link to your clipboard.

Open the Pinterest mobile app — or download it; you’ll need it for this step — and navigate to your profile page. If you have the latest version of Pinterest downloaded, it might ask you as soon as you open the app if you’d like to produce the image from your clipboard.

If not, select the “+” icon to the top right to add a new pin, and you’ll see a menu of options where you can add your “Copied Link” to a new Pin or board on your profile.

Instagram Reels Features

18. Upload and browse video content on Instagram Reels.

Instagram Reels is one of the biggest new features of Instagram to date.

You can find Instagram Reels by opening the app and tapping the TV icon in the bottom navigation bar. You’ll land on a gallery of Reels to watch, including those from people you follow, trending videos, and the most popular creators on the app.

As you view more videos, the algorithm will adapt to your interests and show you Reels relevant to your likes. And naturally, the same goes for your target audience.

The Reels you create are visible on your Profile under the Reels icon. When you want to upload a new Reel, follow the steps to upload an image but click Reels instead.

19. Easily create Reels using the template feature.

Instagram’s native Reels template helps anyone quickly and easily make a Reel. To create a Reel using a template, you can either:

Find a Reel you like that someone has created, tap on the three dots on the bottom right corner of the real, tap “Use as template,” and follow the steps. Note that the only Reels you can use as a template have the Use as a template button.

Or,

Click on the Reels tab, swipe left to access the “Templates” option, and select the template you want to use. Then, follow the steps on screen.

20. Automatically add captions to your Reels and Stories.

The auto-caption feature automatically converts speech into captions for your Reels and Stories. This feature is incredibly important for increasing accessibility for your content and also for allowing people to consume your content without sound.

21. Remix Reels to engage with other users.

Remixing a Reel means creating one that includes content from someone else’s Reel. It’s a great way to engage with other users and create side-by-side interaction.

To Remix a real (on Android and iOS), tap the three dots on the Reel you want to remix. Tap “Remix” and choose whether to play your video side-by-side the original video or after it ends.

Next, record your Reel and share it to your profile.

If you remix a Reel using side-by-side video, you can mix the audio and add voiceovers, text, and stickers to your Reel and the original Reel.

If you remix a Reel and add your video after the original, you can’t change the audio from the original post, but you can adjust the volume level of the original Reel and add a voiceover.

22. Reply to a comment on your Reel with a Reel.

Instagram now allows people to create Reels to reply to comments on Reels. It’s an engaging way to interact with followers and build connections.

To do this (on Android and iOS), tap “Reply” underneath a comment and click the camera icon.

Record your Reel or upload a pre-recorded video from your camera roll.

Click on the comment sticker to update the background color or change its position in the frame.

Edit your Reel, then click “Share.”

Instagram Stories Features

23. Use Notes to share status updates.

Notes are 60-character max posts next to profile images in the messages inbox.

Notes will appear in your followers’ inboxes, and you can choose to share them with all of your followers or your selected Close Friends list. They last 24 hours, and Notes replies appear as DMs.

The new feature is a great way to share your timely thoughts, engage with people, and see what others are saying.

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24. Create a collection of saved posts.

In addition to being able to view all of the posts you’ve liked, Instagram also has an option to save or bookmark certain posts in collections that you create.

Start by going to your profile, and tapping the “Settings” icon at the top-right of your screen, and then select “Saved”:

Next, press the “+” button and name your new Collection.

Click “Next”, and select images from your “Saved” section.

To save photos for future collections, tap the bookmark icon below the post you want to add, as shown below:

Then, go back to your saved photos by following the previous steps.

You’ll see the photos you’ve saved — to add them to your Collection, select the Collection you want to add to, and tap “Add to Collection.” From there, you can add any of your saved photos.

25. Create Stories Highlights to show Stories for longer than a day.

Like in Snapchat, posts to your story only stick around for your followers to see for 24 hours. But sometimes, you have a story that deserves more daylight to be told.

That’s where Stories Highlights comes in, a feature by Instagram that allows you to save stories together in the same space on your profile page. If you ever wondered what that “New” button with the “+” icon was below your profile image, this explains it.

To make a Stories Highlight, tap this New option and select any number of past stories in your album:

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Then, give it a cover photo and a name to display as its own Instagram Story on your profile page. You can remove Stories Highlights at any time by tapping and holding down this story.

26. Reorder Instagram Stories highlights.

The Highlights on your Instagram feed act as your brand’s portfolio — you can use Highlights to demonstrate your company’s values, showcase new products or services, or categorize various topics you post about frequently.

For instance, The North Face uses its Highlights section to highlight various initiatives that are important to the brand, including a section labeled “Summit Series,” “Explore Fund,” “XPLR Pass,” “Pride,” and “Athletes.”

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Since a user can only see the first five highlights when they come across your profile, you’ll want to ensure your first highlights are the ones you’re most proud of. To do this, simply follow this trick:

1. Hold down the highlight you’d like moved to the front of this list and click “Edit Highlight” when the slide-up appears.

2. Next, find an image or video you’d like to add to the highlight. (Don’t worry — you’ll be able to delete this within 30 seconds, so you don’t need to choose one that will stay on the highlight.)

3. Click “Done” in the top right corner.

4. Now, your Highlight will be first in the list. To remove the image or video you just added, follow the above instructions and simply un-check the image you added. Your highlight will remain at the beginning of the Highlight reel.

27. Change your Instagram Highlights Icon without publishing it to your feed.

The image you choose for each Highlight should accurately depict what type of content users can expect to see if they tap the Highlight, so you’ll want to choose a compelling, engaging image.

However, if you have a design, logo, or image you’d like to use that isn’t in your Instagram feed, it’s still possible to make it the Highlight Icon.

To do this, click “Edit Highlight” (same as the step above):

Next, click “Edit Cover,” and scroll through your camera roll to find an image you like.

Once you choose an image from your camera roll, click “Done.” Your Highlight cover image is now an image you’ve never posted on your Instagram account:

28. Schedule posts in advance.

Instagram being a mobile app, you’re probably in a routine of taking photos and posting them to your Instagram Story on the fly. But, you can also pre-post them from your computer for a set day and time in the future.

This feature is available with a social media scheduling tool, as well as HubSpot if you have an Instagram business account. If you have this business profile, switch to it via the Instagram mobile app and follow the prompts to connect it to Facebook.

Depending on the social scheduling tool you use, you might not include this step. Once you’ve toggled to the right account, however, you’ll launch your scheduling tool, navigate to your current connected profiles, and see Instagram as an available integration.

29. Use ‘Type Mode’ to enhance your Instagram Stories.

Since its launch, Stories have become quite creative, and it takes more than a pretty filter to stand out to your audience. Enter “Type Mode,” an option similar to Snapchat that gives you the power to caption Stories that need extra context to resonate with someone. Here’s how to use it:

1. Open Instagram Stories by swiping right from your Instagram feed. This will launch your smartphone camera. Then, take a photo or video and press the “Aa” icon to the top-right of your screen, as shown below:

The “Aa” icon will open Type Mode, where you have eight fonts to choose from. Here’s what a sample Story looks like with Modern font:

30. Post content from other users to your Instagram Story.

Although Instagram Stories are a great way to give your content exposure on your followers’ homepages, you might not always have something Story-worthy. In those times, you can share an inspiring post from someone else through your Instagram Stories. Here’s how:

1. Find a post you want to share in your Instagram Stories and tap the paper airplane icon, as shown below.

Instagram Account: @Freddysusa

This icon will open a screen allowing you to send this post to specific followers, or add to your Story. Tap the latter option, as shown below.

Tapping this option will automatically turn the post into an Instagram Story, which you can edit and design to your liking the same way you would any other Instagram Story.

31. Share candid Stories with your followers.

Instagram Candid Stories lets you share in-the-moment updates with friends to let them know what you’re up to. A unique feature is that each Story is only visible to others who have posted their own Candid Stories.

To share a Candid Story, use the stories camera and select Candid Story, or wait for the daily Candid Story notification.

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Note that the Candid Story feature is not yet available to all users.

Instagram User Preferences Features

32. Mute Instagram notifications using Quiet Mode.

Quiet Mode turns off all app notifications and adds a badge to your profile, so people know you’re taking a break. When you turn Quiet Mode off, you’ll get a roundup of notifications of things you’ve missed.

To use Quiet Mode on Instagram, Navigate to your profile page. Click “Settings,” then “Notifications,” and then “Quiet mode.”

Toggle the “Quiet mode” button to enable it and turn it off when you’re ready to receive notifications again.

You can also set a designated time to trigger Quiet Mode every day, so you don’t have to remember to turn it off and on.

Quiet Mode is currently available in the U.S., UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

33. Create a Favorites list to see your favorite accounts first.

If you have favorite accounts on Instagram or friends whose content you want to see more often, you can select up to 50 accounts to add to your Favorites list.

You’ll see their posts higher up and more often in your Feed, and you can even swipe to a separate favorites-only feed to see what people are up to. Every Favorites feed is free of ads and suggested posts, and nobody else knows who you’ve added to the list.

To choose your favorites, tap the Instagram logo on the top left corner, and select your favorite accounts to add.

34. Get notifications when your favorite people post.

Never want to miss an Instagram post from your favorite influencers again? You can choose to get a notification every time a specific user posts a new photo. All you have to do is turn on notifications for each user individually.

To turn on these notifications, visit a user’s profile, click the bell icon in the upper right corner, and choose what type of post you want a notification for: Posts, Stories, Reels, Videos, or Live Videos.

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Want to turn post notifications off? Just follow the same steps. It’s important to note that you must enable notifications from the Instagram app in your phone’s settings — here’s how.

• To allow notifications on iPhone/iPad: Go to “Settings,” then “Notifications.” Choose “Instagram” and then turn on the setting to “Allow Notifications.”
• To allow notifications on Android: Go to “Settings,” then choose “Apps,” then “Instagram.” Select the option to show notifications.

35. Hide Photos You’ve Been Tagged In

When someone tags you in a photo or video on Instagram, it’s automatically added to your profile under “Photos of You,” unless you opt to add tagged photos manually (see the next tip).

To see the posts you’ve been tagged in, go to your own profile and click the person icon below your bio.

Next, click on an individual post (in your tagged photos) and click the three dots in the top right. Tap “Post options,” then tap “Remove me from post” or “Hide from my profile.”

The first removes your tag, and the second removes it from your tagged photos.

36. Adjust your settings to approve tagged photos before they show up in your profile.

As we mentioned in the previous step, when someone tags a photo or video of you on Instagram, it’s automatically added to your profile. But you can change your Instagram settings to enable manually selecting which photos you’re tagged in that show up on your profile.

To manually approve tagged posts, navigate to “Settings,” tap “Privacy,” “Posts,” then “Manually approve tags,” and toggle the on button. Now you’ll be notified when you’ve been tagged in a post, and you can approve it to show up on your profile.

37. Hide ads you don’t find relevant.

Instagram tries to show you ads that are interesting and relevant to you. You might see ads based on people you follow and things you Like on Instagram, or the third-party websites and apps you visit.

If you see sponsored posts you don’t find relevant, though, you can let Instagram know and slowly teach its algorithm what you like and don’t like to see.

To hide ads on Instagram, tap on the three dots to the right of a post labeled “Sponsored,” and choose “Hide ad.”

From there, it’ll ask you to share why you don’t want to see the ad anymore.

You can also opt out of seeing ads based on sites and apps off of Instagram and Facebook from your device’s settings. Note that even if you choose to opt out of seeing these types of ads, you’ll still see ads based on your Instagram and Facebook activity.

• To limit ad tracking on an iPhone/iPad: Go to “Settings” and choose “Privacy & Security,” then “Apple Advertising.” From there, choose the option to turn off personalized ads.
• To turn off interest-based ads on Android: Go to “Google Settings,” then “Ads.” From there, choose the option to “Turn off interest-based ads.”

38. Send photos privately to your friends.

Posting photos with all of your followers or with the public isn’t the only way to share content on Instagram. You can also share them with individual or multiple users, kind of like a Facebook message or group text message.

You can either send a new photo to friends, or send a photo that you or someone else has already posted.

To send a new photo privately, upload a photo and begin editing it, as you would when editing a new post. When you get to the “Share” page, tap the top where it automatically says “New Post,” but when prompted, select “Direct Message.” From there, you can pick and choose whom you’d like to send the photo to.

You can access your direct messages at any time by clicking the mailbox icon at the top right of your homepage.

To send an existing photo privately, start by opening the post you want to share — it can be your own or someone else’s, as long as the latter has a public account. Next, click the paper-airplane-like icon below the post, then select who you want to receive it when the “Send to” box appears.

User Search Features

39. Search Instagram users without an account.

As much as Instagram would like to see you ultimately create an account for yourself or your business, you can peruse the beautiful brands, people, and dogs that are waiting for you without an account to see if it’s worth signing up.

There are two ways to search for people on Instagram without logging in:

Entering a Username at the End of the Instagram URL

The first way to search users without an account is by using an Instagram username you already know, and adding it to the end of “www.instagram.com/.”

For example, if you were to start with our Instagram username — which is simply “HubSpot” — you can enter the following into your browser’s address bar: www.instagram.com/hubspot. This will bring you to our Instagram profile as well as the elusive search bar at the top of the page:

Once you’ve reached this page, you can use the search bar to the left of the “Sign Up” button to browse users who are already active on the platform.

Googling Them in an Instagram Site Search

A slightly “hackier” way of looking up users without an Instagram account of your own is to simply search their name in a Google site search. This means telling Google to only look up search terms on a website of your choice (in this case, Instagram).

To site search a user, open a Google search and type the following: “site:instagram.com [name of user].”

By keeping all the text prior to the brackets in your search bar, you can shuffle through names of people and businesses and Google will produce results that live only on Instagram. Here’s what a site search looks like for HubSpot, below. As you can see, Google produces our main profile, our culture-focused HubSpot Life profile, Instagram posts that include the #hubspot hashtag, and our HubSpot Academy Page.

40. Look through pictures without accidentally liking them.

It’s pretty easy to learn how to like something on Instagram — so easy, in fact, that people do it accidentally: It’s just a quick double tap of the photo once you’ve entered its full view.

The thing is, it’s so easy to do quickly by mistake.

So, here’s a quick Instagram cheat for you: To look through someone’s photos without “double-tap paranoia,” scroll through Instagram feeds with your phone set to airplane mode. Without internet access, you won’t be able to Like a photo, even if you accidentally double-tap it.

The pictures won’t load in the first place if you start on airplane mode, though. You’ll have to go to the feed first to load the posts, then turn on airplane mode, then start scrolling.

When you reach the end of the first rows of posts and want to load more, simply turn airplane mode off, let more load, and then turn it on again. Cumbersome? Maybe a little, but it could be worth the paranoia mitigation.

• To turn on airplane mode on an iPhone/iPad: Swipe up from the bottom of the screen and click the airplane icon. Or, go to “Settings” and then “Wi-Fi,” and switch “Airplane Mode” on.
• To turn on airplane mode on an Android device: Swipe down from the top of the screen. Then, swipe from right to left until you see “Settings,” and then touch it. Touch “Airplane Mode” to turn it on.

41. Browse posts from certain locations.

One fun thing you can do on Instagram is browse photos and videos from a specific location, or taken near your current location. I like to do that when I’m planning a trip somewhere, or want to check out a new restaurant and scroll through the pictures taken there.

Here’s how to do both of these things.

To Browse Posts From at a Specific Location:

You can either search for a specific place, or you can click into a geotag on an existing photo.

To search for a specific place: Tap the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of your home screen, which will bring you to the general search page. Type in a place you’d like to search for, and you’ll see content most relevant to the place you searched, including the most popular Reels, accounts, audios, tagged photos, and locations.

How to Get Verified on Instagram

A verified badge (the blue check beside a celebrity or brand account name) tells users that you’re, in Instagram’s words, “the authentic presence of a notable public figure, celebrity, global brand or entity it represents”.

For instance, there are plenty of “Reese Witherspoon” fan pages on Instagram, but there’s only one real Reese Witherspoon account, as verified by the blue badge:

To request a verified badge, you must be a public figure, celebrity, or brand and meet certain requirements. If you’ve determined you fit Instagram’s criteria for verification, follow these steps to request a badge:

1. Go to your profile (the person icon in bottom left corner).
2. Tap the three lines in the top right corner.
3. Click “Settings,” “Account,” “Request Verification.”
4. Fill out the form, including username, Full Name, Document type (like government issued photo ID), Category, Country/Region, and Audience.
5. When you’ve filled out all form fields, click “Send.”

It’s important to note, you won’t necessarily receive a verified badge if you request one. Learn more about what happens after you request a verified badge.

Instagram Features & Hacks

I might be biased, but Instagram is one of the most fun (and visually appealing) social apps around. And now, with these tricks, you can use it to an even fuller extent.

Plus, many of these features can help to enhance your brand’s presence on Instagram. Now, you know how to use the app more efficiently, to make sure you’re only tagged in photos you want to appear on your profile, and have even more ways to engage with the people by whom you’d like to be discovered.

The Emmys. The Tonys. The Oscars. The Finnys.

It’s Award Season, friends (#AwardSzn), and NetLine has been included in the fun!

Our 6th Annual B2B Content Consumption Report Won a Finny Award

Recently, NetLine presented at B2BMX 2023 and was invited to attend The Killer Content Awards. 

Demand Gen Report, the host of the event, has held the KCAs since 2012. The event provides an opportunity to celebrate B2B brands that push the envelope, embrace new storytelling methods, formats, and campaign strategies to better engage audiences through their content. 

All-in-all, there were 29 winners in 14 categories…and NetLine happened to be one of these winners! 

Our 2022 State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Report for Marketers won a Killer Content Award (better known as a Finny) in the Research-Based category. With more than 100 nominees in the field, NetLine won one of two awards being handed out in the category, with Splunk + TechTarget taking home the other prize. 

There to accept the Finny on NetLine’s behalf were Marissa Wolfgang, Senior Marketing Manager, and David Fortino, Chief Strategy Officer. After sharing a bit about our flagship report with those in attendance, David shared his humble thoughts.

“I’m just fortunate enough to represent the brand and run around the rest of the year talking about each report,” he said. “It’s truly our interest and passion turning first-party, buyer-level consumption data into something that helps inform marketers to make better decisions tomorrow.”

The Youtility of NetLine’s Annual Content Consumption Reports

Award aside, the recognition our flagship report received was tremendous. 

That’s awesome, congratulations!

— Lee Odden – B2B Marketing (@leeodden) March 2, 2023

Some of the kindest words of congratulations, however, came from B2BMX keynote speaker and KCA Master of Ceremonies, Jay Baer.

“What I love about this Report,” Jay said, following the announcement of NetLine’s win,” and I know this work well (we’ve partnered with NetLine many times at my firm, Convince & Convert)—it’s this idea of generosity and bravery [which Jay spoke about during his B2BMX closing keynote]; I’ve done a lot of research reports in my career, but NetLine’s State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Report is the Mack Daddy-Daddy Mack of research reports.”

“It’s gigantic. It is a big dog. It answers every question (a B2B marketer could wish to answer). It is the kind of research that people would expect to pay a whole bunch of money for. And NetLine just gives it away.”

Getting this kind of compliment from a marketing leader like Jay Baer is an incredible thing. Not only is it great hearing it directly from him, face-to-face, but he’s the guy who wrote a book all about this very subject: Youtilty.

As he defines it, “Youtility is massively useful information, provided for free, that creates long-term trust and kinship between your company and your customers.” 

This is precisely what we aspire our State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Report for Marketers to be. Indeed, we’d call this a youtility and are pleased to know the man who coined the term agrees.

Reflecting on NetLine’s Award-Winning Consumption Report

Incredibly privileged, pleased, and honored to be able to work on behalf of @NetLine_Corp each day.

Hands down, it’s been the most rewarding professional experience of my career. Thank you, #B2BMX

Can’t wait to see what the future holds for us.

Sláinte. https://t.co/66i7XswIDp

— Jon Steiert (@jwsteiert) March 2, 2023

After the event, David Fortino continued to reflect on the team’s achievements. 

“We started this report back in 2017 with a simple goal,” he said. “Allow the data to do the talking. As a result, we’d be investing in our future customers by arming them with data today that can be used to make more informed marketing decisions tomorrow. To say that a lot goes into, and rides on, our flagship report would be an understatement.”

Each year, we publish with the intention of making it better than the previous iteration. Our focus is to make the findings impactful, concise, and actionable. 

While earning the attention of our peers is something we hope to earn, certainly, we set out with the goal of improving the circumstances of B2B marketers and professionals across the world. 

We must also share our thanks with the folks who bring this report to life each year: Marissa Wolfgang, Bao Long Liu, Jon Steiert, David Fortino, Dan Frignito, and Chris Kohler. Each of these professionals plays a crucial role in the production of the report which cannot be overlooked. Thank you all so much!

Preparing for NetLine’s 2023 Content Consumption Report

As we prepare for the release of our 2023 Content Consumption Report, we wanted to pause and say thank you to the B2B community. 

Winning an award is fantastic, certainly, but we’re more appreciative that you find our work meaningful. 

We’re eager to get the 7th edition to you and hear what you find most impactful.

The world of artificial intelligence and machine learning is expanding, and marketers should pay attention. AI is being implemented in nearly every industry to improve business processes, and the data surrounding this tech are staggering.

To help you better grasp AI’s most recent advancements, we’ve compiled a list of interesting AI statistics to consider before you use it for your own company strategy. And if you’re in a pinch, jump straight to the section that you need.

• Interesting AI Statistics
• AI Adoption Statistics
• Marketing AI Statistics
• AI Chatbot Statistics
• Attitudes Toward AI Statistics

Interesting AI Statistics

To understand the importance of AI, you have to look at it from a broad perspective. Here are some stats about the global artificial intelligence market, and which companies are prioritizing the technology.

1. The market for artificial intelligence (AI) has a current market value of nearly 100 billion U.S. dollars and is expected to grow twentyfold by 2030, up to almost 2 trillion U.S. dollars.

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2. Artificial intelligence (AI) is heavily used for service operations and product & service development-related functions in the high-tech and telecom industry.

3. The current AI market race is led by IBM, which holds a more than nine percent global market share.

4. IBM is the leading company in active machine learning and AI patents worldwide, with over 5,500 patent families as of November 2020.

5. Next to IBM in the global AI patent race are Microsoft and Samsung, each within 500 patent families from IBM.

AI Adoption Statistics

Businesses are beginning to streamline processes using AI — just look at the significant increase in implementation over the last few years.

6. Artificial intelligence (AI) saw a staggering growth in adoption rates from 2017 to 2018, and it has leveled off significantly since 2019. It grew nearly 2.5 times in 2022 compared to its adoption rate in 2017.

7. In 2022, many companies are using AI to improve their hiring policies and needs, reduce the need for redundant hiring, and enable more efficient recruiting methods.

Marketing AI Statistics

Marketers are leveraging the technology for their own business strategy. Check out these stats to see how you can put AI to use in your company.

8. In 2021, the market for artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing was estimated at 15.84 billion U.S. dollars. The source projected that the value would increase to more than 107.5 billion by 2028.

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9. More than 80% of industry experts integrate some form of AI technology into their online marketing activities.

10. When asked about marketers’ main application areas of AI in a recent survey, roughly 50% of respondents from the U.S., Canada, the UK, and India mentioned ad targeting when asked about marketers’ main application areas of AI.

AI Chatbot Statistics

The customer service industry has changed with the introduction of AI chatbots. Whether used to improve customer service or auto-populate data for internal reporting, this tech yields some surprising statistics.

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11. The chatbot market is forecast to reach around 1.25 billion U.S. dollars in 2025, a significant increase from the market size in 2016, which stood at 190.8 million U.S. dollars.

12. 26% of business-to-business (B2B) marketers using chatbots in their marketing programs gained between ten and 20% more lead generation volumes.

13. A survey in October 2022 in the United States found that 57% of B2B marketers used chatbots in their demand generation programs to understand their audience better.

14. Another 55% said they did so to generate new leads.

15. An additional 43% of American marketers stated that chatbots helped educate prospects.

Attitudes Toward AI Statistics

So how is artificial intelligence being perceived by your average customer or prospect? Does the general public have reservations about the use of AI? These statistics may help you better grasp the most common perceptions of it.

16. In a 2023 survey conducted in the United States, 48% of respondents stated that neither Photoshop nor Generative artificial intelligence (AI) images of faces/people should be used in social media advertising.

17. Another 25% of respondents said both image software was acceptable for social media advertising.

18. 45% of responding consumers did not understand how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies worked.

19. 73% of respondents said that they believed that AI and ML had the potential to impact customer experience (CX).

20. 48% of respondents stated they would interact with AI more frequently if it made their customer experience with a brand more seamless, consistent, and convenient.

Introduce AI into Your Marketing Strategy

Artificial intelligence will continue to grow more prevalent in the business world.

Its influence on our daily lives has shown us the potential to improve how we work — and how we can let technology work for us.

As a marketer, leveraging Content marketing in your strategy means planning, creating, and sharing content to attract and delight your target audience.

An engaging content marketing strategy generates brand awareness, convinces customers to take action, and drives revenue.

Content marketing encompasses many types of platforms, channels, and types of media — such as social media, videos, and blogs. And as new content platforms emerge, so do new trends and techniques that change how businesses reach their consumers.

Keeping up with the latest changes in the content marketing landscape may seem daunting, but it’s essential to keeping your brand current and competitive. In this post, discover important stats about the state of content marketing in 2023 and trends to look out for throughout the year.

Content Marketing Statistics to Know

• Marketers say sales, web traffic, and social engagement are the most critical metrics for measuring the effectiveness of their content marketing strategy.
• 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.
• Instagram is used by 65% of social media marketers, just behind Facebook at 67%.
• Short articles/posts and videos are the top two content types that B2C marketers used in the last 12+ months.
• 22% of marketers say Instagram has the most growth potential in 2023 than any other platform.
• Gen Z ranked Instagram as their favorite social media app in 2022.
• 50% of Millennials trust product recommendations from influencers.
• 44% of marketers say the most significant benefit of working with small influencers is that it’s less expensive.

Content Marketing Trends to Watch in 2023

1. Short-form video takes center stage in 2023.

Short-form video is the most popular trend among marketers, has the highest ROI, and will see the most growth in 2023. Marketers plan to invest more in short-form videos than any other trend.

In fact, 90% of marketers using short-form videos will increase or maintain their investment in 2023, and 21% plan to leverage short-form videos for the first time in the same year.

This coincides with the videos consumers prefer to watch, as 73% of consumers prefer to watch short-form videos to learn about a service or product.

This consumer behavior has made videos, short-form specifically, the primary form of media used within any content strategy for the fourth year.

2. More brands will emphasize their values in their marketing content.

A recent study commissioned by Google Cloud found 82% of shoppers want a brand’s values to align with theirs. Furthermore, the same study found 75% of consumers would part ways with a brand over conflicting values.

So, it’s no wonder 30% of marketers are creating content that reflects their brand’s values, making it one of the most popular trends in marketing. The trend has the 5th highest ROI and will see growth in 2023.

The COVID-19 pandemic plays a role in the increased importance of values in marketing, according to Giusy Buonfantino, Vice President of Consumer Packaged Goods at Google Cloud.

“COVID-19 drove people to reflect on their priorities, elevating concepts like community service, equity, and sustainability,” Buonfantino said in a blog post sharing the above findings.

Buonfantino says today’s consumers aren’t just looking for savings or convenience; they also want to feel good about spending their money at a company whose values align with theirs.

According to Google Cloud’s study, sustainability is a value most consumers (52%) are interested in. Consumers want to know how companies manage their resources and whether their materials are sourced responsibly.

3. Influencer Marketing will remain vital to reaching audiences online.

According to the Digital Marketing Institute, almost half of consumers depend on recommendations from influencers to determine the products they want to purchase.

Furthermore, 1 in 4 marketers are leveraging influencer marketing and it offers the 2nd highest ROI of any trend.

Influencer marketing is expected to see significant growth in 2023 with 17% of marketers planning to invest in it for the first time. So, why is influencer marketing so beneficial?

According to Nielsen Scarborough, 42% of Americans seek the advice of others for purchase decisions and they want advice from relatable sources.

Influencers are seen as more relatable than brands and companies and use their relatability to form tight bonds with their audience.

So, if you’re looking to humanize your brand and create a deeper connection with consumers — influencer marketing is the way to go.

4. Funny, trendy, and relatable content is crucial in 2023.

Relatable content will grow significantly in 2023 as 46% of social media marketers will leverage it for the first time. Among those using it, 49% plan to increase their investment, and 43% keep investing the same amount.

Additionally, funny content will see the 2nd most investment of any content type in 2023, and 33% of social media marketers plan to use it for the first time next year.

If you’re not sure what’s trending with audiences or what’s getting the most laughs this year, don’t be afraid to lean on influencers.

In addition to being relatable, influencers are constantly tapping into what their audience cares about and what makes them laugh.

5. Social media remains the best way to reach Gen Z.

Social media is the #1 channel to reach Gen Z consumers. We found that 93% of Gen Z spend an average of four hours daily on social media, and 57% of Gen Z have discovered a new product on social media within the past three months.

Furthermore, 28% of Gen Z consumers bought a product through a social media app. Additionally, social media is the marketing channel Gen Z consumers discover new products on most often, and it’s their preferred channel for product discovery.

So, what social media platforms do Gen Z use the most? According to our data, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are in the top 3.

6. Strategic SEO tactics are a must-have.

SEO is far from new in marketing, but it still has a crucial place in content marketing strategies — especially for web content. 29% of marketers use a website to attract and convert leads.

SEO has the fourth largest ROI, and most marketers using it (88%) will increase or maintain their investment in 2023.

And SEO ranks third behind short-form videos and influencer marketing regarding where marketers invest the most money in 2023.

Stay Up-to-date On Your Industry

It’s always essential to stay up-to-date on what is happening in your industry; being aware of these trends is a way to do so.

Should you choose to leverage one of these trends in your marketing strategy, ensure that it’s relevant to your business needs and will help you achieve your goals.

 

Consumer preferences are constantly evolving, which keeps things interesting.

To help you prepare your strategies to meet audience needs, this post will dive deep into our State of Consumer Trends Report findings on consumer preferences, discuss how marketers currently measure up to those preferences and outline what you can do to better meet consumer needs.

What types of content are memorable to consumers?

According to our Consumer Trends Survey, the most interesting and memorable content brands can share is funny content, relatable content, and content that reflects brand values.

1. Funny content

49% of consumers say that funny content is the most interesting and memorable.

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How Marketers Measure Up

According to our 2023 Social Media Marketing Report, 36% of marketers already share funny content on social media. Half of those already leveraging it plan to increase their investments in it in 2023 (speaking directly to consumer interests), and it’ll be the second most invested in content type in 2023.

What can marketers do?

Funny content can be anything from sending emails with a witty subject line or using a trending meme format and relating it to your business.

For example, McDonald’s made a Tweet saying, “it’s easier to get these snack wraps than it is to get tickets,” during the rush of people trying to get tickets to Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour. The snack wrap is no longer available on the menu, so it was a lighthearted and funny contribution to a timely global conversation.

Another valuable opportunity is to create funny video content, which is actually the most likely to go viral.

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2. Relatable content

36% of consumers say relatable content is the second most interesting and memorable content brands can share on social media. Almost 70% of consumers also say that social media content being authentic and relatable is more important than polished, high-quality content.

How Marketers Measure Up:

42% of marketers already share relatable content, and they say it is the second most effective type of content to share on social media.

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What can marketers do?

Relatable content reminds your audiences of their lives, experiences, and needs. To be relatable to your audience, you need to understand them. Who are they? What are their pain points? What are their preferences?

Knowing the ins and outs of who they help you create content that relates to them as individuals. Consumers also want to build relationships with their favorite brands, so feeling like they can relate to your business and your business’ story can foster the connection they’re looking for.

A great way to build relatability is content that expresses your brand values.

3. Content that reflects brand values.

Content that reflects your brand values is the third most interesting and memorable content to consumers. This makes sense as consumers, now more than ever, care about doing business with brands that share the same value systems and support the same causes that they do.

How Marketers Measure Up

30% of marketers are creating content that reflects their brand values, so there is room for improvement.

45% of marketers share this kind of content on social media, and 16% plan to leverage it for the first time in 2023. Of marketers that do share it, 89% plan to maintain or increase their investments in it and say it has the 5th highest ROI of any trend.

What can marketers do?

48% of U.S. adults say brands need to do more about social advocacy, and the most important issues are racial justice, climate change, and LGBTQ+ rights.

With this in mind, share your brand’s values on social media — let them know what you care about and what you do to take a stand. Consumers will know what you care for, and you’ll draw in people who share similar interests and can turn curious browsers into paying customers if they find they truly relate to you.

It’s essential to be genuine in these efforts, as consumers aren’t shy to call out brands that they feel are making empty promises or untrue statements.

What types of content do consumers prefer for learning about products and services?

When learning about products and their features, consumers prefer searching the internet, retail stores and word-of-mouth tied for second place, and television ads in third place. Gen Z is the only generation with a different first preference, which is learning about a product and its features through social media.

With this in mind, marketers can do things like

• Creating an effective SEO keyword strategy to reach users browsing the internet.
• Using high-quality images and visuals for in-store advertisements to attract visitor attention.
• Ask for customer reviews and make it easy for customers to leave reviews so they can learn from others’ opinions about your business.

Under this same question, learning about a product and its features on social media came in fourth place. Among consumers with this preference, they like feed posts, ads or sponsored content, and short-form videos (like TikToks or Reels).

However, splitting these preferences up by generation paints a different picture.

• Gen Z’s top preference for learning is short-form video, story posts, or from an influencer they follow.
• Millennials prefer short-form video, ads or sponsored content, and feed posts.
• Gen Xers prefer feed posts, online communities, and short-form video.
• Baby Boomers prefer ads or sponsored content, feed posts, and online communities.

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How do marketers measure up?

Here’s how marketers currently measure up to consumer preference:

• Marketers most often leverage short-form video as part of their social media strategies (58%) — third place in general overall, but especially important to Gen Z and Millennials.
• 1 in 4 marketers currently leverage influencer marketing, and 89% of marketers who currently use it will increase or maintain their investment — especially important to the second-place preference for ads and sponsored content and Gen Zs desire to learn from influencers.
• 20% of social media marketers post daily, 22% a few times a day, and 34% post several times a week, ensuring that their content is seen when people browse their feeds — feed posts are the top way consumers want to learn on social media.

What can marketers do?

Pay attention to the top three preferences for learning about products, and go from there.

• Consumers like to see feed posts, so create a consistent posting schedule to remain top of mind and increase the likelihood of your products being seen.
• Consumers want to see ads or sponsored content, so you can run ads on your social profiles like paid partnerships, influencer campaigns, or paid ads (like a Facebook News Feed ad).
• Consumers also want to see short-form videos, so create TikToks, YouTube Shorts, etc. — snackable content for any platform. (Wyzowl’s Video Marketing Report found that 93% of marketers say video increases user understanding, so it’ll pay off).

Also, be mindful of generational differences if your target audience is primarily part of a specific generation.

For example, if Gen Z and Millennials are your primary audiences, you could focus on short-form video and making a presence on platforms that cater to it. If your audience is Baby Boomers or Gen Xers, you could create online communities in the channels they’re already in to speak to their needs.

Data-Driven Marketers Stay Ahead of the Curve

Data-driven marketers will win in 2023, so compare the consumer preferences in this post against what your own business is doing, identify areas of opportunity, and solve for your customer.

Have you ever opened an email on your phone and the image was low-quality, the text was too small, and the call-to-action button was broken? Those are all flaws of static email design. Responsive emails are the answer.

Given that more than half of U.S. residents look at email marketing messages on their phones, you need to optimize your emails for multiple screens, including mobile and tablet.

Responsive emails use fluid images and tables to remain flexible across different screen sizes. Ultimately, they deliver content designed for each user’s optimal experience.

Though responsive emails can be designed using CSS media queries, you don’t need any coding experience to make one. Creating a responsive email isn’t just a job for coders.

Here, we’ve lined up some best practices and ready-to-use templates, as well as a quick tutorial about the fundamentals of responsive emails.

• What is a responsive email?
• Responsive Email Design
• Responsive Email Design Examples
• Responsive Email Templates
• Responsive Email Best Practices
• Getting Started with Responsive Emails

Responsive emails are also more accessible, as they allow subscribers to read on their preferred device.

To illustrate, here is how a promotional email I received looked on desktop.

This email has awesome imagery, shoppable icons, and is nicely formatted. When I open the email on mobile, this is what I’m greeted with.

I still have the same information and the same photos and shoppable icons. The only noticeable difference is the email format. It’s different to better fit the mobile experience.

Now, imagine if that same desktop layout was applied to mobile. I’d have to zoom in on my phone to see any of the pictures or text. Instead of doing that, I’d unsubscribe.

With responsive email, user experience can be enhanced, as well as campaign ROI.

Think about it: Subscribers satisfied with an optimized mobile email design will find themselves opening more marketing messages because they know it’ll be accessible and look good.

So, with all this talk about responsive emails, you must be itching to create your own. Next, we’ll look at some responsive email examples and templates.

Responsive Email Designs

There are many ways that you can design responsive emails.

If you have coding knowledge, you can code different email templates for different screen sizes. You can also use a pre-made template that works will all screen sizes.

No matter your approach, you’ll need your email marketing software. Here, you can design an email, and then preview that email on several devices. Most email software will show you how the design will look on multiple devices.

The video below will walk you through how to design an email with a template. In the video, the user is on Klaviyo, but the concepts hold true no matter what software you use.

Coding a Responsive Email

If you’re looking to make elements of your email responsive, you’ll need to work with media queries.

Media queries are a CSS technique. It allows you to set style rules that only appear if certain conditions are true. For example, you can specify what font sizes and image sizes to use when a screen is 600px wide or smaller.

When working with email, you can use media queries to specify what your design should look like on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. To do so, you’ll need to specify the following:

• Use the selector “@media” and specify “screen.” This indicates that the code will affect devices with a screen.
• Set your “max-width” in pixels. This specifies the screen size where the code will take effect.
• Specify any CSS style guides you want that specific screen to follow.

Let’s take a look at the code below.

@media screen and (max-width: 600px) {

body {

font-size: 30px;

}

}

When applied to the CSS of an email, body text will appear at a size of 30px for screens that are 600px wide or smaller.

While this approach can help you make certain elements of your email response, we recommend using a template if possible.

Unless you have comprehensive web design experience, coding several media screens can be time-consuming and frustrating.

If you aren’t technical or want an easier method, try using an email marketing tool with built-in responsive templates. HubSpot’s free email software, for instance, provides drag-and-drop templates that are responsive by default.

Responsive Email Design Examples

It’s time to explore examples. Start with this video, which goes over some of the best email marketing campaigns.

Then, you can read about some of our favorite responsive email designs.

1. TOMS Newsletter

In TOMS’ newsletter, the main difference between the desktop version and the mobile version is the stacking and size of the display ads.

With responsive design, the mobile version doesn’t have cluttered navigation, and the image fits the screen nicely. The CTAs have also been moved for better visibility.

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2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

As seen in the TOMS newsletter, responsive email design helps stack the content in a way that’s visually appealing and easy to digest. This example from the MET is no different.

On mobile, the positioning of the menu changes. Links to different gift shop items fall at the bottom of the page. This keeps the images of available souvenirs front and center.

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3. Mulberry

Again, with a responsive email design, the name of the game is stacking. It’s all about making the content easy to read and visually appealing, no matter how small the device is that someone is viewing the content on.

The alternating photos and text make sense for desktop, while the consistent stacking of photos over related text for mobile, along with the dividing lines, ensures the viewer won’t be confused.

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Responsive Email Templates

A responsive template will automatically adapt to any screen size, so whether the email is opened on a smartphone, tablet, or computer, it will look great and have complete functionality.

For those with less of a coding background or those looking to spend less time with design, my advice is to use a template. They’re a surefire way to make sure your email will look professional and be responsive.

Responsive email templates save you time in designing an email that could’ve been picked out from a selection. For example, HubSpot’s email marketing tool includes over 60 templates just for responsive emails.

Let’s take a look at some template options now.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot offers a couple of free responsive email templates. If you’re a HubSpot customer or a free user, you can download and try them out yourself.

For instance, here’s one of the responsive email templates — notice the sidebar, where you can preview the template on multiple devices.

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Clicking through device types and making sure your email is formatted accordingly is one of the final steps in the design process and is the only step in the responsive email process when you’re using software like HubSpot.

By clicking on the smartphone device for preview, for instance, you can see if your content — including font size and image resolution — is formatted in a way that’s pleasing for mobile.

2. CampaignMonitor

The templates offered by CampaignMonitor are similar to many others, in which responsive email results are shown in the preview tool. For example, here is a CampaignMonitor template:

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You can see the different devices side-by-side so you can compare design elements easily. Tiny edits can be made to create the best experience for all subscribers.

CampaignMonitor templates are often free, so it’s a good choice if you have a minimal budget.

3. Stripo

Stripo offers over 300 free HTML email templates. You can choose templates by industry, season, type, and feature. For instance, here’s a template from their business industry section.

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A good sign of a solid responsive email template is the option to see the preview in both desktop and smartphone variations, as shown in Stripo’s preview mode.

Notice how a single column layout was adopted in the mobile preview to fit the specifications of phones.

Stripo is a website you can visit quickly to find a template that fits your goals. You might consider Stripo if you’re looking to try out responsive emails or want some design inspiration.

4. Constant Contact

Constant Contact offers over 200 professional email templates that are accessible after signing up. From looking at the example below, you can see that the platform offers responsive email templates.

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Constant Contact’s templates have drag-and-drop editing, the option to add surveys, ecommerce functions, and a photo library tool. These features can all help to create the email subscribers want to see.

It’s helpful to use a service like Constant Contact because the specific tools allow you to maintain consistency, like in the example above. You can tell that the responsive nature of the email doesn’t compromise any of the design elements.

Now that we’ve taken a look at some template options, let’s look at another way to make responsive emails work, along with best practices.

Responsive Email Best Practices

The exact design of your responsive email will vary based on the goals of your campaign. However, these tips can help you ensure the best experience for your readers.

• Make sure your responsive email is scalable and flexible. Preview the email on different devices to ensure your message is responsive.
• If you’re coding your own email, remember CSS media queries change fields that are fixed to fields that are fluid.
• Use larger fonts that will be easy to read on smaller screens.
• Single-column layouts are easier to scale. If simple layouts are good for your web pages, definitely consider them for responsive emails.

Be sure to test your emails before you hit “schedule.” Only finalize the designs once you see how they look across multiple screen resolutions. So many people access emails by mobile just for the ease of it.

A simple way to check the effectiveness of your email is to send it to yourself or your team as a test — does it stack up against the other responsive marketing emails in your inbox? If so, you’re ready to send.

Getting Started with Responsive Emails

Responsive emails create a better, more accessible experience for your customers. If you’re just making the transition, start by exploring pre-made responsive email templates. These will save you time while giving you design flexibility.

Then, get a second opinion. Ask a colleague to open an email on their desktop and phone. You can get their honest feedback on both experiences.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to experiment. You can A/B test different responsive designs until you find a layout that resonates most.

Soon, you’ll be sending out responsive emails and increasing your open rates.

When the modern job search is incredibly competitive, how can you ensure your resume stands out among hundreds of applications? An infographic resume could be just what you need.

Here, we’ll explore when to use an infographic resume, what hiring managers have to say about these types of resumes — and how to make one for yourself.

Table of Contents

• What is an infographic resume?
• When to Use an Infographic Resume
• Infographic Resume Templates
• How to Make an Infographic Resume
• Infographic Resume Examples

What is an infographic resume?

An infographic resume is a visual representation of your job experience, skills, and qualifications.

Instead of being text-based like a traditional resume, an infographic resume uses graphic design elements such as icons, graphs, and timelines to present your information.

When to Use an Infographic Resume

While infographic resumes certainly stand out among a sea of submissions, this type of resume isn’t appropriate for all job applications.

If you submit a resume in this format through an applicant tracking system, you could disqualify yourself if the technology can’t read visual information — so it’s best to stick to the format prescribed by the job posting.

Additionally, while an infographic resume might be a good idea for a more design-related role, it’s likely not a good idea for most non-design roles.

Infographic Resume Templates

If you’re interested in creating your own infographic resume, let’s take a look at some templates you can use to get started.

1. Simple infographic resume template.

This simple and minimal infographic resume template is from Venngage.

In this example, there’s plenty of white space. The resume also highlighted creative and software skills and left space for hobbies.

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What we like: It’s clean and easy to follow. Each section is clearly defined and easy to scan. Plus, the round icons create a cohesive design element that brings the whole look together.

2. Graphic design infographic resume template.

This template is also from Venngage. This infographic template would be best for someone in a design role such as a graphic designer, or even a technical role.

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What we like: The design feature at the top of the resume immediately grabs the attention of the viewer and offers a visual overview of the applicant’s skills.

3. Marketing infographic resume template.

In this template from Venngage, you’ll see technical skills and educational training take up the majority of the space on the resume, signaling that this is the most important information.

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There’s also a timeline of work experience at the bottom, which is a creative way to showcase your career progression.

What we like: This template is best for a marketing role as it offers a balanced way to showcase both technical skills and creative elements.

How to Make an Infographic Resume

1. Start with a good structure.

Start by figuring out which tool you’re going to use to create your infographic. You might choose to create one in PowerPoint or use pre-made resume templates on a design website like Canva or Venngage.

Once you choose your tool, identify a good structure. Do you want your name and a brief opening description at the top? Would you prefer to put the education section at the beginning, or end? Are you going to include previous positions, or focus on just the current one?

Additionally, you might want to figure out whether you’re going to focus more on icons and images, or data.

“I love when candidates use infographics as an opportunity to highlight their creative or design abilities,” shares Devon Brown, Director of Global Executive Recruiting at HubSpot.

However, she urges candidates to ensure their design is clean and easily digestible.

“It has to be formatted in a way that makes it just as easy to read as a typical resume,” Brown advises. “The flow of information, and how it’s presented, is critically important if a candidate chooses to go this route.”

2. Take note of everything you want to include in your infographic resume.

Once you’ve chosen a structure, pull up an existing resume and take note of everything you want to transfer over to the infographic resume.

“I’ve had candidates share graphics on the types of roles they’ve supported, as well as metrics related to their current role,” says Kenny Nestle, HubSpot’s G&A recruiter.

For instance, if you want your infographic resume to be data-heavy, write down a few key metrics related to your current role, such as “43% YoY growth” or “12% increase in MRR.”

It’s easier to design your infographic resume once you know what you’ll need to include.

3. Choose a good color scheme.

A cohesive color scheme is a critical component of any good design, and this is no exception.

Consider using clean, complementary colors — like white, black, and orange, or yellow and teal — to help your resume stand out without becoming too distracting.

4. Have a strong opener.

This is a best practice for any resume, but particularly for an infographic, you’ll want to start with a good, powerful opener.

Tríona O’Sullivan, HubSpot’s former global marketing recruiter, shares how essential the opener is on any resume.

“Given how competitive and busy the job market is today,” O’Sullivan says, “it’s more important to ensure your resume is easy to review and states your experience and achievements clearly and quickly since that’s what someone is going to look for first when reviewing.”

Ultimately, your opener is your value proposition. What will you bring to the role that the hiring manager can’t find elsewhere?

5. Use good design principles.

If you want to create an infographic resume, it should use the same design principles as anything else you’d design.

These principles include:

• Creating balance using either symmetrical or asymmetrical designs.
• Leveraging contrast to highlight certain elements.
• Using movement to create a narrative and provide a high-quality user experience.
• Ensuring there’s unity in your design — i.e. your composition’s elements are in agreement.

Take a dive into design principles in this post to make sure your resume is top-notch.

But even if you’re making a design-forward resume, make the context a priority over everything else. Amelia Towle, HubSpot’s head of brand infrastructure and design team manager, spoke with her team on the potential merits of an infographic resume.

Keep your design simple.

“If I think about the purpose of a resume, it’s a document that your intended audience typically wants to scan as quickly as possible to glean information in an efficient way,” she says.

She continues, “If you drastically alter the format, you are perhaps forcing extra cognitive load on a busy recruiter who is just trying to narrow down a potentially vast pool of applicants.”

6. Make it actionable.

Even with additional design elements, there’s only so much information you can fit into an infographic resume.

To give recruiters another place to learn more about your work qualifications, make your resume actionable by including links to your portfolio, website, or LinkedIn.

“While I don’t love super creative infographic-style resumes, I love when someone hyperlinks to their portfolio or website, etc,” O’Sullivan adds. “That’s an amazing way to showcase both their experience and their thought process when it comes to applying for roles. If I see a hyperlink for one, 99% of the time, I will go and check that out.”

If you do choose to create an infographic resume, take a look at a few of these examples for inspiration.

Infographic Resume Examples

1. The colorful, graphic-heavy infographic resume.

The resume below uses plenty of visuals and numbers to highlight relevant information. For instance, there’s a graph to showcase the blog posts Caroline has written that have earned a spot on the first page of Google.

There’s a large “12” to highlight the years of content creation under her belt. There’s even an image of 10 stick figures to demonstrate her individuality.

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Consider how you might use one font, and a complementary color palette, to create a similar infographic.

Caroline designed this one using one of HubSpot’s free infographic templates, so feel free to create the same one using the templates, as well.

2. The data-heavy infographic resume.

In the following infographic resume (also created using HubSpot’s templates), you’ll see Caroline highlighted most of her accomplishments using data — such as the 45% YoY growth, 1,400 additional subscribers, or 24,000 hours managing deadlines.

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She also used icons of a smiley face, pencil, and painter to demonstrate some of her skills in a more visual form.

3. The minimal infographic resume.

The infographic resume below more closely resembles a traditional resume but includes a few graphic design elements that help it stand out.

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This example is best for someone who wants to showcase both technical and creative skills in a professional format.

We could see this infographic resume being used by someone in marketing or sales.

4. The traditional infographic resume.

This infographic resume more closely resembles a traditional resume but includes a few graphic design elements that help it stand out.

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This example is best for someone who wants to make their resume stand out but doesn’t want to stray too far away from the traditional format.

5. The professional infographic resume.

This resume also leans towards a traditional format but incorporates more graphic design elements than the previous example.

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With several icons and even a bar graph at the bottom, this resume is more design-friendly than a standard resume but is still professional. It leaves plenty of room for text to expand on work experience and achievements.

This infographic resume could be used for a variety of roles, from something technical like a software engineer to a more visual position like a social media strategist.

Ready to take your resume to the next level? Grab some starter templates below.