Author Archives: i4lead

Imagine trying to describe a giraffe to someone whose never seen one.

Maybe I’d say something like this: “Well, it has brown patches that look a little like puzzle pieces; a long, 6-foot-tall neck, and skinny legs.”

This description is close enough, sure, but it doesn’t quite capture the sensation of seeing one in real life.

Which is how I feel about high-performing marketing teams: Hard to describe, but easy to spot.

The best way to improve, in any sport or category, is by learning from the best. So I‘ve uncovered the seven surprising ways top-performing marketing teams are winning in 2025, based on HubSpot’s 2025 State of Marketing report — and why others are missing the mark.

Plus, keep reading to hear from marketers at TikTok and Canva at how they incorporate these lessons into their own workflow.

1. High-performing teams will focus on value-aligned brand content.

In 2024, roughly 40% of marketers focused on their customer’s experience with their brand.

This year, they’re doubling down on these efforts, with almost one-fourth of marketers investing in content that reflects their brand values.

Why? Because we’ve seen younger audiences in particular prefer value-driven marketing — and many marketers are more interested than ever in reaching Gen Z and Millennial consumers.

Consider Patagonia’s “Unfashionable” ad, which launched in April 2024. The video goes against typical marketing best practices by actively asking consumers to stop buying so much clothing. The video doesn‘t promote a new product. Instead, it promotes Patagonia’s values.

I watched the video and found myself more drawn to Patagonia‘s products than before – because, in buying their clothing, I feel like I’ll be investing in something meaningful.

That’s the power of value-driven content.

2. The best marketers are leaning into visual.

TikTok. IG. Facebook Live. Webinars.

Short-form video, images, and live-streaming videos were among the most commonly used formats in 2024.

This shows no signs of slowing in 2025.

Ahem, some quick stats: Almost 30% of marketers say short-form video is their most popular content format; and, when asked which format delivers the highest ROI, 21% said short-form video.

Additionally, I was shocked to see that images outpaced interviews, blog posts, and live streaming videos for the most-popular formats marketers are using.

(I mean, really. More than blog posts? I’m biased, though. I know.)

But this makes sense. The majority of consumers spend a good portion of their time on social media – and social is, by and large, visual.

I spoke with Nick O’Connor, Monetization Product Partnerships at TikTok. As he puts it, “In 2025, brands that embrace visual-first storytelling will win consumer attention and engagement. Short-form video, interactive formats, and dynamic creative optimization are essential.”

O’Connor adds: “At TikTok, we see brands driving impact by leaning into native storytelling, tapping into trends, and creating content that feels organic rather than overly polished. The key is to prioritize authenticity and creativity while leveraging AI-powered tools to scale production without sacrificing quality.”

So good marketers will continue to lean into visual content in 2025. But they’ll also invest in owned platforms (like a newsletter) to ensure they’re facilitating a space where they can continue to foster stronger relationships with prospects and leads.

3. The highest-performing marketers will use AI.

This one is surprising to absolutely no one, I presume.

But it‘s still worth calling out: The highest-performing teams won’t just occasionally dabble with conversational GPTs; they’ll fully integrate AI into their existing strategies, content, and processes.

“One thing that’s clear in this rapidly evolving AI-augmented era is that marketing teams that fully embrace AI—the ones that think of AI not just as a tool but as an essential collaborator—will outperform the teams that don’t,” Indy Sen, an Ecosystem Marketer at Canva, told me.

He adds, “AI, when implemented right, has the power to speed up workflows, shaving hours off your team’s workload while keeping the talented humans you hired squarely in the loop.”

AI should be overhauling how you create content, how you report on campaign performance, and even how you send emails. It should change your to-do lists, your career chats with your manager, and your company-wide presentations.

In 2025, marketers plan to:

• Use AI for multi-modal campaigns (20%)
• Leverage AI agents to automate marketing (20%)
• Create content using AI — including copy, images, and ideas (43%)
• Brainstorm with AI (26%)
• Leverage AI for data analysis and reporting (35%)

Almost 50% of marketers say they have a clear understanding of how they’ll use AI in their marketing strategies in 2025.

What does this mean? It‘s time to play ball. If you’ve been hesitant to test AI in unique ways, this is your year to dive in.

4. Top marketing teams will invest in micro-influencers.

45% of marketers told us they’d found the most success in 2024 with micro-influencers, compared to 25% with macro-influencers (100k-999k followers) and just 6% with mega-influencers (1M+ followers).

Top-performing marketers are recognizing the power of micro-influencers — those with smaller but highly engaged audiences (typically between 10k-50k followers).

This comes down to authenticity and trust. Micro-influencers tend to have deeper connections with their followers, resulting in higher engagement rates and more genuine endorsements. Plus, they’re more affordable than mega-influencers, allowing brands to diversify their influencer portfolios.

Take Glossier: Rather than chasing A-list celebs, they’ve built their empire largely through partnerships with beauty micro-influencers who create authentic content that resonates with specific audiences.

The strategy? Quality over quantity. One passionate micro-influencer with 15k dedicated followers can drive more conversions than a celebrity with millions of passive followers.

5. The best marketers will repurpose their content.

If you‘re creating content from scratch for every platform, you’re working too hard. That’s the mantra of high-performing marketing teams in 2025.

Think about it: That webinar you hosted could become a blog post, which could then be chunked into LinkedIn carousel posts, which could then be transformed into TikTok clips, which could then… you get the gist.

This approach isn‘t just about efficiency (although that’s a major benefit). It’s about meeting your audience where they are with consistent messaging.

This is how smart teams are scaling their content efforts in 2025.

6. Marketing leaders will hire social media specialists.

Remember when “social media manager” meant the intern who knew how to use Facebook? Those days are long gone.

The top three roles marketing leaders plan to recruit for in 2025 are:

• Content creator (14%)
• Social media coordinator (13%)
• Social media strategist (13%)

In 2025, high-performing marketing teams are treating social media as a specialized discipline requiring dedicated expertise.

We’re seeing roles like “TikTok Content Strategist” and “LinkedIn Audience Development Manager” emerge as companies recognize that each platform requires its own strategy, content approach, and performance metrics.

The general social media manager role is evolving into a more strategic position that oversees these specialists and ensures brand consistency across platforms while allowing for platform-specific optimization.

With algorithm changes happening almost weekly and new features constantly rolling out, having someone who lives and breathes a specific platform has become a competitive advantage that separates top marketing teams.

7. Data-driven marketing will be a necessity, not a luxury, for high-performing teams.

In our State of Marketing report, nearly one-third of respondents (29%) identified the growing significance of data-driven marketing strategies as the most important industry change, while another quarter (25%) highlighted the increasing importance of data to prove ROI and business value.

The most successful marketing teams in 2025 are leveraging data at every step of their process – from initial audience research to campaign optimization to ROI analysis.

But here‘s the catch: It’s not just about collecting more data. It’s about collecting the right data and turning it into action. Top teams are focusing on metrics that directly tie to business outcomes rather than vanity metrics.

They’re also democratizing data access across their teams. Gone are the days when only analysts could access performance data. In high-performing organizations, marketers at all levels have dashboards and tools to make data-informed decisions daily.

The gap between data-driven teams and those still operating on assumptions is widening rapidly. In 2025, this capability isn‘t just nice to have: It’s table stakes for marketing success.

So there you have it – seven surprising ways top marketing teams are winning in 2025. Which of these strategies is your team already implementing, and which might require a shift in approach? The beauty is that you don’t need to tackle all seven at once – even small steps toward these practices can yield significant results over time.

I fly Southwest Airlines almost exclusively, and one thing I’ve noticed about Southwest is that their branding is on point.

Whether I’m booking a flight on their mobile application, being served my go-to in-flight ginger ale, or walking through the terminal at Midway Airport, I’m surrounded by Southwest’s consistent brand colors, messaging, and imagery.

This is an example of integrated marketing at work. If you’re interested in presenting a cohesive, consistent brand experience that leaves your products or services top-of-mind — like Southwest does — this guide is for you.

Read on to learn more about integrated marketing, how to weave it into your marketing plan, and how to create your own campaign.

Table of Contents

• What is integrated marketing?
• How to Build an Integrated Marketing Campaign
• Integrated Marketing Strategies and Best Practices
• Examples of Integrated Marketing Campaigns
• Marketing Plan Template

Imagine discovering a new brand on Instagram and visiting the company’s website to purchase one of its products. If their website promoted a different message or campaign than the one you found on their Instagram account, you’d have a hard time understanding the gist of the brand, right?

Integrated marketing exists to eliminate these disparities and differences regardless of how or when a customer interacts with your brand. It’s similar to multi-channel marketing, except integrated marketing aligns the message you share on all those channels.

I’ve found that integrated marketing doesn’t just apply only to your inbound or digital marketing channels; it also includes traditional media channels. Many integrated marketing examples I’ll review below incorporate conventional marketing channels such as print, radio, and TV ads.

Why are integrated marketing communication plans effective?

While integrated marketing campaigns can differ in their goals (e.g., converting views, building brand awareness, etc.), they should all have one component in common: to align your marketing channels to present a united marketing “front.”

I’ve also found it more effective to run integrated marketing campaigns than campaigns on individual channels. Integrated marketing campaigns are more impactful for a few reasons because they tend to:

• Reach a wider audience than a single marketing channel.
• Increase visibility as they are more likely to be seen on multiple channels.
• Build trust with visitors as they see a consistent message on multiple channels.
• Save you money since assets are shareable between different marketing channels.

So, how can you build your integrated marketing campaign? These are the steps I follow to get started.

1. Establish your overarching campaign goal.

Before you consider what channels will be part of your integrated marketing campaign, you must consider the goal of the entire campaign.

Once you’ve identified your goal, remember to make it SMART. This will help you stay focused, track your campaign success, and learn how to improve the next time.

When I’ve tracked my own campaigns, I’ve focused on creating goals that relate to key performance indicators (KPIs) and their subsequent metrics.

KPI	RELATED METRICS
Traffic/reach	Unique page views by channel and source
Engagement	Bounce rate; average time on page
Top (and falling) content	Top page views; top exits
Impact	Click-throughs; conversions; backlinks
Sentiment	Comments; social shares
Lead generation	Total leads; total sessions; session to lead conversion rate
Sales	Lead to marketing qualified lead (MQL); MQL to sales qualified lead (SQL); customer purchase/closed-won business

Also, while increased engagement and new leads are always exciting, a multi-channel campaign should consider the bigger picture: how your campaign impacts sales opportunities and business revenue.

2. Choose your marketing channels and set goals for each one.

Now that you know your overarching integrated marketing campaign goal, you probably have a better idea of what channels (if not all of them) can help you reach that goal.

For example, if you want to roll out a new logo and branding suite, you don’t necessarily need to leverage radio ads.

On the other hand, if you’re extending your audience to target a new geographic region or city, radio ads, billboard ads, TV ads, and other local channels may come in handy.

In my opinion, there are 10 major marketing “channels” that you can use to distribute your campaign content, including:

1. Advertising (both print and PPC)
2. Direct marketing
3. Email marketing
4. PR
5. Personal selling
6. Sales promotions
7. Digital marketing (e.g., website, content marketing, and SEO)
8. Social media
9. Events and sponsorships
10. Packaging

Your integrated marketing campaign should include a variety of marketing channels to reach the widest audience and drive home your campaign message. If you see one or more channels plateau, don’t hesitate to add, remove, or test new ones.

Source

3. Define your buyer personas by channel.

Every marketing channel targets its specific buyer persona. For this reason, instead of defining a broad persona for your campaign, I recommend defining your audience by channel.

There will inevitably be some overlap, but I think it’s wise to understand exactly who you’re talking to on each medium and how to tailor those specific assets to be the most successful.

With some campaigns, you may be targeting a specific audience. In this case, flip steps 2 and 3 — define your buyer persona(s) first and then decide which channels can help you reach that audience.

Pro tip: In addition to HubSpot’s (fun!) buyer person tool, you can utilize free buyer persona templates to jumpstart this process.

Source

4. Identify your channel managers.

Depending on the size of your marketing team, you may have different people (or entire groups) in charge of other channels. However, you still must choose who specifically will ensure their channel(s) align with the campaign.

This is important for two reasons:

• So managers can be the expert on their channel (e.g., audience, posting cadence, optimization tactics, reporting strategies, etc.) and will know how to tailor the campaign to be the most successful.
• Because putting one person in charge of all channels may be overwhelming and cause the content and campaign to suffer.

Pro tip: If you’re like me, you may have a smaller marketing team where one person handles multiple channels. Regardless of your team size, do your best to share channel management responsibilities across a few people — ideally, with one person running one or two channels.

5. Create adaptable marketing assets and messaging.

You have your campaign goal, target audience(s), and marketing channels. It’s now time to create your integrated marketing campaign content. This stage is where copywriting, graphic design, and other creative processes come into play.

Before I dive into how, let’s talk about an essential component of integrated marketing content: adaptability.

To keep your campaign consistent (and ease your workload), you should be able to repurpose content for use on different channels.

For example, let’s say your integrated marketing campaign focuses on the launch of a new 3-minute brand video. You could repurpose this video into:

• 30-second and one-minute “trailer” videos
• Still images
• Quotes
• GIFs
• Hashtags
• Blog posts
• Soundbites

One great way to do this? AI tools like HubSpot’s Content Remix can be a huge time-saver.

Source

Pro tip: Create brand guidelines for your integrated marketing campaign to share with your team and any channel managers. This documentation could include a few things:

• Visual guidelines (logo, color palette, typography, etc.).
• Any developed and repurposed assets in multiple file formats.
• Voice and tone guidelines (taglines, preferred language, words to avoid, etc.).
• Messaging guidelines (pain points, goals, types of content, resources, etc.).
• Buyer persona information and guidelines.

6. Establish your integrated marketing communication plan for collecting leads.

Whether or not you intend your campaign to collect leads, you should always be ready to receive them. Trust me, you don’t want to leave this as an afterthought once you launch your campaign.

Step 1: Consider how a visitor might convert to a lead:

• Would they subscribe to your newsletter?
• Input their information to download a content offer?
• Create an account on your website?

Ensure these conversion aspects of your campaign are also on-brand with the rest of your visual and messaging assets.

Step 2: Consider how your leads will be nurtured once they convert.

• Would they roll into an automated email workflow?
• Would you pass them along to sales?

However you go about this step, I advise you to make sure your leads aren’t forgotten once they willingly give over their information.

Pro tip: I try to prioritize communicating with sales to confirm they’re aware of my campaign and on board with the plan for new leads and customers.

7. Launch, measure, and iterate your campaign.

Remember those KPIs and metrics I mentioned? Whichever KPIs relate to your overarching campaign goal (e.g., boosting brand awareness, rebranding, new product, etc.), start tracking those subsequent metrics each week, month, and/or quarter to see how successful it is at reaching your goal.

Don’t forget: Apply what you learn from each integrated marketing campaign to your future campaigns.

Integrated Marketing Strategies and Best Practices

As you construct your integrated marketing campaign, there are a few key strategies and best practices to remember. I’ve detailed them here, and they apply regardless of your chosen media, channels, or goals.

Align behind the scenes.

For you to successfully implement an integrated marketing approach, it’s imperative that you not only choose marketing channel managers but also that all your marketing managers communicate often about projects and campaigns.

While not every integrated marketing campaign or promotion must be on all channels, they should at least complement each other to avoid a fragmented brand experience for customers.

Consider the channel transition.

Integrated campaigns receive traffic from several sources. Consider how a visitor may view/experience each marketing channel:

• If it was their first visit.
• If they transitioned from another channel.

Think about how each channel can help others convert.

For example, say a customer saw your new billboard on their way to work and, once they arrived, visited the website on the billboard.

Imagine if, on your website, the customer couldn’t easily find whatever your billboard was marketing. How confusing would that be? That customer would likely drop off immediately.

Don’t neglect the overlap between your campaigns.

Integrated marketing exists to eradicate the silos of traditional marketing and bring together a cohesive campaign experience. For this reason, don’t neglect the places where your campaign overlaps.

I recommend checking these places to enhance your consistency across campaigns:

• Your email signature, where you can plug your social media handles, website URL, or video links.
• Your social media bios and posts, where you can include links to your website, blog posts, content offers, or other digital content.
• Your blog and website, where you can incorporate social sharing buttons.
• Your standalone landing pages, where you can optimize for relevant keywords and SEO.
• Your PPC copy, where you can test subject lines to see what your audience responds to.

While these overlaps might not directly support your campaign goals, they help your audience transition seamlessly between channels, enjoy that consistent, cohesive brand experience, and ultimately find their way to a page that converts them.

Every marketer knows how much you can learn from those before you. In this section, I’ve pulled together a handful of well-executed integrated marketing campaigns to give you an example of this tactic’s success.

1. Apple TV+’s “Severance” Grand Central Station Stunt

If you’re an avid television watcher, you’ve likely heard of the successful Apple TV show “Severance.” Ahead of the season two premiere of the show, the cast and crew set up an unexpected pop-up at the Grand Central Station in New York City, gathering the attention of local New Yorkers and the world.

Source

Leading up to the Severance pop-up, Apple TV changed the main header image on their app to one of Severance and also put the show in their number one slot for popular series.

By utilizing an integrated marketing strategy, they ensured that the publicity stunt at Grand Central would point viewers to their app, which then made it very easy to find the show.

Pro tip: If you are planning a publicity stunt for the promotion of a particular product, it’s imperative that you make sure your website, social media, PR, etc., all also promote the same product.

2. Duolingo and Social Media Integrated Marketing

Sassy comments from corporations on social media is nothing new. But Duolingo, the language learning app, takes this to the next level with its unhinged and hilarious brand image.

Duolingo went viral on TikTok and other social media platforms in 2025 when a TikTok creator asked the brand to create a video of the Duolingo owl mascot going to sleep to appease her toddler, who wouldn’t go to bed until the owl did as well. This viral video was shared by many on social media as well as featured on the Duolingo app and website.

Source

We can learn a lot from Duolingo’s integrated marketing strategy by looking at their different social media platforms. Their owl mascot is heavily featured and is always up to something unexpected. Replies from the brand have a unified (if not slightly scary) voice, and customers get the same campaign, no matter where they enter the marketing funnel.

Pro tip: If your corporation is going to reply to comments on social media, it’s vital to have a unified brand voice and image.

3. The Barbie Movie and Mattel

Source

2023 was a big year for movies, and one of those successful blockbusters was the “Barbie” movie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

The marketers and advertisers behind the movie used several integrated marketing strategies to promote the movie, including having Margot Robbie dress up as different iconic Barbies during the press tour, having a photo booth Barbie box for moviegoers to snap pics of and post to social media, and encouraging guests to wear pink when attending the film.

All of these were successful integrated marketing tactics, but one of the best moves was involving Barbie’s original company, Mattel, to participate. The year the Barbie movie was released, Mattel created individual Barbie dolls for each of the main characters of the film.

This kind of integrated marketing is successful because those who enjoy Barbie dolls wanted to know what these new dolls were based on, and those who enjoyed the movie were motivated to check out the Barbie doll merchandise for the film, increasing profits for both.

Pro tip: If you’re including merchandise in your integrated marketing campaign, make sure it’s quality and something people will actually want to buy. Cheap or rushed merchandise will not help your campaign but rather harm it.

4. Coca-Cola and Oreo Collab

Limited edition products and collaborations are common marketing strategies consumers experience all the time. But what happens when you pair up two unlikely yet gigantic brand partners like Oreo and Coca-Cola? A surprising success.

Source

Unlike past collaborations where a soda-inspired cookie might exist or just a cookie-inspired soda, the Oreo Coke collaboration had both — and both were advertised on every possible channel.

When you’re a big brand like Oreo or Coke, you often don’t even need your own social media campaign – consumers will taste test and promote your product for you.

And that’s exactly what happened here. If you visit either company’s websites, social media, or more, you’ll see that they all promote the limited edition collaboration items.

Pro tip: If your brand is planning to collaborate with another brand, make sure that you’re both on board for an integrated marketing approach and strategy so customers can get a unified experience no matter which brand they start with.

5. Spotify “Wrapped” Campaign

The best marketing campaigns require little to no advertising because your customers love them so much they do the marketing for you. This is the case with music app Spotify’s yearly “Wrapped” campaign.

Spotify Wrapped shows listeners their top artists, songs, listening time, and more. This campaign returns yearly and has improved its integrated marketing strategy over time.

I remember the first couple of years that Spotify launched Wrapped — it was difficult to find where my yearly wrapped was located on the app. By improving their integrated marketing strategy, you can now easily find your Wrapped on the front page of their app, website, and in your inbox. This has helped customers avoid getting frustrated and improved the whole user experience.

Source

Pro tip: If you launch a yearly campaign, it’s important to add new features and optimizations every year. Consider updating your design, including new additions or stats, or identifying new channels to showcase the campaign.

Marketing Plan Template

As you can see, planning is the key to successful integrated marketing. If you need extra guidance through the planning process, I recommend HubSpot’s free marketing template to help set you off on the right track.

The template includes:

• A business summary
• Business initiatives
• Target marketing
• Market strategy
• Budget
• Marketing channels
• Marketing Technology

I like this template because it’s both easy to fill out and perfect for sharing with your marketing team and executives who need to sign off on your plan. The template also invites you to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses while looking for opportunities and avoiding threats.

I believe that armed with a solid budget and integrated marketing communication plan, you’ll be able to get executive buy-in to begin reaching customers on channels you haven’t previously.

Integrated Marketing Helps You Grow Your Business — Better

After reviewing the concept of integrated marketing, I appreciate how it turns your marketing campaigns into multi-channel movements.

In today’s omnichannel world — with consumers encountering your brand online, on social media, and on their daily commutes — I believe integrated marketing is more important than ever to capture new customers and build brand recognition and loyalty.

Use the strategies, template, and best practices shared in this post to launch your own integrated marketing strategy successfully.

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

Conversion funnels are a fundamental concept in sales and marketing. Personally, I like to visualize the funnel as that big scary slide you wanted to try as a kid. You saw your friends whizzing down, which sparked your interest. You watched how much fun they were having, doing your research. And then the benefits of having fun outweighed your fear, so you climbed up and flew down.

Customers take a similar journey through your company’s conversion funnel when evaluating whether or not to buy from you. You have to pique their interest, build trust, and encourage them to take action.

In this post, I‘ll explain conversion funnels and how they impact your customer journey. Then, you’ll learn how to optimize your funnel to increase the number of people who make it to your conversion point at the bottom.

Table of Contents

• What is a conversion funnel?
• Why Understanding Your Conversion Funnel is Important
• Conversion Funnel Stages
• Conversion Funnel Analysis
• Benefits of Optimizing Your Conversion Funnel
• Conversion Funnel Optimization

Have you ever watched water swirl through a funnel? If you have, you know that the top of the funnel is wide and becomes smaller at the bottom. The shape of the funnel helps direct the water to a final point.

When moving leads to paying customers, a conversion funnel works the same way as a water funnel.

A conversion funnel is called a funnel because companies often have more leads than they do customers, making the top of the funnel a larger pool of people than the bottom. The top of the funnel, where all leads begin, is broader. As leads move through the funnel, it becomes smaller and more personalized. Your content and customer touchpoints help direct leads to the end of the funnel.

Understanding how people flow through your conversion funnel is essential to being an effective marketer or salesperson. It helps you:

• Engage leads.
• Answer questions about your business.
• Address concerns.
• Organize leads into categories and create customer touchpoints that entice each group to convert.

That’s why every funnel should be designed for how your customers buy, not how you sell. The focus is on providing such a great experience within the customer journey that you convince them to convert.

Before diving into how to analyze and optimize your funnel, we need to talk about an important aspect of this process: the customer journey.

Customer Journey

The customer journey complements the conversion funnel, but it’s not the same thing. Unlike the generalized, linear conversion funnel, customer journey maps show the individual and circuitous paths people take from discovering your brand to purchasing.

Let‘s say you’re a food blogger who sells cookbooks. Here‘s how your customers’ journeys can differ.

• Customer A sees and clicks on your banner ad, visits your blog, reads an article, signs up for your newsletter, gets a discount email, and purchases a cookbook.
• Customer B sees your cookbook in a bookshop, buys it, makes the recipes, visits your blog, and subscribes to your newsletter.

The outcomes for customers A and B are essentially the same, but the journeys and touchpoints are different. So, if you know the various ways people enter your funnel, you can optimize for those entry points. That way, you can meet potential buyers where they are and entice them to convert.

Why Understanding Your Conversion Funnel is Important

To better understand why the conversion funnel is important, I turned to a few experts to get their take. Here’s what they told me.

Belinda Conde, SVP of Marketing at Datos, told me that a conversion funnel is the “holy grail” of any marketing strategy. She uses conversion funnels as a crystal ball to help predict future performance.

Conde said, “[The conversion funnel] is massively important for many companies, but the top of the list for me right now is predicting and, therefore, scaling marketing-attributable revenue. Without historical funnel performance data (especially conversion rates at key stages), it becomes nearly impossible to model future performance accurately.”

Ryan Anderson, President of Markiserv, told me that a conversion funnel is the backbone of both sales and marketing. It becomes even more critical when you want to understand where you can improve your marketing and sales strategies.

Anderson said, “For a product or sales-led business, you are able to identify key drop-off points within the funnel to improve upon whether that is top of funnel (TOFU) or awareness, mid-funnel (MOFU) or consideration/intent, or bottom of funnel (BOFU) or action/purchase based intent.”

Speaking of stages within the conversion funnel, let’s define each stage.

Conversion Funnel Stages

Sales and marketing are full of acronyms. If you hang around either of those departments long enough, you’ll hear references to “TOFU” or ‘BOFU.” These acronyms refer to the various stages of the conversion funnel.

The top-middle-bottom funnel is a classic model used by sales teams. It focuses on sparking interest, informing potential customers, convincing them to purchase, and building loyalty to become repeat buyers.

Traditional Conversion Funnel Stages:

• Top of the funnel (TOFU). This is the awareness phase. Potential customers enter the TOFU when they engage with your brand, oftentimes through your website, an ad, an email, or social media.
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU). This is the consideration phase. Potential customers know about your brand and engage with it to learn more. They may sign up for your email newsletter, follow you on social media, or download guides and templates.
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): This is the conversion phase. A prospect is here before they purchase, which means you’ve given them good information and relevant touchpoints. Help them convert by making purchases easy, offering a trial, outlining pricing, or sending a discount for their abandoned shopping cart.

Let’s see what this looks like visually in the examples below.

Conversion Funnel Examples

HubSpot started off with the traditional conversion funnel structure, using marketing efforts to serve as the top of the funnel. Those leads were then passed further down the funnel to the sales team.

While some conversion funnels are simple, others can be incredibly complex. There are several conversion models you can use to suit your business needs, ranging from a simple three-stage funnel for smaller operations to complex, multi-stage sales funnels for enterprise-level companies. Let’s explore some of the most common models.

Three-Stage Marketing Funnel

• Awareness: Get visitors to your website. Attract them with quality blog posts or through social media.
• Consideration: Use that great content to entice new visitors to sign up for your newsletter.
• Conversion: Now that prospects are familiar with your brand, persuade them to purchase by offering a discount code for first-time buyers.

AIDA Funnel

Sometimes called a “purchase funnel,” the AIDA model expands on the basic three-stage structure.

• Attention: Besides blog posts and social media, you can use targeted ads to draw visitors to your website.
• Interest: Pique the prospect’s interest in your product by showcasing the goods. Use case studies to show how your product has helped other businesses. Have notable press mentions? You’ll want to showcase those as well.
• Desire: Your prospects like you. Now, you must make them want you. Gain their trust and create an emotional connection. Continue to serve them content that helps them visualize how your product would fit into their lives and why they need it.
• Action: Now’s your chance to get them to convert. One way is to offer a free ebook, trial, or tool that is only accessible if they fill out a form with their contact information. If your goal is to get them to purchase a product, you could give them a promotional offer to persuade them to buy.

The detail of your funnel depends on your sales process — the longer your sales cycle, the more complex your funnel. If you have a short sales cycle, your funnel tends to be simpler.

Think about how long it takes to sell $2,000 B2B software versus a $20 T-shirt. The software purchase usually requires months of sales calls, marketing materials, FAQs, and demos.

Each of those is a specific point in your conversion funnel. However, potential buyers may only need five minutes to determine whether the t-shirt is the right color and fit before purchasing. The touchpoints required here are taking it off the rack and trying it on.

Action: Jot down a list of your current strategies that help build brand awareness, drive lead consideration, or convert a prospect to a customer. For example, do you run paid social media ad campaigns? Do you offer free trials or provide one-on-one consultations with your sales team?

This list will help you begin to understand your conversion funnel. And to figure out how complex your funnel is, you can look at the data and perform an analysis. This will help you flush out each part of your customer journey to create a unique visual representation of your funnel.

Conversion Funnel Analysis

Analyzing your funnel helps you visualize the flow of potential customers across each point. You can see key traffic sources and high-exit pages to get a feel for how people end up in each stage of the funnel.

Looking at your funnel also helps you uncover barriers and points of friction that cause people to leave a page before they convert. For example, if you see a high drop-off rate on one page, you’ll know to prioritize that as you work toward optimizing your funnel.

To understand your funnel, follow these steps for in-depth analysis:

1. Look for high-traffic pages with high drop-off and conversion rates.

High-traffic pages hold a plethora of helpful information. Not only are these the pages people see the most, but they’re also where people decide to stay or go. Look at the pages where people drop off (aka leave) and where they convert (take your intended action). Some metrics to collect are:

• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Drop-Off Rate
• Conversion Rate
• Number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
• MQLs to Customer Conversion Rate
• Conversion Rate Per Channel (i.e., social, email, and paid search)

Action: Monitor these metrics for at least a quarter. Track your numbers in a spreadsheet to help make auditing easier, or use a custom funnel report. For better visualization, create a graph.

2. Discover where your best customers come from.

Not all leads are the same. Some people drop off near the top of the funnel, while others make it all the way down. That‘s why tracking leads is so important. When you know where your high-quality leads come from, you can analyze that touchpoint or channel to see what you’re doing right.

Ask yourself:

• How is this touchpoint different from other touchpoints?
• What information is resonating with people?
• What are the barriers or friction (if any)?
• How many steps do people have to go through before converting?

Identifying what you‘re doing right in your funnel is just as important as figuring out what you’re doing wrong.

Action: If you need help digging into the data, check out these sales funnel tools or look into heatmap and session recording tools for information on how people navigate your pages.

3. Create an optimization plan.

After you figure out where people are dropping off and converting, it’s time to make an optimization plan. This should include the goals you want to focus on, like more:

• Leads
• Newsletter signups
• Demos
• Software purchases

Goals let you determine what you want from each touchpoint within your funnel so you can measure whether it’s working or not.

After your funnel analysis, you’ll have a list of priority touchpoints that need to be optimized. Make sure to focus on the areas with the most significant drop-off rates first.

Pro tip: To optimize your funnel, make one meaningful change at a time. Singular changes help you understand what’s working and what’s not.

Benefits of Optimizing Your Conversion Funnel

Your conversion funnel is only as good as the strategies you use to build it. Without solid strategy, your leads will quickly drop out of the funnel and will be reluctant to re-engage.

Optimization is crucial — it brings better results with less effort. Let’s look at the positives of taking the time to optimize your conversion funnel.

1. Increased Conversions

An optimized conversion funnel leads to, well, more conversions.

Take Anderson and his team. After optimizing their funnels, they saw improved conversions on their customer registration pages and MQLs.

“We removed barriers to conversion along our funnel, wherein TOFU users were having trouble registering in our funnel, becoming intent-based users, or MOFU, based on a frustrating form fill process,” Anderson said.

Here’s what he and his team did to improve their conversion rates:

• Eliminated large form-fill fields, which improved bounce and exit rates
• Increased TOFU video content to garner more interest.

“This, in turn,” he said, “increased the amount of MQLs that entered our pipeline and MOFU prospects for us to service. Once our MOFU pipeline expanded, this increased our BOFU counts and conversion rates.”

2. Lower Customer Acquisition Costs

One of the biggest benefits of improving your conversion funnel is reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC). CAC refers to how much a brand spends to gain a new customer.

Let’s look at a quick example. Let’s say you analyze your funnel and realize that more of your leads come from social media ads than any other source. Using this information, you can invest more in social media marketing and decrease your spending on other avenues that don’t provide the same results.

While you might spend more on one marketing channel, you’ll save more of your marketing budget by nixing ineffective strategies.

3. Better User Experience

Optimizing the touchpoints in your conversion funnel leads to a better user experience. When leads are pleased with their initial experiences with your brand, they’ll continue to move through the conversion funnel.

Your website is among the first places a lead might interact with your brand. A slow-loading website is a major turn-off for many leads, meaning they’ll bounce off your page and onto something else.

Nearly 18% of visitors become frustrated with slow loading pages. When you improve your website speeds, you reduce your bounce rate and shuffle your leads to the next part of your funnel, like the call-to-action (CTA).

If the next phase of the funnel is personalized to your target audience, even better—especially considering that personalized CTA performs a whopping 202% better than generic CTAs.

Pro tip: 70% of marketers believe that A/B testing is essential to boost conversion rates. Use A/B testing to nail your messaging across your website and CTAs.

4. Better ROI

Optimizing your conversion funnel often means being very specific in your messaging. The more laser-focused your messaging, the better it resonates with the leads who will become customers.

Effective messaging is essential for a better ROI. Brands who nail personalized messaging often see over 120 times better ROI compared to brands who focus on creating marketing campaigns for a broader audience.

5. A Realistic Sales Pipeline

I asked Conde what she thought was the biggest benefit of a conversion funnel. She told me her conversion funnels help identify high-value leads and create more realistic pipelines tailored to a specific audience.

“The most significant benefit would be having a more realistic pipeline for marketing and sales. Last year, my team and I worked really hard to refine our HubSpot Lead Scoring logic to narrow down what really constitutes a valuable MQL. We needed to better profile leads that were genuinely aligned with our ICPs and map out all the implicit and explicit attributes that would demonstrate intent or engagement,” she said.

“That naturally led to a decrease in the number of MQLs in our pipe, but we ended up having a much cleaner and highly qualified funnel. Over time, we’re pleased with the results, and the conversion rates down the funnel are more realistic, allowing us to monitor any anomalies much more efficiently.”

Conversion Funnel Optimization

Every part of your conversion funnel can be optimized to increase the number of people who turn into customers. Think of conversion funnel optimization as finding out what motivates, blocks, and persuades people so you can give them the best experience possible on their unique journey.

To optimize effectively, you need to think about giving each customer what they want at each phase of the funnel. Using the phases outlined above, here’s what to consider at each step along the customer journey.

1. TOFU: Awareness

Issues at the top of your funnel? Take a look at how you attract new leads. Compare every channel that brings in customers (i.e., social media, search engines, your blog, and paid ads) to see which attracts the most people.

Action: If you‘re unsure how customers found you, send out a survey to ask. Look for trends in how people find new brands and put more effort into your best channels. This helps make sure you’re attracting the people in your target audience.

2. MOFU: Consideration

Potential customers made it to the middle of your funnel, but it’s your job to keep them moving toward the bottom.

If you’re having trouble with this phase, look at how people learn about your business and engage with your site.

Action: Ask yourself the following questions.

• Is it easy for people to navigate your site? Or sign up for your email list?
• Do you have relevant, rich content?
• Do you offer pricing and product information?
• Is it easy to get questions answered?

Depending on your barriers, consider these ideas for improvement:

• Product videos and photos
• FAQ page
• Whitepapers, case studies, or blog posts
• Filters and search options
• Newsletter capture
• Discounts
• Check pages for loading speed and broken elements

3. BOFU: Conversion

As the final stop for potential buyers, this is the phase to turn them into customers. You should remove as much friction as possible and encourage people to take the final steps to convert.

Some ways to optimize this final part of your funnel are to make sure product or service pages are fully built out with:

• Interesting descriptions.
• Engaging videos.
• High-quality images and photos.

Consider your checkout process to see if people have issues with payments or abandoned carts. Make it simple for people to compare pricing and clearly outline all product features. You can also send specific BOFU emails or create ads to remind people of their desire to convert.

Think your job is done once a customer converts? Wrong.

While you may have pulled a customer through your conversion funnel, there are plenty of opportunities to re-engage them. Not only is customer retention essential for growing your business, but it’s often more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain a current customer.

Action: Once your customers make it through the funnel, re-engage them. You can invite them to:

• Sign up for a new webinar series.
• Download additional templates.
• Send promotions.
• Join a loyalty club.
• Follow you on social media.

Conversion Funnels Shouldn’t Be Business Models

While conversion funnels are very effective for demonstrating the customer journey for a one-time purchase, they are not a substitute for creating a holistic business model. Relying on a funnel as your business model creates a lack of alignment between each stage of the customer experience.

HubSpot transitioned to thinking of the customer journey as less of a funnel and more of a flywheel — building more momentum as customers move through it.

With the flywheel model, the momentum of your happy customers is used to drive referrals and repeat sales. It’s not a linear beginning and end, but rather a continuous cycle that allows you to generate more business.

Tailor Your Funnel to the Customer

While the customer journey is more complex than my slide analogy, understanding how conversion funnels work can improve this flow. It can help you optimize your funnel, attract more leads, convert them to customers, and boost your bottom line. But all that requires reducing as much friction as possible.

My advice: Find what makes sense for your particular sales cycle and use your existing content and channels to stay in touch. Make sure customers value your business and want to come back because you never know who they’ll introduce to the top of that funnel.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

When Liquid Death, the edgy, death-metal-themed water brand that took American social media by storm, announced it was pulling out of the UK market, marketing Twitter(X) erupted with hot takes.

Was it the irreverent branding that didn‘t connect with British sensibilities? Or proof that even viral marketing can’t guarantee product success?

According to behavioral science expert Phil Agnew, the answer is more nuanced.

1. Who Needs Premium Water?

In the UK, tap water isn’t just acceptable, but a point of pride. Scottish tap water is famously excellent, and many Brits are genuinely proud of their municipal water quality.

The cold climate creates another unique challenge: water comes out of pipes already refreshingly chilled. This natural advantage eliminates one key selling point of bottled water — coldness — before the marketing battle even begins.

“The idea that you’re going to splash cash on something you can get for free out of your tap is quite hard for a lot of Brits to swallow,” Agnew explains.

2. The Marketing-Behavior Mismatch

People in the UK fall into two camps: loyal tap water drinkers, or price-sensitive bottled water buyers. Asking either group to buy premium canned water was fighting deeply ingrained habits.

As Agnew points out, when Red Bull came to market, they weren’t asking people to drink soda for the first time. But Liquid Death was trying to get Brits to buy canned water, something they just don’t do.

This challenge was compounded by a channel mismatch. Liquid Death‘s social media prowess didn’t align with UK purchasing behavior. Brits don’t buy water online. They grab it at stores while shopping for other items.

“There’s something slightly perverse in trying to sell it online when the sale point is actually in person,” Agnew notes.

3. No One’s Drinking The Kool-Aid (or Water)

Despite killer marketing that made the brand stand out in a “sea of sameness,” UK-based Agnew points out a crucial flaw: “I have not seen a single person drinking Liquid Death.”

This matters more than you might think. Studies show we’re significantly more likely to order coffee on a plane if we see someone else drinking it. We follow the herd — but there was no herd of Liquid Death drinkers for Brits to follow.

4. Too Much, Too Soon

Liquid Death tried going mass market too quickly, spreading themselves thin across the UK. Their distinctiveness (what Agnew calls the “Von Restorff effect”) made them memorable online, but this advantage evaporated without in-person visibility.

Contrast this with Joe & The Juice, which placed 15 stores within a small area of West London.

“An economist might call this mad,” says Agnew, “but a psychologist and a marketing scientist would call it genius.”

When customers see multiple locations in quick succession, they assume popularity and success.

Not A Culture Clash

Interestingly, the failure wasn’t about British resistance to American marketing, or Liquid Death’s style of humor. Brits happily consume American products daily, from Coca-Cola to Heinz baked beans. Many even watch the Super Bowl purely for the commercials.

The problem wasn‘t that British consumers didn’t get the joke — it’s that they never saw it in contexts where they make purchasing decisions.

The Right Way To Go Global

For brands considering international expansion, the lesson isn’t to completely overhaul your marketing for each market. Instead:

• Consider targeted saturation rather than wide distribution
• Match marketing channels to actual purchase behavior
• Consider partnerships with premium retailers or exclusive venues
• Target consumers at the point of sale where they can try the product

Agnew suggests that Liquid Death could sponsor Wimbledon to reach young professionals with disposable income in the UK (they likely attend Wimbledon every year). They’re the crowd most likely to adopt its product.

Remember: 80% of product launches fail, according to Harvard Business Review. Liquid Death‘s struggle isn’t unusual. It’s just more visible because their marketing was so damn good.

Who wouldn’t want their own personal executive assistant? Sounds pretty awesome, right?

Well, with the AI tool Claude, anyone can set up a virtual executive assistant in just ten minutes. In this article, I’ll share how you can use Claude’s incredible new Projects feature to create an executive assistant.

That virtual EA can help you analyze meeting transcripts, manage action items, draft follow-up messages, and more.

Ready to get started? Let’s dive right in!

Setting Up Your Claude Executive Assistant

Part of what makes today’s AI tools so powerful is that they can truly be customized in endless ways. There are countless different approaches to creating a virtual assistant, and I definitely encourage you to play around and experiment.

So, think of the steps below not as hard-and-fast rules but as a beginner’s guide: This is a quick and easy way to get started, but it only showcases a small portion of Claude’s huge potential to transform how you work.

Step 1: Set project instructions.

The first step to set up your executive assistant is to navigate to the Projects feature within Claude and click on “Set Project Instructions.” In the popup that opens, you can define exactly what you want your assistant to do.

For our executive assistant, I defined two key responsibilities: meeting analysis and follow-up management. I also noted several important components of each of these, including analyzing meeting transcripts, identifying key action items, and tracking deadlines.

In addition to these responsibilities, I also defined a communication style and output format for the assistant’s responses.

I directed the assistant to use a professional but conversational tone, to identify issues proactively, to prioritize tasks, and to flag urgent items. I also defined a specific format with which the assistant should respond. I specifically ask for key items such as a short meeting summary, action items (with owner and deadline), and suggested follow-ups.

Finally, I specified the exact items that should be included when the assistant tracks follow-ups: a list of outstanding items, items due this week, overdue items, and suggested messages to send.

Importantly, this is all just one approach. I constantly tweak our project instructions, especially when it comes to the exact format and content of the follow-up tracking. I’ve found that this general setup works well for me, but it’s important to customize and fine-tune the instructions to meet your unique and evolving needs.

Step 2: Upload content.

Once you’ve defined your project instructions, it’s time to upload the content that Claude will analyze for you.

If you have an enterprise account, you can link to your Google Drive account, which makes it possible to search for and link directly to live files. Otherwise, you can just upload a static file.

For us, I’ve found that it tends to work best to do this at the end of each day. In principle, you could upload a new meeting transcript after each meeting, but in my experience, it’s usually more efficient to get a full summary once a day.

Step 3: Ask Questions

Alright — I’ve defined the assistant’s instructions and uploaded the content it will analyze. Now, it’s time for the fun part!

Once it’s set up, there are several questions you can ask Claude to start to reap the benefits of your virtual executive assistant. The first basic request I like to make is to “analyze the latest meeting transcript and update our action list.”

This prompts the assistant to analyze your transcripts and extract key action items. Then, it adds those actions to your existing action list, helping you keep track of everything you need to do in one place.

Another useful question to ask is, “What are our outstanding action items and what needs to follow-up today?” This is a great way to get a quick view of what’s on deck for today, as well as the critical issues that need your immediate attention.

Claude will also call out any action items with unspecified deadlines, which I’ve found can be super helpful to keep things from slipping through the cracks. Claude basically forces me to make sure there’s a clear owner, due date, and description for each action item, which helps us stay organized.

Next, in addition to flagging outstanding items and tasks with missing details, the virtual executive assistant also keeps a running list of all action items, including who they’re assigned to, their deadlines, and their statuses. To view that list, I can just ask, “Give me a complete list of all my actions.”

You may even want to get more specific, asking it something like, “Give it to me in the table format.” This is especially helpful because it will match the format of its output to the format of your existing action item tracking table.

Finally, one of our favorite ways to use Claude is for drafting email or Slack messages based on the items in our action list. For example, you can ask it to draft a follow-up message to check in on the status of a certain action item. You can also ask it to write a message that will assign a certain task to a certain person.

Of course, it’s important to review these messages before you send them off, but I’ve found that these automatically generated emails and Slack messages can be really helpful and save us a lot of time.

The Future of Claude

If you ask me, Claude is already an amazing tool — but I also know that this is just the beginning. In the future, I think that the team behind Claude is likely to offer a few more features that will make it even more powerful.

Specifically, I think that at some point soon, Claude will start letting you write back to a Google Doc, rather than just reading from them. This will make it possible to share updates to your action item list in real time, rather than only being able to see the latest version of your list within your own Claude account.

In addition, we think it’s likely that Claude will offer integrations that let it draft suggested emails directly to your email client. After all, right now, we have to copy and paste the suggested messages from Claude into our email, but it would be much more streamlined if you could generate the emails directly in Gmail or Outlook.

And finally, we think similar integrations would make sense for platforms like Slack, too. In the future, we imagine that Claude will link directly with Slack to analyze all your communications there automatically and suggest messages within the relevant channels.

Unlock New Levels of Productivity with Claude

I’ve only been using Claude for a short while, but I’m convinced that it’s an amazing and underutilized productivity tool.

Of course, as with any tool, it’s only going to be useful if you set it up and use it in the right way. For example, one key question to consider before you start is the scope of work you want your assistant to help you with. I recommend setting up a separate assistant for each larger project that you manage. For instance, I manage three pods within HubSpot, so he set up one assistant for each pod.

Navigating nuances like these is part of the challenge of adopting any new technology. But with the simple steps we’ve outlined here, you’ll be on your way to using Claude. You’ll then be able to maximize your efficiency with a basic — but incredibly powerful — virtual executive assistant.

To learn more about lead-scoring tactics and marketing growth strategies, check out the full episode of Marketing Against the Grain below:

This blog series is in partnership with Marketing Against the Grain, the video podcast. It digs deeper into ideas shared by marketing leaders Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot’s CMO) and Kieran Flanagan (SVP, Marketing at HubSpot) as they unpack growth strategies and learn from standout founders and peers.

As a marketer, I know that a marketing strategy is essential to nurture future clients, improve my business’s bottom line, and increase the ROI of my efforts. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy — 74% of small and medium businesses say they lack confidence in their marketing strategies.

To stay consistent and see powerful results, you need a clear roadmap for your objectives, audience, positioning, and tactics.

Here, I’ll share the critical components of an effective marketing strategy, complete with data from HubSpot’s latest State of Marketing report and a free marketing template so you can hit the ground running.

Table of Contents

• What is a marketing strategy?
• Marketing Strategy Components
• Why is a marketing strategy important?
• Marketing Strategy Process
• Examples of Successful Marketing Strategies
• Best Marketing Tools to Execute Your Strategy

A completed marketing strategy typically includes brand objectives, target audience personas, marketing channels, key performance indicators, and more. Overall, 82% of marketers say they believe their marketing strategies are effective.

I’ve found that a marketing strategy will:

• Align your team to specific goals
• Help you tie your efforts to business objectives
• Allow you to identify and test what resonates with your target audience
• Empower you to capitalize on emerging consumer trends

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

I like to think of a marketing strategy as outlining the long-term goals and overall approach, while a marketing plan covers the specific actions and tactics to achieve those goals.

In other words, marketing strategy guides a business’s overall approach to marketing. It includes goal-setting, market and competitor research, and messaging and positioning for a brand.

For example, say you’re creating a marketing strategy for a new fashion brand. Your strategy might target young Gen Z students and position the brand as trendy and affordable.

But, a strategic marketing plan is a detailed tactical roadmap that outlines the specific actions and tactics that should achieve the marketing strategy’s goals.

For example, the marketing plan for the fashion brand mentioned above might include:

• Targeted social media campaigns
• Influencer partnerships
• Online advertising timeline

Both a marketing strategy and a marketing plan are essential for a business’s success.

To succeed with the fast pace of change, stay relevant with your audience, and integrate AI in marketing, it’s vital to stay ahead of the curve.

Below, I’m going to show you step by step how to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. But first, let’s go over the individual components that make up a strong marketing strategy.

1. Marketing Objectives

Believe it or not, “gaining more customers” isn’t the only marketing objective to consider. While one company may want to focus on lead generation and customer acquisition, another may want to increase brand awareness and industry authority. Others may prioritize customer engagement, loyalty, and referrals.

I always recommend that you outline your marketing objectives before building upon your strategy. Why? Because your goals will inform other components of the plan, including the budget and content creation process.

With every objective, be as specific as possible. Aim to create SMART marketing goals divided by channel or promotional tactic, and don’t forget that you can always come back and revise your goals as your priorities change.

2. Marketing Mix

The marketing mix, also known as the four Ps of marketing, is the preliminary framework you must create to understand what you will be marketing, where you’ll be marketing it, and how you’ll be marketing it.

The following P’s make up this framework:

• Product: What are you selling?
• Price: What is the price?
• Place: Where will you be selling the product?
• Promotion: Where will you be promoting the product?

Once you have these broad strokes, you can extrapolate this information into a full-fledged marketing plan for each promotional channel.

3. Marketing Budget

A marketing budget is an essential element of your strategy. Without allocating funds to hire the right talent, use the right software, advertise on the right channels, and create the right content, your marketing strategy can’t succeed. To get a high return on investment, you must first invest.

Pro tip: Remember that you can always start small — hyper-focusing your budget on one or two efforts — and build upon them once you generate an ROI.

4. Competitive Analysis

Knowing your competition is key when creating a marketing strategy. With a competitive analysis, you will know where your marketing and positioning stand in relation to the market.

You might already have an idea of who your competitors are, but I think it’s still essential to sit down and analyze them. You may end up uncovering a surprise competitor who’s vying for your target buyer’s attention and engagement.

With this analysis, you can position your brand alongside other brands. What do you do better than your competitors? It’s essential to map this information when creating a marketing strategy— grab HubSpot’s free competitive analysis template to get started.

5. Audience Segmentation, Targeting, and Personalization Strategy

Segmentation and targeting refer to the process of delivering more relevant, personalized messages to target audiences. In other words, rather than blasting out generic campaigns to everyone, you’ll go through a methodical process for creating content that resonates with specific audiences.

Personalized marketing is more important than ever: 96% of marketers report that personalized experiences have increased sales. Segmentation and personalization at scale are game-changers for B2B marketers using AI to boost engagement and conversion rates.

During this process, you’ll take three steps:

• Identify your target audience. Carry out market research, interview customers, and create buyer personas detailing your audience’s needs, wants, and pain points.
• Target a segment of your target audience. It’s better to speak to a narrow group of highly qualified buyers than to send your message out to everyone.
• Outline a segmentation and personalization strategy. Document how you will reach different audiences, including how AI and other tools will help you personalize at scale.

6. Content Strategy

Once you have your budget, competitive outlook, and targeting information, it’s time to create a content strategy. First, refer back to the marketing channels chosen in your marketing mix.

A content strategy should outline the content formats best for your audience and the goals for your content— whether that’s to educate, entertain, or generate conversions.

7. Metrics & Key Performance Indicators

Last but certainly not least, your marketing strategy must include metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure how well you’re performing.

The KPIs you choose will vary depending on your business type and preferred customer acquisition channels. Examples of KPIs include:

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Organic traffic
• Conversion rate
• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

Now, let’s dive into why it’s important to follow the steps of a marketing strategy.

Why is a marketing strategy important?

Without a defined strategy, you’ll essentially be throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. And that process will cost you money, time, and resources.

A robust marketing strategy will reach your target audience and have the power to turn people who’ve never heard of your brand into loyal repeat customers.

Here are just a few of the top reasons I think a marketing strategy is essential:

Offers Direction

A marketing strategy outlines clear goals and defines the path to achieve them. It pulls together all marketing efforts within an organization for optimal effects.

Targets the Right Audience

A well-defined marketing strategy helps you find and understand your target audience. This helps your business tailor your messaging and positioning to reach the right people at the right time.

Builds Brand Identity

A marketing strategy helps you create a consistent and cohesive brand identity. This makes it easier to align all marketing initiatives for increased brand recognition and loyalty.

Maximizes ROI

With analysis of market trends, competition, and customer behavior, marketing strategies help businesses find the most effective marketing channels and tactics to invest in. This helps businesses get the maximum return on investment.

Evaluates Performance

A marketing strategy defines key metrics and performance indicators. This makes it easier for your business to measure and track the success of marketing initiatives. It also gives you what you need to make data-driven decisions and optimize future campaigns for better results.

1. Conduct market research.

Before you can begin creating your marketing strategy, you need to gather useful data to make informed decisions. Market research is like playing detective, but instead of solving crimes, you uncover juicy details about your customers.

I believe that market research is important because it helps your business make data-driven decisions for your marketing strategy. It also makes it easier to understand your target market, find gaps, and make the most of your resources.

This process is essential for understanding your customers and adapting to changing trends. If you’re new to this process, this complete market research guide and template can help.

Once you have the data you need, you’ll be ready to set some marketing goals.

2. Define your goals.

What do you want to achieve through your marketing efforts?

Well-defined goals will guide your marketing strategy, whether you’re increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or diversifying your customer base. Your marketing strategy goals should reflect your business goals. They should also offer clear direction for marketing efforts.

For example, say one of your business goals is to increase market share by 20% within a year. Your goal as a marketer could include expanding into new target markets, updating your brand, or driving customer acquisition.

Other marketing goals might be to increase brand awareness or generate high-quality leads. You might also want to grow or maintain thought leadership in your industry or increase customer value.

I find that defining clear goals provides direction and clarity, guiding marketing efforts toward desired outcomes. It helps with resource allocation, decision-making, and measuring the success of marketing initiatives.

I recommend this SMART goal guide which can help you with more effective goal-setting.

3. Identify your target audience and create buyer personas.

To create an effective marketing strategy, you need to understand who your ideal customers are. I suggest taking a look at your market research to understand your target audience and market landscape. Accurate customer data is especially important for this step.

But it’s not enough to know who your audience is. Once you’ve figured out who they are, you need to understand what they want. This isn’t just their needs and pain points. It’s how your product or service can solve their problems.

So, if you can’t define who your audience is in one sentence, now’s your chance to do it. Create a buyer persona that’s a snapshot of your ideal customer.

Buyer Persona Example

For example, a store like Macy’s could define a buyer persona as Budgeting Belinda, a stylish working-class woman in her 30s living in a suburb, looking to fill her closet with designer deals at low prices.

With this description, Macy’s marketing department can picture Budgeting Belinda and work with a clear definition in mind.

Buyer personas have critical demographic and psychographic information. This can include:

• Age
• Job title
• Income
• Location
• Interests
• Challenges

Notice how I included all those attributes in Belinda’s description.

For B2B SaaS companies, keep in mind that buyer personas don’t apply solely to the end user. When you’re selling a product to another business, you also have to address the decision-maker, the financial buyer, and the technical advisor, among other roles, says Head of Marketing at Entrapeer, Hillary Lyons.

“You need to be able to tailor your message to each of these unique personas even though most of them will never actually use the product,” says Lyons. “You have to sell each of them on the unparalleled benefit you provide without muddling your [overall] message.”

You don’t have to create your buyer persona with a pen and paper. In fact, HubSpot offers a free template you can use to make your own (and it’s really fun).

You can also use a platform like Versium, which helps you identify, understand, and reach your target audience through data and artificial intelligence.

Buyer personas should be at the core of your strategy.

4. Conduct competitive analysis.

Now that you have an understanding of your customers, it’s time to see who you’re competing with to get their attention.

To begin your competitive analysis, start with your top competitors. Reviewing their websites, content, ads, and pricing can help you understand how to differentiate your brand. I think it’s also a useful way to find growth opportunities.

But how do you know which competitors are most important? This competitive analysis kit with templates will walk you through the process. I like it because it will help you choose and evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, and strategies of your competitors.

This process will help you find market gaps, spot trends, and figure out which marketing tactics will be most effective. Competitive analysis can also offer valuable insights into pricing, positioning, and marketing channels.

5. Develop key messaging.

You’ve figured out who you’re talking to, what they’ve already heard, and what they want to hear. Now, it’s time to share your brand’s unique value proposition.

In this step, you’ll craft key messaging that shows the benefits of your product or service that resonate with your target audience. This process should show off the research and work you have done up to this point. It should also incorporate your creativity, inventiveness, and willingness to experiment.

In my experience, well-crafted key messaging:

• Sets businesses apart from the competition
• Resonates with the target audience
• Is flexible enough to be consistent across all marketing channels
• Builds brand credibility
• Creates an emotional connection with customers
• Influences buying decisions

The key messaging in your marketing strategy is critical to driving engagement, loyalty, and business growth. These value proposition templates can help if you’re not sure how to draft this important messaging.

6. Choose your marketing channels.

You know what you want to say. Now, decide on the best marketing channels for your message. Your top goal for this stage of your strategy is to align your channel choices with your target persona’s media consumption habits and interests.

Start with media channels you’re already using. Then, consider a mix of traditional and digital channels. The top channels used for marketing in 2025 according to Salesforce are social media, website/app, digital ads, email marketing, and email.

Source

For social media, you’ll need to determine which specific channels are best to reach your audience. Consider your audience’s demographics when making a choice and limit yourself to social channels where you know you can produce high-quality, consistent content.

Source

To streamline this process, I like to think of your assets in three categories— paid, owned, and earned media.

Paid Media

Paid media is any channel you spend money on to attract your target audience. Most of this spending is on advertising. This includes online and offline channels like:

• Television/streaming
• Direct mail
• Out-of-home advertising like billboards
• Social media ads
• SEM (search engine marketing)
• Podcast advertising

Owned Media

Source

Owned media refers to (mostly) online channels your brand owns, including:

• Blogs
• Websites
• Organic social media

It also refers to the media your marketing team creates, such as

• Videos.
• Podcasts and audio content.
• Ebooks.
• Infographics.

Earned Media

Another way to say earned media is user-generated content. Earned media includes:

• Shares on social media.
• Posts about your business on X or Threads.
• Reels posted on Instagram mentioning your brand.
• Organic news stories about your company.

To decide which marketing channels are best for your marketing strategy, look carefully at each channel. Think about which channels are best for reaching your audience, staying within budget, and meeting your goals.

For example, a business targeting a younger demographic, like Gen Z, might consider using TikTok or Reddit to reach its audience.

It’s also important to choose a number of channels that’s manageable for your team and budget. 82% of small and medium businesses agree that using multiple marketing channels generates better results, but it’s important to avoid taking on too much. It’s much better to market on three channels well than on 10 channels poorly.

I suggest looking at your content strategy as a whole to get a clear vision of how you can integrate different content formats and channels into your strategy.

For example, say you already have a blog that’s rolling out weekly content in your niche (owned media). You might consider promoting your blog posts on Threads (owned media), which customers might then repost (earned media). Ultimately, that will help you create a better, more well-rounded marketing strategy.

7. Create, track, and analyze KPIs.

Once you have a clear outline of your marketing strategy, you’ll need to think about how you’ll measure whether it’s working.

At this stage, you’ll shift from marketing detective to numbers nerd. With a little planning and prep, your analytics can unveil the mysteries of marketing performance and unlock super insights.

Review your strategy and choose measurable KPIs to track the effectiveness of your efforts. Pick a marketing analytics software solution that works for your team to collect and measure your data.

​​

Ideally, I recommend choosing an analytics platform that allows you to track data across all of your marketing channels — from emails to social media and your website. This centralizes all of your data, which makes it easier to understand how each channel contributes to your overall strategy.

You can then plan to check and analyze the performance of your strategy over time and identify the channels that bring the best results. This can help you refine your approach based on results and feedback.

Lexi Boese, an ecommerce growth strategist and co-founder of The Digital Opportunists, recommends making data a priority when building your marketing strategy.

“The more data you can use, the easier you can track your success,” she says. “This could be as simple as understanding which channels convert the highest amount of customers (to determine how your team should prioritize ad spend), or assessing whether you have a higher amount of first-time or returning customers to [determine] if you should focus on internal or external marketing.”

Analyzing KPIs helps businesses stay agile, refine their strategies, and adapt to evolving customer needs.

8. Create a content strategy.

Think of a content strategy like a plan for how you want to communicate with people through things like social media posts, blog articles, videos, or even emails.

You already know who you’re trying to reach, but this determines how you’re going to say it and in which format. A content strategy should outline the type of content you’ll share, goals, how often, and an editorial calendar for planning content.

In 2025, multimedia content and visual storytelling are king. According to the State of Marketing, 30% of marketers use short-form videos as part of their content strategy, and 31% say it generates the highest ROI of all content creation formats.

Source

It’s even more essential to invest in formats that have a high ROI, such as short-form video, audio content, and user-generated content. Consider adding podcast and audio content to your strategy: 91% of marketers planned to increase their investment in podcasts and audio content in 2025, and 46% of weekly podcast listeners have purchased a product or service after hearing about it on a podcast.

Source

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in text-based content like SEO and blogging. It’s simply important to be strategic about where you allot the most resources, in my opinion, especially if you have a limited budget.

9. Create an AI strategy for marketing.

Your boss may have asked you how you plan on using AI this year. If you’re like me, you’re learning on the fly. 48% of marketing leaders have invested in AI tools for their teams, but just 47% of marketers have a clear understanding of how to use AI in their marketing strategy.

Let’s be clear, AI isn’t a marketing strategy on its own.

It’s simply a tool that can make everything else— identifying buyer personas, creating personalized content, prospecting, and even analytics— faster and more effective. 75% of marketers say they use AI to reduce manual task time, and 86% say that AI saves them over an hour a day.

In your marketing strategy, document how you plan to integrate AI into your processes and workflows.

Examples of AI in Marketing Strategy

• Analyzing your target audience and their wants, needs, and desire.
• Writing a first draft of emails, blog posts, or website content.
• Using buyer signals in your CRM to send hyper-personalized campaigns.

10. Present your marketing strategy.

A finished marketing strategy will pull together the sections and components above. It may also include:

Executive Summary

A concise overview that outlines the marketing goals, target audience, and key marketing tactics.

Brand Identity

You may want to create a brand identity as part of your strategy. Brand positioning, voice, and visual identity may also be helpful additions to your marketing strategy.

Marketing Plan and Tactics

Your marketing plan is the specific actions you’ll take to achieve the goals in your marketing strategy. Your plan may cover campaigns, channel-specific tactics, and more.

Not sure where to start? This free marketing plan template can help.

Download for Free

Budget Allocation

Defining a budget for your marketing strategy helps you show that your planned resource allocation aligns with business goals.

I think it’s important to get clear about your spending and how your proposed budget will impact the company’s overall business goals.

Timeline and Milestones

Marketing strategies can be complex and difficult for stakeholders to understand. Creating a timeline that outlines the different tactics, milestones, and deadlines can help.

Your marketing strategy is a living document. It will need constant reviews, revisions, and optimizations to meet your long-term goals. Prepare to revise your marketing strategy at least once a year to address market trends, customer feedback, and changing business objectives.

Examples of Successful Marketing Strategies

1. Regal Movies

Digital Strategy: Owned Media

Regal shares interactive Instagram content that’s not only relevant to its film-loving customers but also encourages them to interact with the content.

Source

Regal’s Instagram post is an example of owned media because the company was in full control of the answers it shared with its followers. Interacting in the comment section was an opportunity for Regal to showcase its voice and brand to its audience.

And it clearly worked well. The post received half as many comments as it did likes, with an impressive 207 comments.

Best for: I think social media is a great owned channel to experiment with new ideas for your overall marketing strategy.

2. La Croix

Digital Strategy: User-Generated Content, Earned Media

I think user-generated content is one of the best ways to gain traction in your strategy.

It demonstrates your appreciation for loyal customers, builds community, and incentivizes other users to promote your products for the chance at a similar shout-out.

Plus, sometimes the content your brand loyalists create is really, really good. In this case, the consumer is creating a handmade needlepoint featuring the brand’s product.

Source

Pro tip: UGC isn’t reserved for consumer brands with visual products to share. B2B companies can also take advantage of UGC by sharing positive reviews of their product and incorporating them into their messaging.

3. Small Girls PR

Digital Strategy: Owned Media

Source

Small Girls PR is a boutique PR company based in New York, and one of the company’s talents is connecting with amazing clients. This post on Instagram is an effective marketing example, as it boosts awareness for their brand and offers social proof by featuring high-profile clients.

Pro tip: I find that owned media in the form of PR is a great way to spotlight company executives and position them as industry leaders.

4. Tobii

Digital Strategy: Paid Media

Eye-tracking software company Tobii launched a LinkedIn ad to promote a lead magnet. While the brand may have created the guide specifically for paid promotions, it’s also possible that they repurposed a high-performing blog post into a downloadable PDF.

Source

In this case, all they had to do was repackage their current content, build an ad around it with creative assets, and run it.

What I like: In previous sections, I discussed the power of leveraging multiple forms of media in your marketing strategy. This is a great example of it.

5. Target

Digital Strategy: Owned Media, Influencer Partnership

If you’ve got the time for influencer partnerships, I encourage you to take full advantage of it.

Influencer marketing is when you partner with influencers to promote your content on their site. By doing this, your content reaches new audiences you might not be able to reach organically:

Source

Target recently partnered with fashion expert and influencer Jeneé Naylor to collaborate on its Future Collective line. What made this campaign even more powerful was that Naylor was a former Target Team Member.

I love how this collaboration highlighted Target’s commitment to supporting its team members and influencer marketing strategy.

Best for: Consumer, lifestyle, and retail brands. While just 24% of marketers use influencer marketing, marketers report that it has a high ROI. The channels with the best ROI for influencer marketing are Facebook (28%), Instagram (22%), and YouTube (12%).

Best Marketing Tools to Execute Your Strategy

While a marketing strategy is essential to reach your goals, that’s just step one. You need a robust tech stack to plan, manage, and execute your marketing strategy. Tools can make or break your marketing efforts. Just over half of marketers without a CRM, for example, felt their marketing strategy was effective compared with 87% of those using HubSpot.

Source

Here, I’ve curated a list of marketing and management tools to help you track and measure the success of your marketing goals.

1. HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub allows you to connect all your marketing tools into one centralized platform, including social media, content marketing, and email marketing.

HubSpot avoids the complexity and headaches of legacy CRM tools. With this tool, you can attract users with blogs, SEO, and live chat tools. You can then convert and nurture those leads through marketing automation, the website and landing page builder, and lead tracking features.

With custom reporting and built-in analytics, you can analyze your data and plan your next move.

HubSpot’s Breeze AI features bring generative AI to your fingertips so you can create great content, automate workflows, and built campaigns with AI-powered intelligence.

What I like: HubSpot Marketing Hub integrates with over 800 tools, making it easy to create a tech stack that meets your specific business needs.

Pricing: Free plans are available; Starter – $15/month; Professional – $800/month; Enterprise – $3,600/month.

2. Trello

Source

Trello keeps your marketing team on track and openly communicates about the projects you’re working on. You can create boards for individual campaigns, editorial calendars, or quarterly goals.

Built-in workflows and automation capabilities keep communication streamlined, and simplicity keeps your marketing team focused on the work that matters.

What I like: Trello’s visual elements and straightforward organization make it easy for everyone to stay on the same page.

Pricing: Free plans available; Standard – $5/month; Premium – $10/month; Enterprise – $17.50/month for 250 users.

3. TrueNorth

Source

TrueNorth is a marketing management platform built to help you hit your marketing goals. Built specifically for marketing teams, TrueNorth turns your marketing strategy into a visual projection of your growth, which is used to create monthly milestones that help you stay on track.

What I like: TrueNorth centralizes all your ideas, campaigns, and results in one place, with everything tied back to your goal.

Pricing: Plans cost $99/month, with a free 14-day trial available.

4. Monday.com

Source

Everything on Monday.com starts with a board or visually driven table. Create and customize workflows for your team and keep groups, items, sub-items, and updates synced in real time.

You can also transform data pulled from the timeline and use Gantt views to track your projects on Monday.com to make sure you’re meeting your deadlines.

Plus, with more than 40 integrations — from SurveyMonkey to Mailchimp and, of course, HubSpot — you can visualize your data and make sure your whole company is collaborating.

Best for: Companies with locations around the world or lots of remote workers, as it keeps everyone in touch and up to speed no matter where they’re located.

Pricing: Monday.com is free for two seats; $9/month/seat or $90/month for 10 seats; Standard – $12/month/seat or $120/month for 10 seats; Pro – $19/seat/month or $190 per month for 10 seats. Contact Monday.com for Enterprise pricing.

5. Semrush

Source

SEO continues to be a huge factor in the successful ranking of your website. But you need the right tools to do it successfully.

Semrush allows you to run a technical SEO audit, track daily rankings, analyze your competitors’ SEO strategy, research millions of keywords, and even source ideas for earning more organic traffic.

But the benefits don’t stop at SEO. I like that you can also use SemRush for PPC, building and measuring an effective social media strategy, content planning, and even market research.

Best for: Creating, implementing, and tracking your marketing strategy.

Pricing: Pro – $139.95/month; Guru – $249.95/month; Business – $499.95/month.

6. Buzzsumo

Source

BuzzSumo allows you to analyze data to enhance and lead your marketing strategy, all while exploring high-performing content in your industry.

Use the platform to find influencers who may help your brand reach, track comments, and find trends to make the most of every turn.

What I like: As your needs evolve, you can also use their crisis management and video marketing tools.

Pricing: Content creation plan – $199/month; PR & Comms plan – $299/month; Suite plan – $499/month; Enterprise plan – $999/month.

7. Crazy Egg

Need to optimize your website?

Source

I highly recommend getting started with Crazy Egg. You’ll be able to identify “attention hotspots” on your product pages, track ad campaign traffic on your site, and understand if shoppers are clicking where you want them to.

You can even make sure your “Buy Now” buttons are in the best place.

Crazy Egg also offers recordings, A/B testing, and more to help make sure your website is offering the best user experience.

Best for: If your marketing strategy includes optimizing your website, Crazy Egg is the tool for you.

Pricing: Starter – $29/month; Plus – $99/month; Pro – $249/month; Enterprise – $499/month.

Get Started Creating an Effective Marketing Strategy

Ultimately, creating a complete marketing strategy isn’t something that can happen overnight. It takes time, hard work, and dedication to confirm you’re reaching your ideal audience— whenever and wherever they want to be reached.

Stick with it (and use some of the resources I’ve included in this post), and over time, research and customer feedback will help you refine your strategy to make sure you’re spending most of your time on the marketing channels your audience cares most about.

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

In TikTok’s early days of mostly dance challenges and lip-syncing exchanges, Shola West, a Gen Z career advocate, speaker and educator, spotted a gap.

“I decided I wanted to come on the platform to share tips and tricks from my career working in the media industry,” she says.

Now affectionately known as the “Big Sis to Young Creatives” — with accolades including Forbes 30 Under 30 — West is building a digital brand around providing career advice to rising professionals.

“I didn’t go into it thinking it would be a social media business per se,” says West. “It was about adding value.”

Now, it’s her full-time business.

The social media entrepreneur makes her money from brand partnerships, workshops, and other aligned collaborations.

Want to learn more? You’re in luck. I chatted with some of the best in social media entrepreneurship and I’m diving into trends, tips, and more below.

Table of Contents

• What is social media entrepreneurship?
• Why is social media entrepreneurship so popular?
• Top Social Media Entrepreneurship Trends
• Tips for Social Media Entrepreneurs

What is social media entrepreneurship?

Social media entrepreneurship entails building a business using social media as the predominant method of driving sales and marketing.

The concept goes hand-in-hand with a surging “creator economy” — the term used to describe influencers or content creators who leverage their digital platforms to produce, distribute, and monetize their content, often generating revenue from brand partnerships, paid advertisements, and affiliate links.

Other forms of social media entrepreneurs might have businesses in sectors such as ecommerce, consulting, and beyond.

Why is social media entrepreneurship so popular?

It’s rare to encounter a business that’s not tapping into social media in some way. In the U.S. alone, 77% of small businesses use social media for essential functions like sales, marketing, and customer service.

It’s no wonder, as these same online platforms are the hunting grounds for buyers: One in four consumers prefer searching for brands on social media platforms over search engines. And when it comes to how consumers value individual creators, 49% make daily, weekly, or monthly purchases based on influencer posts.

I think it’s safe to say social media is a lucrative channel for entrepreneurs. It’s also a low-cost, high-reward business tool for people with creative minds but tight budgets.

Top Social Media Entrepreneurship Trends

1. Short-form video is dominating.

Across the board, social media platforms are really pushing and prioritizing video right now. Short-form video is the fastest-growing content category on LinkedIn, and the platform recently started testing a vertical video feed (similar to the formats on Instagram and TikTok).

“I’ve been seeing an explosion of video podcast interviews,” says Gigi Robinson, founder of Hosts of Influence. “It’s allowed for opportunities where you can better relate to a brand, or a founder of a brand, which may make you a more loyal customer.

2. People want to see behind-the-scenes.

On a similar note, how-the-sausage-is-made content is booming.

“Some brands do this quite well,” says Emma Sneddon, a freelance social media manager, referencing examples like REFY and Free Soul.

In the Free Soul post below, the brand celebrated International Women’s Day with various events — and a video that showcased not only what the brand is about but the people behind it.

“Rather than purely saying, ‘Here‘s our product, please buy it,’ they’re showing more behind-the-scenes content. They’re getting their employees involved.”

3. There’s a rise in influencer marketing.

“We’re moving towards more authenticity over aesthetics,” Sneddon also shared with me. “Social media entrepreneurs are starting to focus on raw, relatable, more personality-related content.”

As brands catch on, many are turning to micro-influencers (creators with 10,000 to 99,999 followers) rather than celebrities to showcase their products and services through original content.

Sixty-four percent of marketers have worked with micro-influencers in the last year, and 47% say this group generated the most marketing success.

“Back in the day, people felt like you had to have a million followers to get partnerships, to land brand deals, to get opportunities,” says West. “That’s not the case anymore. If you have a strong niche and a well-engaged community, even if you have 5k followers, you’re still able to gain access.”

Tips for Social Media Entrepreneurs

1. Don’t be afraid to carve out a niche.

In a saturated industry, presenting something fresh by leaning into your unique experience, expertise, and interests is what will set you apart. That’s what West did, and she tells me it’s working in her favor.

Similarly, my newsletter, podcast, and community platform Stella is a network specifically connecting Black women in media. That’s by design — and it works: Niche communities can foster greater user engagement and loyalty. They also promote a stronger sense of belonging and relatability.

2. Be adaptable.

Part of mastering social media is experimenting across platforms.

“I think platform diversification is key,” says Robinson. Don’t be afraid to add and evolve — oftentimes, what’s waiting are massive rewards and new customers. Don’t be afraid to pivot, either.”

For example, Substack launched the Creator Accelerator Fund, which incentivized creators to migrate their subscriber communities to its platform, offering a host of tools and services.

3. Be consistent but intentional.

Develop a social media posting schedule that best suits your business model — and stick to it. But don’t get bogged down by the notion that you need to post at a certain cadence just because you’re seeing it from another person or brand.

“Consistency for everyone looks different,” Sneddon tells me. “I always say quality over quantity. You want your posts to be value-driven and to actually add something to your audience. You don’t want to be posting every day just to try and keep consistent.”

Regardless of the frequency, social media maintenance can get tedious. Schedulers like Vista Social and Buffer are helpful alternatives to manual posting, and I know a lot of companies and creators who have had great results with them.

Also, most social media platforms have built-in scheduling tools you can tap into.

And if you’re ever feeling burned out creatively, West has a tip: She says that AI, when used responsibly, can be a great resource to help generate new content ideas.

For example, HubSpot has an AI-powered blog idea generator tool that can help you brainstorm ideas when you’re stuck or hone an idea into something you can work with.

Source

4. Collect your own data.

If there’s anything we learned from TikTok’s temporary U.S. ban, it’s that we can’t assume platforms — and the data that comes with it — will exist forever.

Create your own email marketing system to ensure you’re collecting emails and other pertinent information from your online community.

5. Build a community.

Successful social media entrepreneurs, says Robinson, know the difference between an audience and a community. The biggest differentiator lies in engagement.

“Your audience is the people that are often supporting you, but your communities are the people that buy into you. When you are able to be successful with social media, you‘re able to convert, and you’re able to make money because people want access to you.”

In other words, community is central to conversions.

Sneddon agrees. She says you should be constantly “engaging with your audience, asking them questions, and replying to comments.”

She adds, “This will build your community and have people coming back to your page because they know you’re going to interact.”

Don’t be afraid to self-promote.

If I could share one main takeaway from these conversations — and my own experiences — it would be that you have to drive your business forward yourself. This is why one of the best strategies for sustaining a career as a social media entrepreneur is self-promotion.

“Closed mouths don’t get fed,” says Robinson. She’s locked in 15 gigs since the start of 2025 by sharing her past work loudly across her social media channels. Work, after all, leads to new work.

For my company’s video marketing campaigns, Facebook is a natural choice. As the second-most widely used social media, the company inspires confidence and excels in audience targeting, reach, and cost efficiency. However, it does take some strategy to make sure your videos land.

A quality video marketing campaign on Facebook can strengthen your brand and increase your customer base. Though the steps are simple, running marketing videos on Facebook has many moving parts to consider. And most importantly, your videos should appeal to your audience, so you need to create video content that is engaging, emotional, and entertaining.

Check out these lists I put together of best practices and top industry examples to get your creative juices flowing.

Table of Contents

• Best Practices for Facebook Video Marketing
• 10 Excellent Examples of Video Marketing on Facebook

Best Practices for Facebook Video Marketing

1. Gather trends to inform your video marketing plan.

There are two areas I recommend you focus on. First, read up on current video marketing trends to help you understand audience behavior and preferences. You want to know when and how your target demographic uses Facebook and which types of videos they are most likely to respond to.

Second, your campaign may include both native videos (like Facebook Live, reels, posts, and stories) as well as paid video ad campaigns.

Pro tip: If your budget allows for a paid campaign, you need to brush up on the nuts and bolts of running ads on Facebook. Review how to choose the right objectives, track click-throughs, use automated messaging, and select calls-to-action (CTAs).

2. Define big-picture marketing goals.

A big part of both paid and native campaigns is also keeping general objectives in mind. Are you aiming for product education, brand awareness, or driving traffic? There are so many directions to go in, so you need to keep the big marketing picture in mind to stay on track.

For example, if your goal is to gain new customers, you want to put effort into eye-catching images, catchy text, and brief videos. If your goal is to boost sales with current customers, live video events and increased personal interaction are the way to go.

Pro tip: Either reference the marketing goals and plan you already have in place or get started with a free marketing plan template.

3. Streamline video production.

Whether you’re on the planning or production side of your campaign, finding an easy-to-use, dedicated video app will let you spit out clips and videos for faster results. Consider dabbling in technologies like AI-informed video microapps to make your life easier.

Pro tip: Keep in mind that production will take a significant chunk of time. Find shortcuts and take advantage of tools to keep this part of the process in check. If you want to keep operations rolling, it’s a huge advantage to use technology prudently at the production stage.

4. Keep video marketing short and engaging.

Due to its visual nature, video is ideal for inspiring buyer action. Viewers tend to prefer short videos to long ones. I found that, according to Search Engine Journal, 85% of viewers prefer clips less than 15 seconds long, and short-form videos receive 2.5 times more engagement than long-form.

Pro tip: Keep videos concise and striking. Check out some of our excellent examples of video marketing below for inspiration to keep length brief and storytelling precise.

5. Incorporate entertaining live video.

While heavy use of live video is not the norm for most companies, sprinkling it into your strategy can help corral current customers and seriously increase engagement, especially if it’s entertaining and personally interactive.

Facebook boasts some of the easiest-to-use live video options. You can quickly go live from your feed or schedule and promote a live event in the future.

Pro tip: Take a minute to learn how to run a Facebook Live event. This format is perfect for product announcements, live testimonials, product demonstrations, Q&As, and even live selling.

10 Excellent Examples of Video Marketing on Facebook

1. Powerbeats Pro 2 | Beats by Dre

Large brands often have the advantage of star power, like in this example from Beats by Dre filled with some of the world’s biggest sports stars — Lionel Messi and LeBron James. But what I like is their creative interplay of product with celebrity.

Drenched in sweat and set against dark backgrounds, this inspiring video ad comes in at about two minutes. Not short, but not too long, either. The company uses the full two minutes to highlight athletes who are at the peak of fame and incorporates their Powerbeats wireless headphones as an essential tool to success.

I think the use of the word “power” throughout keeps the video on its theme of greatness. The video highlights incredible stats from each of the athletes’ careers and features them all wearing the product while performing in their respective sports. The continuity and striking visuals make it hard to look away or forget.

Pro tip: Repeat your keywords to strengthen messaging. For example, ask yourself what your key message or takeaway is for your marketing video. Consider making a word chart that explores keywords and adjacent words that support your message.

2. Blazer EV SS | Chevrolet

Advertised as the quickest Super Sport model ever produced by Chevy, the Blazer EV SS features in an equally quick 30-second spot posted on Facebook on February 14, 2025. Vintage clips of Chevy’s glory days at the track are cut together in quick succession, leading to an exciting reveal of the Blazer’s sleek and powerful silhouette in action.

Chevy has a rich history of power and speed — and they don’t shy away from promoting their industry leadership and accomplishments. If it fits with your brand, you may want to take note and highlight your products and services with a confident vibe.

I picked this video ad due to its superior design concept. Movement and power are displayed on a few levels as the video starts slow and increases in visual and verbal speed.

Pro tip: Fine-tune your video pacing to evoke emotion by experimenting with a free tool like HubSpot’s Clip Creator to heighten anticipation and keep viewers glued to the screen.

3. BRUNKRISSLA Comforter Set | IKEA USA

IKEA can be described in many ways — quirky, stylish, fun, whimsical — and their 15-second video posted on February 16, 2025, combines all these adjectives in one. What do they do best? Create a striking and unforgettable visual: Mount Rushmore covered in a soft comforter and pillows.

Animated IKEA helicopters fly in the goods to cover the national monument, adding a straightforward but fantastical impression. A shortened .bitly URL right in the text of the post links the viewer straight to the online catalog.

I think bright colors and a little silliness go a long way to drive traffic to IKEA’s website, making purchasing easy and impulsive after a quick, eye-catching visual.

Pro tip: Feature your product in a lighthearted way if it fits with your brand. Check out this blog on funny commercials to find the right humor for your brand.

4. #GoProAwards | GoPro

GoPro’s use of customer-submitted video just makes sense. The millions of hours of footage caught on GoPros is clearly one of their marketing department’s gold mines.

In this video for their #GoProAwards campaign, GoPro customers are encouraged to send in their best. A searchable hashtag makes the campaign quickly accessible across many platforms, but where they really excel is customer engagement combined with focusing on the best of the best.

As a company, they can stand out on Facebook’s feed with beautiful, striking, or exclusive footage. Their ongoing campaign delivers compelling visuals: a rarely seen box jellyfish, a nighttime bike ride in the forest, skydiving stunts, and a bustling coral reef provide content that is sure to be following fodder.

Pro tip: For longer, planned campaigns, use hashtags to group videos over a period of months or years. This makes it easy to look at engagement and track how your campaign has done over time.

5. Garmin Coach | Garmin

In this Garmin Coach video ad posted on Facebook in September of 2024, aspiration is implied using the rolling visual of a competitive cycler. The fit physique, authoritative voice, and bare-bones production are right on brand for Garmin’s hard-working demographic.

What does Garmin do well with this video? They maintain focus. They cut the fat. At only 30 seconds, I think they give viewers what they want in a product announcement — a quick rundown of the features backed by strong and confident footage of the product in action.

The dialogue of the video is expertly written and follows classic marketing writing principles of including only focused and relevant content.

Pro tip: Create a script with confidence and always keep your target audience in mind. Check out HubSpot’s Ultimate Video Marketing Starter Pack for a free video script template to follow.

6. Meta AI | Facebook

A Facebook marketing video on Facebook had to make the cut for obvious reasons. Facebook has a huge compendium of all forms of video marketing — produced, clips from user accounts, and AI-informed. But, I am highlighting this Meta AI explainer video because it is a good example for brands of a short — very short at 12 seconds — illustration of how to use a new feature.

Clean and well-paced, I find this video format is best for how-to content, which is hugely valuable for brands. A relatively quick and simple screen recording will bolster customers’ product use and keep them coming back for more. The keys to success are simplicity, pacing, and highlighting only one feature per video so users can focus on what they want to learn.

Pro tip: Users will never stop needing product demos or explainer videos. Product demo videos aren’t always intuitive, so explore this blog on successful product demo videos to get some ideas.

7. Family Farm Videos | Organic Valley

The Organic Valley brand is known for promoting the small family farms from which they source their dairy and other grocery products. Their series of farm footage from these family farms across America serves as quick behind-the-scenes glimpses for consumers. Customers of Organic Valley are likely concerned about animal welfare, environmental health, family values, and a quality product.

The “family farm” aspect of videos like this one from June of 2024, filmed in a field of sleeping dairy cows, promotes the hard-working, wholesome image of the brand. Plus, they’re fun to watch. When I think about video marketing in a social feed, Organic Valley does well at posting regularly and reminding customers that the brand is still committed to sourcing from real family farms.

Pro tip: Don’t stray far from your brand values if they are a major selling point. Trying out new marketing styles can be fun and interesting, but if you stray too far from your key messaging, you risk confusing buyers.

8. #DiorCouture | Dior

Beauty and lifestyle brands take note. Dior is known for being highly inspired yet accessible to everyday consumers who are in the market for luxury fashion, fragrance, and cosmetics. Their focus on elegant details makes their video ads pop.

In this minute-and-a-half short starring Anna Sawai, Anna attends her first Golden Globes, easy on the eyes, and the “inner dialogue” revealing her inner fears and anxieties portrays her as just as human as the rest of us.

“Do I look okay?” she thinks as she is dressed in a stunning white number and done up with beautiful Dior accessories and makeup. Posted on February 5th, 2025, I like how this ad tells a simple story that keeps you watching but also serves as an announcement that Anna is Dior’s newest brand ambassador.

Pro tip: Keep your brand aesthetics on point. If you’re a luxury brand, your video needs to reflect that and feel expensive.

9. Gemini AI | Google

Mega corporation Google doesn’t shy away from posting regular Facebook marketing videos. And, it’s an understatement to say that Google has resources to spare for any marketing pursuit they take on. They produce masterful, touching marketing content like it’s no big deal. That being said, I believe we can still learn from what they do right.

In a recent marketing video posted on Facebook on July 26, 2024, titled “A Little Help from Gemini,” Facebook mixes emotional storytelling with a few key features in a video to promote their Gemini AI chatbot.

Part personal interest story, part product demo, this video tells of a young girl’s dream to be like U.S. Olympic hurdler and sprinter Sydney McLaughlin-Levron — and someday break her record.

It plays out a conversation between her father and Gemini — he is asking various questions to help support his daughter in her dream: “How to teach hurdle technique,” and “Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is.”

What I like: The text of the father’s dialogue popped and rolled across the screen the entire time. And since it has been reported that 85% of users watch Facebook videos with the sound off, this is a genius move.

10. Beauty for Nature | Dove X Walmart

Dove is no stranger to taking a stand and gears most of their campaigns toward social and environmental causes. In a video posted in August of 2023, the textures of the earth are shown beautifully alongside various skin textures.

Dove used the video to announce the Dove Nature Regeneration Project in partnership with Walmart and the Rimba Collective in Southeast Asia to protect and restore 123,000 acres of rainforest.

What I like: Dove maintains their brand’s strong core values. An announcement spoken over their signature striking visuals is enough to keep viewers enraptured for the entire 30 seconds. Pleasurable, enjoyable, and real, this video is a relief for the eyes amid the busy clutter of social media feeds. And it achieves its objective as a major public relations piece.

Facebook Video Marketing Is for Everyone

I’m always impressed by marketers who tackle a new social media platform without previous experience. It can be daunting to begin a new campaign on an unfamiliar platform. Luckily, I’ve also found that Facebook video marketing is pretty user-friendly and yields quick results.

There’s a lot we can learn from companies with giant marketing budgets, but don’t feel like you need to start investing millions of dollars into your video marketing just yet.

I’d start small with HubSpot’s free Clip Creator Tool and Ultimate Video Starter Pack and experiment with your Facebook video marketing strategy. The creative process spent before actually filming a video is just as important as the actual content, so don’t be afraid to spend a good chunk of time defining your brand strategy.

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

Creating a social media strategy in today’s ever-changing digital landscape can be overwhelming. But here’s what I learned: It’s also absolutely essential.

I recently sat down with three top-tier social media experts and dove into HubSpot’s State of Social Media report. Together, we explored how to develop a strategy that drives traffic and delivers real ROI to your brand.

We also pulled together the key trends shaping social media marketing today.

Table of Contents

• What is a social media strategy?
• Why You Need a Social Media Strategy
• How to Build a Social Media Strategy That Works

In other words, a social media strategy is a structured approach to content creation, posting, and audience interaction. It involves:

• Defining brand voice and messaging.
• Selecting the most effective platforms for engagement.
• Setting measurable goals for audience growth and interaction.
• Implement a content calendar based on peak engagement times.
• Analyzing performance metrics to optimize strategy.

A social media strategy requires a comprehensive understanding of audience behavior, platform trends, and emerging digital tools.

Pro tip: If you want an easy way to track engagement metrics, audience growth, and more, I recommend trying HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software.

Why You Need a Social Media Strategy

Social media is more than a promotional tool; it is a core component of brand engagement, sales, and customer retention. Without a structured plan, businesses risk investing time and resources in content that fails to drive meaningful impact.

“One of the biggest challenges, I think, social media marketers face is saturation and competition. There’s so much content on social media that sometimes it makes it challenging to stand out from the crowd.

“Having a robust strategy that understands the target audience includes strong copy and unique content can help to cut through the noise,” says Ellie Nash, social community executive at Kurago.

A strong strategy helps brands:

• Build authority.
• Engage audiences.
• Achieve measurable outcomes.
• Align messaging with customer preferences.
• Leverage technological advancements.

Brands without a defined strategy risk falling behind as consumer behaviors shift and platform algorithms change. This year alone, we’ve seen how digital marketing continues to evolve with AI’s growing role in marketing, AI-driven content, hyper-personalized advertising, and new engagement formats reshaping audience interactions.

1. Define your target audience.

If you haven’t already identified and documented your buyer personas, start by defining the key demographics of the audience you’re trying to reach — such as age, gender, occupation, income, hobbies, and interests.

To reach your audience without annoying them, you must first understand what they want and why.

What is their motivation?

Are social media users visiting these apps to learn, explore, shop, or just have a good time?

In our most recent State of Consumer Trends Survey, we asked over 500 general consumers to pick the three most common reasons they use social media.

While 65% actually use it socially to keep up with friends, 53% just want to be entertained and 50% want to learn new things. Unfortunately, 28% say they prefer to go on social media to learn about new products or brands.

The good news?

Later in the survey, when we asked consumers how they prefer to research and learn about brands and products, a whopping 41% said they like to do this on social media channels (a slight increase from a similar survey we ran six months prior).

While Gen X and Boomers skew lower on this average, Gen Z and Millennial generations are using social for brand research more often — which is not surprising due to their hyper-connectedness to the web.

As you might be able to tell from our data above, your target audience plays a role in how successful the right strategy will be. And better catering to them helps you create focused advertising that addresses your ideal consumer’s specific needs.

For instance, the sponsored post below by Monday.com, a project management platform, highlights the platform’s flexibility and workflow customization feature.

The post targets business owners and project managers who may feel limited by other project management software.

Source

What does this mean for you?

Consider your ideal consumers’ challenges and what problems they’re solving daily. Focus on no more than four types of people representing most of your buyers. Don’t get hung up on the exceptions or outliers, or you’ll never get started.

Once you start creating content for your audience, prioritize engaging your audience at every level.

Pay close attention to any questions or comments your audience posts. And be quick to address them, as that engagement could make or break a conversion or purchase.

Consumers like feeling like they’re part of a community when they’re on your social media pages. More than 1 in 5 social media users joined or participated in an online community in the last year.

Speaking of communities, creating social media groups is a smart move to attract, keep, and engage the audience, with 90% of marketers agreeing.

Here’s why:

• Groups help people get involved.
• Followers can learn from each other.
• Your brand becomes a connector — something like a helpful friend.
• Communities feel like friendlier places to chat compared to pages.

Research from Sprout Social reveals that 60% of marketers refine their approach based on audience insights. Social listening tools help brands analyze trends and tailor content accordingly.

Pro tip: To reach the right audience, use social listening tools. These tools check social media for keywords, assess if the talk is positive or negative, and give you reports. I often use this info to create buyer personas for better targeting.

2. Incorporate ecommerce.

Social media isn’t just for discovering products anymore — it’s becoming a place to buy them, too. People love the convenience of shopping directly in the app where they first see something they like.

In fact, a quarter of social media marketers already say social shopping tools are more effective than traditional ecommerce sites. Looking ahead, 80% of them believe consumers will eventually shop more within apps than on brand websites or through third-party platforms.

If we look at how this trend is fairing across the globe, several other countries have already made social media shopping a norm.

For example, check out this comparison of data from the U.K., China, and the U.S.:

• In the U.K., social commerce was valued at $24.71 billion by 2023, it reached $31.27 billion in 2024. Forecasts indicate the market will grow to $83.27 billion by 2029.
• China leads the global social commerce market, with 90% of consumers making purchases through social media in 2023. Live streaming e-commerce is expected to grow to 8.16 trillion yuan by 2026.
• In the U.S., social commerce sales are set to surpass $100 Billion in 2026, according to Emarketer.

Source

So, what’s the takeaway?

If you sell products, social media should be a key part of your ecommerce strategy. It doesn’t matter where you are. Social selling is a big deal — so it’s time to take it seriously.

Most platforms offer built-in ecommerce features like shoppable posts, and almost half (47%) of social media marketers are already selling directly within apps.

The most popular social selling tools for marketers are:

• Instagram Shops and Instagram Live Shopping (High ROI)
• Facebook Shops (Average ROI)

Source

If you need inspiration for incorporating ecommerce into your social strategy, take a cue from Sephora.

Whenever the beauty brand posts a product image, it includes a product tag that links directly to its shoppable page. It’s seamless — followers can purchase without ever leaving the app.

The key to social selling success is trust. While Sephora has an established reputation, you can build trust by sharing customer reviews, user-generated content (UGC), and product info.

Source

Pro tip: I recommend you go with image, video, and carousel ads for brand awareness to emphasize store visits, ad impressions, and engagement. For increased sales, select product, collection, or shopping ads to drive direct purchases and product page visits.

3. Optimize your social channels for search.

Social search is on the rise.

As more people turn to social media with their queries instead of search engines, 89% of social media marketers agree that social search is important to their overall social media strategies in 2023.

Nearly 24% of consumers aged 18-54 use social media first to search for brands.

Source

For marketers, this means your social channels must be optimized for search. Prioritize social SEO if you want your social channels to show up in the results when your audience searches for your brand.

Similar to optimizing for search engines like Google, you can optimize your social presence.

Here’s how:

• Include relevant keywords and hashtags in your posts and bio.
• Make sure your username is easy to search for.
• Keep your username consistent across accounts.

When adding alt-text, avoid stuffing keywords, says Annie-Mai Hodge, director and founder of Girl Power Marketing.

“This feature describes the image on a page for the visually impaired, so it’s important you describe the image accurately. In doing that, you’re providing extra context for the social platform too, which can, in turn, get your content more visibility in search results,” says Hodge.

Pro tip: You don’t need to film an hour-long video. Short-form video — think YouTube Shorts — can help you rank higher. Short-from video is also considered the future of lead generation.

4. Focus on a few key social channels.

Most small businesses or social teams don’t have the bandwidth to establish and sustain a quality social media presence on every single channel. And learning the ins and outs of each one? Totally overwhelming.

That’s why it makes sense to focus on the platforms that will bring the best ROI. For many brands, that’s Instagram.

Instagram continues to lead in engagement, ROI, and quality lead generation. In 2025, 58% of marketers cite Instagram as their top-performing platform for driving results, making it a priority for marketing investment.

Instagram Reels, in particular, remains a dominant force in user interaction, with short-form video driving higher engagement than static posts.

But don’t just jump into Instagram because I said so. Brands also need to be strategic about where they show up.

“The platform can say a lot about the brand itself. With more and more consumers being more in tune with how they spend their money and whether corporations’ ideals align with theirs, this is becoming more of a consideration for brands in the long run,” says Tameka Bazile, senior social media manager at Elevate Labs.

If you want to create a strong social media strategy from scratch, start small.

If you’re just starting out, don’t stretch yourself thin. Research where your target audience hangs out. For example, if you’re aiming for business professionals, LinkedIn might be a better fit than Instagram.

Bazile says brands should also consider the following when it comes to expanding across multiple platforms:

• Means. “Does their social team consist of enough members and get enough budget to successfully manage multiple accounts?” Bazile asks.
• Consumer access. “Are their ideal consumers found on the platforms they are seeking to expand to?” she says.

I recently read insightful expert perspectives on this LinkedIn article about picking the right social media platform.

Amidst all the chatter, Roel Timmermans‘ comment caught my attention:

Source

Or as Hodge says, “You don’t need to be on every single social media platform, full stop — for most businesses, it’s a waste of time and resources to be on platforms where your audience isn’t active.”

When creating your strategy, Hodge says, “You would’ve looked at where your audience is, what your competitors are doing, and what you’re aiming to achieve with social media — all of this will help inform you as to what social media channels you should be focusing on.”

Pro tip: Check where your competitors are most active and what kind of content they post. You’ll see what works or doesn’t and how engaged their audience is. Don’t copy them — just use that info to make smart decisions for your strategy.

5. Create engaging content tailored to each platform.

As I mentioned, every social media platform has its own vibe.

The way people engage and the type of content they expect — it all varies. So, if you want your posts to land, you’ve got to adapt your content to fit each platform’s style and tone.

For example:

• LinkedIn is all about professional, insightful posts.
• Instagram is made for eye-catching visuals and quick messages.
• TikTok is all about creativity and riding trends.
• X loves snappy, real-time updates.

When you get it right, content tailored to the platform builds trust and boosts engagement.

Take Instagram, where you should focus on crisp images or short videos with punchy captions. On LinkedIn, you’ll want to lean into thought leadership and industry expertise. And for TikTok, it’s humor, challenges, or fun behind-the-scenes moments that humanize your brand.

Wendy’s is a great example of this.

The brand’s X game is sharp and sarcastic — perfect for the platform’s fast-paced nature.

Source

But on Instagram, Wendy switches gears with polished posts featuring new menu items and vibrant photography.

Source

Pro tip: Instagram stories and TikTok challenges are perfect for casual, day-in-the-life content. Save the deep dives for YouTube and LinkedIn, where people are looking for more in-depth insights.

6. Repurpose your content.

Why stress over creating different content for each platform?

Keep it simple: repurpose and use the same awesome content in different places — within reason, of course.

According to our research, most marketers repurpose content in some way, shape, or form, while 17% consider it one of their key strategies.

This makes sense. By recycling content, you can:

• Get your message to more people on different platforms.
• Save time by using what you already have instead of starting from scratch.
• Stay visible on search engines by updating and reusing content.
• Cater to your audience’s preferences with different formats.
• Make your content last longer by updating timeless pieces.
• Improve your strategy by checking how your content performs on different channels.

We at HubSpot love repurposing content — from simple LinkedIn posts like this …

Source

… to hilarious TikTok video:

Although most marketers do it, only 7% told us it yields them substantial ROI compared to content that’s more catered to platforms.

If you’re short on time or trying out a new platform similar to the one you already use, go ahead and make small tweaks to optimize content across channels. I’d say it’s worth experimenting with, as long as you’re delivering what your audience wants.

Just be careful not to spam them with the same content over and over again — that’s a quick way to lose their attention.

Pro tip: Stumped on a creative content idea that feels more personal than repurposed? HubSpot’s Content Remix tool uses AI to make it easy.

7. Make a plan for customer service.

When putting together your social media strategy, consider how you’ll use your channels for customer service.

Social media is so ingrained in our day-to-day lives, so it’s no surprise that people turn to these platforms for everything, from brand discovery to customer service.

According to our State of Social Media and Consumer Trends research, one in five social media users contact a brand through social DMs for customer service each quarter.

43% of marketers use customer service reps, 41% rely on platform managers, and 13% employ automated tools like chatbots.

Whether you create a separate account dedicated to customer service or have an auto-reply set up when people DM you on Instagram, have a plan for how you’ll handle it with this Free Social Media Customer Service Template.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about the importance of good customer service on social media.

According to Zendesk research:

• 73% of consumers will switch to a competitor after multiple bad experiences.
• 56% of consumers rarely complain about a negative customer experience- they quietly switch to a competitor instead.
• 3 in 4 consumers say a bad interaction with a business can ruin their day.
• Consumers will give companies 2.2 chances on average before switching to a competitor.
• 60% of consumers have purchased from a brand solely based on the service they expect to receive.

Pro tip: Apart from clearly stating working hours, let customers know the expected response time and inform them about quicker alternative resources if available.

8. Develop a posting schedule to guide you.

Social media isn’t an exact science, and it definitely doesn’t work the same for every business or industry. To make it work for you, I always advise people to create a clear posting schedule that helps your team stay consistent with content.

HubSpot offers some great social media tools and templates that help you plan your content and build a solid posting schedule and social media calendar.

One method I’ve found effective is from Tameka Bazile, who shared a neat way to categorize social media content.

Here’s how she categorizes it:

• Evergreen engagement content.
• Evergreen promotional content.
• Specific campaign content.
• Recurring communications content.

“Breaking down content into these buckets allows social teams to maintain regular presences online while also separating content data into easily trackable pieces,” she says.

Set realistic goals for how often you’ll post and engage, and stick to the posting schedule you’ve created. It’s all about consistency.

Pro tip: Choose platforms that allow easy editing and content management within your team. This ensures smooth collaboration and calendar updates.

9. Talk WITH, not AT, your followers.

In our latest Consumer Trends research, 41% of consumers pointed to relatability as the most memorable aspect of posts from brands or companies on social or the web.

Friendly brands win more followers (and hearts). So, skip the self-promotion overload. Instead, get into conversations and respond to comments authentically.

People love it when you chat with them, not just throw information their way. It makes them feel special, creating a genuine affection for your brand.

And no, you don’t have to sound super professional. Casual talk works even better on social media. Just take a cue from McDonald’s:

Source

I personally can’t get enough of BMW and its fantastic relationship with fans and followers. They always try to respond to every comment on social media:

Source

As of 2025, social media engagement rates for brand posts have experienced notable changes across various platforms.

• Facebook: 0.064% via rivaliq
• Instagram: 0.50% via social insider
• X: 0.021% via rivaliq

So, once you get a comment, find the right way to interact and show that you care. Don’t just ghost and ignore. These comments boost your post higher in algorithms and make it more visible.

Pro tip: Never delete negative comments unless they’re super offensive or inappropriate. Instead, use them as an opportunity for constructive engagement and improvement.

10. Measure your results.

It’s hard to know what to focus on if you don’t have goals, a roadmap, or a clear brand strategy. You’ll end up lost in the noise of social media, unsure of what’s working or what to prioritize.

As Bazile says, “Without goals, a product roadmap, or even a full brand strategy, social media managers will struggle to know what to prioritize in the social space, what metrics to measure to convey progress, and what sort of content or social presence is ideal for the brand.”

There’s a lot you can track on social media with the right tools, but let’s not get overwhelmed.

• Start with the basics. For example, how much traffic are your social channels driving to your website or blog?
• Once you’ve got a handle on that, use tools like Facebook’s Page Insights, Instagram’s Account Insights, and LinkedIn’s Visitor Analytics to spot trends in engagement.
• Look for patterns around what topics or keywords get the most attention.
• Once you know what your average traffic and post performance look like, it’s time to set some goals.
• Choose metrics that are simple and easy to track — otherwise, you’ll lose motivation fast. Things like total interactions, traffic to your site, and social-driven revenue are a great place to start.

“One of the most valuable indicators, in my opinion, is impressions,” Nash says. “Impressions measure the number of times a piece of content is displayed on users’ screens and help to evaluate the effectiveness of your content strategy in terms of exposure and brand awareness.”

Pro tip: Don’t only focus on platform numbers. Track the social sentiment as well. See if people express positive or negative feelings about you in online conversations. It takes a bit of manual work, but it’s worth it. Check regularly for better insights.

11. Adjust your tactics as needed.

Social media won’t start working overnight.

Establishing a following, stabilizing your brand, and seeing the results of your efforts take time. So, experiment to find the right combination of channels, content, and messaging that works for your audience.

We can pick up some cool tricks from Victoria’s Secret in this regard.

The company has shifted from using only professional photos and videos to incorporating more casual content. Now, VS’s Insta feed also includes UGC and interviews with random people on the street and in their stores.

Victoria’s Secret proves that even as a high-end brand, you don’t lose anything by including everyday people.

Actually, you gain.

Source

More followers. More engagement. More exposure.

Keep track of changes in your post views, audience demographics, and post interactions, and make changes as needed.

Over time, you can adjust your posting schedule, content, and personas based on the collected information, which will help you fine-tune your strategy and generate more consistent results.

I get it: trying new stuff might feel risky, but adapting is essential to staying relevant.

For instance, instead of relying solely on promotional content, brands should lean into formats that engage their audience.

In our 2025 survey of over a thousand global social media marketers:

• 35% said product demonstrations or tutorials drive the most engagement.
• 25% reported that behind-the-scenes content helps build stronger connections with their audience.
• 21% highlighted the impact of user-generated content.

These numbers show that audiences crave authenticity. Instead of just talking about your brand, showing the process, the people, and the community behind it can make a bigger impact.

Pro tip: Tailor your content to match seasonal trends and holidays. This helps keep your brand messaging timely and relatable. And most importantly — people love it.

Keeping Up With Social Media Strategies

The tips I’ve shared here will boost your ROI now, but make sure to stay prepared for the inevitable shifts as new tools, channels, and trends emerge.

To stay on top of things without feeling overwhelmed, I recommend following research like our State of Social Media report. You can also check out our blog for real, actionable insights on the trends and strategies you need to keep on your radar.

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

To industry outsiders, social media management is a fun and carefree job, but those of us who have had boots on the ground know differently.

Sure, there are exciting, creative tasks, but there’s also strategy, analysis, and near-constant monitoring and engagement. There’s planning and publishing, and sometimes even public relations fires to put out.

Social media is a demanding, full-time job with many moving pieces, and it’s only becoming more high-profile, as 56% of marketers expect their social media budget to increase this year.

Need guidance on how to organize social media content for your business? I asked social media managers from across several industries for their best social media organization tips. Here’s what they shared.

1. Plan ahead with a content calendar.

Knowing what to post, whether for myself or clients, has always been one of the most stressful things about social media management for me. I’ve found planning ahead can help minimize that.

Create a social media content calendar for as far into the future as possible. Fine details like how frequently and what time you post will vary by platform and audience, but having a plan of the content you intend to create and post gives you ample time to execute.

I recommend mapping out at least two weeks and having your content ready a week before publishing so you aren’t left scrambling at the last minute.

Of course, time-sensitive trends and news may also come up (more on that in a sec), but having this foundation set in advance will help keep you from going dark.

HubSpot has a social media calendar template to help you get started.

Source

Pro tip: Leave room for flexibility.

“Keeping an updated content calendar is a must, but being flexible in that calendar is just as necessary,” shares Shivangi Mistry, Social Media Marketing Manager for Alchemee (formerly The Proactiv Company).

“Trends come and go faster than ever. Being able to move content around and having a flexible calendar will give you the freedom to participate in these social media conversations.”

Sure, not every trend will be a hit for every brand, but Mistry still encourages marketers to experiment with them and see what lands.

“Learnings like these may warrant low-performing numbers every now and then, but don‘t be discouraged. Not everything performs well all the time but showing your audience you’re a part of the conversation is what keeps the brand alive. Keeping content timely and pulsed out regularly makes a brand’s page feel relative and relatable to the viewer.”

Remember: Our survey showed that over three-fourths (76%) of marketers believe having authentic and relatable social media content is more important than having polished, high-production content.

2. Schedule social posts ahead of time and in bulk.

Few things are more annoying than having to drop what you’re doing or throw off your work flow to post something on social media.

With that in mind, make a habit of scheduling posts in advance and in bulk if you can.

Scheduling posts saves a lot of time and allows you to focus on other parts of your job instead of constantly being ready and waiting to post.

Many moons ago, former HubSpot Social Media Manager and now Director of Content at Apollo.io Robyn Showers used to tweet from the @HubSpot account 24 or more times per day, not including replies.

She started using HubSpot’s social media management software to schedule tweets in bulk by uploading them from a spreadsheet to get out of this reactive state. I also did this on a weekly basis for dozens of clients during my account management days.

Years later, the tool has only gotten more comprehensive.

It allows you to run all your social media from one central location, including scheduling to Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn. You can also run and manage social ads from the platform.

3. Use a project management or to-do list app.

Social media managers would be lost without their to-do lists.

Some of us are paper and pen folks (like yours truly), but even I have found digital list apps to be extremely helpful in social media organization as you can easily link to your platforms and related documents.

There is a lot to choose from – Todoist, TickTick, ClickUp, or Google Tasks. To narrow down your options, here are a few key features to look for:

• Syncing option between devices
• Recurring due dates and reminders
• Priority levels
• Categories
• Task sharing and delegation
• Calendar feeds

4. Know where to find trending topics.

What’s trending right now? What memes and songs are all over TikTok? What is going viral on Instagram? Which news stories are people talking about on Facebook and LinkedIn?

These are all questions social media managers need to consider – not just when they arrive at work in the morning but all day long.

By staying on top of rising trends, social media managers can help brands “newsjack” and join the conversation before it’s too late.

Of course, knowing where to find these things on each specific platform (i.e., the “What’s happening” box and tabs on X) is important, but there are also tools to help you do this cumulatively.

For example, you can sign up for an RSS reader like Feedly.

Through Feedly, you can follow your favorite industry news sites, blogs, and even Subreddits. The tool also has a paid “market intelligence” option to track competitive intel, tech innovations, and industry-specific trends.

Source

This is a huge time saver, as you’ll get a great deal of insight and information pulled into one single feed. There’s no need to jump around a bunch of different platforms to see what’s going on.

5. Keep tabs on your competitors.

In addition to trending topics and memes, you’ll also want to keep tabs on your competitors.

Take note of the content they publish, campaigns they run, how audiences respond, what new products or features they launch, and what questions or problems audiences may have. All this information helps you better understand what you’re up against and how you can best compete with your social strategy.

There are number of social media listening tools to help you in this department, but if you’re a HubSpot user, you can also take advantage of social inbox to monitor specific handles or hashtags.

6. Maintain an ‘Inbox Zero’ mentality.

For most people, high productivity comes from closing out of email for several hours at a time. This couldn’t be less true for social media managers who must stay alert to incoming requests.

Back when Laurie Meacham led the social media team at JetBlue, they had to stay on top of Twitter (now X) mentions in addition to social post requests from their marketing, public relations, operations, and customer commitment teams. How did she manage?

“I maintain the ‘Inbox Zero’ mentality — in other words, keeping my inbox at zero new messages or nearly zero at all times. This way, I always know what’s new and what needs my action,” she said. “Nothing gets lost in mountains of unimportant emails or assignments.”

Pro tip: It can be easy to lose important emails below the fold, so star (or flag) the ones you want to refer back to and set alert notifications for your most important senders.

7. Create a form for social promotion requests.

When you run a brand’s social media, it’s common to hear from any and all departments requesting posts. Maybe sales wants you to promote an upcoming product launch or HR wants you to push new job listings.

To keep everything organized and minimize the number of social media promotion requests you get via email and instant messaging, field these requests through a form (like we do at HubSpot).

This way, you free up your email and IM and have a dedicated place to review requests. Google Forms or Typeform makes these free and easy to create.

Pro tip: If you’re concerned about time-sensitive requests, add a note that specifies the best way to contact you or your team for urgent requests.

8. Use Canva to make batches of images.

Canva is a wonderfully simple (and free) graphic design platform that social media managers can use to create social media images. Better yet — you can use it to create templates.

Maintaining a consistent aesthetic is very important on social media. With Canva, you can create templates, get them approved by your branding team if necessary, and use them

whenever you post on social media. (We even do this at HubSpot.)

You can create multiple folders based on the post category, the platform, or the visual format – how you organize it is all up to you.

Reflecting, Showers shared how she would use Canva to create images in bulk for HubSpot’s campaigns on social. “Anytime we run a campaign to promote an ebook, webinar, or another valuable piece of content, I want to have at least five creatives to test on Twitter,” she said.

To create those graphics, she only had to design one image on Canva, then use the “copy” tool (shown below) to duplicate the image and create multiple versions while retaining the core design elements.

Note: Canva also now integrates directly with HubSpot. Just saying.

9. Repurpose your content.

With so many platforms, it can feel overwhelming to keep up with publishing and creating content. But listen — you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Sure, you shouldn’t repost the same exact copy and piece on every platform — that’s just lazy, and audiences will tune you out. However, you can reshape and reword content to be used on different platforms or formats.

If you see a blog article getting a lot of traffic, think about how you can rework it for audiences on Instagram or YouTube. Or if a video is doing well on LinkedIn, perhaps it can be shortened and edited to appeal to audiences on TikTok.

Whatever the transformation, repurposing can help you get more out of the content you already know your audience loves and keep your social media calendar full.

Pro tip: Repurpose your existing content with artificial intelligence (AI).

According to new HubSpot research, 56% of social media marketers are using AI to create short-form videos, while 53% are using it to generate images — and who can blame them?

Though it will likely need some editing and fine-tuning, AI can repurpose content faster than any human could on their own.

Ask ChatGPT to write posts for X or Claude to craft a video script. Even better, try a tool built specifically for content repurposing, such as HubSpot’s Content Remix.

With Content Remix, Professional and Enterprise-level users of Content Hub can repurpose existing content into new formats for social media. This can be materials you have hosted on HubSpot (i.e., images, text messages, ads, and blog posts) or new content you upload to the tool.

Note: In addition to helping you create content, HubSpot’s Breeze Social Media Agent can also help analyze your social performance, company details, and marketing best practices to develop an effective social media strategy.

10. Use AI to trigger engagement.

Fostering engagement with your audience on social media is just as, if not more, important than sharing content. In 2025, consumers crave personalized experiences and are loyal to the brands that can offer them.

Social media engagement is powerful way to do that — but it can be hard to scale. Thankfully, AI can help keep up or at least initiate engagement.

For instance, ManyChat can be used to send a direct message when people comment on an Instagram post with a specific word or phrase. (I use this frequently, both professionally and personally.)

Pro tip: End your message with a question or ask.

While, depending on the context, automated messages can be easy to spot; you can still foster engagement by ending your message with a question or asking people directly to respond. You’d be surprised how often people will.

11. Take advantage of ‘Saves,’ ‘Collections,’ and ‘Bookmarks’ for curating.

While original content should be the core of your social media strategy, curation is a great way to supplement it. Luckily, in recent years, social media has evolved to make curation easier and keep this content organized.

Facebook and Instagram, in particular, have won my heart when it comes to this. Both Meta platforms let you save posts to “collections,” which are essentially folders you create around different topics or even format types.

For instance, if you’re a beauty brand, you could have a collection of user-generated content created showcasing your products or another with posts sharing makeup application tips you think your audience will like.

No matter your approach, having these collections in your arsenal gives you somewhere specific and easy to access when it’s time to curate a post.

12. Diversify your mediums.

Images, videos, stories, polls — social media platforms have no shortage of features and formats for brands to experiment with these days, so use them to your advantage.

Diversify the types of content you create and share even within the same platform. Not only will the variety keep your feed interesting, but it can help you reach more people.

You see, different people enjoy consuming information in different ways, so if you only create one type, you may be ignored by many in your target audience. Plus, not every topic lends itself to every format. For example, a software tutorial is likely best suited for a video rather than a series of photos. So, let your subject matter guide you as well.

Wix does a great job diversifying its content, as seen on its Instagram account.

Source

The tech company posts a mix of Reels/videos and carousels, user-generated and brand-generated pieces, graphics, and real photography. This keeps their feed dynamic and interesting to scroll through.

Pro tip: This is another place where HubSpot’s Content Remix can help!

13. Organize your windows and tabs in a specific order every day.

When you‘re juggling your email, calendar, social streams, post requests, links, and so on and so forth, you can easily lose track of which tab is where. One member of JetBlue’s social team suggests keeping windows and tabs open in a specific order that you’ll get used to and memorize quickly.

The JetBlue team also suggests getting into the habit of closing out of tabs as soon as you’re done with them.

“We get sent so many links that, if I’m not careful, I’ll have 30 articles open as well as Fly-Fi selfies and pictures of suitcases with wheels and zippers missing.”

If someone tweets a link at your brand, once you‘ve addressed that tweet, close out of the link. This also helps ensure your toggle bars never get so crowded that you can’t easily see updates as they happen.

14. Set a time limit for each task.

Social media managers tend to have jam-packed schedules that don’t allow them to do one task for too long. So, set a timer on your phone or computer to keep yourself on track and moving through all your essential responsibilities.

If you need to come back to something later, you can. But having timers or time limits as guardrails will help you from getting too caught up.

15. Test and experiment.

Social media management best practices and tools are constantly evolving. So, stay open and try out new processes or tech alternatives. Sign up for free trials and try betas. You never know when something may pop up that will make you much more productive and effective.

Staying Organized as a Social Media Manager

It’s one thing to get organized; it’s another to stay that way.

All of the tips outlined below require consistency. Otherwise, they won’t serve much of a purpose. Incorporate these tips into your routine and see which are worth your time (aka effective), and you can realistically stick with.

Once you do, you will slowly but surely see how much more organized your days will become.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.