Author Archives: i4lead

I love the Back to the Future series, especially Part II where we see “the future.” Of course, the most famous part of our promised 2015 was the Mattel Hoverboard. A decade later, and I’m still waiting to glide down the sidewalk on my hoverboard.

The pattern of excitement, overpromising, and then reality isn’t relegated to the movies. Because I’m a marketer, AI tools have flooded my working world with the promise of revolutionizing my department and company.

The latest push centers on agentic AI. I’ve found AI agents helpful in some capacities — saving me time, automating repetitive tasks, and assisting with research. But have they reached their full potential? Not yet.

Agentic AI offers impressive advances in technology. But many companies haven’t realized AI’s potential yet — and they’re still not fully ready to implement agentic AI for maximum benefit.

Let’s talk about where AI agents fit into marketing today, the real benefits they can deliver to your marketing team, and what the future could hold.

Table of Contents

• What are AI agents?
• Why are AI agents useful in marketing?
• Benefits of Marketing AI Agents
• Best AI Agents for Marketing
• Challenges of Using AI Agents in Marketing

Essentially, you give an agentic AI a goal and allow it to figure out what to do and then do it. An AI agent goes beyond basic automation by adapting and responding to tasks without human prompting. It’s an agent you put into the world to do things.

This is an early space, but demand is growing: The AI agent market is expected to grow to $47 billion by 2030. Expect to see more AI agents populating the marketing space soon.

Why are AI agents useful in marketing?

Marketing today demands two things above everything else: speed and personalization.

Audiences always expect better marketing — they want their marketing messages to feel timely, relevant, and real to their experience. But marketing teams are stretched thin, being asked to deliver that individualized experience at scale across more customer segments, channels, and product lines. And, of course, to do so with tighter marketing budgets and timelines.

Agentic AI fills that gap.

Most people hear “AI” and think of a generative AI tool like ChatGPT or DALL-E. And these AI tools have already influenced digital marketing by helping teams brainstorm ideas, draft content, and automate simple tasks. Agentic AI builds on that foundation — managing the workflows within the team and executing actions with much less human involvement.

Right now, AI agents for marketing show up in four key areas:

• Content creation
• Customer support
• Campaign optimization
• Data analysis

The common thread across these use cases is workflow automation. Agentic AI offers marketing teams freedom from draining, repetitive work tasks like drafting social copy, pulling reports, or triggering customer messages.

Unlike their chat-based or bot counterparts, AI agents can run with greater autonomy within their pre-designed boxes. Once set up, they can listen for triggers, take action, and adjust outputs based on real-time data — all (mostly) on their own.

Mind you: AI agents don’t replace strategy or creativity. Instead, they give marketers more time and energy to focus on those things.

That said, part of agentic AI’s challenge today is separating its specific use cases from “AI” as a general concept. Many companies are still discovering what AI is, let alone how to plug it into their operations and grant it more decision-making authority.

The data reflects this challenge: McKinsey found that, while 55% of organizations use generative AI in some capacity, over 80% haven’t seen measurable impacts on enterprise-level earnings. If AI broadly hasn’t driven bottom-line benefits yet, it’s understandable that leaders might hesitate to invest more — even if agentic AI offers something more advanced.

Gartner projects that 33% of enterprise software will include true agentic AI by 2028 — up from less than 1% today. The potential is clear, as is the utility. But for most marketing teams, agentic AI’s actual power lies just over the horizon.

Benefits of Marketing AI Agents

Even though AI agents haven’t reached their full potential, they offer interesting (if mostly incremental) benefits for any marketing team. The common ones you’ll find are faster content creation, personalized customer experiences, and increased team efficiency.

That said, I asked a few marketing experts about benefits beyond the basics. Here’s what they shared.

Parallelizing Variant Work

Who’s ready to redesign their landing page again? Every marketer who’s undergone that process knows the linear steps you take to pick a target audience, build a campaign, test, and repeat.

Ross Simmonds, founder of Foundation Marketing and Distribution AI, sees agentic AI’s power in adding another dimension to the grind of this build-and-test process.

“One surprising way AI agents are reshaping marketing workflows is by parallelizing variant work,” said Simmonds. “Historically, marketers tackled tasks like writing landing pages or emails in a linear process: one industry, one page, one campaign at a time.”

“But with AI agents, you can now create 5-10 variations of the same asset — tailored by industry, persona, or geography — simultaneously. What once took days or weeks can now be completed in hours.”

Part of that benefit comes from what Simmonds calls “autonomous quality assurance” — an important trust-building piece of AI as a teammate.

“Trained AI agents can review documents for brand voice, grammar, tone, and formatting errors at scale,” he said. “Instead of manual checks, these agents can flag inconsistencies across hundreds of assets in minutes, freeing up marketers for more strategic tasks.”

Adaptive Decision-Making

You’ll find plenty of chatter about using agentic AI to handle repetitive marketing tasks. But Sergey Ermakovich, CMO at HasData, pushes marketers to widen their thinking on using AI’s data-crunching capabilities for decision-making.

“An aspect [marketers] don’t think about is its adaptive decision-making,” said Ermakovich. “AI scans through first-party data at scale. Then, change customer segmentation depending on behavioral triggers. It can shift a customer to a high-intent audience segment after they abandon their cart. The adjustment happens in real-time and at a frequency and precision that a human team cannot match.”

This process removes many of the barriers that those repetitive tasks create.

“It creates a personalized customer journey that optimizes conversion from each moment and interaction,” said Ermakovich. “The optimization isn’t dependent on scheduled campaigns or A/B tests.”

Real-Time Micro-Segmentation

Customer segmentation has long been a focus of marketing research and tools — how do you more effectively reach the right people? Anastasia Parokha, head of marketing at Creative Fabrica, sees an opportunity to get incredibly tactical by using AI for real-time micro-segmentation. And she thinks it’s a gap in many teams’ marketing strategies.

“Modern AI models are trained to analyze user behavior in real time and even adjust your content. Now, you can create specific micro-groups of audiences that help you personalize content,” she said.

She also notes many marketers still doubt this approach because they worry about uniqueness or authenticity.

My advice is to take a hybrid approach, such as using AI for lower-risk tasks,” said Parokha. “This could be A/B testing or copywriting for emails. After that, you can expand the role of AI in marketing because you will be the one to train it. The key is to collaborate and continuously improve the artificial intelligence models you use in your work.”

Best AI Agents for Marketing

In my list of the best AI agents for marketing, you’ll notice a theme: workflow automation and assistance. That’s really where the wall is now — we’re waiting to cross the autonomy threshold. But, in the meantime, these are solid tools to help your marketing team save time, enhance personalization, and optimize campaigns with far less manual work.

Breeze AI by HubSpot

I’ve found the more specialized the agent’s purpose, the better the results. Such an idea seems straightforward in theory, but it’s much trickier to implement in practice.

That’s why I like HubSpot’s Breeze AI agents. You can deploy agents focused entirely on content generation, customer inquiries, prospecting, social media, or knowledge base development.

For instance, I’ve been on a landing page split testing kick lately, and retargeting landing page content is a perfect use case for an AI agent.

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Plus, if you use HubSpot’s platform, your internal data can inform more tailored answers for customers and better results for your team. No confusing integration points or additional tools required.

Pricing: Some parts of Breeze AI, like Copilot, are available for free with a HubSpot plan. These advanced agents need a Professional plan (starting at $800/month) or Enterprise plan (starting at $3,600/month).

ZBrain AI Agents

ZBrain AI agents are great options for AI power users and enterprise-level buyers. Integrating AI agents is one of the largest hurdles facing enterprises, and ZBrain can help solve that problem.

I really like ZBrain’s “Agent Store,” with a gigantic selection of pre-built and curated agents. Technical proficiency needs can slow down many enthusiastic AI adopters within the enterprise setting, so having it laid out so “plug-n-play” style is fantastic.

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ZBrain a “low-code” option, but even with the Agent Store I’d recommend at least intermediate levels of AI know-how before investing. It’s a powerful work suite and comes with a heftier price tag to boot. But, when you’re ready to scale agentic work, lean on ZBrain.

Pricing: ZBrain starts at $999/month, with custom enterprise quoting available.

Chatsonic

For a tactical marketing AI assistant, Chatsonic by Writesonic does some fine work. It’s built for content creation but extends across the entire process, from generating ideas your audiences like to analyzing performance automatically.

I like Chatsonic’s multimodal approach — it combines multiple models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in the content creation process. I’ve found each model to be more adept at certain kinds of writing and other creation tasks, so it’s nice to have it all under one digital umbrella.

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Pricing: Start for free with Chatsonic or upgrade starting at $16/month/user.

Agentforce

Salesforce has recently thrown a lot of its weight behind agentic AI integrated into its suite. Agentforce provides agentic assistance for automating customer service, sales, and marketing operations.

If you keep your Salesforce databases updated, you have tons of data at your disposal for conversational AI tools and predictive analytics to anticipate your customers’ needs.

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Like any company-specific offering, I’d advise you to think carefully about integration requirements.

Pricing: Agentforce’s pricing rolls into your Salesforce contract. You can get a dose of Agentforce for free with Salesforce Foundations — after that, expect a consumption-based pricing model of $2/conversation.

Relevance AI Agents

Relevance AI isn’t totally no-code, but its platform makes creating and launching AI agents much easier than coding them on your own.

For marketing, the company highlights its “AI Lifecycle Marketing Agent,” focused on customer research and outreach management. That’s a useful need, especially for smaller teams.

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Pricing: Relevance AI will give you 100 credits per day on its free plan. The Team Plan will run you $199/month with 100,000 credits for some real agentic horsepower.

SmythOS

If coding isn’t your jam, SmythOS offers a solid no-code platform to help your team build and deploy AI agents. You assemble your agent using a drag-and-drop interface, making it a more visually appealing process (and less complex). I like SmythOS’s pre-built modules and templates for common tasks, so you don’t get caught in a building loop of your own.

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It’s a good place to handle workflows and repetitive tasks — where agentic AI is most useful now.

Pricing: You can use SmythOS on a limited free plan or jump into a paid plan starting at $39/month. It also scales from startup to enterprise sizes, depending on your needs.

Challenges of Using AI Agents in Marketing

I asked several marketing experts to share their experiences and challenges with AI today. Here’s what they told me.

Agentic AI Integration

Even with powerful tools and low/no-code options available, operational integration remains a massive hurdle to clear. As companies grow their staff count and tech stack, the number of integration points expands faster than some people expect.

When it comes time to integrate a new resource like agentic AI, marketing leaders can hit some difficult walls. Jose Fuente, marketing lead at SYMVOLT, shares more.

“AI tools often struggle to mesh seamlessly with legacy systems, creating data silos that hinder performance,” Fuente said. “Add to this the technical expertise required for implementation, and it’s clear why adoption rates can lag behind expectations.”

However, integration challenges shouldn’t halt progress forever. Fuente shares her solution for pushing past these barriers.

“We [marketers] can overcome this by focusing on solutions with dynamic API integrations and partnering with AI specialists for smoother implementation,” she said.

“Pilot programs are also invaluable as they allow teams to test and refine processes before scaling up. The broader trend here is about shifting mindsets. AI isn‘t just a shiny new tool; it’s a co-worker that thrives on collaboration.”

Data Hygiene and Management

It’s 10PM — do you know where your data is? Proper data management was hard enough before AI tools clamored for access. Without clear structures and guidelines for data collection, management, and use, agentic AI can stall out before it hits velocity.

Sean Clancy, managing director at SEO Gold Coast, shares why specificity of data shared with AI matters.

“The hard part is training it on what’s actually important. Marketers throw everything at these tools without showing what a ‘bad’ campaign looks like in context,” he said.

“I’ve seen better results when teams feed in a few messy past campaigns first. Let the agent learn from those before giving it new material. This makes the checks more relevant and the alerts more useful.”

Clancy continues by noting that’s when marketing teams actually accomplish things with agentic AI.

“You stop wasting time on things that don‘t move the needle, and your team doesn’t need to babysit live campaigns hour by hour,” he said. “It’s a quiet shift, but it changes how teams catch problems before they become expensive.”

Staff Resistance

You might build it, but they might not come. I believe employee distrust of AI is your biggest barrier to adoption. If people don’t understand, care, or want to use these tools, they’ll flop.

It’s a challenge that Vrutika Patel, CMO of Cambay Tiger, met head-on when using AI to run hyper-local campaigns.

“Our team worried about job security and learning curves. We overcame this by starting small — training staff on one AI tool at a time and celebrating early wins,” she said.

“Begin with a clear problem to solve. For us, it was proving our freshness claims to specific neighborhoods. We matched delivery speed data with customer locations to create tailored messages that resonated with local buyers. This story-driven approach works because customers connect with authentic, relevant messaging.”

Understanding AI as a Partner

I’ve seen marketers be encouraged to “just try AI for a bit” and become incredibly frustrated when AI doesn’t behave as expected. But if the marketer doesn’t understand what they’re asking in the first place? AI can’t magically fill the gap; it’s a partner, not a replacement.

And agentic AI does even more processing away from the human operator, which can give it a black-box feel if you’re not careful with implementation.

Tim Hanson, CMO at Penfriend, calls this the “understanding gap.”

“I‘ve witnessed countless marketing teams throw vague prompts at AI and then complain that ‘AI doesn’t work’ when the output isn’t what they imagined,” said Hanson.

“The AI never did it wrong; they just didn‘t know the process well enough themselves to explain it properly. The uncomfortable truth is that AI exposes our knowledge gaps. If you can’t clearly articulate every step of how you‘d create something manually, you can’t effectively delegate it to AI.”

Hanson continues with an answer to this marketing conundrum.

“The solution is counterintuitive — to use AI effectively, you need to first get better at doing things manually,” he said.

“I had this exact experience when I started with AI. I was getting mediocre results until I realized I needed to map out processes I knew intimately first. Once I started with processes I could explain step by step (like competitive content analysis), suddenly I was getting exceptional results.”

“Start with a process you know cold, map out every decision point, and use that as your foundation for AI integration. Only then expand to more complex workflows.”

Prepared marketing teams will benefit the most from AI agents.

While I wait for my hoverboard, I hang onto the excitement and enthusiasm for new ideas that have driven my marketing career — especially with AI.

Like any new marketing idea or technology, agentic AI follows the same pattern. Tools improve and promises grow. But the real marketing work stays the same: Build good systems, craft strong strategies, and solve for your customer.

AI agents aren’t science fiction anymore, but we’re not quite at the hoverboard either. In this in-between state, agentic AI can help marketing teams, and they’re getting smarter. The potential to change how we work is real.

But what I learned most from researching AI agents is that the future of marketing won’t belong to teams chasing shiny new tools. The teams that’ll win with agentic AI will build readiness: organized data, clear processes, well-mapped workflows, and a culture that embraces testing and learning.

Three years ago, if you’d asked Kasey Brown, founder and CEO of Different Breed Media, she’d tell you scheduling one post to identically populate across the gamut of social media platforms was a smart, time-saving strategy.

But in 2025, that won’t fly.

“These platforms are becoming more sophisticated in their own ways,” says Brown. That means understanding each one’s unique features, strengths, and weaknesses — and tailoring your strategy accordingly — is more important than ever.

In our Social Media Marketing Trends report, we asked 1,100+ social media professionals about the social media platforms they use most in 2025. We also tapped experts to weigh in on the ones that are losing steam, and the trends determining how marketers can optimally reach their audiences and customers across this digital ecosystem.

Table of Contents

• 2025 Social Media Trends
• Social Media Platforms Marketers Should Watch in 2025
• New Social Media Platforms
• What Platforms May Be Losing Steam?
• How To Determine Which Social Media Platforms Are Worth the Investment

2025 Social Media Trends

1. Short-form is dominating.

In 2025, it’s no secret that quick videos are dominating — I recently wrote about this short-is-king surge among social media entrepreneurs.

Turns out, short-form video is the top format among social media marketers more largely, who’ve determined it has the highest ROI.

It’s also the area in which they plan to increase the most investment in 2025 — when compared to other focuses like images, UGC, and live streaming — with 75% planning to keep their current investment level and 17% planning to increase theirs.

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2. AI is being leveraged for content creation.

The number one way marketers are using AI is for content creation — specifically for assistance with tasks like writing copy, creating images, and generating ideas from scratch. According to HubSpot findings, about 56% of marketers are using AI to create short-form videos, while 53% are using it to generate images, and 42% are creating long-form videos.

I’ve found that ChatGPT is a helpful tool to generate thought-starters — just be sure to spend enough time training it to understand your brand’s unique tone of voice. I’ve found it particularly useful in instances involving collaborations: Maybe you’re partnering with another brand and need guidance for how to merge the two styles for a collaborative campaign or event.

“I think AI gives us much more leverage,” says Aymber Young, a social media growth expert. “The biggest change that I‘m seeing is the ability to integrate AI to where you don’t have to do as much of the legwork when it comes to content creation.”

“You can go to ChatGPT and say, ‘Hey, I create content on health and wellness, and I want people to focus on eating plant-based foods. Can you give me a content calendar for the month, for LinkedIn? For YouTube?”

3. Live video and audio are building community.

I’m a big fan of how-the-sausage-is-made videos. In other words, brands who take viewers behind the scenes in a way that feels more raw and personal than edited content does.

According to Brown, this strategy works really well for building trust.

“Lives should be staples in any sort of strategy that involves building relationships with an audience,” she says. This is especially true in what she calls an ongoing “trust recession,” wherein people are using a lot more discernment when determining where to spend their dollars.

4. Content must entertain audiences.

People want to be entertained, even while they’re being sold a product or taught something new. Bonus points if you can make them laugh: Turns out, 91% of consumers want brands to be funny.

“I work with a lot of clients to help them ‘edutain’ a lot more,” says Brown. “Some of the best content that’s working mixes education with entertainment and really good personal storytelling.”

To help you stay on the cutting edge of social media, I’ve compiled a list of key platforms and features you should have on your radar this year.

Social Media Platforms Marketers Should Watch in 2025

1. Instagram

Instagram is one of the leading platforms social media marketers expect to invest in most in 2025. Recent data shows Instagram is the top-performing platform when it comes to driving site traffic, engagement, and audience growth, with 58% of marketers using it to establish their communities.

I’m particularly drawn to the interactivity fostered by Instagram Stories, where elements like cross-collaborating and link sharing are effective for community-building and engagement.

2. TikTok

As mentioned, short-form video is one of the most popular, top-performing, and highest ROI trends. Given this, it’s no surprise that TikTok users sit at 1.5 billion as it caters to short-form videos.

TikTok is also a great platform for reaching Gen Z, as our consumer trends survey found that 62% of the generation uses TikTok — and it’s also the platform it spends the most time on.

That said, people — myself included — may be wary of TikTok (given the recent U.S. ban) but Young believes TikTok’s value isn’t going anywhere. It still sets the short-form standard.

“It’s still the platform with high virality,” says Young. “You have the [highest] chance of going viral just with organic content on TikTok.”

3. Facebook

Despite increasing competition, the old-standing Facebook should still be on the radar of marketers in 2025 due to its massive reach — bringing in 3.06 billion active users every month.

It’s also still a hotspot for ads: In 2024, Facebook’s total ad revenue amounted to $164.5 billion, up from $134 billion the previous year.

4. YouTube

Based on HubSpot’s findings, YouTube is the platform seeing the most increased investment from marketers in 2025.

While the platform’s done a lot of evolving over the years, integrating features like YouTube Shorts and live streams, Brown says she’s bullish about its future for a different reason: long-form.

Yes, short-form content may be dominating, but she believes YouTube’s long-form content will never lose steam for its strong retention value. It all goes back to trust — and the more time consumers spend with a brand, the more inclined they are to trust them.

5. LinkedIn

Data shows most marketers might not agree, but Young believes LinkedIn should be the platform that’s top of mind in 2025. “It’s really shifting to be a leading community-based platform,” she says.

I’m in Young’s camp. LinkedIn’s been an unmatched source for organic networking, thought leadership, and overall narrative-driven branding. It’s more of a long-game platform, but the results can be worth it.

With a now wider array of content types — text posts, carousels, long-form blogs, lives, and more recently, a vertical video feed, LinkedIn is also trying to step up its game to compete with platforms like Instagram.

New Social Media Platforms

In the ever-evolving landscape of social media, new platforms are continuously emerging, bringing fresh ideas and opportunities — but also question marks in terms of new strategies to consider and overall sustainability.

Here are some up-and-coming platforms to keep an eye on.

Threads

Launched by Meta in July 2023, Threads is one of the newest social media platforms on this list. Its arrival is timely due to the technical and cultural changes Twitter (now X) has faced since Elon Musk’s takeover in 2022. “I do think Threads has a lot of potential given it does operate a little bit similar to X,” says Young. “It feels a lot more buttoned up.”

Thanks to its integration with Instagram, Threads grew rapidly, reaching 100 million active users within 10 days of its launch.

Users can seamlessly transfer their Instagram profile information and followers to Threads, simplifying app adoption. Additionally, users can embed Thread posts into their Instagram Stories and profile bios, generating more interest in the app.

Lemon8

Lemon8 is a new social media platform owned by ByteDance (aka TikTok’s parent company). Though it was initially launched in Japan in 2020, it became accessible in the U.S. and U.K. in February 2023.

Lemon8 is often described as a combination of Pinterest and Instagram, since it’s a photo-sharing app where users can share and discover curated lifestyle content. Popular categories on the platform include fashion, beauty, and health and wellness.

Young is unsure about its longevity. “Lemon8 had a moment especially during the TikTok ban scare back in January but its long-term potential feels uncertain to me,” says Young. “I personally jumped on it and noticed how visually similar it is to Pinterest, which was interesting at first. But I haven’t seen the same stickiness or creator excitement that drives growth.”

Substack

Substack is an online platform that enables writers, journalists, and content creators to publish and monetize their work through subscription-based newsletters. It provides an easy-to-use interface for writers to create and distribute their content directly to subscribers.

Substack also offers tools for managing subscriptions, collecting payments, and engaging with readers. The platform has gained popularity as a way for independent writers (like myself) to generate income and build a loyal audience without relying on traditional media outlets or advertising.

My Substack, Stella, is home to exclusive interviews from Black women in media and an engaged audience that can opt into a free subscription or a paid one for additional content behind a paywall.

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Twitch

Twitch is a live streaming platform primarily used for streaming video games, eSports events, and other creative content. It allows users to watch live broadcasts of games being played by other players, as well as interact with the streamers and other viewers through chat.

“I’ve been particularly intrigued by Twitch,” says Young. “I’ve noticed more creators and influencers leveraging the platform for real-time engagement and some are generating significant income through subscriptions, donations, and partnerships.”

“I think there’s untapped potential here for major brands to get creative: partnering with streamers for organic product placements, having spokespersons do live demos or Q&As, or even hosting hybrid conferences with a Twitch livestream component,” Young concluded.

What platforms may be losing steam?

BeReal emerged in 2020 wanting to be the more real alternative to other apps like Instagram promoting the use of filters and editing. But it may not be sticking quite the way its creators initially planned: In 2023, worldwide downloads were at about 31.5 million, which decreased 60% year-over-year to 12.7 million in 2024.

That’s likely because data shows Gen Z’s media consumption habits are defining social media trends — and Gen Zers aren’t enthused by an app that offers very minimal opportunities to curate.

“I don’t think younger audiences are adapting to it as much,” says Brown. “It feels just a little too impulsive for Gen Z.”

How To Determine Which Social Media Platforms Are Worth the Investment

To determine which social media platforms are worth investing in, marketers consider a variety of factors:

• Audience reach
• Sales conversions
• Driving traffic to websites

When it comes to figuring what works best for your brand, consider a low-stakes approach to start. Brown is a big fan of using dummy accounts to tap into new platforms, understand their value, and assess if it’s worth a larger investment.

“When you start up a fresh account, it feeds you everything, because it‘s trying to gauge what you’re interested in. And this fresh content generally is super viral and has a ton of engagement, right? So the first kind of few days on that new account is just showing some of the best content out there.”

From there, you can determine what might (and might not) be a fit for your brand.

You also don’t have to explore all that’s out there all at once. “Start with mastering three,” says Young. “And then as you grow your team, and you grow the ability to manage all these different platforms, incorporate more. It can be overwhelming trying to keep up with every single platform.”

Should you follow the social media trends of 2025?

Consumer behavior changes quickly in the digital space, and businesses that are willing to adapt to social media trends are probably the ones that are going to see the most success.

For staying on top of the latest social media trends, I seek insight from active leaders in the social media marketing space, like Rachel Karten. Her Substack newsletter, Link in Bio, has more than 92K subscribers and breaks down social media trends, news, and strategies on a weekly basis.

Young also advises searching the archives of free platforms like YouTube University, where you’ll likely find the answer to any questions you might have around social media marketing.

Whatever your strategy, Brown emphasizes one important factor: “What‘s working best is content that’s super authentic,” she says. “But also leaning more into what I like to call ‘unselfish content.’ Ask yourself, ‘How can I always have the viewer in mind?’”

Not every trend will work to achieve your goals, but keeping the customer as your north star will ensure you stay on track.

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

When I was first setting up my freelance business website, I read tons of articles and social media posts about how to find and attract quality leads. Because none of that advice said much about designing the actual form for capturing those leads, I didn’t put much thought into whether lead form best practices even existed.

After all, if your offer is strong enough, it doesn’t matter what kind of form you use to collect people’s information, right? Well, not exactly.

It turns out that some forms are more effective than others at capturing not just more leads, but higher-quality leads. So, in this guide, I’ve compiled the most up-to-date expert advice on lead generation form best practices. (And if you want to take a step back and think through your strategy first, this free lead generation starter guide can help.)

What is a lead generation form?

Lead forms, or lead generation forms, gather information from potential customers in exchange for an offer or a piece of content such as an ebook, case study, research report, or webinar.

Often, these forms are delivered through a landing page, but you might embed them directly into your website content as well.

Personally, I’ve seen greater success from lead forms that were directly embedded into my web pages than from those that required an extra click to access the landing page. But this can depend on your audience and on your offer. When in doubt, try testing both to see which placement performs better for you.

In any case, once a website visitor fills out the lead form with their information, they are able to access your offering. The key is to ensure prospects see a clear value in the resources you offer so they will be compelled to trade their personal information for access.

This means you need to offer something your prospects will value, but it also means you need to clearly communicate that value to them.

That’s where lead form best practices come in.

An effective lead generation form communicates your value proposition in a way that entices prospects to sign up.

7 Lead Generation Form Best Practices

As with most marketing strategies, finding just the right structure for your lead forms will take some trial and error to get the results you want. But these six lead generation form best practices will give you a solid foundation to build on.

1. Choose the right placement.

Before I get into what to include in your lead generation form, let’s talk about where to place the form itself.

Generally, you’ll want to keep your form above the fold. This means placing it at the top of the page so it’s prevalent and easy to spot without scrolling. However, this isn’t the only position to consider for your lead form placement.

Here are four potential placements for you to test.

Beside the Landing Page Offer

Placing your lead generation form above the fold doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be the only thing visitors see when they first land on the page. Instead, try placing the form and copy introducing your offer side-by-side.

For example, take a look at the landing page below. The lead form is above the fold, but it’s not the most eye-catching element on the page — the content is.

Putting the form beside the landing page copy reminds users of the valuable resource they’ll receive if they submit their basic information.

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Throughout the Landing Page or Website Content

If you have a lengthy landing page or are embedding your lead form into website content such as a blog post, you’ll want to include the lead form in at least three positions — or after every 350 words — throughout the page.

Take this report for example. It contains over 1,000 words of content, with the lead form in five different locations as you scroll down the page.

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This accomplishes several purposes:

• It prevents the prospect from forgetting about your offer as they digest the content.
• It makes it easy for the prospect to fill out the form, since they don’t need to scroll back up and find it again after reading.
• It repeatedly prompts the prospect to fill out the form so they can access your offer, giving them more chances to say yes.

Regardless of how long your landing page is, make sure to include the lead form one final time at the bottom of the page. This position allows your content to take center stage so visitors have one more chance to determine if it’s worth downloading.

For a more streamlined look, you could even replace some of the embedded lead forms with buttons that automatically scroll down to that final lead form at the bottom of the page.

In a Chatbot

Besides using chatbots to automate responses and communicate with your visitors, you can use them to share your lead generation form. For instance, when you click “Get full report” on the landing page below, the form pops up, requesting your email to “Download the Full Report.”

Using a chatbot to share your form is an unobtrusive way to keep your offer in visitors’ line of sight no matter how far down the page they scroll.

Source

2. Determine the right length for your lead form.

The next — and probably biggest — concern when designing your forms is the length. In other words, how much information should you ask for?

I asked this question of several marketing experts, and their consensus was: it depends.

While ideally, you want to keep your lead forms as simple as possible, the exact number of form fields you should include will vary based on whether you’re aiming for quantity or quality of leads — and what sort of resource you’re offering in exchange for their information.

Shorter forms are great for generating more leads since people can fill them out quickly.

Longer forms, on the other hand, require prospects to provide more details about themselves and their needs, meaning they show a better purchasing intent. So you may get fewer leads, but they’ll be of better quality.

Source

Arham Khan, founder and CEO of Pixated, recommends tailoring your lead forms to the stages of the buyer’s journey:

• For prospects in the early awareness stage, only ask for their name and email so you can keep in contact.
• For serious buyers considering their options, add specific qualifying questions to help filter out lower-quality leads.
• Likewise, for high-ticket deals, add a few more strategic qualifying questions to filter out all but the most qualified leads.

“For a B2B software client,” Khan says as an example, “we added a simple ‘Company Size’ drop-down. Lead volume decreased by 22%, but qualified prospects jumped 37%. Their sales team celebrated the change.”

That said, even high-intent prospects may click away if they see a long, complicated lead generation form. To avoid this, many of the experts I spoke with advised using a progressive lead form that includes steps and a progress bar like the one pictured below.

This gives visitors an idea of how quickly they can complete the form and download the resource.

3. Personalize the form.

A great way to qualify the leads from your lead generation form is to personalize the form fields to your target audience using dynamic form fields.

Dynamic form fields use dependencies to show visitors different questions based on their previous answers. For example, if you work with clients in different industries, you might first have them select their industry from a drop-down list. Then, the form would ask for industry-specific information to help you determine which services they need.

Some dynamic forms can also change depending on the visitor’s previous interactions with your website. For example, it might automatically populate certain fields with information the user has entered on other pages of the site or ask specific questions related to information on pages they’ve previously viewed.

Callum Gracie has used this tactic on the website for his digital marketing agency, Otto Media.

“If someone visits a client’s pricing page multiple times but hasn’t signed up, our form doesn’t just ask for their email, it includes a question like, ‘What’s stopping you from signing up?’ with multiple-choice options,” he explains.

“If they select ‘Need more details on ROI,’ we send them a case study instead of a generic sales email. When we applied this tactic to an e-learning client, conversions increased by 39% because leads felt like we were addressing their specific concerns, not just pushing them into a sales funnel.”

4. Offer low-commitment options.

Not everyone who views your form will fill it out. But that doesn’t mean you have to let potential leads slip away just because they aren’t quite ready to give you all of their information. Many of the experts I consulted recommended adding a few low-commitment actions that interested visitors can take.

• Follow up on incomplete forms. If visitors provide their email but abandon the form midway through, send a quick follow-up email to ask if they’re still interested in your offer and link them back to the form.
• Let them save it for later. Sometimes, people can’t fill out the form in one sitting. Using a form that saves their information and prefills it on their next visit can help encourage them to come back and finish later. Likewise, letting visitors email the form to themselves can help reduce the chances of them forgetting about it.
• Use buttons instead of free-text fields. When possible, replace free-text fields in your form with buttons or drop-down selections. Not only does this reduce friction for visitors to complete your form, but it will also make it easier for you to categorize your leads based on their responses.
• Offer an alternative. If your form is targeted at serious buyers, visitors who aren’t ready to buy will end up leaving the page. However, you can still capture some of those top-of-funnel leads with an alternative offer. Create an exit intent popup with a simple offer — like a free download or newsletter content — in exchange for just their name and email.

Source

5. Include your privacy policy.

More than 80 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and members of the European Union, have privacy and data collection laws. Often, these laws require you to include a privacy policy when collecting personally identifiable information (PII).

PII covers both sensitive information, like a visitor’s full name and email address, and non-sensitive information, like their zip code, race, date of birth, etc.

Irrespective of a form’s location on your website, you should place your privacy policy where it’s easily noticeable. This puts prospects at ease if they are skeptical about sharing their information.

For example, our lead forms show a privacy policy preview right above the download button. Visitors who want to know more about how their information may be used or stored can click the link to read the full privacy policy before signing up.

Source

Finally, consider placing client testimonials, authority endorsements, third-party security certifications, or a guarantee seal beside your privacy policy. These can help alleviate any remaining concerns for visitors who may hesitate to fill out your form.

6. Change the submission text and button appearance.

The submission button is a major component of your lead form, so how it looks should never be an afterthought. If you’re using the default text “submit” for this button, you may be losing out on leads.

Overwhelmingly, the majority of experts I spoke to reported a jump in conversion rates after changing the submission text to something more conversational and relevant to the offer or brand.

For example, Kate Ross, a marketing professional for beauty brand Irresistible Me, has seen great success with on-brand, friendly language like “Hey, want first dibs on new styles?” instead of the generic “Submit your info.”

Depending on your offer, other alternatives to “Submit” could include “Download now,” “Get the free guide,” or even “Sign me up!”

But the text isn’t the only component of the submission button you should consider changing. Ross tested two color options for her lead form’s buttons — red and teal, in her case — and found that teal outperformed red by as much as 15%.

Since such a small change can make a huge difference in conversion rates, I recommend running A/B tests to determine which designs and wording perform best for you.

However, when testing your form, only test one element at a time.

For instance, if you’re testing the color, shape, or size of the submission button, don’t simultaneously test the form length. That way, when one variation of the form brings in more leads, you’ll know exactly which element made the difference.

7. Bonus: Don’t forget the success message.

Whether people are applying for a role in a company, downloading a free resource, or contacting you about your services, they want a response once they hit your submit button. Otherwise, they’re left wondering if the submission succeeded.

This is where autoresponders come in handy. Many form builders have this functionality, so take advantage of it. Besides providing an excellent experience, having an autoresponder in place helps you begin your relationship with prospects on the right foot.

Additionally, I’ve found it helpful to change the form submission success message so that it prompts users to check their email inbox and spam folder for the confirmation email. After all, the last thing you want is someone thinking you failed to deliver the promised resource just because it landed in spam.

Building Better Lead Forms

As my own experience creating lead generation forms has taught me, how a lead form looks and where it’s located matter just as much as the value you’re offering in exchange for prospects’ information.

But my biggest takeaway from the above best practices is that there is no perfect formula for an effective lead form.

Instead, when building your form, start with who you’re targeting and what kind of incentive you’re providing them. Tailor the form’s design and fields accordingly, and then test and tweak it until you achieve your desired results.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in November 2011 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

I’m optimistic about the future of SEO, and I want everyone who reads this to feel the same. Of course, I can’t deny that things are changing, and I’m preparing for many major shifts over the next few years regarding AI and the future of SEO.

Advancements like Google’s integration of generative AI into search are already changing the digital search landscape, and yes, we can’t deny it: people are using LLMs to solve problems and even buy products. But, to what degree is this new type of search taking over, and how do we prepare?

Many web analysts, SEO strategists, and writers are learning how to leverage AI to create stronger websites and more effective content. This will greatly alter how your competitors approach content creation — and it should alter how you approach it, too.

To shed light on the future of SEO, we’ve reached out to SEO experts at Semrush, Search Engine Journal, and HubSpot. Keep reading to learn how you should prepare your SEO strategy for 2025 and beyond. And if you want to learn more about the latest in marketing, check out our latest State of Marketing Report.

Predictions on the Future of SEO, and How You Should Prepare [Data + Expert Insights]

There’s no doubt that with the rise of AI, the future of SEO can feel uncertain, but after working in this industry for over ten years, I can honestly say I’m not worried. SEO has always been uncertain and ever-changing; that’s what makes it so exciting, challenging, and, yes, admittedly, a bit stressful at times.

I was very careful with the predictions I included in this article. I desperately wanted to balance the narrative about AI and the future of SEO. Please read all the predictions and remember to consider that two things can be true at once:

• AI is great and impactful.
• AI has its limitations.

1. The LLM hype will peak.

I’m going to start with this prediction because I think it instantly adds balance to this discussion.

I know I’m not alone in thinking that AI, generative content, and marketing shortcuts are not always what they seem. The problem is that the hype around AI, the promise of faster, better, and cheaper, is muddying the water. Online, it feels like the benefits of AI are shared far more than the consequences of over-reliance.

With the overly optimistic outlook about AI’s role in the future of SEO, even I can feel under pressure and challenged by clients who, unbeknownst to them, are asking for a sub-par process using AI because someone on LinkedIn shared their AI miracle.

Let me tell you: I was relieved when experienced and respected SEO Mark Williams-Cook shared his thoughts on LLMs and a prediction that we’re near the peak of where we’re going to be with LLMs.

Williams-Cook is the director of Candour and founder of AlsoAsked. I’ve been following Williams-Cook for years on LinkedIn and have always appreciated his contribution to SEO, which includes his unsolicited SEO tips and well-rounded, well-researched, and sophisticated take on the SEO landscape.

With twenty years of experience in SEO, he stays close to what’s happening in the industry and keeps us all updated in his newsletter, Core Updates. Williams-Cook also shares unmissable SEO insights on the Search with Candour podcast.

It’s fair to say that he’s learned a lot about how the SEO landscape changes, and importantly for this article, how people respond to new and exciting developments like AI.

Williams-Cook says, “In terms of the hype cycle, I feel we’re near the peak of where we are going to be with LLMs now. There are a couple of realities that are starting to hit home.”

Source

Williams-Cook notes that the big one is the unsolved problem of hallucinations.

“Many tasks require a series of objectively correct answers, but the very technological nature and, in fact, the ‘magic’ of LLMs, means hallucinations are unavoidable in the base models,” Williams-Cook says.

For those who don’t know, ‘hallucination’ refers to irrelevant, false, and/or inconsistent content generated from LLMs. Naturally, it reduces trust and, if unnoticed, could be catastrophic for businesses.

Below is one of the less serious but completely useless examples of hallucination. AI overviews provide the exact same phone number for a number of businesses.

Source

Williams-Cook brings some data about hallucination rates.

“OpenAI’s technical card for ChatGPT 4.5 stated a 19% hallucination rate on a test designed to catch them; however, it scored a 37% hallucination rate on SimpleQA, a standardized test that asks for facts about known entities published on websites that rank,” he says.

Williams-Cook shares that there are attempts at “grounding’ this output. Arguably, Google is best placed to do so with its extensive web index and scoring metrics. However, Williams-Cook points out that attempts to do so reliably seem to be failing to scale, with Google returning hallucinated information.

Williams-Cook continues, “While LLMs can be useful, the danger is that the public at large has no idea how these tools are working, and we’ve been trained at large to ‘trust’ Google and others as a brand for many years. When we hear ‘AI’, a lot of people will automatically think it is something ‘intelligent’, rather than a very fancy but spicy predictive text.”

According to Williams-Cook, the byproduct of generating likely text so confidently is that it sounds so believable. Studies have shown that not only are LLMs wrong a staggering amount of the time, but they are confidently wrong.

Williams-Cook told me a story where a client used AI for a scientific piece. The AI cited studies, including titles, researcher names, and even the year a study took place.

The client’s in-house expert reviewed the content. The verdict? Well, the study was a complete hallucination. It was entirely false. Because of how the AI wrote the content (with conviction), the study looked completely legitimate to the average reader.

It would be very easy to publish falsities using AI. So, marketers (and everyone) must review every word of AI. Luckily for the client, they work with educated industry experts who spotted the incorrect study. Anyone less qualified could easily have missed it. I would’ve.

Source

Williams-Cook believes that we’ll see an erosion in public trust in these tools as this becomes clearer. He points to an “agentic” future, in which AI agents can perform research and multi-step tasks completely independently. Williams-Cook speculates that this will likely end up being an entirely separate technology to LLMs, but it will still need a source of truth.

“Whichever scenario plays out, many of the principles of what we are currently doing will hold true, as they are fundamentally user-centric,” he says. Both outcomes lead to an erosion in public trust.

I believe marketers have a greater understanding of how LLMs work. In fact, for many marketers, the limitations of AI are not news. In HubSpot’s latest survey on the State of AI Marketing, marketers expressed that barriers to using AI tools included:

• Data privacy concerns. Almost half (42.67%) of people surveyed were concerned about data privacy.
• Role security concerns. Over one-quarter (25.16%) of people surveyed were concerned with security.
• Ethical or legal compliance concerns were shared by 22.05% of those surveyed.

Why I liked this prediction: As above, it brought balance. Additionally, I can absolutely see the narrative change as everyone understands the limitations of AI. I believe this will reduce the over-reliance on AI and increase the AI user’s understanding of the value of SOPs when using AI. No business should risk its brand integrity.

So, what does this mean for the future of AI and SEO?

Well, it means we have to be careful when we use AI. I often use AI as a tool. Sometimes, I generate a bit of content, and I love writing. I don’t deny it can be very useful, but a human edit is critical.

2. Conversion from LLMs will increase.

There’s certainty that conversions from LLMs will increase. The facts are, a year or two ago, we didn’t get any conversions from LLMs because they didn’t exist, so the only way is up.

Before I get into this section, it’s vital you remember that we’re still dealing with small datasets when discussing conversions from LLMs. The vast majority of search is still happening on Google. An article by Danny Goodwin in Search Engine Land rounds up a few studies and reports:

• Even if every single one of ChatGPT’s one billion daily prompts were search-related, it would still account for under 1% of global search activity.
• Only about 30% of prompts resemble traditional search behavior.
• Google handled more than 5 trillion searches in 2024 — roughly 14 billion per day — holding onto a dominant 93.57% share of the global search market.
• By comparison, ChatGPT handled around 37.5 million search-style queries each day — a tiny 0.25% slice of the pie.
• ChatGPT’s search share is less than Bing (4.10%), Yahoo (1.35%), and DuckDuckGo (0.73%).

All this said, I don’t think we can ignore the role of AI, the future of SEO, and how it impacts user behavior when considering a product or service.

I was “chatting” with ChatGPT last week about a purchase. I was torn between two brands at very different price points, and it was a conversation with ChatGPT that helped me decide which product to choose.

Nate Tower, president at Perrill, has some interesting data and insights about conversions in LLMs.

In a LinkedIn post, Tower boldly stated that “traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity is converting at higher rates than any other channel right now.”

Tower believes that ChatGPT and other AI-driven search engines generate higher conversions because users view them and ‘talk’ to them “more like colleagues and friends.”

While the conversion rates are higher, Tower admits that “volume is really low compared to other channels, but there is a potential goldmine of high-quality users waiting for you on ChatGPT.”

I was curious about Tower’s statements and wanted to know if he had the data to support what he was saying, and he did.

Tower shared four data sets from four industries:

• B2B services.
• B2B manufacturing.
• B2B healthcare.
• SaaS.

Some of the findings from this data include:

• Across each industry, conversions from LLMs were higher.
• In the most extreme instance, LLMs converted at 7.75% for the SaaS company compared with a sitewide conversion of 0.47%.
• In many cases, LLM conversion rates were two to three times the sitewide conversion rate.
• Conversion rates have been as high as sixteen times the sitewide conversion rate.
• There are a few cases, particularly in ecommerce, where conversion rates from LLMs are not performing as high as other channels.

Tower predicts that AI search provides a huge opportunity for smaller brands to make their mark in generative engines. Tower says, “Prompts on ChatGPT and other tools are hyper-specific to the user’s needs, giving smaller brands more opportunity to appear as the top recommended option.”

Tower gives an example where a Google user might search “best CRM” or “best CRM for a manufacturing company.”

“On ChatGPT, that same user is providing a very specific prompt like ‘Please recommend a CRM for a $100M metal fabrication company with six sales reps spread out over six territories in multiple countries…’ And often the prompt is more specific than that,” Tower says.

I strongly agree with what Tower is saying here. AI search does provide an opportunity for smaller brands to reach their prospects by showcasing how they can meet their specific needs and differentiate themselves.

However, as AI search develops, I predict there will be barriers to getting visibility in the search, as we see on Google. At the moment, my experience is that the AI search, such as ChatGPT, only shows sites that are performing well in Google, meaning you need a site that can reach the top spots in Google before you’ll get visibility in AI search, and we all know that is no easy feat. Equally, as SEOs know, the algorithm is always trying to provide the best results, and often this isn’t in favor of small businesses.

Top tips:

• You can start tracking your visibility in AI search now. Take a look at Kyle Rushton McGregor’s Looker Studio AI traffic tracker.
• You can also view conversions from people who landed on a page from an AI tool and converted. The screenshot below shows the landing page report with sales made, showing the page the user landed on, the session source, and total revenue.

• You can use HubSpot’s AI Search Grader to understand how LLMs view your brand. It’s easy to use.

With HubSpot’s AI Search Grader, you’ll find your:

• Brand sentiment.
• Share of voice.
• Overview of how your brand is perceived (positive, negative, or neutral).
• General analysis.

So, what does this mean for the future of AI and SEO?

AI search is currently playing a small role in the buyer journey. Although small, early data suggests that AI search and LLMs could be quite a significant part of the decision process. We can also see that Google is by far the most used search engine, and SEOs should be mindful of this while gently pivoting strategies to increase visibility in LLMs.

So far, good SEO that takes a consumer-first approach is what helps brands secure ranks on Google and visibility in AI.

3. Audiences will still want answers from real people.

“AI will change how search works,” says Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media Studios. “You may already find it at the top of many search results.”

However, Crestodina says your audience will still look to your company for answers.

“Your audience needs your help and expertise. As subject matter experts in our niches, we can still publish helpful, useful articles and that content can still be discovered, in search results, in AI overviews, or in prompt responses in the AI apps,” he explains.

Crestodina says we are still subject matter experts in our niches and that our brands can become the most helpful resource to prospective customers. Marketers just have to adapt.

“Likely, the brand with the biggest digital footprint will win,” he says.

And Crestodina believes a brand can win by:

• Writing for many websites beyond their own blog.
• Collaborating with influencers, especially those who create content.
• Appearing on lists, directories, and podcasts.
• Conducting original research and making their site the primary source for new data.
• Doubling down on social media and email marketing.
• Recording videos and making sure the transcript includes the elevator pitch for the brand.
• Publishing true thought leadership because strong opinion is the fastest way to differentiate human-made content from AI-generated content.

In other words, show off your industry expertise while leveraging as many channels as you can to get your brand in front of your audience and in their ears.

“With a few changes to your content strategy, you may be well suited to win in the new era of content discovery, where you optimize for search, but also optimize the AI, training it to recommend your company and your content,” Crestodina says.

Top tip: If you‘re unsure how to get started on updating your content strategy in the age of AI, HubSpot’s AI Search Grader will come in handy.

It’s a first-of-its-kind, free app that quickly analyzes your brand based on what your prospects & customers are seeing across AI search engines — then gives you actionable recommendations on how to improve.

So, what does this mean for the future of AI and SEO?

Human-written content is far from over, writers, especially industry experts, are still very much in need; they are critical to a content strategy that continues to move the needle for businesses.

4. Human-written content will continue to form the basis of AI responses.

As a follow-up to the prediction above, Yannick Van Noy has some thoughts on the role human-written content plays and will continue to play in the future of SEO and AI search.

Yannick Van Noy is the founder and CEO of Alpha Strategy & Marketing. I happen to know that Van Noy’s SEO knowledge is excellent because he recently audited my work. I found his understanding of SEO to be vast, considered, in-depth, balanced, and sophisticated. We had many discussions about SEO, and one particular story stands out.

First, Van Noy’s predictions for the future of SEO and AI. He says, “In the next two to three years, I believe we’ll see a more nuanced approach to how people use search engines versus AI tools.”

Van Noy echoes Nate Tower’s point about the importance of nuance, explaining that AI shines in situations where users are dealing with complex or layered problems.

“AI is incredibly useful for tackling highly complex or nuanced problems — situations where users need a personalized solution, are debugging a technical issue, or are navigating something that doesn’t have a straightforward answer,” he says.

In these cases, AI can offer faster, more synthesized responses than traditional search, which often requires digging through dozens of links. However, Van Noy draws a clear distinction between those scenarios and more straightforward queries.

“For more conventional searches — such as finding a restaurant, shopping for products, looking up tutorials, or following instructions — Google and other search engines will remain the go-to,” he explains.

Existing search tools are already optimized for these tasks through blog posts, forums, and reviews, and AI isn’t expected to replace that. “Just like calculators didn’t replace basic arithmetic in our heads, AI won’t replace simple search habits — it’ll just fill the gaps where traditional search struggles.”

He adds that the content we create for search today — blogs, news articles, how-to guides — will continue to matter in the age of AI.

“If anything, they’ll remain a foundation for AI responses. The future will be about knowing which tool fits the job: AI for context-heavy, layered questions, and search engines for everything that’s already been well-documented and indexed,” he explained.

Van Noy has a great story to illustrate the importance of human-written content in a digital world that may move toward AI search in some instances. Van Noy and his team had an article to edit. The article was already ranking on page one, rank one, but they wanted to keep the article updated.

The team turned to AI to research the topic, but of course, with their article ranking page one, rank one, all the AI could do was regurgitate his own article back at them. The AI didn’t have new data to add anything insightful. The topic was already covered in full, so new insights needed to be added by a human.

According to HubSpot’s data from the State of Marketing, 64% of marketers surveyed are using generative AI for text-based content creation such as blogs, ebooks, marketing email copy, press releases, product descriptions, text-based social posts.

A study by Originality.ai shows that content ranking on Google that includes AI is rapidly increasing. I can see that this may continue for a while; however, we should, in theory, hit a point where human-written content is absolutely critical, and the hype around this will increase.

Source

So, what does this mean for the future of AI and SEO?

It is absolutely essential that you don’t abandon human-written and human-reviewed content. Although things look great for AI now, we know AI is limited in what it can share. While using AI, your content can only be as good as others have input. If your brand has any unique insights or pioneering thoughts, AI simply won’t be good enough.

5. SEO evolves to include LLMs.

Although Google is the go-to for online search, we can’t deny that SEO is evolving, and visibility in LLMs matters.

Daniel Foley Carter is a highly respected SEO expert with over 26 years of experience across all areas of the industry. He’s currently the director at the digital agency Assertive, as well as the director of SEO Audits, known for its in-depth audits that go beyond SEO to include metrics like user engagement. He also leads SEO Stack, a tool designed to enhance the power of Google Search Console.

I’ve followed Foley Carter for years on LinkedIn and always appreciate his direct and informed perspectives on SEO. To help conceptualize his dedication to SEO, I can tell you that he recently shared a six-hour webinar on technical SEO.

When asked about the future of SEO and AI, Foley Carter says, “With the advent of machine learning and AI, we’re seeing faster and more impactful progression in the SEO space.”

Foley Carter explains that, given Google’s stranglehold on the search market and the fact that it has the largest index of documents on the planet, it’s primed to lead progress in search. We know that competing engines such as ChatGPT and BING have pushed forward Google’s integration of AI into search.

As search becomes more conversational, Foley Carter notes, the way people interact with information is already starting to shift — something we’re seeing with tools like Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) and emerging conversational search features.

According to Foley Carter, “conventional SEO is most definitely going to be phased out as Google isn’t reliant on the things it used to be.”

With both technology and user behavior evolving, the strategies behind search optimization will need to adapt as well. Foley Carter predicts that SEO as a skill will see a shifting need to optimize for LLMs. That includes strengthening the selection of citation sources.

In other words, it’s no longer just about ranking well in traditional search — it’s about showing up in AI-generated results and being seen as a credible, high-quality source.

“With LLMs growing, we’re going to see a paradigm shift in a lot of industries, but, fundamentally, end users’ needs need to be met with good quality results, whether they are AIOs or traditional search results,” Folly Carter says. “Subsequently, being present in both is going to be crucial to maintain traffic and to drive conversions/revenue.”

While this may sound like a steep change, he ensures that SEO will continue to incorporate the fundamentals for crawlers, addressing things such as rendering, DOM output, good technical practice, and structured data. However, the field will also rely more heavily on trust signals as well as content types that are more likely to be used in AIO generation or citing.

So, what does this mean for the future of AI and SEO?

I wanted to bring Foley Carter’s insights after the prediction above (that human-written content will continue to form the basis of search) because the two are very linked.

Foley Carter says that SEO will optimize for LLMs to strengthen the selection of citation sources; ultimately, without human-written content and excellent SEO (which is also what gets brands into LLMs), there won’t be new content in the LLMs. SEO is the ticket to visibility in AI search.

6. The type of content that performs best will change tremendously over the next year.

HubSpot’s Senior Director of SEO Global Growth Aja Frost told me that Google is prioritizing “first-person, credible, personality-driven content.” This is a response to the exponential increase in the amount of AI-written, low-value content.

The shift to personality-driven content makes sense. If Google’s consumers are flooded with low-value AI content, Google knows:

1. The content isn’t going to resonate with their audience, and
2. Their AI models won’t have enough new information to keep learning and adapting.

So, what does this mean for the future of SEO?

For Frost and her SEO team at HubSpot, it means drastically increasing their investments in authoritative, human-first perspectives.

And, it means reimagining HubSpot’s existing strategy, with a greater emphasis on perspective-driven content and emerging channels.

7. Human-first perspectives will win over more traditional, educational posts.

Over the next few years, expect to see branded content that is written from the perspective and experience of the content’s creator.

“For years, most companies I wrote for required me to write in their brand‘s voice,” HubSpot Blogger Erica Santiago recalls. “I never had to dive into my own experiences or pepper in my own sense of humor. It was all very clinical, detached. And that was the tone of most branded listicles and articles I’d find in my own search results as well.”

But she says she’s already seeing and experiencing a shift as AI gains more traction in SERPs.

“I wrote an article recently for HubSpot about email marketing trends, and I ended up citing marketing emails in my own personal inbox to ensure I was writing perspective-driven content that AI couldn’t emulate,” she says.

Santiago explains, “Now, when I read branded content, I notice writers are citing their own unique experiences and injecting their personality as well.”

Frost told me that she no longer distinguishes between SEO and editorial. For a post to rank, it needs to meet certain criteria for both.

She says, “That means looking at every piece of content and asking, ‘How do we make this a really unique, compelling piece of content that you can’t find anywhere else on the web?’ And ‘how can we ensure it‘s written by someone who has unique expertise on the topic?’”

8. Brands will have to optimize their content for voice search.

AI is used in voice search to improve language recognition, personalization, and accuracy. As AI becomes more integrated in search engines like Google, users will likely see more improvements in tools like voice search.

It’s also worth noting that voice search is being used more and more when searching for information online.

According to DataReportal, 30% of internet users aged 16-64 worldwide use voice assistants each week. What’s more, 45% of Americans report using voice search on their smartphones.

So, what does this mean for the future of SEO?

Well, it simply means brands will need to optimize their content for voice search results. Marketers can do this by:

• Leveraging featured snippets.
• Optimize your website for mobile users.
• Use long-tail keywords and words like “how,” “what,” and “where” when possible.

9. Web analysts predict trustworthiness will become the most important ranking factor in the SERPs.

When it comes to Google’s E-E-A-T, web analysts say that trustworthiness will become the most important factor in ranking highly on SERPs, followed by expertise, experience, and authoritativeness.

It makes sense that trustworthiness will continue to matter most in the coming years since trustworthiness is essentially the sum total of the other three rating factors.

In other words, your website’s rating for expertise, experience, and authoritativeness helps Google dictate how trustworthy your website is overall.

I spoke with Katie Morton, Search Engine Journal’s senior managing growth editor, to learn her tips for increasing trustworthiness.

She told me, “Since Experience, Expertise, and Authoritativeness support Trust, it’s best to look at the whole of the E-E-A-T concept rather than focusing on any single aspect of the acronym.”

That said, Morton points out that Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines specifically call out the following three points to increase Trust:

• E-commerce sites with secure online payment systems and reliable customer service.
• Honest product reviews meant to inform rather than solely to drive purchases.
• Accurate content about Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics to prevent harm.

For companies looking to increase trustworthiness, again, it’s important to address all aspects of E-E-A-T. Here are her suggestions:

Expert Authors

Source content from authors with direct experience, a depth of knowledge, and expertise in the topic they are writing about. Anyone could Google a subject and write an article about it, but if the writer isn’t a subject matter expert, this doesn’t establish E-E-A-T.

Having recognized experts and authorities in your industry as authors on your site can boost the credibility of your website and brand. On your website, provide bios of your authors and content creators that include their expertise, experience, and credentials.

Accurate Content from Trusted Sources

Publish truthful and well-researched content that cites credible sources. Support claims via the experience and expertise of the author’s first-hand knowledge, with research and statistics from trustworthy sources, or both.

Originality and Value

Ensure that your content is original, substantial, comprehensive, and provides valuable insights. Content that provides value to users is more likely to be shared. When a piece of content gets positive attention through shares and backlinks, it can lend a sense of authority when your content is cited as a trusted source.

Morton adds, “It takes a lot of effort to create content that establishes E-E-A-T, but the results are well worth it. If you follow these suggestions, you will also create Helpful Content, which Google strongly encourages.”

This can help serve both your business and your audience while establishing a positive brand reputation.

10. Marketers will leverage social search and other platforms.

Search engines are still dominant, but social search is growing in popularity, especially among Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X.

In fact, 31% of consumers use social search when looking for answers to questions online, and 1 in 4 consumers aged 18-54 actually prefer social search over search engines.

This could have a major impact on the future of SEO by shifting your focus from Google to Instagram, TikTok, and other social platforms.

HubSpot’s Santiago has first-hand experience with this shift.

“I‘m leading a quick-hit video initiative with other HubSpot bloggers so we can add more value to our posts for readers as well as get more eyes on our content,” she explains. “This means we’re making videos for platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts and then embedding these videos into our posts.”

Santiago says with more people using the above platforms as search engines, it‘s important marketers create content for these channels that leverage back to the brand’s website.

“I don‘t Google things nearly as much as even just a year ago,” she says. “Just the other day, I looked up ’Best platform sandals for the summer‘ on TikTok and found so many new brands I ended up following. I even bought a pair directly from one brand’s Instagram. A year or two ago, I would have Googled that query and bought from the brand’s website.”

Marketers who optimize their accounts for social search have three top strategies:

• Include relevant keywords and hashtags in your social posts.
• Include relevant keywords and hashtags in your bio.
• Make sure that your username is easy to search for.

I’ve seen the power of social search first-hand. When I hear about a new brand, I don’t Google them anymore — I search for their Instagram account. And oftentimes, their social media page is the determining factor in whether I end up purchasing one of their products.

While it’s early days, social media might someday take the lead in product discovery. Many users prefer visuals over text, so it makes sense that they might not want to read a lengthy webpage about a product:

They just want to see it in action.

Additionally, SEO experts are leaning more heavily into multimedia content to expand beyond search regarding opportunities for reaching audiences.

This makes sense: During volatile times, it’s critical that your business becomes adaptable, and you learn how to find new avenues to obtain traffic and leads.

As Frost told me, “At HubSpot, we are dramatically increasing our investment in other types of media, like video, podcasts, newsletters, and types of media that will be far less affected by the changes in search happening on Google.”

11. AI will change how SEOs and content creators do their jobs …

And finally, for the least surprising prediction in this list: AI will change how SEOs and creators do their work.

In fact, more than half of blog writers already use AI, and 74% of web analysts say it improves their content’s performance and ranking on the SERPs.

Over 50% of web analysts have already incorporated AI tools into their workflow.

Some of these analysts are gradually testing it and comparing results to performance without AI, while other analysts are building entirely new teams to leverage AI.

In particular, these web analysts are using AI for specific tasks, including keyword research, automating tedious tasks, optimizing their websites, and idea generation.

Nick LeRoy is an SEO consultant who has worked in the SEO industry for over fifteen years. He is the author of the SEOForLunch newsletter, where he brings updates, articles, SEO interview tips, the latest jobs, and more to the industry.

LeRoy has some thoughts on how the future of SEO will impact how SEOs are tracking data. LeRoy warns that “If you’re still measuring SEO success only by rankings and organic traffic, you’re missing the bigger picture.”

Instead, LeRoy says, SEOs should be shifting their tracking to:

• How does our SEO work impact email, social, and referral traffic?
• What’s the total “halo effect” of our content investments?
• What efficiencies or scale are we providing to our paid media counterparts?
• Are we building a brand that Google cannot ignore?

I agree that conversion tracking and the way we talk and think about SEO have to change. I stand strong with the notion that impressions, clicks, and clickthrough rate still matter, but it’s critical that SEOs think about the wider marketing landscape and how SEO fits into it.

So, what does this mean for the future of AI and SEO?

When used correctly, AI can drastically improve an SEO team‘s strategy. That’s why it’s critical to work with AI, not against it, as you consider how you might shift your strategy to meet these new challenges.

12. … And it will greatly improve marketers’ web optimization strategies.

Kyle Byers, director of organic search at Semrush, told me there are innumerable ways marketers can leverage AI.

As he puts it, “AI is incredibly powerful and flexible in what it can help marketers accomplish — from purpose-built tools like our own ContentShake (AI content generator app) and SEO Writing Assistant to general chat-based interfaces like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google’s Gemini.”

AI can also help marketers optimize their websites.

Here are some of the ways Byers suggests marketers leverage AI for web optimization:

• Conversion copywriting. (“Act as a tech-savvy small business owner who is shopping for accounting software. Grade the following landing page headlines on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how likely they are to make you want to try or purchase my product, then draft five new headline ideas that would be more compelling.”)
• Rephrasing content. For example, simplifying a long paragraph or sentence to meet an 8th-grade reading level. Or rewriting content to make it more unique, to strike a different tone, or to follow your brand’s style guide.
• Getting “unstuck” with content writing. (“Help me finish the following paragraph.”)
• Brainstorming additional angles to add to your content. (“Act as a sales manager who wants to develop an internal training program to improve your team’s sales skills. What important subtopics or angles are missing from the following content, which you would want to learn more about?”)
• Quickly drafting a list of 10 possible title tags and meta descriptions for a given webpage.
• Generating Schema markup. (“Generate FAQPage Schema markup for the following FAQs.”)
• Generating tags for different languages/locations.
• Translating content from one language to another.
• Generating regular expressions (for example, using Google Search Console or Google Analytics).
• Generating new robots.txt rules will also help understand existing robots.txt rules.

He adds, “AI tools can be amazingly powerful if used correctly. Just keep in mind that they’re just that: tools. Use them to leverage your expertise — not to replace it.”

(Interested in trying Semrush for yourself? Click here for an exclusive extended 14-day PRO free trial for HubSpot readers.)

The Next Evolution of SEO

From speaking with experts, I can see that AI is here to stay, and with it comes a new dawn of SEO.

After having discussed the future of SEO and AI with experts, the reality is that this shift may not be as scary as it can seem. Good SEO is what’s keeping LLMs updated, and people are still using Google significantly more than anything else.

As a content creator long-trained in the art of writing for SEO, I’m personally thrilled about this evolution.

It will require businesses to recalibrate and continue putting innovative, novel, human-first perspectives ahead of rote, cut-and-dry content.

As a marketer, nothing could make me happier.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

AI is gaining traction in every industry and advertising is no different.

So, I surveyed 247 advertisers to ask about their AI usage – everything from the tools they use to their 2025 investment plans.

They also shared the key challenges keeping them from investing in it more.

Ready to dive in? Let’s go.

How Advertising Professionals Use AI

Adoption

When it comes to AI adoption, it’s pretty recent for most advertisers I surveyed, with 70% of respondents saying they’ve only been using AI tools for advertising in the last 12 months.

This explains why 55% of respondents report that their organization’s AI adoption level is intermediate, meaning they regularly use it for specific tasks while 22% report only beginning to experiment with basic AI applications.

How is it going so far? 67% of respondents say using AI has had a positive impact on the effectiveness of their advertising strategy. In addition, 22% report that AI implementation has led to a significant advantage against competitors.

Most respondents (36%) see AI as assistive technology in which humans lead. Roughly another third (32%) of respondents believe in an equal, co-creation effort between advertisers and AI.

There’s another 19% who say their creative teams let AI lead with human oversight.

Given these data points, why isn’t adoption higher? Here are the top three reasons respondents cite for not adopting AI further:

• Data quality or accessibility issues
• Integration with existing systems
• Budget constraints

The survey suggests that the higher the org’s AI adoption level, the more likely they are to struggle with integrating it with their current systems.

That’s because when you’re just starting out, you’re typically using simple software, like AI chatbots, which don’t require complex system integration. But as you start to incorporate AI into your workflows and operations, integration becomes necessary and can be a bottleneck.

Tools and Usage

To start things off, there are two companies most advertisers I surveyed go to for their AI needs: OpenAI – saw that one coming – and Google.

The third most popular company is Meta, though only a third of respondents report using it.

So, what are they using it for? Content creation for the most part. It’s also the process 29% of respondents report seeing the most improvement in since using AI.

Forty-four (44%) of advertisers surveyed use AI for audience targeting and segmentation and 36% for performance prediction and analytics.

The four percent (4%) who report using AI expertly see even improvement across these 3 categories. This suggests that increased AI adoption drives greater returns.

Less than five percent of respondents use it for sentiment analysis, trend prediction, A/B testing, or budget allocation.

When I asked respondents to predict which areas will be most transformed by AI in the next five years, most (36% of respondents) said data analysis.

Creative development and content production are tied for the next areas that’ll be most impacted by AI.

Switching to the human side of things, most advertisers believe strategic thinking and data interpretation are the most valuable skills in this AI era.

By far, the challenge respondents report most when implementing AI in their work is the inaccuracies that come up. They also cite training and AI literacy and copyright concerns.

That said, only 11% of respondents believe ethical judgement has become more valuable.

How do advertisers plan to invest in AI? More on that next.

Investment

Most advertisers surveyed (36%) plan to invest between five and 20 percent of their ad budget on AI while twenty-five percent will invest 21 to 40% of their budget on AI.

Fifteen percent of respondents plan to invest less than 5% of their budget in AI while only 6% will invest more than half of their budget.

Of those 6% of advertisers, 40% report that performance prediction and data analytics have been most improved by AI.

Key Takeaways

If you’re just starting to explore AI, you’re not alone and you haven’t missed the train. Most marketing professionals have only recently gotten aboard – within the last year to be more specific.

And they’re not going full speed either – they’re starting with the more simple content generation and slowly graduating to more complex tasks.

Lastly, we know that when advertisers start using AI, their business is in a better position against competitors.

So while initial investments may be conservative, the gradual adoption signifies a shift toward AI implementation.

You and I both know it: there’s no secret to a successful social media campaign. Instead, there’s just strategy; nowadays, posting won’t cut it — and social media marketers are feeling the pressure more than ever.

Tons of moving parts constitute a high-performing, truly modern social strategy. According to HubSpot’s 2025 Social Media Trends Report, some of them include building online communities, planning channel-specific content strategies, prioritizing expert voices, and optimizing content for on-platform search.

In short, there’s so much more to consider if you want to create a robust social media marketing campaign that’s as impactful as it is effective.

Luckily, I’m not here to tell you how to run a social media campaign. I’m here to tell you what you should lean on — from tools to tactics — to make your next one a standout sensation. Keep reading to get everything you need (and then some) for your next social media glow-up.

Table of Contents:

• What is a social media marketing campaign?
• What makes a social media campaign successful?
• How to Plan a Social Media Campaign
• How to Run a Social Media Marketing Campaign
• Social Media Campaign Examples

Although a successful social media marketing campaign can be defined by one sentence, I would argue that its contents can’t be.

In the next section, I’ll explain in depth what scroll-stopping social media marketing campaigns entail and provide some eye-opening stats that will hopefully inform how you approach your social media marketing moving forward.

What makes a social media campaign successful?

As I mentioned, the social media landscape has completely changed over recent years.

Over the last year, between algorithm updates, new platform launches, and shifting audience expectations, it’s clear that social media folks need to not only pivot but — and don’t come for me — also consider potentially deconstructing what content planning looks like.

Before I jump into how these shifts could directly impact your brand, I’d like to elaborate on what I mean by all this. Here’s a short breakdown:

• Social media marketing is becoming increasingly reliant on multi-platform strategy and multi-content execution. Brands and their social media marketers should no longer post one type of content, nor should they post on one particular platform. Audiences want to see a variety of content across all the platforms they engage with, even if those platforms and content types aren’t your brand’s bread and butter.
• If a brand wants to drive true ROI, its identity and motivations must be crystal clear through social media marketing. Consumers are done searching high and low to assess whether a brand is really what it says it is. These days, just by glancing at your social media profiles, they expect to get the big picture about a brand’s commitment to social issues, specific demographics of folks, and core values.
• A brand’s social media marketing needs to incorporate AI support wherever possible. If your brand isn’t utilizing AI, it’s missing out on major opportunities to streamline content, improve social listening, and make brand storytelling accessible to more audiences.

Now, I’m sure a couple of those truths were probably difficult to swallow, especially all at once, but they’re necessary … if growth is the goal.

If you want to know what it’ll take to adapt your social media campaigns and strategy for where the future of social is headed, take a look at the list of recommendations I put together below:

1. Investing in Video

Social media marketing is becoming more and more video-centric; now that video’s rise has arrived, it’s not going anywhere.

HubSpot’s 2025 State of Social Media Trends Report revealed that YouTube adoption has grown 65% in the last year. And, according to more data from the report, 83% of marketers feel comfortable posting on YouTube.

However, video strategy doesn’t start and end with YouTube. Check out how B2C and B2B marketers (and their dollars) are showing up across various video platforms:

• 34% of B2C marketers plan to invest more in TikTok this year, 31% in Instagram, and 29% in YouTube.
• 26% of B2B marketers plan to allocate more budget to TikTok in 2025, only 24% plan to expand efforts into Instagram22% will prioritize investments in YouTube.

2. Channel-specific Strategies

Social media marketing campaigns in 2025 are all about getting granular. As social media audiences develop preferences for how they want to engage with and receive content across different platforms, brands must shift and accommodate where their viewership and consumership will be and how to capture folks’ attention.

That said, as you develop a social campaign strategy, consider tailoring your approach for these top social media channels:

• YouTube (ranking at no. 1)
• Instagram (ranking at no. 2)
• TikTok (ranking at no. 3)

Now, although YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok take the top three slots for where brands are showing up, keep in mind that there are niche audiences on other channels. LinkedIn, Substack, Threads, Bluesky, even Facebook, are close runner-ups, so don’t write them — or what they can do for your social strategy — off completely.

3. Long-term Audience Building

If you want your social media marketing campaign to thrive and survive any algorithm, you must grow an audience that believes in every piece of content you create. This starts with slowly cultivating a real community.

Don’t believe me? Peep the stats from State of Social Trends below:

• 64% of companies have dedicated community managers
• 85% of marketers agree that building an active online community is crucial to a successful social media strategy
• 93% of marketers are maintaining or increasing their investment in community in 2025

Ultimately, audience building goes a long way in establishing trust and long-term loyalty. If you’re not invested in the people who make your brand successful, they won’t be invested in what it offers.

4. Leaning on Social Search

Search isn’t dead, it’s just gotten more social.

When you embark on the research phase of building out a social media marketing strategy (more on this later), you should consider two things: 1) how your brand is showing up in social media search results and 2) how you can leverage social search to get the answers you need, to make your social media marketing campaigns stronger.

State of Social Trends uncovered that 89% of marketers agree that optimizing content for on-platform search is important to their social strategy. Plus, 84% of marketers agree that consumers will search for brands on social media this year.

If anything, these numbers should reinforce that social search isn’t just an alternative to traditional search engines; it’s just an essential element to understanding how folks perceive your brand’s offerings and how they rank against others.

5. Having a Diverse Content Mix

I hate to break this to you, but … your next social media campaign strategy cannot prioritize only one content type. No more image-only feeds or motivational posts with curated cursive copy. Ditch ‘em.

Here’s the data from HubSpot’s 2025 State of Marketing Report to underscore my strongly written plea for content variety:

• 30% of B2C companies are leveraging short-form video, 22% are amplifying live-streamed video content, while 21% are leveraging user-generated content (UGC) and 20% are leveraging blog posts,
• 23% of marketers plan to invest in relatable content in 2025.
• 23% of marketers also plan to invest in funny content this year.
• 18% of marketers plan to invest in authentic content in 2025, too.

Clearly, audiences are asking for personalized content and to see a brand’s true colors. Therefore, brands and social media marketers should give them what they want. Otherwise, they risk getting left behind (and losing some crazy ROI).

6. Leveraging AI

Lastly, if you’re not leveraging AI in your social media strategy, you’re seriously missing out on ways to scale and streamline your social marketing campaign efforts. HubSpot’s State of Social Trends Report shared the following stats about how marketers are bringing in AI to enhance content creation and performance:

• 1 in 5 marketers plan to explore using AI agents to automate marketing initiatives from end-to-end strategy to execution.
• 75% of marketers agree that using AI helps them be more creative when making social media content.
• 71% of marketers actively use AI tools in social media marketing.
• 77% of marketers agree that AI will make it easier for them to connect with their audience on social media.

How to Plan a Social Media Campaign

There are so many ways to create a successful social media marketing campaign. Of course, your plans will vary based on industry, social media platform, and campaign type. Still, no matter how niche your brand is or what audiences you’re hoping to convert, never underestimate the power of taking it back to the basics.

That said, here are a few foundational tips I suggest keeping in your back pocket to guide the creation of your next social media marketing campaign:

1. Start with researching what’s working (or not).

In the planning stages of your social media marketing campaign, you have to consider your competition. It’s non-negotiable.

When it comes to outshining your competitors on social, I follow one philosophy: what you’re doing is no better than what they’re doing until you do some deep diving to understand what’s oversaturated and what’s actually resonating.

Start with completing a SWOT analysis, then do some lurking on social (Reddit and TikTok will likely have the honest perceptions you’re looking for), then, finally ask yourself the following questions:

• Which companies are similar to yours and already have successful social media accounts?
• Which companies have campaigns that you know did well?
• Do the companies you review typically conduct giveaways, contests, or live videos?
• What is engagement like on their social posts?

By taking a step back and asking yourself these questions, you can determine how to make your campaign unique. But don’t stop there. Look for inspiration elsewhere, too.

If your competition isn’t on social media, you’re not a fan of their previous campaign style, or you have an exceptionally special business, look for other campaigns that inspire you and determine how you can apply elements such as a similar style, level of engagement, aesthetic, or a specific message to your campaign.

2. Craft a strategy that’s informed by multi-channel insights.

Next, you’ll want to craft your campaign strategy. To determine your campaign strategy goals, you should work with data … not just any data, though. The data you’ll want to use should come from the following steps:

Find your target audience (across every platform you post on).

Think about these questions:

• Who are you trying to reach?
• How would you classify your target audience?
• What do you hope this campaign will achieve for your company and audience?
• How can you create continued engagement with your followers throughout your campaign?

Ensuring your content and messaging appeal to your target audience should always be your top priority. In fact, it’s a vital rule while developing your social media marketing campaign.

Never forget who you are trying to connect with and why. If you miss the mark, your audience won’t just notice, they’ll scroll right by your social posts and lose interest in your campaign altogether.

Here are some ways to appeal to your target audience on social media:

• Consider the trends that are resonating with audience across platforms. Ask yourself: What do people want to view these days? What have you seen doing well on other timelines? Think about what you see (and love to interact with) on your own timeline and adapt it to suit your brand’s voice on social.
• Create compelling visual content that feels authentic and engaging. Whether it’s a video on TikTok or a carousel on Instagram, make sure your visual content is compelling and interactive. Give your audience something they haven’t seen before, or add your own spin to something that’s doing well on folks’ timelines.
• Make your audience feel seen. If your followers leave questions, comments, or concerns on your posts, you should respond (‘cause duh). By doing so, you’ll form a personal bond with your audience, making them more loyal to you and your brand.

Choose your content types and format.

Remember what I said earlier about social media marketing becoming increasingly reliant on multi-content execution? At this stage of cultivating your social media marketing campaign, you should start zeroing in on the types of content you’ll need to create.

To determine your content types, you have to first consider the why behind your campaign creation. Here are some traditional instances in which your brand and/or company might create a social media marketing campaign:

• Holidays
• Special occasions or milestones
• Partnerships with other businesses
• User-generated content (UGC) promotions
• Contests or giveaways

Then, consider which content type should be used on what platform. For example, if your campaign uses a lot of still photography, Instagram might be the platform for you. If your campaign requires live streaming and want to share longer videos, TikTok might be a good option. And if you want to release shorter bursts of information, Threads or Bluesky could be a good fit. Think about what each platform is best for and go from there.

Pro tip: One of the best use cases for AI is repurposing your existing content into other formats while keeping a cohesive voice and message.

Personally, I think HubSpot’s Campaign Assistant is great for reusing and recycling content. It allows you to input your key messaging and CTA, then creates coordinating Instagram, Facebook, and Google ad copy without the heavy lifting (aka rewriting the same thing over and over across platforms).

Manage the results of your campaign strategy.

No matter why you’re creating your campaign, you’ll probably be interested in knowing your campaign’s level of success. But to make any conclusions about your success, you’ll need metrics to measure and monitor throughout your campaign.

A popular way to do this is through a metric tracker such as Google Analytics or HubSpot’s social monitoring and metric tracking tool. This type of concrete data will provide you with information like:

• Overall campaign traffic.
• How many new followers you’ve attracted (as well as how many followers you lost).
• Levels of engagement.
• Changes in website traffic.
• Changes in sales.

3. Don’t just post your content — promote it.

Now it’s time to start sharing your campaign and promoting your content. Check out some of the following techniques for promoting and sharing your content (I included some examples, too):

Promote one message throughout your campaign.

You should start by promoting one message on multiple platforms using content that fits the chosen platform. By consistently sharing the same message across your campaign, your followers will hear the same information repeatedly, allowing them to retain your message.

Marketing campaigns have proven that messages are most effective when repeated. Repetition results in familiarity, which fosters trust between your audience and your message, brand, and product. Redundant messages stick.

Balance your promotional and non-promotional content.

Your followers will notice if you’re constantly pushing promotional content on them. By balancing promotional and non-promotional content, your followers will perceive you as helpful and want to engage with you more.

In short, this is about your followers not feeling pressured or pushed into becoming a customer (because no one wants to be pressured into a sale, y’all). You will be most effective if you provide your followers with promotional content balanced with content they find enjoyable, like funny or light-hearted UGC.

Ensure your content is unique to your business.

Create an aesthetic for your campaign that matches your brand. Now, you want this to be unique. Anyone who lands on your page should know it’s yours without reading your profile handle.

When I think about aesthetic done right, I immediately picture Rhode Skin, Hailey Bieber’s “clean girl” skincare and makeup brand.

Rhode does visually-pleasing content exceptionally well. From curated color palettes to soft, dreamy concepts, Rhode creates Pinterest girly-inspired content with a twist. 99% of the time, that “twist” is always a surprise.

Sometimes, the twist is food marketing; other times, it’s a contemporary 80s glam revival. Audiences never know what’ll come next, and that’s the fun part. Scroll through the screenshots below to see what I mean:

Source

Source

My point is this: being unique and authentic helps you stand out. It also gives people a reason to want to follow you over your competitors. Regardless of how you choose to stylize your content, it needs to feel cohesive, fun, and connected back to your brand’s offerings.

Engage with your audience regularly.

Say it with me now: No matter how many followers your brand may have, you should always set aside time to nurture your online audience. This means:

• Answering direct messages (DMs).
• “Liking” comments.
• Responding to feedback (even if it’s unkind).

Engaging with your followers, even in small ways, signals that you care about them beyond vanity metrics; that they’re not another number. Moreover, you cultivate relationships and experiences that keep followers invested in your brand by showing up for them consistently.

Create a unique hashtag for your campaign.

All major social media campaigns should have a hashtag that should be the same across social platforms; here’s why:

• Hashtags allow your team members to keep track of interactions.
• Hashtags make it easy for your followers to engage with your campaign.
• Hashtags are unique and memorable.

For example, Black-owned and Gen Z consumer-focused skincare and beauty brand, Topicals, has a newly-launched (but already buzzworthy) social media campaign called Faded Fortune. Faded Fortune may have been born through social, but its success is connected to IRL, one-night-only brand experiences, thus its impact extends beyond the digital space.

Source

Additionally, Topicals’ campaign hashtag for Faded Fortune is, fittingly, “#FadedFortune.” It’s straightforward, simple to remember, and deeply connected to the brand’s in-person activations — as well as the guaranteed high-energy fun that consumers can expect from attending.

Additionally, Faded — a skincare serum and facial cleansing bar designed to brighten acne scarring — is one of Topicals’ core product offerings, so this campaign directly links the concept back to what they sell, grounding consumers in their brand narrative and a niche product-focused experience.

Source

Automate your content with scheduling software.

Although creating engaging content and interacting with your followers may be time-consuming, there is a way to schedule your campaign posts ahead of time. (And, if I’m being totally honest, every social media marketing person is doing some form of pre-scheduling anyway. It’s part of the workflow.)

Tools such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and CoSchedule allow marketers to schedule posts with text, photos, videos, hashtags, and more. Plus, some of these scheduling tools — like HubSpot’s Social Media Management Software — contain analytics features to help users determine which scheduled posts are doing well and which posts need to be modified.

Use live streaming to your advantage.

HubSpot’s 2025 State of Marketing Report highlighted that 21% of B2C brands are leveraging live streaming as a part of their content strategy. With live streaming, audience members can watch content in real-time from anywhere around the world, which creates a golden opportunity for brands to expand their reach to new countries, demographics, and customer segments.

TikTok Live is one of the most popular ways to stream live content, followed by other platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. You can use live streaming to demo products for your followers, conduct giveaways and contests, interview guests and influencers, or simply make customers feel personally connected to your brand.

Ultimately, the way you promote your content is your decision, but don’t forget to test and analyze your results. By keeping a close eye on your performance, you’ll know if any immediate changes can or should be modified while the stream is still live. Additionally, you can also apply your findings to future campaigns.

How to Run a Social Media Marketing Campaign

Here’s the thing: there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to run a social media marketing campaign. And I’m not here to convince you otherwise. Every brand’s goals are different, so every campaign will inevitably look a little different, too.

However, when you are running one, there’s a few standard building blocks that you have to prioritize from the very beginning; not all of them aren’t even explicitly responsible for strengthening your social media presence either. Instead, they exist in the backdrop of your overall digital strategy.

To provide more context and help you get a better grasp on these social media marketing campaign do’s, take a look at the list of foundation tips I put together below:

1. Improve brand awareness.

Although your social media marketing campaign may be focused on other KPIs, improving brand awareness should always be a core pillar of your social strategy. In fact, HubSpot’s 2025 State of Marketing Report noted that 13% of marketers plan to invest in brand awareness for the first time in 2025, so there’s no better time to lean into authenticity and purpose-driven messaging than right now. It’s never too late.

Your brand can improve brand awareness through social media in a variety of ways, such as:

• Posting your campaigns on a variety of platforms (hello cross-posting!).
• Using specific hashtags.
• Providing followers with incentives for sharing your content and tagging their friends (i.e., choosing a lucky follower to receive a goodie box of products).
• Posting a customer’s UGC on your feed or story.

Improving your brand awareness through social media doesn’t need to take a lot of time either. Once you have a plan for your campaign, you will be able to map out exactly where and when it should be posted to keep things efficient. It’s that simple.

2. Connect with your audience.

Connecting with your audience is important in all types of marketing, especially in social media marketing.

In a world with growing distractions and diminishing patience, effective marketing tactics matter more important than ever. The good news, though? Social media has made it easier to connect with potential customers anywhere around the world.

When working on a social media marketing campaign, you want to connect with your audience in two ways: 1) on a surface level — through a reshare, repost, comment, or a “like” — and 2) on a deeper level — through a relatable post that gets them feeling a certain way about your brand or products.

Once you make customers feel seen, they’ll keep coming back.

3. Increase website traffic.

You probably already know this, but social media marketing is a great way to boost website traffic.

On social, customers have little patience and lose interest quickly. By including a URL to your brand’s website (and other social channels) in your bio, you:

• Guide curious scrollers right to your most valuable digital touch points.
• Increase the likelihood that potential customers engage with your product or service in ways that feel most accessible for them.
• Reinforce brand credibility by making it easy for users to find consistent, up-to-date information about your brand.

Here’s some other quick-win suggestions for increasing website traffic and visibility through your social media marketing strategy:

• Your campaign team can respond to followers on social with URLs to specific landing pages on your website. Whether it’s a product page, blog post, or FAQ, providing relevant URLs in conversation shows you’re listening — and it’s a subtle yet powerful way to guide users toward conversion.
• Add a website or landing page URL to your actual post on social media. Don’t just rely on your bio link. Including a clickable link in your actual post (where platforms allow) helps followers take immediate action. A well-placed URL removes friction and directs people exactly where you want them to go.
• Include a strong call-to-action (CTA) in your captions that encourages followers to click through to your website. A strong call-to-action, like “Learn more on our site,” “Shop the collection,” or “Get the full story,” can increase click-through rates while making your post feel purposeful and actionable.

Now that I’ve have reviewed some of the most successful ways to make your social media marketing campaign stronger, let’s dive into some of the best and brightest social media marketing campaign examples.

Social Media Campaign Examples

1. Rhode Skin: Peptide Lip Shape Liner

Dynamic poses. Life-size products. Heels with socks. If Rhode Skin knows how to do one thing right, it’s curating a vibe through social media marketing.

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I know I briefly mentioned Rhode Skin, but I’d like to mention it again, especially if I’m going to talk about a masterful social media campaign. Rhode Skin’s peptide lip shape campaign, without a doubt, was one of the most talked about beauty campaigns of 2025.

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Starring the brand’s founder, Hailey Bieber, and recently-dubbed pop girl sensation Tate Mcrae, along with several other Rhode dreamgirls, the peptide lip shape campaign hit timelines in late January 2025 and left both Rhode evangelists and folks who were new to the brand pretty floored.

The result? Absolute fanfare takeover for the campaign across Rhode’s hero platforms — TikTok and Instagram — plus tons of UGC, some good, some bad, some neutral.

It’s important that I note that the response to Rhode’s peptide lip shape collection wasn’t all peaches and cream. A chunk of consumers — primarily women of color — had a lot to say about how the product was meant to be used; some felt confused by its longevity and wear.

Nevertheless, people showed up for Rhode. Here are what I think folks can take away from Rhode’s social media marketing campaign:

• Don’t be afraid to get literal with your social media marketing strategy. Rhode’s fitness-themed campaign aligns perfectly with the “shape” part of its collection name — Peptide Lip Shape. From gym-inspired visuals to cool girl athleisure aesthetics, they leaned into the theme and had fun with it. Literal doesn’t have to mean boring — it can actually create a clever, memorable through-line that audiences instantly connect with.
• If you can, put your founder front and center. One thing that Rhode’s customers always anticipate is that Hailey Bieber, its founder, will be at the front and center of its promotional campaigns. By establishing Hailey as a recognizable and consistent brand figurehead, Rhode strengthens brand familiarity and trust. Her presence adds star power, but more importantly, it humanizes the brand and gives audiences someone to follow, not just something to buy.
• Show your audience that you not only have range, but that you listen and don’t judge. After receiving backlash for not being diverse enough in its inaugural blush collection launch, Rhode was intentional about showcasing women with different skin tones — from fair to deep — in the rollout for this campaign. This visual inclusivity showed that Rhode was not only listening but also evolving. It made the brand feel more thoughtful, expansive, and aligned with a broader audience — a smart move that resonated across social channels.

2. On Shoes: Zendaya x ZoneDreamers

In April 2025, On, the Swiss-engineered shoewear and athleisure brand, launched a star-led, space-themed campaign and short film with Zendaya at the forefront of its promotional efforts.

The campaign was designed to spotlight its new Spring/Summer 2025 Movement collection along with its recently-released low-profile sneaker, Cloudzone.

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The social media marketing campaign was anchored by two hashtags: “#DreamOn” and “#ZoneDreamers.” Plus, along with the social media marketing campaign rollout, On also released a Zendaya “edit” featuring items from the brand, all hand-picked by Zendaya.

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This was On’s first attempt at getting creative and totally out-of-the-box for a collection launch. Although perceptions about the campaign are relatively fresh, On’s consumers have already demonstrated excitement about Zendaya’s association with the brand, shopping her picks, and, of course, watching her in a completely new project (especially post-Challengers).

Here are my takeaways from On’s social media marketing methodology, if you care to take a few notes:

• If you can, get thematic. By world-building and choosing a specific theme to build their newest collection around, On created an immersive experience that extended beyond product alone. The space-meets-sport aesthetic gave the campaign a clear creative direction, made the visuals instantly eye-catching, and offered audiences something more imaginative than a traditional product launch.
• Don’t be afraid of ancillary marketing. On’s decision to place Zendaya not only at the helm of its social media campaign but its sister-short film helped stretch the campaign’s reach across multiple formats and audiences. The cinematic approach blurred the lines between fashion and storytelling — giving people more reasons to engage, share, and talk about the campaign outside of product-focused moments.
• Lean on high-production quality whenever you can. From casual short-form video edits to a longer-form short film, On didn’t cut corners on visual storytelling. This level of polish elevated the campaign and made it feel aspirational, yet still approachable. High-quality creative builds brand trust and makes content feel timeless — something that can be repurposed long after launch week.

3. Redken: Sabrina Carpenter x Acidic Bonding Concentrate Collection

In October 2024, Sabrina Carpenter, pop’s newest diamond of the season, joined Redken as its first-ever global ambassador.

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Sabrina’s first assignment? Promote Redken’s Acidic Bonding Concentrate (ABC) collection, aka the source for her healthy, glowing goldilocks.

While on tour, at press events, and through her own social media, Sabrina executed her half of the deal flawlessly. Meanwhile, on socials (particularly Instagram and TikTok), Redken had a Sabrina-style takeover, highlighting UGC content inspired by Sabrina’s go-to look, pictures of Sabrina’s best hair looks, and imagery inspired by her hit single, “Espresso.”

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And although Sabrina’s Short ‘n’ Sweet era has been in motion for a while now, the brand is still committed to amplifying their ambassador whenever possible, even as her eras come and go.

In turn, folks and faithful Sabrina fans have adopted Sabrina’s haircare routine through buying the full Redken collection and following her step-by-step process for achieving her signature blonde hair.

Here’s what I think social media marketing folks can take away from Redken’s ABC campaign and partnership with Sabrina:

• Make a long-term investment. By partnering with Sabrina Carpenter as a global ambassador, Redken played the long game. Instead of a one-off collab or limited-time sponsorship, they committed to building a relationship that could evolve with her career — and her fans. That kind of consistency builds trust, awareness, and brand loyalty over time.
• Choose a name and a face that’s easy to remember. Because Sabrina is memorable, Redken’s ABC collection sticks with people. Their partnership with her not only taps into her musical notoriety but also nods to her playful, old Hollywood beauty aesthetic. Combined with a high-profile name like hers, the campaign became instantly recognizable — and even easier to search, reshare, and talk about.
• Match your feed to your brand’s energy. From the start, Redken’s campaign visuals echoed Sabrina’s vibe: fun, polished, confident, and feminine. Their social presence didn’t just sell haircare — it sold a recognizable aesthetic that aligned with their ambassador’s personal brand. That kind of creative cohesion goes a long way in building a social campaign that feels intentional, not just promotional.

Your Social Glow-Up Starts Now

I’ll keep it real — building a social media campaign that actually lands ain’t easy, but it is doable.

Strategy, consistency, creativity, and real-time audience awareness? That’s stuff you’ll need to see results. Whether you’re testing a new format, riding the wave of a trending audio, or deep-diving into platform analytics, what matters most is that you’re showing up with intention.

You’ve got the insights. You’ve got the inspo. Now go out there and post like you mean it. And when it clicks? Trust me — your audience will notice.

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

The story of 7-Eleven’s remarkable transformation in Japan offers a masterclass in global expansion done right. Despite being an American brand, 7-Eleven has become a beloved institution in Japan with twice as many stores, and 8x higher profit margins than in its home country.

But not every brand’s international journey ends in success. When Liquid Death, the edgy water brand that conquered American social media, announced its retreat from the UK market, it joined the ranks of companies that couldn’t replicate their domestic success overseas.

What separates global winners from losers? According to behavioral science expert Phil Agnew, the contrast between these two stories reveals universal truths about global expansion that extend far beyond convenience stores and canned water.

The Liquid Death Paradox: Great Marketing, Wrong Context

Liquid Death’s UK exit wasn’t about poor marketing — it was about misunderstanding local market dynamics. Here’s why the edgy water brand struggled in Britain (read our full analysis here): 

• Product-Market Misalignment: The UK’s high-quality tap water and naturally cold climate eliminated two key bottled water selling points: quality and refreshment.
• Channel-Behavior Mismatch: While Liquid Death excelled at social media marketing, Brits predominantly buy water in physical stores during routine shopping. “There’s something slightly perverse in trying to sell it online when the sale point is actually in person,” Agnew said.
• Lack of Social Proof: Despite memorable marketing, Agnew himself hasn’t seen “a single person drinking Liquid Death” in England. Without visible consumption by others, the brand couldn’t leverage social proof—a critical factor in adoption.
• Flawed Geographic Strategy: Instead of concentrated saturation in key areas (like Joe & The Juice placing 15 stores in West London), Liquid Death spread too thin across the UK, diluting its impact. 

The 7-Eleven Reversal: American Brand, Japanese Triumph

The Liquid Death story becomes even more instructive when compared with 7-Eleven—an American brand that achieved extraordinary success overseas, particularly in Japan.

Despite originating in the US, 7-Eleven has twice as many stores in Japan (21,500) as in America (9,224), despite Japan being much smaller in geography and population. Even more strikingly, 7-Eleven in Japan boasts an operating margin of 27% compared to an average of 3.5% in other countries. 

How did an American convenience store chain become a beloved cultural institution abroad while struggling in its home country? The operational differences tell the story:

1. Supply Chain Innovation

In 1979, 7-Eleven Japan created the Nihon Delica Foods Association (NDF), a conglomerate of food production companies dedicated to keeping meals fresh from factory to store. By 2024, they operated 172 factories around Japan, ensuring consistent quality across all locations.

This stands in stark contrast to American 7-Elevens, which rely on shared distribution centers that also supply Walmart, Taco Bell, KFC, and others—creating inconsistent quality and freshness.

2. Inventory Management Excellence

7-Eleven Japan employs a management approach called “Tanpin Kanri”—constantly analyzing what customers are buying, what they’re not, what products to order more of, and what to discontinue. This item-by-item analysis creates a feedback loop that continuously improves product selection.

3. Community Integration Strategy

Perhaps the most profound difference isn’t just quality—it’s how deeply the brand integrates into local community life. In Japan, 7-Eleven functions as:

• A banking center with ATMs and financial services
• A package delivery point
• A bill payment location
• A place to access government services

Japanese 7-Elevens position themselves as neighborhood hubs that people need to visit regularly, whereas American 7-Elevens are viewed as places you stop only when necessary and leave as quickly as possible.

The Global Expansion Blueprint

For brands considering international expansion, here’s a comprehensive approach based on lessons from both stories:

1. Research Beyond Demographics

• Conduct behavioral analysis: Understand how locals actually shop, consume, and make decisions about products in your category. Liquid Death missed that Brits rarely purchase water online.
• Map the competitive landscape: What seems like an innovative product in one market might be redundant in another.
• Identify true market needs: Question your assumptions about product benefits. Liquid Death’s “cold refreshment” benefit was redundant in the UK’s climate.

2. Adapt Your Operations, Not Just Your Marketing

• Localize your supply chain: 7-Eleven Japan created a dedicated network of 172 food production facilities, while American 7-Elevens rely on shared distribution.
• Rethink your distribution strategy: Consider Joe & The Juice’s approach of clustering multiple locations in premium neighborhoods before expanding widely.
• Modify your inventory systems: 7-Eleven Japan’s Tanpin Kanri system created a responsive inventory management approach that matched products to local demand.

3. Build Community Integration

• Identify essential services: 7-Eleven Japan succeeded by becoming a hub for banking, package delivery, and government services.
• Target tastemakers in your specific niche: Agnew suggests that Liquid Death could have sponsored Wimbledon to reach young professionals with disposable income.
• Start with focused saturation: Rather than spreading thinly across an entire country, saturate a specific neighborhood or city first, as Joe & The Juice did. This creates the visibility and social proof needed for broader expansion.

The Value of Operational Excellence

The $47B takeover bid for 7-Eleven’s parent company by Canadian retail giant Couche-Tard suggests that solving these operational and market challenges, even in a seemingly simple business like a convenience store, can create massive value.

As both the Liquid Death and 7-Eleven stories demonstrate, success doesn’t just come from great marketing or a compelling product. It comes from understanding local contexts, adapting operations accordingly, and building systems that create lasting competitive advantages.

I’ve fallen down countless rabbit holes while doing seemingly simple searches: “How to make a latte?” turns into “Latte vs. americano?” which turns into “How bad is caffeine for you?” and ends with “Coffee alternatives.” AI-powered search engines can save you time and give you better results — if you know how to use them.

I tested nearly a dozen search engines and narrowed the list to these nine options, which include the best for mobile, the best for users new to AI search, and lots more. Take a sip of your coffee (or coffee alternative), and let’s go.

Table of Contents

• What are AI search engines?
• How I Tested AI Search Engines
• 9 Best AI Search Engines

What are AI search engines?

AI search engines use some combination of web crawlers, innate artificial intelligence, and user data to improve users’ search experiences and provide more relevant information. Ironically, these machine-powered engines are some of the most intuitive, and ranking among the overall top search engines.

Since AI search engines are built to better understand human intent, they can save you time guessing the combination of keywords that will return your desired results. And search engine results pages (SERPs) will often include AI-generated summaries with cited sources, so you don’t have to click through several URLs to check their relevance.

Want to improve your company’s performance in today’s search landscape? Our new AI Search Grader takes your site and summarizes how your company will perform in AI search. The tool then recommends how you can perform your performance.

How I Tested AI Search Engines

I tested each search engine on Chrome by asking the same question: What are the latest content marketing trends for SaaS companies in 2025? I used incognito mode and cleared the cache between each new search. I stayed logged out except where I’ve noted otherwise (a few require free logins).

All the search engines touched on the same core trends, so my rankings focus on comprehensiveness, readability, overall user experience, citations, and whether a particular search engine is better for certain users.

A note on pricing: Many of these search engines have slightly complicated pricing structures, but most offer a free and at least one paid option. The paid options usually have additional features like extended access to the most recent AI models, but whether you need those models will depend on how you use AI.

9 Best AI Search Engines

1. Best Overall: Perplexity

Perplexity came out on top for its familiar and easy-to-use UX, comprehensive and skimmable results, and depth of resources.

It has a very similar interface to ChatGPT since it uses OpenAI’s language models, so it will feel familiar to a lot of users:

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Perplexity’s results include a “Sources” tab at the top, so you can easily toggle to see the list of citations. It’s a great way to skim and make sure its sources are reputable and high-quality.

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Unique among all the search engines I tested, Perplexity includes a summary table in its results, which I found immensely helpful — sometimes my eyes cross when I see all that information scroll down my screen, so I appreciated the skimmable summary.

Perplexity cited 20 sources, nearly twice as many as any other AI search engine I tested. It was one of only two that pulled results from YouTube, and it was the only one that also included Reddit (which can be a goldmine if you find the right subreddit).

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Perplexity provides a detailed breakdown of trends, plenty of citations, and a summary table. That makes it the best option for experienced marketers, who may need to do deeper research — but also the best for less-experienced marketers who may want to start with the summary.

What I Like

• Visually well organized, with high readability for both new and experienced marketers.
• The summary table is a standout feature.
• Extensive citations and the best search diversity by far, listing 20 sources, including YouTube and Reddit.

What Needs Improvement

• Perplexity was the only AI search engine that didn’t have obvious areas for improvement.

Pricing

Perplexity has a two-tier pricing plan, plus Perplexity Enterprise accounts.

• Free forever: Includes unlimited free searches and three Pro searches a day.
• Professional: $20/month. Includes 300+ Pro searches a day.

2. Best for Visual Learners (and Second-Best Overall): Komo

Komo’s search results begin with a nifty color-coded “Perspective Pulse” — the clearest and cleanest summary of any search engine I tested.

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Komo has two other features that make it stand out in a crowd: You can select both a search corpus (e.g., the web, academic sources, socials, news, video, blogs) and one of 10 pre-defined personas.

Personas let you choose how you want the information organized — options include gathering quotes, providing an explainer or a TL;DR, or gathering data. I didn’t test personas for this article, as they require a paid subscription.

Komo also lets you choose which AI model to use for your search. The options include various models from Gemini, Claude, and OpenAI. This is great for experienced AI searchers who have a handle on the pros and cons of all the options out there.

What I Like

• The sources are noted immediately next to the relevant text. But unlike other search engines, which use footnotes or dropdown menus, Komo uses a button with the website’s favicon that breaks up the wall of text. I found it much nicer to look at than other SERPs.

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• Decent search diversity, with 10 sources listed.

What Needs Improvement

• There are so many options — AI models! Personas! Search corpora! — that it may overwhelm users who are brand new to AI search.
• Komo needs more search diversity to compete with the likes of Perplexity — but it’s still a close second place for me.

Pricing

• Free plan: $0
• Basic plan: $15/month
• Premium plan: $30/month
• Business plan: $200/month

3. Best for Mobile: Arc Search

I tested Arc Search on an iPhone 14 Pro using the free Arc app for iOS; it’s also available for Android.

Arc is easy to use and easy to read on mobile, and its results were similar in quality to the web-based browsers I tested. Plus, its voice search worked seamlessly, easily working out what “SaaS” was (I pronounced it “sass”).

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It also makes it easy to see all the sources at a glance, and Arc and Perplexity were the only AI-powered search engines I tested that pulled results from YouTube videos. Arc cited 11 different sources, which is on par with other AI search engines.

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What I Like

• No third-party ads.
• It auto-archives old tabs — between my mobile Chrome and Safari apps, I currently have 216 open tabs, and that’s a record low. So if you’re like me, Arc will be a lot lighter.
• You can switch seamlessly between Arc and Google search, which is particularly useful on mobile.

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What Needs Improvement

• I found the UX a bit too cute, and a bit cluttered.
• It took me a moment to realize that “Browse for me” meant searching with AI.
• One of the questions in Arc’s FAQ is how it makes money if it’s both free and ad-free. Problem is, it doesn’t answer it — and that leaves me with more questions.

Pricing

• Free.

4. Best for Google Users: Gemini

If you’re already fully integrated into the Google ecosystem, Gemini is an easy choice for AI-powered search. Formerly known as Bard, the AI chatbot may be attractive to those who have grown accustomed to Google’s many products.

Gabrielle Herrera, a senior marketing manager of community growth at HubSpot, sums it up: “I really enjoy Gemini because it’s integrated with the Google Ecosystem — which was my preferred search engine to begin with.

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Gemini is separate from Google’s AI Overviews, which appear at the top of some Google search results (and which I’m not covering here, since it’s not a separate search engine).

Gemini’s results were some of the most comprehensive of the bunch, and it included more information about AI’s role in content marketing trends, including Google’s E-E-A-T search quality rater guidelines.

What I Like

• Good search diversity, with 13 sources cited.
• It has a “Double-check response” feature, which uses Google to run a secondary search of your question to ensure accuracy.

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What Needs Improvement

• Gemini includes sources for each bullet point, but you have to click on a down arrow to find them. I’d like to see a comprehensive list of all sources included in the initial results.

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Pricing

Gemini has three plan tiers, including one that provides Gemini Advanced free to U.S. college students.

• Gemini is free, but it places some limits on access to its most advanced model.
• Gemini Advanced is $20/month and increases the limits on its “most capable experimental model, 2.5 Pro.”

5. Best for the Privacy-Concerned: Brave Search

Brave Search is the AI-powered engine of choice if privacy is your top concern. It doesn’t track users or their queries, meaning it can’t share or sell personal data — because it never collected it in the first place.

Its AI-powered search engine promises it’s “the only large real-time answer engine that puts privacy first and does not rely on Big Tech search engines.” It wasn’t the best or most powerful search engine I tested, but the quality of information is on par with the rest.

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Brave Search also looks a lot like Google, so it’s a great place for AI beginners to start.

What I Like

• Brave has tabs for Images, News, and Videos, just like Google. This stood out among the search engines I tested, which largely provide text-based results.
• Brave is known for its commitment to privacy and security, making it an essential option in the AI-powered search landscape.

What Needs Improvement

• Poor search diversity, citing only four sources.
• I searched normally and with the “Answer with AI” feature for both questions and received identical search results in both modes — so it’s unclear what advantages Brave is bringing to AI-powered search.

Pricing

Brave offers a number of products like a VPN, a proprietary browser, Brave Search API, and lots more.

• Brave Search is free to use.
• Brave Search Premium is $3/month or $29.99/year, and is ad-free. Unlike its competitors, there aren’t any additional features, but Brave touts Premium as a way to support private, independent search.

6. – 7. Best for People Who Hate Search Engines: Claude and ChatGPT

In an informal HubSpot Slack survey on favorite AI search engines, Claude and ChatGPT — despite not actually being search engines — were the top two responses. And if they look like search engines and quack like search engines, I decided they’d pass the duck test.

HubSpot motion designer Oscar Estrada said, “I like that ChatGPT is able to search through both text and voice modes. Also, its deep research functionality is pretty useful.”

ChatGPT is great for newbies — it summarizes each point in just a sentence or two, so I wasn’t overwhelmed with information. It’s also familiar to a lot of folks, since it was one of the first AI chatbots on the scene.

 

Since HubSpot has an Enterprise Claude account, I signed in and used 3.7 Sonnet. The free version uses a less powerful model.

What I Like

• Claude’s friendly, conversational tone stands out among all the search engines.
• ChatGPT has a “Sources” button that opens a right sidebar — I liked being able to see the list of sources on the same page as the results.

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What Needs Improvement

• ChatGPT and Claude have poor search diversity, each listing only five sources for my query.

Pricing

• Both Claude and ChatGPT have perfectly serviceable free versions.
• Claude’s Pro version is $17/month, and ChatGPT Plus is $20/month.

8. Best for Outlook Users: Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is an AI companion tool that pairs with Microsoft 365 apps, such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Copilot integrates into Microsoft 365 apps to help with the most appropriate tasks, from writing thought-starters in Word to design help in PowerPoint to email inbox efficiency in Outlook.

Copilot also has a web version that functions similarly to other AI search engines. You enter a question, and it curates a response by scouring the web for references. For this article, I tested the web-based version.

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What I Like

• Copilot is built for Microsoft, so if you’re an Outlook user, this may be your search engine of choice.

What Needs Improvement

• Copilot only listed two sources — far fewer than any other search engine.
• Copilot isn’t a search engine first and foremost, and that shows in both the overall UX and the SERPs, which were lacking compared to the others I tested.

Pricing

• Free plan limits access to certain models during peak usage times.
• Microsoft Copilot Pro is $20/month and includes “preferred access to the most advanced models during peak times.”

9. Best for Academic Research: EXA’s Websets

EXA is a bit of a wild card in this experiment, and a word of warning: it’s not for most people.

But for those doing deep academic research or marketers who want an exhaustive list of resources to use for their own research, EXA’s Websets can be a fantastic complement to other search engines.

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Instead of summarizing results like most other AI-powered search engines, EXA’s Websets finds blog posts, scholarly articles, and other news related to your query and search criteria. If you prefer to do your own research, this is a great tool for identifying the best and most relevant resources with just one query.

What I Like

• Searches both scholarly journals and articles/blog posts.
• Clearly labels which of your criteria each article “meets” and “misses” — a unique and useful tool for research deep dives.

What Needs Improvement

• The spreadsheet-like interface isn’t nearly as intuitive as others on this list.
• The credits-based free plan starts at 750, and after one search, I was down to 420.

Pricing

EXA’s target audience is AI companies — and as such, it’s the most expensive on this list by a long shot.

• You can try EXA’s Websets for free using a credit-based system.
• The starter plan is $200/month and includes 20k credits; Pro is $800/month and includes 80k credits.

Where There’s A Will, There’s A(I) Way

Before testing AI search engines for this article, I was already an occasional Perplexity user, but I was pleasantly surprised by several others on this list. Whether you’re new to AI or a seasoned pro, try out a few of these search engines and see which ones meet your needs.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2024 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

If you’ve ever tried to put together an email marketing plan, you might have wanted to pull your hair out at least once or twice. Maybe you didn’t have enough time to properly segment your lists, so you knew your clickthrough rate was gonna totally suck.

Or you were planning several email campaigns at once, so keeping track of all the details for each was kind of like trying to juggle while skateboarding while accomplishing your 50-squats-a-day goal.

Email marketing requires a lot of attention to detail, which is why we put together an email planning template that removes the guesswork and helps set your email campaign up for success. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how it works.

Table of Contents

• Organizing Your Email Marketing Campaign Strategy
• How to Plan Your Email Campaigns & Track Results

Organizing Your Email Marketing Campaign Strategy

The best way to prevent mediocre email marketing is to get organized.

When you’re having difficulty managing all the moving parts of your email campaigns, it’s hard to be proactive and strategic about what you send, which ultimately means your campaigns will be far less fruitful in terms of generating opens, clicks, and qualified leads.

The problem gets worse the more email campaigns you need to plan and send.

To get organized here at HubSpot, our email marketers came up with what we think is a pretty neat email marketing planning template that helps us (and hopefully you, too) keep track of:

• Which emails you’re sending to whom
• The various A/B tests you’re conducting
• The high-level results of each email you’ve sent

We use it as an all-in-one checklist, a calendar, and a communication tool.

Let’s explore how it works, shall we?

How to Plan Your Email Campaigns & Track Results

We realize that not every company sends emails the same way. We encourage you to customize the template according to your individual needs and your organization’s goals.

Since frequency, timing, messaging, content, design, and other elements of email marketing will all vary, feel free to adjust the template by hiding certain columns if you don‘t need them or by adding in new ones we didn’t account for.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Step 1: Download the template.

You’ll want to download your own copy of the template so you can follow along as we explain how it can help you be more strategic about what you send.

Step 2: Open the Email Planning Template in Excel or Google Sheets.

Once you’ve downloaded and opened your Email Marketing Planning Template in Excel or Google Sheets, you’ll notice it contains two tabs. The template itself, which we’ll explore in this post, resides in the “Email Planning Template” tab.

Download the Template

You’ll quickly discover that the Email Planning Template tab is divided into three sections:

1. Email Planning (green cells)
2. Email Results Tracking (yellow cells)
3. A/B Testing Planning & Results (red cells)

Each of the three sections contains columns for the 18 details you should plan for or keep track of in the planning, testing, and results stages of email marketing, which I’ll list in a second.

The planning template will help you think through the 18 details below to ensure you‘ve dotted all your i’s and crossed all your t’s before pressing that irreversible “send” button.

Step 3: Fill out the template‘s ’Email Planning’ section.

This is where you‘ll record the logistics of each email, like when it’s being sent out and who‘s sending it. Here’s what you will record in this section:

1. Email Send Date: When does this email need to land in your prospects’ inboxes? In the template, Column A contains the date of your email send.

Pro tip: If you’re not sure when the best time to send an email for your campaign is, check out these stats we’ve gathered to find the right time.

2. Email Topic: What is your email about? Ex: New Ebook or Monthly Email Newsletter.

3. Owner: Who on your team is crafting this email?

4. Status: Ex: Not Started, In Progress, Ready to Test, Scheduled, Sent.

5. Subject Line: What subject line will you use to entice recipients to open your email?

Pro tip: If you’re struggling to create excellent copy for your emails—be it subject lines or body—consider tools like Campaign Assistant, which can craft high-quality copy quickly with AI.

6. Email Draft Link: Copy and paste the link to your email draft here from your email software for you to keep track of or your team to review. Once the email is live, you can replace the draft link with a link to the live email

7. Send List: Name of your email list, such as “Corporate Executives Interested in Social Media Topics.”

8. Suppression List(s): Names of lists you want to exclude from your send. Ex: “Unengaged Leads and/or Corporate Executives from SMBs.”

Step 4: Fill out the template‘s ’Email Results Tracking’ section.

How did your email do? You’ll record the results in this section.

1. Total Emails Sent: How many email addresses did you send your email to?

2. Total Emails Delivered: Of the email addresses you sent your email to, how many successfully landed in an inbox?

3. Total Emails Opened: Of the email addresses you sent your email to, how many were opened?

4. Total Clicks: How many unique individuals clicked a link in your email?

5. Deliverability: Automatically calculates Total Emails Delivered / Total Emails Sent. Above 95% is ideal, but hard to achieve if your list(s) are purchased. (And you shouldn’t be purchasing lists in the first place.)

6. Open Rate: This automatically calculates the Total number of Emails Opened/delivered. An open rate of 20% would mean that out of every 10 emails delivered, 2 were actually opened.

7. Clickthrough Rate: This automatically calculates the percentage of recipients who clicked a link in your email out of the total emails opened.

8. Leads Generated: How many new potential business contacts did you get from email recipients filing out the form on your landing page?

Pro tip: Get better results by regularly cleaning your email contact list. You can do this by segmenting your contacts.

Step 5: Fill out the ‘A/B Testing Planning & Results’ section.

There are numerous ways to A/B test your emails. You can test your subject lines, image, call-to-action layout, placement of social sharing links and buttons, and pretty much any element you want. Here, you’ll record the A/B test(s) you did on each email.

1. A/B Test Description – Describe any A/B test you‘re conducting with this email send and which metrics you’ll be using to gauge success.

2. Summary of A/B Test Results – What were the results? Which variation won?

And Voilà!

With great planning and organization, you won’t overlook major details, your team will be kept in the loop, you can better track your results, and—because you’ve thought through all you need to when planning campaigns—your emails perform better, too.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in August 2014 and has been updated and for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Most brands chase exposure. They pour money into ads and PR, hoping to buy attention. And, it works if you have deep pockets. But if you don’t?

Then, you’ve got a bunch of tactics to gain earned media value without paying for every mention. Here’s where your whole team will help you gain EMV.

In this article, I’ll break down what EMV is, why EMV isn’t just your marketing team’s concern, how to calculate EMV to prove its impact, and real-world examples of brands doing it right.

Table of Contents

• What is earned media value?
• Why should your team know your earned media value?
• The Earned Media Value Formula
• Earned Media Value in Action
• 3 Examples of Earned Media Value

What is earned media value?

Earned media value (EMV) is the estimated dollar worth of all the publicity your brand gets — without paying for ads. It’s free exposure from media coverage, social media mentions, shares, and good old-fashioned word-of-mouth.

EMV is usually calculated by comparing it to the cost of running ads with the same reach and impact. In other words, how much would you have to spend on advertising to get the same level of attention?

Channels That Drive Earned Media Value

• Public relations (PR): Getting your brand featured in news articles, magazines, TV, or radio through strategic outreach — for free.
• Social media mentions and shares: When people talk about your brand on platforms like Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Reddit, or Facebook.
• Influencer marketing: When influencers, bloggers, or vloggers organically hype up your product/service to their audience.
• Word-of-mouth: The strongest marketing tool — people recommending your brand to friends, family, business partners, teammates, etc.
• UGC: Customer reviews, unboxing videos, testimonials, and any content created by real users.
• Guest blogging and podcasts: Being invited to share your expertise on external platforms to tap into new audiences.
• Awards and recognitions: Industry accolades that increase your brand’s credibility and authority.

In short, EMV happens when people talk about your brand because they want to — not because you paid them. It’s real influence, not rented space.

Why should your team know your earned media value?

Earned media isn’t just a vanity metric. It’s an indicator of brand trust, customer engagement, and marketing effectiveness.

Here’s why your team needs to track and understand it.

Builds brand authority and trust.

Earned media builds the strongest trust between a brand and its audience. When a brand’s message comes from a third party, it instantly feels more credible.

Costco is a great example of a company that makes the most of earned media. Its high-quality Signature Select products and dedication to its $1.50 hot dog combo have bred brand loyalty. You may have heard of the Costco guys, a father-and-son duo that reviews the company’s products. My personal favorite is the band The Never Ending Fall’s series, “Can It Kirkland?” In each video, they compare name-brand and Coscto-brand alcohol.

@neverendingfall

Can it Kirkland? ONE LAST TIME 🥺 LOVE YOU ALL SO MUCH. Thanks for all the laughs 🥹 (come find us on the gram) ❤️#costco #kirkland #fyp #xyzbca #canitkirkland

♬ original sound – TheNeverEndingFall

Actually, Costco doesn’t spend on advertising. Instead, the company relies heavily on earned media and word of mouth, leading to a brand value of $48.3 billion in 2024.

Boosts visibility and referrals.

Thanks to EMV, your brand spreads naturally through shares, organic mentions, and referrals. For instance, 14.28% of Coca-Cola’s traffic comes from referrals only.

In fact, Facebook alone accounts for 51.23% of Coca-Cola’s total social media referrals, highlighting the impact of organic reach on brand visibility.

Source

But how does it work for smaller brands?

I talked to Mia Jozipović, content and marketing strategist for Siterice.hr. She recently pulled off a great PR campaign and shares her tips:

“We ran a study using data from our platform on the average costs of childcare, pet care, and cleaning services in Croatia for 2025. I sent the data to media outlets I thought would find it interesting, and it led to tons of PR articles — completely free,” she said.

“For example, Net.hr and Lider Media — some of Croatia’s biggest sites gave us free media coverage. Did we deserve it? Absolutely! I gave them something juicy they simply could not resist.”

This case means your analysts or coders have to roll up their sleeves and aid marketing folks in preparing research. Most importantly, they have to understand the “why” and its business impact.

Improves strategy and budget allocation.

Tracking EMV data means understanding what’s working and where to adjust. The right platforms, content types, and influencers can drive serious value, but without a clear measurement strategy, it’s easy to misallocate resources.

Olivia Tian, marketing and innovation manager at Raise 3D, an industrial 3D printing company, shared a great example of this in action.

She told me about a product launch where they heavily relied on PR and assumed media coverage alone would generate conversions. While they secured solid placements, engagement stalled.

Next, she amplified it through LinkedIn thought leadership posts, nurtured it via email marketing and integrated it into sales enablement materials.

This one adjustment — embedding media mentions into outbound sales efforts — led to a 30% increase in email response rates.

Tian wraps it up by saying:

“Don’t just chase PR wins — ensure earned media is woven into your broader marketing and sales funnel for long-term impact.”

The lesson: EMV campaigns include salespeople, too, to spread the word.

The Earned Media Value Formula

EMV helps brands put a dollar amount on unpaid publicity. While there’s no single standard formula, marketers generally calculate it by estimating how much they would have spent on ads to get the same reach and engagement.

The basic EMV formula is:

1. Total Impressions — Includes views from social media, press coverage, influencer mentions, and user-generated content.
2. CPM for Paid Ads — Look at industry benchmarks or your past campaigns to see how much brands typically pay per 1,000 impressions in your space.
3. Multiply Impressions by CPM — Gives you an estimated dollar value of what your earned media exposure would cost if it were paid advertising.

Alternative Ways to Measure EMV

Sometimes, you can tweak the formula to make it more accurate depending on the channel and engagement metrics. Here are a few other approaches:

1. Engagement-Based EMV Formula

Since impressions alone don’t show true impact, some marketers factor in engagement (likes, shares, comments) to get a more accurate value:

• CPE (Cost per Engagement) represents the average cost of a like, share, or comment in paid media campaigns.

2. PR Value Formula

For press coverage, PR teams often use an Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) model:

• This works well for traditional media (newspapers, magazines) by estimating what it would cost to buy that same amount of space in ad form.
• Multiply it by a credibility factor (typically 2-5x).

3. Influencer EMV Formula

For influencer partnerships, brands usually calculate EMV using engagement rates and influencer pricing models:

• CPE (Cost per Engagement) and CPV (Cost per View) vary by industry and influencer tier.

“Our most successful EMV campaign involved partnering with micro-influencers in our niche who created authentic content showcasing our product. We calculated impact using: (Estimated Advertising Value) x (Quality Multiplier) x (Engagement Rate),” says Lisa Benson, marketing strategist at DeBella DeBall Designs.

“For example, a post reaching 10,000 people in our target audience with high engagement would be calculated as: (Cost for equivalent paid reach) x (1.5 for positive sentiment) x (engagement rate of 6%). This formula helped us demonstrate that earned coverage was delivering 3x the value of our paid channels,” Benson said.

4. UGC EMV Formula

For user-generated content, you can calculate EMV based on engagement and reach:

Natalia Lavrenenko, UGC manager at Rathly, offers her way to calculate UGC impact and shares tips for result-driven campaigns.

“High engagement beats high follower count every time. Before launching, test different creators with small-budget activations to see who actually converts. One campaign stood out by turning UGC into brand momentum,” she said.

“A giveaway encouraged customers to share their experiences, leading to thousands of organic posts. EMV was calculated using: (Total Mentions x Average CPM) + (Engagements x Value per Interaction) = Earned Media Value.”

Which EMV formula should you use?

It depends on your brand’s goals:

For social media: Engagement-based EMV works best.

For PR and press coverage: AVE gives a solid estimate.

For influencer marketing: Use engagement + view-based EMV.

While EMV isn’t a perfect science, tracking it helps brands understand the real impact of organic buzz. Choose a formula that aligns with your strategy and tweak it as you gather more data.

Pro tip: HubSpot’s free Paid Media Template helps you track and organize media placements across channels like paid search, social media, TV, and more. Easily calculate metrics like CPC, CPM, CPA, and ROAS, while analyzing performance to see which channels deliver the best results for your business.

Earned Media Value in Action

Let’s get practical and walk you through a made-up example of an EMV campaign from the very beginning.

Scenario: A marketing manager tasked to attract new gym visitors for an indoor rock climbing gym. They need to create a viral campaign that will be lifted by pros and newbies and local sports news for free.

Implementation: The gym hosts a special event where a 10-year-old climber completes a challenging route meant for pros. A spectator records the moment and posts it on Instagram and TikTok, tagging the climbing gym. The video gains:

• 1.5 million views.
• 75K likes.
• 4K shares.
• 800 comments.

The marketing manager takes it to local news and a national sports magazine. They agree to post the story for free, which triggers an avalanche of fitness bloggers picking up the story — all without the gym spending a dime on ads.

EMV Calculations

Here, we use the formula :

EMV = (Impressions × CPM) + (Engagements × CPE)

Where:

• CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions) = $8 (industry average for fitness ads)
• CPE (Cost per engagement) = $0.40

Applying the Formula

1. Impressions Value

(1,500,000÷1,000)×8=12,000

2. Engagement Value

(75,000+4,000+800)×0.40=31,120

3. Total Earned Media Value

12,000+31,120=43,120

This means that the final EMV accounts for $43,120 worth of exposure.

Why does this matter?

If the marketing manager chose paid ads to attract new leads and gain exposure, they would’ve needed a significant budget to reach the same audience.

And to be honest, I can hardly imagine the climbing gym investing over $43K in paid ads in one month.

3 Examples of Earned Media Value

Now that we know what EMV is and how to calculate it, let’s check out a few brands that really know how to make the most of it.

1. How did the Barbie movie spark organic buzz?

The marketing campaign for the Barbie movie, released in 2023, became a standout example of earned media success.

Warner Bros created an immersive and catchy campaign, including the “Barbiecore” aesthetic that dominated social media platforms (TikTok and Instagram especially).

Source

The campaign sparked organic conversations, with influencers and fans sharing their own Barbie-inspired outfits, memes, and experiences. This led to an avalanche of free publicity across social media, news outlets, and pop culture discussions.

Why I like it: The campaign blended nostalgia with modern trends, encouraging UGC content that extended its reach far beyond paid ads. It shows how aligning your brand with cultural moments can create a massive earned media impact.

2. How does Duolingo turn trends into attention?

To follow up on the Barbie trend, I can’t skip mentioning Duolingo’s perfect timing with their owl mascot, who transformed into Margot Robbie. Duolingo made a splash with a pre-film ad inspired by Barbie and a presence at a movie premiere in LA:

It didn’t just turn out bold but resulted in tons of likes and comments, with some of the most popular media outlets and influencers making stitches of these videos, giving Duolingo even more exposure.

Source

In fact, Duolingo’s TikTok has become a masterclass in viral content, consistently generating earned media. Their owl mascot, featured in funny and relatable videos, regularly racks up millions of views and shares.

Why I like it: Duolingo proves that even tech brands can humanize themselves through humor and relatability. And by jumping on trends at the right time, they get noticed by influencers and media.

3. How does Semrush amplify its event reach organically?

Global Marketing Day, hosted by Semrush, is a 24-hour online marketing conference that brings together top experts from major brands like Google, TikTok, Pinterest, and Vogue Business.

The event streams live from studios in New York, London, and Dubai, offering 48 sessions on topics like SEO, branding, AI, and more.

Semrush generated social media buzz and UGC content throughout the event, earning media exposure across different platforms.

Source

The results from the 2023 conference speak for themselves:

• Reached over 5 million people across all posts.
• Generated 2,700 tweets with #globalmarketingday.
• Attracted 90,000 registrants.
• Secured 55,000+ leads.

Why I like it: When you invite experts from different companies, you’re pretty much guaranteed a lot of shares from their teams and connections. A snowball effect — more shares, less effort. Word of mouth takes over.

Also, by inviting SMEs, Semrush shows they’re not just throwing an event, they’re solidifying their spot as a leader in digital marketing education.

Don’t Buy Attention — Earn It

Is it easier to get a mention when you pay? Yes. But is it more valuable? No.

Paid mentions can bring quick results or flop, but the real value lies in EMV. Every brand should aim for a long-term game — great content and smart promotion on their own end to make the media or an influencer notice them.

Get these things right, media attention comes naturally.

Monitor the value of organic mentions. Use AI to track brand mentions, and never forget to thank the media that featured you.

Build those relationships. Earn that attention, nurture it, and watch it compound.