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At many companies, it can feel as if there are 100 miles between sales and marketing. In a recent LinkedIn survey, 60% of global respondents believed that misalignment between sales and marketing could damage financial performance, yet there are a number of disconnects between the teams from strategy to process.

One of the most critical steps for aligning your sales and marketing efforts is creating a service level agreement (SLA). Traditionally, an SLA serves to define exactly what a customer will receive from a service provider. But SLAs serve internal operations as well, and sales and marketing agreements are among the most crucial.

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Ultimately, a service level agreement is designed to create alignment between two parties by setting clear expectations and mitigating any issues before they happen. With that in mind, there are multiple types of SLA depending on your use case.

1. Customer Service Level Agreement

A customer SLA is just what it sounds like: an agreement by a vendor to deliver a certain level of service to a particular customer. Here’s a fun example:

In the TV show The Office, the company, Dunder Mifflin, supplies paper to various organizations. They might have a customer SLA stipulating that Dunder Mifflin will supply [Company X] with 50 reams of paper per month, shipped every Monday to [Address 1] and [Address 2] by Darryl Philbin — with a confirmation of delivery sent to Jim Halpert. (Sorry, we had a little too much fun with the references in that one.)

2. Internal Service Level Agreement

An internal SLA only concerns parties from within the company. While a business might have an SLA open with each of its clients, it can also have a separate SLA between its sales and marketing departments.

Let’s say Company X’s sales department has to close $5,000 worth of sales per month in total, and each sale is worth $100. If the sales team’s average win rate for the leads they engage with is 50%, Company X’s marketing director, Amir, can work with the sales team on an SLA, stipulating that Marketing will deliver 100 qualified leads to sales director, Kendra, by a certain date every month. This might include four weekly status reports per month, sent back to Amir by Kendra, to ensure the leads Kendra’s team is receiving are helping them keep pace with their monthly sales goal.

3. Multilevel Service Level Agreement

Multilevel SLAs can support a business’s customers or the business’s various internal departments. The point of this type of SLA is to outline what is expected of each party if there’s more than just one service provider and one end user. Here’s an example of a multi-level SLA in an internal situation:

Company X’s sales and marketing teams partner up on an internal SLA that delivers leads from Marketing to Sales every month. But what if they wanted to incorporate a customer retention strategy into this contract, making it an SLA between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service?

After sales closes 50 new deals for the month, it’s Customer Service’s job to keep these customers happy and successful while using the product. In a multi level SLA, Company X can have sales director, Kendra, send monthly “customer friction” reports to Joan, the VP of service, based on dialogue the sales team has regularly with its clients. This helps the customer service team build a knowledge base that better prepares them for the pain points customers call them about.

You can learn more about customer service’s increasing role to business growth in the HubSpot Academy.

What does an SLA include?

The details of an SLA will differ among internal and external agreements. Nonetheless, there are common building blocks that each SLA should include, whether the recipient of the service is your customer or your sales team.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing & Sales SLA Template

Download this Template

HubSpot’s Sales & Marketing SLA Template is the ideal resource for outlining your company’s goals and reaching an agreement between these two crucial teams. Download it now for free.

1. A Summary of the Agreement

The first item on your SLA should be an overview of the agreement. What service have you agreed to deliver to the other party? Summarize the service, to whom it’s being delivered, and how the success of that service will be measured.

2. The Goals of Both Parties

In external SLAs — those between a business and its customers — the goals stated in the agreement are primarily those of the customer. If this is your intention, work with your client to marry their needs with the abilities of your product, and come up with a measurable goal that your company can feasibly meet for the client on a regular basis.

Is this an internal SLA between your sales and marketing departments? Both teams should have their goals outlined in this section of the contract, while making sure that when Marketing hits its goal, Sales can reach its own goal as a result.

3. The Requirements of Both Parties

SLAs should include what each party needs in order to reach their goals. In agreements that serve a customer, keep in mind their needs might go beyond simply “the product.” They might need more than that to reach their goals — such as weekly consulting, reporting, and technical maintenance from you.

SLAs between sales and marketing teams should describe what they might need from the opposite department in order to help them hit their targets. Marketing, for example, might need weekly status reports on Sales’ pipeline so the marketers can adjust their lead-generating campaigns accordingly.

4. The Points of Contact

Who’s in charge of making sure each party’s goals are met? Sort out which team does what, and who talks to whom, in this section of your SLA. Is there a separate employee using the services, in relation to the employee who reports on performance every week? Make it clear who’s involved in the SLA, and how.

5. A Plan if Goals Aren’t Met

You might not want to think about it, but there should be formal consequences when a goal isn’t met as part of an SLA. Don’t freak out, though — these consequences aren’t always business-ending situations. Include a form of compensation to the service’s end user for when the service doesn’t meet their agreed-upon goals. In external SLAs, according to PandaDoc, this compensation can come in the form of “service credits.” Grab PandaDoc’s free SLA template here to find out more.

For Sales and Marketing SLAs, work with your sales team to establish a plan for how any lost revenue is to be made up as a result of an unreached sales quota. You might settle on a strike system that holds certain employees — in both Sales and Marketing — accountable for diagnosing and resolving issues of low performance.

6. The Conditions of Cancellation

Under what circumstances will your SLA be terminated? Whether your contract serves a customer or two internal departments, you’ll typically find yourself putting the SLA on the chopping block when it’s just not working. Maybe your goals have gone unmet for the last three months, or the current agreement simply doesn’t have buy-in from everyone involved.

Come up with formal conditions under which you’d cancel the current SLA in pursuit of, hopefully, a better SLA.

Examples of SLAs

While an SLA will be unique to your needs, here are some examples and templates that can give you an idea of what an SLA may look like.

1. HubSpot’s Marketing & Sales SLA Template

As previously mentioned, HubSpot has a template for marketing and sales service level agreements. Instead of being overly complicated, the template provides straightforward, no-nonsense sections so that any party can skim at a glance.

What we like best: It’s laid out in a two-column style to easily denote which team is responsible for which activities and metrics. Having them side-by-side like this further underscores the goals of partnership and alignment.

How to Implement This in Your SLA

Simplicity is the key to recreating this SLA template. Whether you use HubSpot’s offering or create your own, effectively implementing this type of SLA means resisting the temptation to list out every possible outcome and instead focus on the big picture of goals, initiatives, and accountability.

2. Hivehouse Digital’s Marketing & Sales SLA Template

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This sales and marketing SLA template focuses heavily on metrics, making it a great choice for high-performance teams. The design relies on tables for easy information input and even comes with prompts/examples to help you define the agreement.

What we like best: The document is organized step-by-step, making it a great choice for teams without a formalized SLA process (yet).

How to Implement This in Your SLA

Implementing the Hivehouse model for your SLA means leaning into its step-by-step strengths. By breaking down SLAs into smaller and more manageable steps, there’s less chance of you and your team getting overwhelmed.

3. Lucidchart’s Marketing and Sales SLA Template With Examples

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Instead of going through the process of creating an SLA, this template organizes sections by the marketing and sales process itself, from goals to lead qualification, handoff, and nurturing.

What we like best: The template takes a visual approach with columns for marketing, sales, and shared goals. This makes ownership of deliverables crystal clear throughout the process.

How to Implement This in Your SLA

Seeing is believing in this type of SLA template. While the nitty-gritty details are there, this approach uses color and shape to highlight important categories and actions. If you’re planning to take this approach to your SLA, use color psychology and graphic design principles to create a visually appealing SLA.

4. AT&T’s Small Business Service Agreement Example

Here’s a real-world example in the wild. Not all SLAs are between marketing and sales teams or even other internal departments. Here’s an SLA that lays out a service agreement between AT&T and its customers, setting expectations for the engagement. They make this SLA publicly accessible for all their users.

What we like best: The agreement is plain and simple, leveraging bullet points to make each detail clear and understandable.

How to Implement This in Your SLA

AT&T’s real-world example highlights the importance of calling out what matters — in this case, by using bullet points. Applying the same approach to your SLA means distilling larger and more complicated outcomes into easily-understood snippets that don’t leave room for confusion.

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5. Microsoft Azure SLA Example for Cloud Services

As a service provider, Microsoft Azure also makes its SLA for customers public. The SLA uses bullet points to clearly identify its offerings and customer promises, which are unique depending on the plan and services rendered.

What we like best: The SLA is organized with headings for quick navigation to the offerings that are most pertinent, and information is kept concise with an optional “View full details” link.

How to Implement This in Your SLA

In-depth SLAs are naturally complicated, making it easy to get bogged down in the details despite best efforts to keep things simple. Microsoft’s example offers a streamlined approach to implementation: Call out the key details and then provide links to the full SLA text.

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6. PandaDoc’s Multi-Page SLA Template

PandaDoc provides another option for provider/client agreements and is a great choice for more formal arrangements.

What we like best: This template makes for a clear and concise SLA with times, dates, and solid expectations.

How to Implement This in Your SLA

While this type of SLA leans more toward legalese with language like “whereas” and “therefore”, it has the advantage of a solid narrative structure to describe expectations. If you’re planning to implement something similar, consider using a template to speed up the process rather than starting from scratch.

How to Make an SLA for Marketing and Sales Alignment

While SLAs are common between businesses and new customers, they can also improve internal alignment. When one exists between sales and marketing departments in particular, this agreement details marketing goals (like number of leads or revenue pipeline) and the sales activities that’ll follow and support them (like engaging leads that were qualified by the marketing team).

Both the sales and marketing departments use this document as a commitment to support each other based on concrete, numerical goals. And guess what? 87% of sales and marketing leaders say collaboration between sales and marketing enables critical business growth.

Now, if you don’t have a Sales and Marketing SLA in place, fear not: We’ve outlined how to create one below so that you can easily start aligning your sales and marketing teams.

To draft your SLA, you first need to align your Sales and Marketing teams around a shared set of goals — or, as we put it before, the harmonious “Smarketing.” This alignment can then dictate the creation of a written SLA that reflects these goals. Here’s how to create an SLA with “Smarketing” in mind:

1. Calculate a numerical marketing goal based on the sales team’s quotas.

As a marketing department, not only should you have a concrete goal for each campaign you run, but you also should have a high-level numerical goal that aligns with the sales team’s operations. At the end of the day, that’ll mean qualified leads and actual sales from those leads.

Salespeople are driven almost entirely by their sales quotas — the numerical goals that correlate with their compensation and job security. If Marketing commits to a similar, related numerical goal, it shows that the team is being held accountable in a manner similar to Sales. The trick, however, is to make sure your numerical goal can effectively power the sales team’s numerical goal.

In order to calculate the marketing side of your SLA, you’ll need the following four metrics:

• Total sales goal (in terms of revenue quota)
• % revenue that comes from marketing-generated leads (as opposed to sales-generated ones)
• Average sales deal size
• Average lead-to-customer close %

Then, it’s time to do some calculations:

• Sales quota x % revenue from marketing-generated leads = Marketing-sourced revenue goal
• Marketing-sourced revenue goal ÷ Average sales deal size = # of customers needed
• Customers ÷ Average lead-to-customer close % = # of leads needed

2. Segment your goals by specific intervals during the year.

It might also be a good idea to reevaluate the marketing side of the SLA each month, as a variety of factors can change the numbers used in your calculations over time. To do so, create a document that tracks your SLA calculations by month, which should include the following metrics:

• # of marketing-generated leads
• # of those leads that became customers
• Revenue from those closed customers
• Total revenue closed that month from marketing-generated leads only
• Total revenue closed that month

You will also need:

• The average sales cycle length

With the figures above, you can re-calculate the metrics you started with on a monthly basis, or at whichever interval suits your business — quarter, year, etc. Just make sure the same measure of time is used for both Sales and Marketing to maintain alignment. Have a look:

• # marketing-generated leads that became customers ÷ # marketing-generated leads = lead-to-customer close %
• Revenue from closed customers ÷ # of marketing-generated leads that became customers = sales deal size
• Total revenue closed from marketing-generated leads / total revenue closed = % revenue from marketing-generated leads

You could also take it one step further, and incorporate quantity and quality into these metrics. The above calculations provide you with a quantitative volume goal of marketing-generated leads. However, we know that not all leads are created equal, and as a result, some may be considered higher- or lower-quality than others.

For example, a decision-making executive might be a more valuable contact than an intern. If that’s the case, you can do the above analysis for each subset of leads, and set up separate goals for each type/quality level.

Want to take it even further? Measure in terms of value, instead of volume. For example, a CEO may be worth $100, for instance, while a director is $50, a manager is $40, and so on.

3. Calculate sales’ figures and their goals.

The sales side of the SLA should detail the speed and depth to which a salesperson should follow up with marketing-generated leads. When establishing this end of the SLA, consider these two sales statistics:

• Salespeople who follow up with leads within an hour are nearly seven times more likely to have meaningful conversations with a decision maker on the other end.
• However, only 7% of leads respond to a follow-up contact within five minutes after filling out a form.

Bottom line? Not all leads may be fit to send to sales immediately. They often need to meet some minimum level of quality, like reaching a certain activity level, which can only take place after being nurtured by Marketing.

Nonetheless, engaging a lead the short time after he/she converts is critical to maintaining a relationship with them — the question you have to answer is what that engagement should look like. Either sales or marketing should take action to start building that relationship, make nurturing easier, and set up the sales rep for success when she eventually does reach out.

Keep in mind this advice is futile if you don’t consider the bandwidth of your sales reps. Sure, in a perfect world, they’d make six follow-up attempts for each lead — in reality, though, they may simply not have enough hours in the day to do that. For that reason, you’ll also need to factor in the number of leads each rep is getting (based on the marketing SLA), how much time they spend on marketing-generated leads versus sales-generated leads, and how much time they have to spend on each one. If you’re looking to conserve time, some of the follow-up — email, in particular — could be automated, so look into options there.

4. Set up marketing SLA reporting.

Now that you have your SLA goals, it’s time to track your progress against that goal — daily.

To start, graph the goal line using this formula:

(1÷n x g)

Where n is the number of days in the month and g is your monthly goal.

That should determine what portion of your monthly goal you need to achieve each day. You’ll want to graph that cumulatively throughout the month and mark your cumulative actual results on the same chart. We call that a waterfall graph, and it looks something like this:

5. Set up sales SLA reporting.

For the sales SLA reporting, you’ll have two graphs — one monitoring the speed of follow-up, and the other monitoring the depth of follow-up.

To graph the speed of follow up, you’ll need the date/time the lead was presented to sales, and the date/time the lead received her first follow-up. The difference between those two times equals the time it took for sales to follow up with that particular lead.

Take the averages of lengths of time it took for sales to follow up with all leads within a particular timeframe — day, week, month — and chart it against the SLA goal.

To graph the depth of follow-up — e.g., the number of attempts — look specifically at leads that have not been connected with, since the goal of the follow-up is to get a connection. For leads over a certain timeframe that have not received outreach, look at the average number of follow-up attempts made, and graph that against the SLA goal.

6. Communicate, celebrate, and address the achievement (or lack thereof).

Maintaining strong communication regarding how each team is performing on goals boosts transparency. If either team isn’t reaching their goals, addressing that confirms their importance, while celebrating hitting those goals can aid motivation.

If you’re not sure where to begin when it comes to setting these goals, check out our free Marketing & Sales Lead Goal Calculator, designed to help you determine and track the goals that will eventually become part of your SLA.

To ensure you’re getting the most from SLA creation, implementation and management, it’s worth aligning your efforts with industry best practices. Some of the most common include:

Define Realistic Goals

While promising the moon might seem like a good idea, things can quickly go off track when SLA outcomes aren’t met. As a result, it’s worth starting SLA creation with a brainstorming session that includes relevant stakeholders. Here, the goal is to define what you want to do, what you can do, and what you can reasonably offer.

Ensure Everyone is On Board

Next, make sure all relevant parties feel like their needs are being met with your draft SLA. Better to find out up-front that there are potential problems — and make proactive changes — than face pressure to scrap in-place service level agreements and start over.

Get Specific

Specificity is what makes SLAs work. For example, if you’re an IT service company drafting an SLA about uptime, the number of “nines” — 99.999 percent, 99.9999 percent, etc. — defines exactly how much uptime you’re agreeing to provide. Using specific terminology reduces the risk of conflict around SLA expectations by removing ambiguity.

Pinpoint Key Metrics

While specific SLAs are a solid starting point, you also need ways to effectively measure the success of your agreement. In the uptime example above, minutes of downtime per year are often used to determine if goals are being met. When it comes to marketing or sales, meanwhile, metrics could include leads generated, deals closed, or any other measurement that makes sense under your SLA structure.

Account for the Unexpected

Unexpected events — such as severe weather, staffing challenges, or sudden IT failures — can make SLA goals challenging to reach. As a result, it’s worth creating clauses that account for unexpected events. While there’s no way to predict exactly what will happen, and obligations remain to meet at least minimum standards, building in some breathing room for the unexpected is well worth the effort.

Double-Check the Details

Even small details matter. Consider the example above: While 99.999 percent uptime works out to just over 5 minutes of downtime per year, 99.9999 percent is 31 seconds. Here, a misplaced 9 could put your company on the hook for providing service levels that are almost impossible to reach. As a result, it’s worth getting your SLA double-checked by a fresh pair of eyes before moving forward.

Review and Revise as Needed

Service level agreements aren’t static documents. While they cover a set period and describe a specific set of actions, both provider and partner needs can change during that time. As a result, it’s worth building in the option for review part way through the SLA agreement period and conducting a full review when the contract is up to determine if changes are required.

One Last Step When It Comes to SLAs

When it comes to what should be in your service level agreement, there’s one final piece: Review these metrics on a regular basis to monitor your progress, and make sure both Sales and Marketing have access to the reports for both sides of the SLA.

This step helps to maintain accountability and transparency and allows for both teams to address issues — or congratulate each other on productive results.

Editor’s Note: The post was originally published in January 2019, but was updated in December 2019 for comprehensiveness.

Since 2016, we’ve published our annual content consumption report with a few core pieces of information with the goal of improving upon the prior year’s efforts.

This year, in our sixth edition, we’ve not only raised the bar, but we’ve also delivered an entirely new set of must-see data points to the party.

Introducing the 2022 State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Report for Marketers

Inside these 65 pages (which makes this report our grandest by more than 10 pages), we analyzed more than 23 petabytes worth of content, resulting in 4.6 million first-party registrations—a 9% increase YOY.

NetLine’s research unearthed dozens of incredible insights into the behaviors of B2B buyers.

Here are a few key highlights from this volume:

• Professionals registering for webinars are 29% more likely to make a purchase decision within 6 months.
• Consumption within the Information Technology industry—the largest audience across NetLine’s platform—increased 7.1%.
• Even though eBooks were the most in-demand format for users (representing 43.3% of all registrations), B2B Marketers promoted 20% more White Papers than eBooks.
• 15.2% of B2B professionals expect to invest within the next 6 months.
  

That last bullet is quite weighty, no?

In analyzing these 4.6 million first-party registrations, we discovered a number of intriguing facts: Interest in content regarding remote work was threaded throughout many content assets; professionals were searching for peace within their work and personal lives; simultaneously, our peers were doing our best to keep up with the ever-shifting sands of the digital workplace through B2B content.

However, there was one thing we uncovered in producing this report that we’d never included or had access to before: Buyer-level intent data.

~31% of B2B Buyers Are Investing Within the Next 12 Months

The competition in the B2B Marketing space is quite fierce, as strategies and tactics once thought of as solely for B2C business have crept into its brethren’s side of things. With all of these campaigns and ad budgets to compete against, how great would it be to actually know “Who” you should be reaching? Buyer-Level Intent Discovery solves that conundrum.

With access to the largest B2B content library on the web, we were able to analyze nearly 25k individual responses from the past year, yielding 72k first-party buyer-level intent insights revealing where B2B professionals actually reside within the buying cycle.

Aside from the report’s worth of takeaways we detail in the report (which is essentially a report within a report), the biggest takeaway is this: 

Content consumption is directly connected to investment within the next 12 months. The more your audience consumes, the more likely they are to be closing in on a purchase decision. 

Now that we’ve established the baseline, we want to share two key observations.

eBooks Were Requested 484% More Than White Papers

For years now, eBooks have been the top dog in terms of user registrations. In 2021, overall eBook registration volume grew 15.5%, accounting for 43.3% of all downloads.

To emphasize just how dominating the eBook format is across the B2B content ecosystem among users, Guides, Cheat Sheets, Tips & Tricks Guides, White Papers, Research Reports, Kits, Webinars, and Checklists combined still represent a smaller number of registrations than eBooks.

However, while eBooks were the most popular format for users—eBooks were 4.8x more likely to be downloaded in 2021 compared to White Papers—Marketers were smitten by White Papers once again, promoting 20% more White Papers. Quite the major difference in supply and demand, no?

But knowing that Marketers strive to make data-based decisions whenever they can, why would content creators focus on a medium that doesn’t yield as many registrations?

The Relationship Between Buying Journey and Content Format

Simply knowing that eBooks are the most popular content type doesn’t shed light on whether eBook registrations (or any other format) directly correlate with greater buying intent.

By overlaying consumption data and intent signals, we were able to identify behaviors that allowed us to make a rather significant statement:

If a certain format is being requested within an immediate buying window (anywhere between 0-6 months) while concurrently being ignored by those who aren’t looking to make an investment within the next 12 months, chances are that requests of said content format is a strong indicator of buying intent.

Based on this data, we can suggest that White Paper registrations are a greater indication that a user is in the later stages of a purchasing decision.

This is a major discovery for B2B Marketers and Sales pros alike. Truly, this information is what Content Marketers and decision-makers are most interested in.

From this correlation, we’ve categorized 14 unique content formats with two distinctions of Immediate Buying Decision Association: More Likely and Less Likely.

It’s also worth commenting on the connection between format “weight” and purchase intent. Take a look at the formats in the More Likely column and note how information-rich they are. No one is expecting a Research Report, Webinar, or White Paper to be something consumed casually. Conversely, the Less Likely column features the opposing format styles, meant to be consumed and absorbed quickly.

Therefore, the longer a piece of content is (or is perceived to be), the more likely it is to be requested by a user trending towards a purchase decision.

Webinar Promotion Increased 69.8%

Speaking of long-form content, Webinar registrations (+63% YOY) nearly matched Webinar promotions (+69.8% YOY), meaning there’s a healthy supply of demand for the medium. On-Demand Webinar registrations increased by 45%, generating 40.75% more requests than Live Webinars. Virtual Event registrations were the big winner, however, seeing a 139% YOY increase. With the world trending more and more towards hybrid events and strategies, this is a terrific sign that the webinar medium is sustainable. Events hold an important place in the Marketing landscape, but when we’re looking at the return on your time, quality of data, and pipeline generation, Webinars hold the upper hand.

What should further excite B2B Marketers is that our buyer-level intent data showed that professionals who register for Webinars are 29% more likely to have a purchase decision within six months of registering for the content vs. any other content format. Webinar attendees are definitely prospects you need to keep a very close eye on!

Learn More About 2022 B2B Content Marketing Trends

The work that goes into our annual report is an effort that is unmatched across the rest of the calendar year. For the past four months, we’ve been working each day to uncover the best insights available within our vault of first-party consumption data. It’s our distinct pleasure to share this work with you.

We promise you that there are insights and stats within this report that will change how you market in 2022.

NetLine’s 2022 Content Consumption Report is now available for download. We hope you learn a thing or two.

A few months ago, while I was driving to the airport, I saw a billboard for Kim Kardashian’s company, SKIMS. A week later, I saw ads on Instagram, then a SKIMS segment on “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” 

I had one of those moments where I thought “SKIMS is showing up everywhere!” That’s because the company has an integrated media planning strategy.

A few months after these events, when I was shopping for shapewear for my wedding, guess what brand I thought of? (Spoiler alert: it was SKIMS.) That’s why, as a marketer, having an integrated media plan is important for your marketing strategy — below, we’ll dive into what it is, and how to adopt it in your marketing strategy. 

Already know what you need? Jump there with this table of contents:

• What is integrated media?
• Integrated Media Planner
• Integrated Media Planning
• Integrated Media Examples

Using integrated media essentially ensures that all of a businesses’ different audience segments can encounter its ads, and likely encounter them on various channels. The decision about which specific channels to use is the task of an integrated media planner. 

 

Integrated Media Planner

An integrated media planner makes all media planning decisions based on buyer personas, competitor analysis, reviews, and social listening. From this, the planner learns the best course of action that will help their marketing meet business goals. 

They choose the most effective channels, types of media (paid, owned, earned, etc.), and consider when and how frequently content will show up depending on the platform. 

For example, perhaps you’ll post Instagram stories around 5-7 p.m. when your audience is home from work and you’ll plan a radio spot for the morning, around 6-9 a.m., to reach your audience that is commuting.

Either way, deciding when and how often a piece of content will appear is an important aspect of an integrated media planner’s job, and ‌this happens during integrated media planning.

 

Integrated Media Planning

Integrated media planning is the process you’ll go through when you’re considering various media platforms you want to use in a marketing campaign. 

An integrated media plan answers questions like “Who is the target audience?” and “What medium will reach this audience?” For example, if you’re targeting millennials, you might consider Instagram and Twitter for your media plan. However, if you’re targeting Gen X, maybe you’re thinking that a combination of radio and Facebook might work best.

Integrated marketing plans also ensure that the ads you create across your different channels are consistent and cohesive for what you’re offering. As in, when you advertise something on one channel, you advertise it the same way on another channel so audiences can see a cohesive campaign regardless of how they come across your ad. 

Ultimately, an integrated media plan will use a multichannel approach with a mix of traditional and digital methods, such as radio, TV, billboards, social media, streaming commercials, search engine marketing, email marketing, events, or partnerships.

Below, we’ve outlined five steps to creating an integrated media plan:

1. Figure out your goals.

Before you can start planning your integrated media approach, you have to know your goals.

Just like any marketing campaign, you should have SMART goals written down so you can develop a strategy.

For example, perhaps you want to reach a certain amount of people in a certain amount of time. Or maybe you’re just looking to increase brand awareness among a new market.

No matter what it is, write down your goals and objectives so you can track your performance.

2. Decide your target market.

If your company has a buyer persona, or perhaps even a few, then this might be easy for you. Or maybe you’re deciding between which persona you’re going to target for a certain campaign. Either way, your personas should guide your media plan.

However, if you don’t have a target buyer persona, then now is the time to create one. Your buyer persona will include demographic information such as income, education, and gender. But it should also include pain points and goals.

Understanding your target market means knowing what’s important to your audience, what their life is like, and what problems they have.

Ultimately, you should know who you want to purchase your product so you can deliver personalized content.

Also, your buyer persona might tell you what type of media your audience likes to consume and the type of content they like.

To make this process easier, think about your customer journey. What are the touchpoints? Figuring out this information should help you develop your integrated media plan.

3. Choose various media platforms to disseminate your campaign.

This is the bread and butter of integrated media planning as its when you’ll decide where to distribute your marketing campaign.

Do you want to include social media, TV, radio, organic search, and blogging in your strategy?

Ultimately, you should make this decision based on research on your target market. You should have answered questions such as “Where does my audience want to consume content?” and “What type of content do they want to consume?”

For example, your audience might prefer short-form videos to long-form videos. Or perhaps they like reading a blog more than seeing a picture on Instagram. Either way, you should strike a balance between traditional and digital methods.

Ultimately, your integrated media plan should be audience-centric.

4. Produce the creative.

Once you know your goals, your target market, and most importantly, what type of content you’re going to create, it’s time to produce the creative for your campaign.

Write the copy, design the graphics, and take the pictures. Your creative elements should follow your brand guidelines and tell a story about who you are as a company.

To keep your workload easy, you might consider creating adaptable marketing assets that can be used for several channels.

5. Execute and analyze.

Now that it’s all said and done, it’s time to analyze your approach. Answer questions like, “Which channels worked best?” and “Did I strike the right balance between various media platforms?”

Once you’re armed with this information, you can incorporate it into your future campaigns.

However, don’t forget to let your strategy play out. Don’t switch it up so quickly that you don’t know how it will perform over time. Some campaigns include both short-term and long-term strategies and goals, so it’s important to see the impact before changing it out.

 

Integrated Media Plan Examples

1. Baboon to the Moon

Baboon to the Moon sells bags for people to use on their adventures, from small weekend getaways to intense backpacking trips. It used integrated marketing to advertise one of its limited-run lines that pays homage to CDMX (Mexico City). 

It created marketing assets for three different marketing channels (email, Instagram, and website, respectively) that are cohesive in images, copywriting, and editing style. Regardless of the channel audiences are reached on, every single ad tells a story about the same thing — the CDMX collection. 

2. NPR Music Tiny Desk 

NPR runs a segment on NPR Music called Tiny Desk, where artists perform a live, acoustic set. It recently launched a Tiny Desk contest for the ‌public, where undiscovered artists can submit an original song for a chance to win a Tiny Desk concert. To advertise the contest, it created an integrated media campaign on Instagram Story and Twitter (pictured below),

 

And a humorous YouTube video ad. 

 

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3. GrubHub and Seamless 

Delivery service GrubHub absorbed delivery service Seamless in 2021 and launched an integrated marketing campaign to make users aware of the acquisition. Seamless created an Instagram post, shown below, that lets customers know with a unique and catchy slogan that “Seamless is GrubHub.” 

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The companies also advertised the new acquisition in New York City subways, creating an integrated marketing campaign using traditional forms of advertisements (physical ads) and digital ads (Instagram). 

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Over to You

The best marketing campaigns almost always include an integrated media plan. You should have a balance between digital and traditional marketing tactics. After all, the omnichannel experience is what customers expect and want. Marketing is all about delivering the right message, to the right people, at the right time, and that’s what integrated media planning is all about.

What was the first social network you ever joined?

While many people will recall it being Facebook or Twitter, others might remember some of the earlier, less popular social networks. You know, like Friendster, Open Diary, and Orkut?

A lot of these original social networks go forgotten, but that doesn’t make their stories any less important. After all, these networks laid the groundwork for the social media giants we use today.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into the stories of some of the earliest social networks — and why they didn’t stick around.

From Six Degrees to Snapchat: A Brief History of Social Media

One of the first versions of a modern social network is Classmates.com, which launched in 1995 and allowed users to share messages and photos with their childhood and college classmates.

In 1997, SixDegrees was founded based on the theory that people are only separated by six levels of friends and family members. It was the first social platform that allowed users to create and curate profiles and laid the groundwork for online social networking.

Blogging (once called weblogs) came to the scene in 1998 with Open Diary, which included a social networking feature where users in groups could read each other’s writing. Open Diary laid the groundwork for later blogging sites like Xanga and LiveJournal in 1999.

In 2002, Friendster was launched to help circles of friends find one another and communicate online. It paved the way for other sites like LinkedIn (2002), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004) to launch networks with similar features, such as Myspace’s Top Eight friends, Facebook friend groups, and LinkedIn connections.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s came Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Google+, which experimented with short-form and visual content, as well as aggregating and saving content for later consumption. Some of the latest social networks on the scene include Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok — platforms based on sharing authentic, ephemeral, visual content that requires as few words as possible.

Of course, this is a very brief history — and several social networks were launched and forgotten during this timeline. Needless to say, those networks still played a role in the development of the bigger social landscape we know and use today. Let’s discuss some of the networks we’ve forgotten and why they didn’t stick around.

8 Dead Social Networks You Might Not Remember

1. Vine

Launched in 2013, Vine was a popular video app where users created six-second looped videos. Users could make their content, follow friends and popular creators, and browse trending videos. It dominated social media networks from 2013-to 2016, and many of the popular videos remain relevant in pop culture and memes to this day.

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When Did It Fall?

Vine was discontinued in October of 2016.

Why Did It Fail?

Vine ultimately failed because it could not keep up with other growing networks of its day that championed video, like Instagram. Many Vine executives and co-founders were also against monetization and did not want to take sponsors from brands, so creators and marketers moved to platforms like YouTube where they could monetize their content.

2. MySpace

Myspace is a social networking site where users could create a profile page to share their interests, photos, and connect with friends. It also appreciated music, so users could set a song that would play every time a friend visited their profile.

In its prime, Myspace was the most popular social networking site, even surpassing Google as the most visited website in the United States.

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When Did It Fall?

In 2011, Myspace’s CEO Mike Jones announced that the platform would no longer try to rival Facebook. It would instead pivot to a social entertainment style site and, while it still exists today, does not remain a fraction as popular as it did in its prime.

Why Did It Fail?

The New York Times cites Myspace’s decline as result of consumers and changing tastes, coupled with the rise and popularity of Facebook.

Myspace also had a change of leadership when bought by News Corporation, and Tom Standage, Deputy Editor of The Economist, said “Its new owner treated it as a media outlet rather than a technology platform and seemed more interested in maximizing advertising revenue than fixing or improving the sites underlying technology.” The site soon became inundated with advertisements, affecting usability.

The site ultimately fell because of a failure to focus on site users and their experience, but instead on monetization and advertisers, which sent consumers elsewhere.

3. Friendster

Friendster, launched in 2002, was the first social network to allow users to create profiles and share content with their contacts. It was also used to learn about local events, pop culture news, and to connect with brands. At its peak, Friendster had roughly 115 million users around the world. The website currently ranks 2,949,342 in global internet traffic and engagement over the past 90 days, according to Alexa.

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When Did It Fall?

Friendster rebranded as a social gaming website in 2011. It closed for good in 2015 after Mark Zuckerberg bought Friendster’s suite of social networking patents for $40 million.

Why Did It Fail?

Jonathan Abrams, Friendster’s founder, says “The problem was that Friendster was having a lot of technology problems,” and people could barely log into the website for two years. He adds, “By the time Facebook and MySpace were doing those things, Friendster had lost a lot of market share in the U.S. for stability issues.”

Computer scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology conducted an “autopsy” on Friendster to uncover its demise, and they cited a disastrous site redesign in 2009 that caused traffic and users to plummet. They also determined that it took much more effort to navigate the platform than the benefits that came from using it.

Friendster also wasn’t widely adopted by users’ friends and families, so their time was better spent on other networks where more of their real-world network was online — namely, on Facebook and Myspace.

4. Google+

Google+, launched in 2011, was a social network owned and operated by Google. It was essentially a way for all Google users to have a central location for all of the actions they took across all of the different Google platforms and services.

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When Did It Fall?

The Google+ developer API was discontinued in March of 2019, and the site was shut down for business and personal use in April 2019.

Why Did It Fail?

Low user engagement was a significant factor in Google+’s demise, and the company reported having difficulty “Creating and maintaining a successful Google+ that meets customer expectations,” and said that 90% of user sessions lasted less than five seconds.

In addition, an API update in 2018 potentially exposed the personal information of 52.5 million users to outside developers, and this occurred for six days before being discovered. The Wall Street Journal reported that “The move effectively puts the final nail in the coffin of a product that was launched in 2011 to challenge Facebook Inc. and is widely seen as one of Google’s biggest failures.”

5. Open Diary

Open Diary, founded in 1997, was an online blogging and journaling website that laid the groundwork for features we see on modern blogs, like comments. Writers could add friends and change privacy settings so only specific people would see what they were writing, and it eventually expanded to different topic areas so users could write about a variety of themes.

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When Did It Fall?

Open Diary closed in 2014.

Why Did It Fail?

After two major security breaches, falling subscription revenue led the Open Diary team to offer more expensive paid subscription options to recoup its losses. This move instead drove users away towards free alternative blogging sites, like Xanga and LiveJournal.

6. Ping

When he launched Ping in 2010, Steve Jobs referred to it as “Facebook and Twitter meets iTunes.” Ping was a social networking feature within iTunes where users could add friends, follow artists, and look up local concerts. Friends could also preview songs their friends were downloading and listening to.

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When Did It Fall?

Ping was terminated in 2012.

Why Did It Fail?

Ping was originally meant to feature an integration with Facebook that would allow users to easily connect with friends and artists they already followed on Facebook, but the partnership fell through. Users were then left with a blank slate on which to build another social network of people to follow.

Additionally, Ping only allowed users to listen to 90-second previews of songs on its network — any longer and they had to buy the song. Since Ping was part of iTunes, it became redundant instead of an enhanced experience. Apple replaced Ping with a better integration with Facebook and Twitter that allowed for easy music sharing.

Many of the features meant to make Ping stand out from the crowd can now be seen on Spotify, where users can connect their Facebook and follow friends, see what they’re listening to, and learn more about their favorite artists.

7. Orkut

After a failed attempt to purchase Friendster, Google launched Orkut in 2004 as a place for people to add friends and share content. Users could view profiles, rate friends, add them to lists, and like their friends posts. At its peak, Orkut had 300 million users around the world.

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When Did It Fall:

Google shut Orkut down in 2014.

Why It Failed:

Orkut took hold in a few countries, primarily India and Brazil, but never achieved widespread international popularity. At the time, YouTube and Google+ were outpacing Orkut’s growth, so Google refocused on these platforms in an attempt to compete against Facebook and social media. As such, the Orkut team cited the growth of Google’s other social media assets as a reason to shutter the site.

8. Eons

Eons, launched in 2006, was touted as “Myspace for boomers,” and set age restrictions that prevented anyone under the age of 50 from joining, which was later lowered to 40 in 2008. The site never experienced a huge boom in popularity around its launch and, at its peak, had roughly 800,000 users.

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When Did It Fall:

Eons.com shut down in 2012.

Why It Failed:

The age targeting was restrictive for a reason, but this had detrimental effects as the user base was rather limited. It also prevented the site from being widely popularized and, as social media was just coming onto the horizon and wasn’t yet widely adopted, the platform was unable to build a successful network out of such a small user group.

Lessons for Marketers From Failed Social Media Networks

There are several lessons for modern marketers in the stories of these fallen social networks. We’re not saying that you’re always at risk of killing your brand, but keeping these tips in mind may help you maintain and grow your followers and engage with them authentically.

1. Understand your audience.

The most significant factor of success when creating a social media network is creating for the audience that you want to have. For example, you wouldn’t create a text-based blogging site if you’re hoping to attract multimedia creators.

As with all marketing practices, make sure that you have a solid understanding of your audience, who they are, and what they want, so you can create a platform that will meet their needs and keep them on the platform.

2. Meet your audience where they already are.

Many social networks fail because brands try to reinvent something that already works well, or requires extra work for users to be able to participate. For example, Ping wasn’t able to integrate with Facebook, so users had to recreate social networks that likely already existed for them on an entirely new platform.

Instead, meet your audiences where they already are and supplement their experience. Part of Facebook’s success and longevity is due to its creation of an infrastructure where users don’t need to leave Facebook to get things done. It’s grown beyond just a social network into a destination for news, commerce, and content consumption.

Marketers should experiment with new technologies and offerings to keep followers interacting with their brand more, such as creating helpful chatbots, publishing on new forms of media, and trying new strategies like virtual reality or experiential marketing to keep audiences engaged and on a website or social platform for as long as possible.

3. Borrow from your competitors.

Borrow a page from the Facebook playbook and be aware of what your competitors are doing. For example, Vine was forced to shut down because other networks were offering similar features, but did it better and provided more opportunities, like creators who could monetize their content. A recent example

4. Be authentic and not overly self-promotional.

A common thread between Ping and Open Diary’s downfall was the brand’s attempt to monetize. Users didn’t like Ping advertising iTunes music that they could only listen to for 90 seconds, and Open Diary users didn’t want to pay for something that was free on other sites.

Users want an authentic experience on social media to interact with friends, family, and their networks, not logging on to a site and being bombarded with advertisements.

The next time a new social network comes onto the scene, we’ll be here to tell you the story — and predict if it will be here to stay. 

Believe it or not, driving traffic to your website — albeit challenging — isn’t enough to sustain your business. To truly leverage that investment in traffic, marketers must use conversion rate optimization, or CRO, to convince said traffic to complete the desired action.

The list below outlines many helpful tools for marketers looking to optimize their conversion rates. From high-level changes like landing page and email design and inspiration to in-depth insights on how your visitors navigate through your content, these tools will help you improve your site’s performance.

To help you understand the tools and their uses, we’ve also broken this list into a few major categories:

• Lead capture tools
• Research tools
• Analytics tools
• Mouse tracking and heat maps
• Feedback tools
• Experiment tools

Ready? Let’s start converting.

Lead Capture Tools

These are the tools you will use to capture more leads on your site, thus improving your CRO analytics . While most conversion-focused content has a built-in form or CTA, these tools act as additional lead capture mechanisms to boost the number of leads that convert on your content.

1. HubSpot

Price: Free

It’s Google Analytics meets SumoMe meets a CRM. Sounds cool, right? It starts with an exit intent popup CTA, then syncs with your website’s existing forms to learn about your site visitors and their path through your pages.

HubSpot’s tools give you in-depth contact insights on prospects and current contacts in your database. It also pairs its contacts database with a dashboard that shows you a high-level view of which marketing efforts are paying off and converting and which ones aren’t.

2. HelloBar

Price: Free plan or $29/month to $49/month

HelloBar is a lead capture tool that allows you to add a popup form to your website to grow your email list, promote your social pages, showcase a sale, or other lead generation strategies. The free version allows you to create one modal that’s shown to every 10th visitor. However, premium plans offer more advanced call to action (CTA) options.

3. Sumo

Price: Free plan or $49/month

Sumo offers a suite of free tools to help you increase your site conversions. For lead capture, it offers a “Welcome Mat” popup CTA, a “Smart Bar” to increase email subscribers, a scroll-triggered box, and a “Contact Us” form.

Along with their Google Analytics research tools, the Sumo suite helps you gain on-page insights and increase your email list.

Research Tools

Before you create any content, call upon these tools to draw inspiration and check out what other smart marketers have seen success with in the past.

4. BuzzSumo

Price: $99/month to $499/month

The best content gets shared and linked the most. So what better way to gain preliminary insights than to compile all of the most shared content on your particular topic?

With BuzzSumo, all you have to do is enter the keyword or topic. Then, it’ll pull together the most shared and linked content on that topic. Time frames range from the last day, week, month, or year.

So if you’re trying to optimize the landing page for your new webinar on cat fashion, all you have to do is enter “cat fashion.” BuzzSumo will then give you the best articles, resources, videos, and more on the fascinating topic of cat couture.

You’ll then be able to dig in and explore some of the key elements that made these pages popular. With that, you can go back and incorporate them into your own content.

5. SimilarWeb

Price: Contact for pricing

Knowing where your website visitors came from can (and should) have a big impact on the type of content you create. With SimilarWeb, you can see where your traffic is coming from, which keywords are fueling your organic traffic, and what other sites are considered most similar to yours. You can also compare analytics to find out the website conversion optimization by looking over data.

With this information, you’ll be able to optimize content for your biggest traffic sources and dig in to see what competitor sites are doing to drive conversions.

6. Land-book

Price: Free

If you’re creating a landing page from scratch, getting started can be difficult. Luckily there’s Land-book, a free collection of the web’s best-designed landing pages.

With Land-book, you can explore how top companies use elements like copy, positioning, layout, and design to drive conversions. Pick and choose your favorite elements from the Land-book database, and then incorporate them into your own landing page.

7. Really Good Emails

Price: Free

In today’s marketing landscape, if you want to get your message across, you’d better know a thing or two about visual communication and design.

Don’t know a thing or two about either? Enter Really Good Emails.

Similar to Land-book, Really Good Emails is a database of the web’s best-designed emails from the world’s most innovative companies. Use this as a resource to see how you can design your email to get your message across in the best way possible, as fast as possible.

(Check out this post for even more resources where you can find great marketing examples.)

8. SubjectLine.com

Price: Free

When sending an email, the subject line can either make or break your performance. Before you choose which ones to send, check them out using this awesome resource.

SubjectLine.com has tested over three million subject lines and has a tool to evaluate your potential options. It gives a deliverability and marketing score, plus advice on improving.

9. Headline Analyzer

Price: Free

CoSchedule’s headline analyzer gives a score of 1–100 to gauge the effectiveness of titles. The score is calculated based on word usage, grammar, vocabulary, type of headline, character, and word count.

The tool shows you what your headline looks like on Google and in an email subject line. This tool serves as a great litmus test to generally know how well your headline will perform.

CRO Analytics Tools

These are the tools you will use to measure and track your content’s performance. You can use the CRO analytics to fully analyze the dips, jumps, and fluctuations in your conversion rate.

10. Kissmetrics

Price: Contact for pricing

Kissmetrics is a complex tool that integrates with your email service provider to make it easy to analyze your audience and email them in specific cohorts.

With Kissmetrics, you can learn the path that your customers have taken through your website. You can also conduct A/B tests, build data sets (without SQL), perform website conversion optimization, and assess the ROI from your campaigns.

11. Google Analytics

Price: Free for basic, contact sales for premium

Google Analytics is a free way to track your website visitors. You can see how long it takes visitors to bounce from your pages, if visitors complete goals from a certain path, and which sources bring people to your website.

What’s great about Google Analytics is that it allows you to see which keywords people are using to find your page, devices they’re searching on, and uncover demographic data. However, there are no specific emails or contact information associated with your site visitors.

12. HubSpot Website Grader

Price: Free

Website Grader is a great way to get a quick snapshot of a website’s overall performance. It gives insights on performance factors (including speed, page size, and page requests), mobile responsiveness and appearance, SEO (page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and site map), and security. It’s great for website conversion optimization.

From there, the tool devises a grade and provides suggestions on how to improve, which makes it easy to come up with some quick wins that’ll help you boost conversions.

Mouse Tracking and Heat Mapping Tools

These are the tools you will use to see how people interact with your content, including how they scroll and where they click.

13. Hotjar

Price: Free for Basic, $29/month

Once you’ve nailed the basics like landing pages, CTAs, pop ups, and content, you’re ready for some more advanced conversion rate optimization. Hotjar offers heat maps and screen recordings. They enable you to track how much your page is being viewed and how visitors navigate your website.

Hotjar also offers analytics, so you can see how well your pages are performing. This is helpful to see what’s working and what you can change to increase conversion.

14. Clicktale

Price: Contact for pricing

Clicktale is similar to Hotjar, as it also offers heat maps to help you determine the most valuable real estate on your pages, scroll depth (where is the “fold” on your website?), click tracking, and link analysis.

Using these tools, you’ll have the information you need to organize content, CTAs, and page design in a way that makes the most sense for engagement.

15. Clicky

Price: Free plan, or $9.99/month to $149/month

Clicky gives you real-time analytics on the visitors to your website. It tells you where people are accessing your site, how long they’ve stayed on each page, and how many visitors are actively online. The resource also offers heat maps and scroll tracking.

Clicky is an excellent one-stop-shop for customer behavior. You’ll have multiple formats at your disposal to leverage for optimizing the performance of your website — so you can convert as many leads as possible.

16. Crazy Egg

Price: $24/month to $249/month

Crazy Egg offers a full suite of heat maps and click tracking, with the additional functionality segment clicks by source and evaluating link effectiveness. The basic package is fairly inexpensive and gives great insights into how effective each website page is.

17. Heatmap.me

Price: Free plan or up to $100/month

Heatmap.me is a great free option for anyone looking to start exploring heat maps, responsive web design tests, and real-time page statistics. Heatmap.me can also track dynamic elements on your site in the heat map tool. Think slider bars, photo galleries, and other interactive sections.

When you use the tool, you’ll see real-time analytics. It gives you important data you want to see, such as CTR and page performance. They’re easy to analyze for beginners and provide the numbers you need to enhance success.

Feedback Tools

These are the tools you’ll use to engage and receive feedback from your visitors. Feedback tools include surveys, polls, messaging, and user testing programs.

18. Intercom

Price: $87/month to $153/month

You can use chat tools to acquire new customers and chat with existing customers.

As a CRO analytics tool, you can use Intercom to communicate with website prospects to learn if they need additional help, find out how their experience is going, and learn how you can improve. It also allows you to track leads and use a shared inbox with your team.

19. Qualaroo

Price: $149/month to $499/month

Using chat windows doesn’t have to be limited to just being live. In fact, Qualaroo proves that. It offers popups to collect live feedback from website viewers.

With this information, you can tailor a site experience, target specific customers, and learn what issues people may be experiencing. This tool is extremely helpful at all stages of the funnel, and is frequently utilized in the e-commerce space.

20. SurveyMonkey

Price: $25/month to $99/month

SurveyMonkey has a free option for those just starting with survey research. You can use this tool to learn demographic information, discover which types of content your prospects and blog subscribers prefer, and get product feedback.

Survey your customers about their satisfaction. You’ll get great insight straight from the source about what draws your audience to your company. From these results, you can work on improving conversion methods.

21. Five Second Test

Price: $50/month to $100/month

UsabilityHub has an awesome community-fueled tool called Five Second Test that allows users to upload a product, app experience, or design and have the community test it before launch. For example, one of the tests you can run is a click test, which will give you a heat map of page performance.

You get responses about recall, general feedback, and UI thoughts. This is a great way to have opinions. Five Second Test also offers click, preference, question, and navflow tests for other website and UI questions. You can also design surveys with the tool.

Experiment Tools

These are the tools you’ll use to manage, plan, and execute A/B and multivariate tests. Some of these tools will help you turn ideas into experiments, while others will help you create the variations and run the actual tests on your site.

22. Optimizely

Price: Contact for pricing

Testing is hard. It’s hard to come up with a good control group, find a large sample, and determine if your experiment is statistically significant. Luckily, Optimizely helps a lot with all of that – and then some. With Optimizely, you conduct tests across all devices and platforms, then figure out if it’s significant. The software offers A/B, multiple page, and multivariate tests.

Optimizely’s tool gives you a full, robust report of test results (example shown above). You’ll see interactions and, best of all, sign up clicks. Your report will tell you how many leads each test variant earned, so you can choose the best.

23. Effective Experiments

Price: Contact for pricing

Effective Experiments is a concise way to track all of your experiments. If you have tons of Excel spreadsheets cross-referenced with Google Analytics data, you are probably going crazy trying to keep track of everything. This tool puts it all in one place and helps you determine statistical significance.

How to Shop for Conversion Rate Optimization Tools

It can be hard to shop for the best conversion rate optimization tools, so we gathered together these five tips to keep in mind:

1. Sign up for trials before making a decision.
2. Be thorough when searching for reviews.
3. Go for quality, not quantity, when it comes to price.
4. Ask other marketers what they are using.
5. Read reports from other companies about CRO.

The Benefits of CRO Analytics Tools

There are several benefits of selecting CRO analytics tools. Some include:

• Being able to effectively track ROI.
• Using tools to create an engaging headline.
• Capture customer leads.
• Collect marketing research data.

Now, you’re armed and ready to start improving conversion rates across your website conversion optimization and marketing efforts. These tools range from free and for beginners to robust and more advanced. Feel out which options seem right for you, and soon you’ll be upgrading to the more complex tools when you’ve mastered the basics.

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

Benjamin Franklin once said “Failing to plan is planning to fail,” and when it comes to content and media, truer words have never been spoken.

Until 2020, that is.

But, although 2020 saw some of the most unprecedented global events, 2021 continued to put content and media teams to the test.

In fact, 99% of content planners, strategists, or marketers who have ever pivoted their strategy say some of their pivots happened in 2021.

Unsurprisingly, the #1 reason they gave for this was the global pandemic.

To make matters more complicated, 39% of those who pivoted in 2021 changed their content plan a whopping three times throughout the year.

Despite all that turbulence, 62% of media planners say their content performed better than their goals in 2021. And, if anything, 2020 and 2021 taught marketing teams how important content planning and re-planning is.

To get a sense of how marketers planned or pivoted their way through such an unpredictable year and how they will approach media planning in 2022, we surveyed 600+ media planners to gather data on their goals, strategies, the tools they use, and how they met the unique challenges of 2021.

Curious about some strategies and insights specifically? Click below to jump to the section you’d like to read first.

• The Top Goals of Marketing Media and Content Planners
• Content and Media Planning Strategies
• Which Channels Marketers Use In Their Media Mix
• The Benefits and Challenges of Media Planning
• Budgeting Your Content Marketing Efforts
• Timing Your Media Plan
• Media Planning and Content Marketing Tools
• Pivoting Your Content Plan

Top Goals of Media and Content Planning

As you can see below, engaging and growing new audiences, maximizing the ROI of their content, and understanding which channels or platforms their audience spends the most time on are top priorities for media planners and content marketers in 2022.

But which strategies are most effective to achieve these goals?

Media and Content Planning Strategies

The Most Effective Media Planning Strategies

The top strategies media planners and content marketers charged with planning use are conducting market research to understand their target demographic and find the most effective channels to reach them, leveraging media planning templates, and running content audits.

Unsurprisingly, these tactics line up fairly well with the top goals, which include growing audiences with content and targeting the right marketing channels.

Media planners also rated setting a clearly defined budget (57%), analyzing the results of your content strategy (57%), clearly defining goals/KPIs (55%), and using a calendar to schedule content (48%) as the most effective media planning strategies they use.

To accomplish most of these, marketers can leverage media planning templates, a strategy I’ll talk about in more detail later.

Ultimately, all of the above strategies are highly effective and will see significantly increased use and investment in 2022. As you move forward in planning, you’ll want to consider a mix of them rather than just running with one or two tactics.

Next, let’s dive a litter deeper into each major planning strategy and opportunity.

Market and Demographic Research

Market research is leveraged by 43% of media planners and will grow significantly in 2022, with 45% planning to leverage it for the first time.

• 64% of media planners who use it say it is the most effective media planning strategy they leverage.
• 16% of all media planners will invest more in this than any other strategy in 2022.
• 70% of media planners who do channel research say it is the most effective media planning strategy they leverage (the highest of any strategy.)
• 22% of all media planners will invest more in it than any other strategy in 2022.

While technically the second-most-effective strategy, I decided to bring this one up first because understanding the demographics of your target audience isn’t just critical for proper media planning, but essential for any marketing strategy to succeed.

You can examine a wide range of data including age, location, education, and income to start building buyer personas, which are fictional representations of your ideal customers that you can cater your content towards. And here’s the best part – you likely already have most of this data available to you for free.

Of course, you could also conduct market research studies of your own, or go through an outside agency for a more holistic view of your industry.

But in terms of media planning, I’d argue that knowing which channels your audience is spending their time on is just as important as knowing who your audience is.

Channel and Platform Research

Learning about your audience doesn’t just stop at personas or demographics.

In 2021, 43% of media planners conducted market research to find the most effective channels for reaching their targets. This percentage will grow significantly in 2022, with 53% planning to leverage it for the first time.

The data above isn’t too shocking. Before you know how much of your budget to invest in each area of your media mix, you’ll want to get an idea of which channels your target audience spends their time on.

You can also benefit from using your own data by looking at which channels are most effective at helping you meet your specific goals. But, you should also leverage outside research as it can provide crucial demographic data on the specific channels you use.

For example, in our 2022 Social Media Report and survey, we found that younger audiences like Millennials and Gen Z prefer shorter video content that is funny, trendy, and reflects a brand’s values – on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Meanwhile, Baby Boomers prefer interactive/educational content such as interviews/podcasts/expert discussions, and live videos, with Facebook being their platform of choice.

These facts will help you plan out your media mix by giving you insight on critical questions, such as whether your demographic is embracing social shopping tools on platforms like Instagram or other platforms.

Once the research is complete, media planners are using templates to help allocate and organize their media mix with maximum efficiency.

Media Planning Templates

Media planning templates are leveraged by 40% of media planners and 46% of them say it is the most effective strategy they use to reach their business goals.

The use of media planning templates will see significant growth in 2022 as 39% plan to leverage them for the first time and 11% of all media planners will invest more in templates than any other strategy.

There are a wide variety of media planning templates to choose from, all designed with a different purpose, but ultimately they exist to help you track, plan, organize, distribute, and analyze all your media content.

The most popular templates are social media strategy templates that help you align your media content with your audience and analytics and reporting templates for Excel, PowerPoint, and Google Drive that make the processes of pulling, organizing, and sharing data simple.

Luckily, HubSpot has both of those templates available for you to download right now, with a handful of others that may also come in handy.

Once their media plans are fully organized and executed, marketers are leveraging content audits to analyze their performance and inform their future content plans.

Content Audits

Running content audits to inform media planning strategy is used by 37% of media planners and is the third-most-effective tactic for media planners to reach their business goals.

• A whopping 81% of media planners who run audits say they have been effective for reaching their business goals and 67% say the results of their content audits have had a moderate to significant impact on their media planning strategy.
• The use of content audits will grow significantly in 2022 as 37% plan to leverage them for the first time and 15% of all media planners will invest more in content audits than any other strategy.

So what are the goals of a content audit?

By analyzing the performance of the content you create, you get insights on what exceeded expectations, what falls flat, and why

Identifying content gaps is the #1 objective of content audits, but that doesn’t mean it has to be hard. Here’s a guide on how to run a simple content audit specifically to find and fill those content gaps.

Identifying issues with your website and improving the user experience is another highly effective strategy for driving traffic to your web content, improving SERP ranking, and increasing engagement. In our survey of 400 web traffic analysts, we found that web analysts who reported an effective website strategy in 2021 were 25% more likely to optimize their website for loading speed.

If you’re still not convinced to audit your content, we also asked media planners about the biggest benefits they’ve seen from auditing. Here’s a graph with the results:

How often should you run a content audit?

Most media planners who run content audits do so on a monthly or quarterly basis. If you’re ready to start auditing your content, you can either create your own template or use this one from HubSpot.

Not only did we craft it ourselves, but 46% of media planners who use templates for content audits use it, making it the most popular third-party template. Our data also shows that 86% of those who use HubSpot’s template say content audits have been effective for reaching their overall business goals, so you should give it a shot.

Which Channels Marketers Use in Their Media Mix

The top channels media planners leverage are paid and organic social media content, email marketing, and organic search.

As this data is directly in line with our previous marketing research, here are a few quick bullets on each:

• Email marketing is the most leveraged media channel used by 1 in 2 media planners and will continue to grow this year with 22% planning to leverage it for the first time. Email marketing has the 3rd highest ROI of any channel.

• Paid social media content is used by 47% of media planners and has the highest ROI and highest engagement of any channel. Channel usage will grow significantly in 2022 as 14% of all media planners plan to invest more in it than any other channel and 25% plan on leveraging it for the first time this year.

• Organic social media content is used by 43% of media planners and will continue to grow this year with 22% planning to leverage it for the first time and 9% planning to invest more in it than any other channel in 2022. Organic social has the 2nd highest ROI and 2nd highest engagement levels of any channel.

• Organic search is leveraged by 36% of media planners and 45% of them say it has the highest ROI of any channel they use. It will grow in 2022 with 23% of media planners planning to leverage organic search for the first time.

• 84% of media planners leverage a mix of organic and paid media.

But, what’s the ideal media mix look like? Check out this helpful guide with even more data. 

The Benefits and Challenges of Media Planning

The Benefits of Content and Media Planning

Media planning can help you organize, plan, and analyze your content, but what are the biggest benefits marketers get from having a dedicated content plan? Here’s a breakdown of our survey results:

One interesting theme to note above is that the top three benefits relate to understanding channels, where your audience is, or where and how to target them. From what we’ve seen over the past decade, the secret to effective, ROI-generating marketing or content is understanding and knowing where to meet your targets.

So, while the idea of media planning might seem daunting in times when plans constantly change – it’s still incredibly valuable, worth your time, and is likely to return on its investment.

Ultimately, the work you do as a media or content planner will teach you how and when to create new content, when to pivot, or how to effectively change course in times where competitors are struggling to understand changing consumer thoughts and behaviors.

Media Planning Challenges

For all its benefits, media planning also comes with some challenges. Here are the biggest challenges marketers face with media planning:

Determining the most effective media mix is an incredibly important aspect of media planning, but also the one media planners struggle with the most. Check out this article for tips on optimizing your media mix.

Aside from finding the most effective media mix, a limited budget is the second biggest challenge media planners face, so let’s take a look at some data on content marketing budgets.

Budgeting Your Content Marketing Efforts

How Much of Your Budget Should Go to Content Marketing?

Chances are you already have a budget dedicated to content marketing, but if you don’t, it may be a good idea to join the 94% of media planners who do.

The real question is how much of your total marketing budget should go to content marketing, so here’s a look at our results:

Half of brands spend under 50% of their marketing budget on content, with 72% of media planners saying the primary brand they work with spends between 20%-60% of their total marketing budget on content marketing.

Where Marketers Invest Their Content Marketing Budget

So, how much is that content budget we just discussed above? Here’s a look at how much marketing departments delegate to content. 

• 1 in 4 brands have a quarterly content marketing budget under $40K
• 38% of brands have a quarterly content marketing budget between $40K-$100K, while 35% have a budget over $100K.

With your budget in mind, let’s take a look at how often you should be creating a media plan and how far in advance to start laying the groundwork for your content strategy.

Timing Your Media Plan

How Often Should You Create A Media Plan?

Nearly half of media planners create a media plan for their primary brand once per quarter:

Whichever cadence works best for you, you’ll also need to start your planning process ahead of time. Let’s find out how far in advance marketers are creating their media plans.

How Far in Advance Should You Start Formulating Your Media Plan?

According to our survey, 41% of media planners will change their media mix in 2022, but how far ahead will they start planning?

Over 80% of media planners formulate their strategies less than 4 months ahead of time.

Another crucial piece of formulating your media plan will be the tools you use, so let’s look at which tools marketers find the most effective.

Content Planning & Marketing Tools

The top two tools media planners use are HubSpot Marketing Hub (38%) and HubSpot Media Planning Templates (34%).

Here’s a chart showing the biggest benefits of leveraging media planning tools:

Another tool leveraged by 78% of media planners is automation, here’s what content strategists and media planners use it for:

Pivoting Your Content Plan

Pivoting can be intimidating due to the uncertainty of abruptly switching up your content plan, so here’s a high-level look at our survey data on the topic. You can also find a deeper dive into our data and tips in this post.

Is Pivoting Your Content Plan Effective?

Whether you had every marketing campaign for 2020 and 2021 fully planned out or were just winging it, the pandemic forced us to toss whatever plans we had out the window and adapt in real-time.

As we mentioned above, most marketers who pivoted their content plan in 2021 did so because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The good news? A whopping 74% of media planners say their most recent pivot was effective for reaching their overall goals and 78% of media planners say their content plan changed a moderate to significant amount the last time they pivoted.

When do brands pivot a content plan?

Here’s how media planners knew it was time to pivot. Spoiler! It’s not always due to global events. 

Of the media planners who have ever pivoted, over two-thirds did so to try a new social media platform, and 77% pivoted to try a new feature.

Which platforms or features have media or content planners pivoted to?

Facebook and Instagram Shopping platforms; YouTube Shorts; and live chat rooms like Instagram Live Spaces, Clubhouse, and Twitter Spaces have been receiving high interest from strategists lately. 

What’s more, our survey discovered that:

• Marketers who say their last pivot was effective are 10% more likely to have pivoted to use Twitter Spaces.
• Marketers who say their last pivot was effective are 10% more likely to have pivoted to use Facebook Live Shopping.
• Marketers who say their last pivot was effective are 8% more likely to have pivoted to use YouTube Shorts.
• Marketers who say their last pivot was ineffective are 9% more likely to have pivoted to use Spotify Green Room and 8% more likely to have pivoted to use Spoon.

What should be your first steps to pivoting a content plan?

Switching up your content plan can feel like going into uncharted territory. To help you, here’s how the media and content planners we surveyed take on the challenge. 

I found that marketers who talk to sales and customer service teams to better understand their customers and their pain points have more effective pivots than those who don’t. They’re 16% more likely to say pivoting was effective.

Also, those who adjust their media mix to reflect changing consumer habits have more effective pivots. They’re 9% more likely to say pivoting was effective.

To get a more detailed step-by-step guide on how to pivot, check out this post.

How often should you pivot your content plan?

While, most brands that pivoted did so at least three times in 2021, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make big changes once a quarter.

However, it’s smart to have flexible aspects of your planning that can change if external factors, like world events, arise.

And, if and when the unprecedented does happen, you’ll want to take a stp back and ask yourself what adjustment or strategy is right for your brand. 

Although consumers care about responsive content, they also care about ethical marketing and social responsibility of the brands they follow. Because of this, they’ll be quick to spot (and call out) inauthentic and opportunistic behavior, which could damage a company’s image.

And while we’re on the topic of avoiding mistakes, I also asked media planners about the biggest mistakes they’ve made when changing their content plan. Let’s take a look at where they’ve gone wrong.

Mistakes to Avoid When Pivoting Your Content Plan

Pivoting your content plan is effective, but also has its pitfalls. These are the top mistakes media planners have made when switching things up:

As you can see above, changing your content strategy drastically to cater to just one segment of your audience isn’t recommended.

And to reiterate the advice of Karla Hesterberg, the Sr. Manager of Content Growth Strategy at HubSpot, “Remember that content strategy is always a long game —your short-term strategy can’t compromise your ability to solve for the ongoing, long-term needs of your content property.”

Speaking of long-term goals, switching up your media plan on the go could wind up being expensive. Here’s how much of their budget media planners are spending when they pivot.

Key Takeaways for Content & Media Strategists

Content and media planning can get complex and complicated in today’s world where everything – including your target buyer – is constantly changing.

Ultimately, strong preparation will help you be ready to create and optimize your content strategy to cater to your evolving target audience.

Although we went over a handful of different strategies and data points above, here are three key themes that you can take away from this post.

• Understanding your audience is vital: As a marketer, creator, and media planner, you need to know your audience to know what they’ll respond to, what will motivate them to engage with you, and where they’ll go to consume content. You’ll also have to know where your audience spends the most time. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to create campaigns that meet them where they are and nurture them into buying your product.
• Plan to re-plan: The world is always changing. An effective media planner creates a plan, but also prepares for things to change and identifies ways they can optimize, shift, or pivot it when something unexpected happens.
• Always be auditing: One strategy won’t work forever, in any field of marketing. So, it’s important to continue to track and audit your efforts. That way if something stops working or needs to be fixed, you can optimize it or shift away from it promptly without losing time or money.

Want to see even more data on this topic? Check out the free, downloadable resource below which highlights the bulk of the data from our survey all in one place. 

HubSpot’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) best practices has played an essential role in our success and we know that it can for all companies in the HubSpot community. We’re seeking to help our customers achieve their best performance through adopting these practices too.

Our commitment to DEI helped us foster a culture that prizes a range of ideas from people with an array of experiences and backgrounds. We invested innumerable people hours, hired professionals, and sought world-class expertise to identify the DEI best practices, implement them and measure their success.

Although there’s no finish line for this work, that massive effort has supported our company’s growth trajectory through talent acquisition, employee retention, and workplace culture. We recognize that not all companies have the resources to make an equivalent investment, but all companies in the HubSpot community can make DEI a sustained advantage. We asked, shouldn’t it be easier for companies to identify and adopt DEI best practices and measure their success?

This increasingly common challenge faced by companies of all sizes is why HubSpot Ventures is excited to announce our investment in and partnership with Kanarys, a DEI technology company focused on providing the tools that organizations need to create long-term systemic change around DEI.

Kanarys utilizes human resource information systems integrations and artificial intelligence (AI) powered assessments to gather the data organizations need to meet DEI challenges head-on. Knowing where to start is important, which is why Kanarys is now partnering with HubSpot to offer HubSpot customers access to its DEI Maturity Quiz. 

This DEI Maturity Quiz identifies where companies are on their DEI journey, and ways they can grow their DEI strategy for long-term success. It analyzes and assesses best practices for critical DEI components, such as DEI Councils, employee resource groups, unconscious bias training, paid apprenticeship programs, supplier diversity programs, and more. In addition, HubSpot customers will now have access to Kanarys’ comprehensive library of guides and toolkits developed by subject matter experts in DEI, available here (invitation code is HUBKAN@2022).

Kanarys co-founders Mandy Price, Star Carter, and Bennie King all grew up in the Dallas area and attended The University of Texas at Austin where they became friends, yet twenty years later the three would come to call each other co-founders of Kanarys after experiencing inequities in the corporate workplace. Guided by data, the Kanarys co-founders are now on a mission to help companies identify opportunities to avoid common mistakes when implementing and measuring DEI initiatives.

 

 

While many companies approach diversity through quarterly trainings or specially organized committees, these initiatives often lack measurement of how inclusion and equity are being addressed and truly impact the business model. HubSpot has taken a detailed, fact-based approach to assess the performance of its efforts.

Kanarys makes it easy for all companies to take an innovative data-informed approach by bringing together cutting-edge technologies like AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to better understand the effectiveness of DEI initiatives based on employee sentiment and an organization’s systems, policies, procedures, and practices.

Kanarys’ intelligent platform allows companies to uncover DEI stumbling blocks and develop proactive strategies to implement instead of being reactive under pressure. The opportunities for companies are that they can now retain employees longer, build a healthier culture, develop more innovative products and solutions, and serve their customers more empathetically.

Joining Kanarys on their journey to build more equitable workplaces was a natural fit for HubSpot. Diversity, inclusion, and belonging are mission-critical for us, and we believe they are crucial to helping our community grow. By using Kanarys, HubSpot customers will be able to jumpstart or assess their own DEI initiatives to identify areas of growth and put DEI programs in place that foster growth and innovation. 

Learn more about Kanarys here, and HubSpot Ventures here.

If you’re on Spotify, chances are you’ve curated a playlist with all your favorite songs — and rearranged them in a specific order. But did you know you can do something similar on Instagram?

Enter the Instagram Guide — a tool that allows you to curate your favorite Instagram posts, Reels, or Lives in one location, which you can share with your community. For marketers, it’s a great way to revive old content, promote products, and introduce your brand.

Let’s take a closer look at Instagram Guides, how you can leverage them in your marketing strategy, and how to make one in six steps.

What is an Instagram Guide?

In short, an Instagram Guide is a collection of posts, Reels, or Lives — either from your own feed or from others.

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All guides revolve around a single topic, story, or idea. For instance, you could create a gift guide, product round-up, or exercise routine — but more on that later.

Once you create a guide, it will live under a public tab in your profile that users can visit anytime. You can also share it to your Instagram Story for more visibility.

There are three types of guides on Instagram — places, products, and posts.

• Places is for sharing travel-related or location-specific content. For instance, you could share your road trip itinerary or your favorite coffee shops in X location.

  Example: The Most Instagrammable Places in Phoenix.

• Products is for showcasing products from Instagram Shops. You could create anything from product tutorials to listicles of your favorite products or brands.

  Example: My 8 Must-Have Products for Sensitive Skin.

• Posts is for articles, commentary, or anything interesting you’ve shared or saved from others. This type focuses less on visuals and more on your storytelling abilities.

  Example: How to Build a Healthy Morning Routine.

With a solid understanding of Guides, let’s discuss the benefits of using them in your Instagram marketing.

Instagram Guides for Marketing

Instagram has countless features for marketers — but what makes guides stand out from the crowd?

Check out the top benefits of using Instagram Guides in your marketing:

1. Revive your old content

Content on Instagram has a short lifecycle. After hitting the “Post” button — and watching the likes pour in for a day or two — your content sits on your feed, collecting dust.

With guides, you can shine a spotlight on your past content. When a user clicks on an individual post in your guide, it directs them to the original post — giving it a new lease on life.

2. Drive traffic to your blog or website.

Guides are a great way to share your tips, tricks, advice, and recommendations on specific topics — but you shouldn’t reveal everything.

Instead, use the guide to summarizing one or two points from your blog posts — then encourage users to visit your blog for more details (or more tips). That way, you can drive traffic to your other channels.

3. Introduce your brand.

Instagram Guides are a great way to introduce both new and current customers to your brands and its values. Use them to highlight social responsibility work, new milestones, behind-the-scenes content, or new initiatives.

For example, fashion marketplace Vestiaire Collective highlights its brand values by posting guides on building a more sustainable wardrobe and the power of upcycling.

4. Leverage user-generated content.

With Guides, you can combine content from other users with your own — which presents an opportunity to leverage user-generated content.

For example, suppose you run a sunglass brand. You could create a guide titled, say, “The Trendiest Sunglasses of 2022” that contains photos of your customers wearing your products. What better way to leverage UGC, promote your products, and attract new customers — all at the same time.

5. Promote your products — without being too sales-y.

If you struggle with promoting your products without sounding like an infomercial, Instagram Guides are a great way to strike that balance.

Back to the sunglass example above — if you were to create a guide for your new collection, you could add value to the reader by including advice, tips, or tricks within the guide. Then, title your guide in a way that puts the value front-and-center, such as “How to Style Oversized Sunglasses.”

This is one way to subtly promote your products without it being the center of attention.

How to Make a Guide on Instagram

Creating a guide is relatively simple, but you’ll need the latest version of Instagram before you can start. It’s also a good idea to brainstorm what type of guide you want to create — and take note of the content you want to include. Then, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to your Instagram profile and tap the plus (+) button. This opens a menu with options of what you can post on Instagram. Tap “Guide.”

2. Next, tap on the type of Instagram guide you want to create. You can choose from Places, Products, or Posts.

3. Select the content you want to add to your guide. This can be content you’ve shared or saved from others.

4. From here, you’ll need to write a few details about your guide — namely the title and summary. You’ll also need to upload a cover photo if you want to change the one Instagram provides.

5. As you scroll through the guide, add titles and descriptions, commentary, or thoughts to each post.

6. Once you’re happy with the guide, click Share.

Instagram Guides are all about repurposing content. So take a look at your feed and find new stories you can tell. Leverage the tips in this article to make your guides an effective top-of-funnel marketing strategy to engage users, promote your products, and introduce your brand.

As a platform with high engagement and growth potential, TikTok is a favorable app for businesses that want to get their solutions in front of more people.

According to TikTok, 49% of users (over 490 million people) seek and discover something new on the app each month. TikTok’s highly personalized algorithm delivers relevant content to users through the For You feed, keeping users engaged.

Here’s what brands need to know about TikTok’s algorithm and the unique path to purchase on the app.

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TikTok is revamping the outdated linear sales process and is focusing on driving growth at scale. The smoother and more seamless customer experience from their unique path to purchase is described as an “infinite loop.” Rather than a sales funnel with a defined start and endpoint, TikTok users enter, exit, and re-enter the buyer’s journey at the stage that best matches their needs and wants.

TikTok’s massive success is due to following its user’s lead, building around their behavior, and providing them with the right content based on which stage they are at in the customer journey.

Why Brands Need to Be on TikTok in 2022

Let’s be honest. Putting together a whole strategy for each social platform, monitoring the results, and optimizing performance is a lot of work. And brands have been hesitant to adopt TikTok into their existing social strategy.

Whether this is because of limited internal bandwidth, it being considered a “Gen Z” app, or nobody in the office wanting to be behind the camera — there is no denying the potential of TikTok when you look at the numbers.

Let’s dive into the top TikTok statistics brands need to know:

• TikTok monthly active users: There are 1 billion monthly active users on TikTok.
• Number of App Installs: TikTok has been downloaded 3 billion times and had the most non-game app installs for 6 months in 2021, achieving 383 million downloads from January to June 2021.
• Surpassing competition: In 2021, TikTok was the 7th ranked social media app. Surpassing Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit for monthly active users is impressive considering it was only launched in 2016.
• Engagement Rate: With a session duration of 10.85 minutes, TikTok has been recognized as the top social media platform for engagement. This is twice Pinterest at rank #2 with 5.06 minutes.
• Growth rate: In the U.S., TikTok had a 787.86% user growth rate and a 1157.76% increase in its user base worldwide.
• Influencer earnings: TikTok influencers and creators can earn up to $5 million a year if they have up to 100 million followers. The most popular categories for influencer content are beauty, fitness, dance, pranks, and entertainment.

This rapidly growing social media app’s innovative and unique algorithm allows users to reach more people based on how they interact with your content.

TikTok’s key differentiator is the sense of community on the app. TikTok’s niche communities provide a place for everyone to connect, and new communities are continually emerging as more people join the app.

If you’re new to TikTok, check out #BusinessTok or #BrandTok. These niche communities provide content for marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners on tips, real-life experiences, and live streams of their networking events.

Gina Nacnac, manager of brand partnerships at HireInfluence, shared with us the importance of TikTok marketing for brands in 2022:

In 2022, we’re going to see a rise in Content Creators on TikTok that create content specifically for the brand’s owned channel appearing as the face of the brand for a contracted period of time, like quarterly or every six months. This is going to provide more opportunities for smaller creators to monetize and will provide ways for brands to connect with consumers authentically through relatable creator content.

 

TikTok’s Unique Path to Purchase

TikTok transforms how brands connect with their audiences, drive purchases and find success. The platform recently conducted a global research study to understand TikTok’s role in and perceptions across the retail consumer journey. Here is what they found:

• People on TikTok are 1.5x more likely to instantly purchase something they discovered on the platform than other platforms’ users.
• TikTok is 1.7x more likely to be the source for product discovery compared to other social platforms.
• TikTokers are 1.4x more likely than the other platform users to research products/brands they find on the platform.
• TikTok users are 1.5x more likely than other platform users to persuade friends or family to purchase a product or service they’ve come across on the app.
• TikTok users are 2.4x more likely than other platform users to create a post and tag a brand after buying a product.
• TikTok users are more than twice as likely to comment or D.M. a brand after purchasing a product compared to other platform users.

Brands that see massive success on TikTok aren’t just pushing products and creating content when it’s time to sell. Instead, they develop a consistent presence by using a TikTok scheduling tool and focusing on their brand’s role as a creator of entertainment. Successful brands leverage their TikTok Business Account to create a home on the platform, establish their unique brand voice, and build a community.

TikTok is revolutionizing the social media marketing landscape through its infinite loop buyer’s journey. Compared to other platforms, TikTok is leading the way at each stage of the customer journey — awareness, consideration, and decision.

How The TikTok Algorithm Works in 2022

One of the key ranking signals on the TikTok algorithm is video completion. Each time a user watches a video in full, that video will be more likely to be suggested to other users’ feeds.

Another major influence on the TikTok algorithm is hashtags and user-viewing habits. TikTok will take note of the type of videos you’re watching and which niche communities they are coming from. It will then suggest similar videos to you based on your content consumption.

For example, if you can’t get enough of DanceTok, good news — the algorithm will keep suggesting related videos. Brands looking to increase the reach of their videos should use trending songs, hashtags, and dances.

This is how TikTok has defined their For You page algorithm:

“This feed is powered by a recommendation system that delivers content to each user that is likely to be of interest to that particular user. Part of the magic of TikTok is that there’s no one For You feed – while different people may come upon some of the same standout videos, each person’s feed is unique and tailored to that specific individual.”

Key Components of the TikTok Algorithm:

• Video Information: video information signals are based on the content you seek out on the Discover tab (i.e., captions, sounds, hashtags).
• User Interactions: as mentioned above, the TikTok algorithm is influenced by a user’s content consumption and interactions on the app.
• Device and Account Settings: although these do not have as strong of an influence on the TikTok algorithm, it’s still worth mentioning. These are settings (i.e., language, country, device type) a user chooses on their account that TikTok considers when optimizing content.

What Engagements Are Not Important to the TikTok Algorithm

As we covered, the TikTok algorithm considers a few key ranking signals when suggesting videos to your feed. But what are the least important metrics of engagement?

• Content already viewed
• Duplicated content
• Potentially upsetting content (TikTok provides examples of “legal consumption of regulated goods” or “graphic medical procedures”)
• Content that gets flagged as spam

And the best news yet? For new users or TikTokers with a low following, the TikTok algorithm doesn’t use follower count as a ranking signal. Meaning small accounts still have the potential for high reach.

Want to see what other businesses are doing on TikTok? Check out this roundup of TikTok marketing examples to inspire your brand.

Wrapping Up

Incorporating the latest platform trends into a brand’s marketing strategy can help them to more effectively engage, educate, and sustain their audience seamlessly into the TikTok community. Don’t know where to start? We’ve got you covered! Check out the Trend Discovery Tool to uncover what’s trending in your vertical, what’s on consumers’ minds, and what’s viral on TikTok in real-time.

In 2022, businesses need to stay on top of new marketing techniques, trends, and rising platforms to drive key growth and better connect with their audience. One of them is TikTok, and there’s no sign of it slowing down. There is a huge opportunity for businesses to take advantage of the viral nature of the app and allow it to take their digital campaigns to the next level.

Instagram has demonstrated tremendous growth, with its community reaching over 2 billion monthly users in 2021.

Despite its impressive reach, many business owners are still overlooking its marketing potential. As a result, they’re leaving high levels of engagement, brand awareness, and even profit on the table. But why?

In just 12 months, we used Instagram to gain 400,000 followers for Foundr — which translated to over 70,000 email subscribers. At the end of that period, we were averaging 30,000 call-to-action clicks per month from Instagram, and converting 30% of the users who landed on our website from our Instagram page into email subscribers.

We’ve seen it work, now it’s time for you to get in on the action. In this article, we’ll show you how to build your brand with Instagram. (If you’re looking for more marketing tools and resources for your new business, check out our comprehensive guide on how to start a business.)

1. Build an Instagram strategy.

We listed this as the first step because it is the most crucial step in building a brand on Instagram.

If you lack a clear strategy, you’ll end up with low-performing content and a scattered feed as you struggle to brainstorm new ideas.

To build your Instagram strategy, you’ll need to do four things:

• Determine your goals.
• Narrow down your target audience.
• Research your competition.
• Develop your content plan.

2. Experiment with the platform’s features.

Instagram is constantly evolving. In fact, every week, the Head of Instagram shares a video discussing new features and product updates on the platform.

In one of his latest videos, he announced that they were testing a subscription feature that would allow people to subscribe to their favorite creators and get access to exclusive Lives and Stories.

In addition to all the new features the social platform tests, there are a lot of established tools, such as Live Rooms, shoppable posts, scheduled Lives, and hashtags – just to name a few.

Our advice is to choose one to two features to test out every month. This will prevent you from getting overwhelmed and allow you to measure the impact of each feature.

For instance, hashtags can help you reach users who don’t follow you but could be interested in your products and services.

Don’t know how many to use? Data from our latest Instagram Engagement Report suggests brands should only use one hashtag per post.

Another reason to test Instagram features is that it can help you reach more users. The platform has admitted to prioritizing accounts that use features the brand wants to highlight, such as Reels.

It’s a win all around: You stay ahead of the curve, discover which features work for you, and you can expand your reach in the process.

3. Jump on trends.

On social media, all it takes is one person’s video or sound to go viral for the rest of the world to join in with their own version.

Most of these trends are fun and harmless with a lifespan of about three weeks or less.

Why should you join in? Well, it’s an opportunity to connect with your audience in a creative and fun way. If you jump in as the trend is rising, it can also give you a quick boost in engagement and reach.

When considering joining any trend, there are two things you want to ask:

• How can I bring this back to my business and/or industry to make it relatable to my audience?
• What is the origin of this trend and could it go against our company values?

4. Invest in high-quality creative assets.

A great Instagram post can be boiled down to a formula and requires two elements: beautiful imagery and engaging text.

Beautiful Imagery

Choose images that tell a story or elicit emotion. This image we shared is not only compelling and interesting, but it also elicits emotion and therefore drives engagement from our followers.

What this will look like for your business will depend on your industry, but think outside of posting images of your own products and services.

Posting about yourself repeatedly on social media is like being that person at a party who talks constantly about themselves. Also, beware of copyright issues.

If the image is not your own, request permission to use it or source non-attribution-required photos. (Check out this awesome list of royalty-free stock photos here.)

Engaging Copy

While you don’t have to add text to your Instagram posts, doing so packs a punch that just an image won’t provide.

Think of your caption as an additional way to reel in your followers and keep them engaged. It’s a place to add context, share more information, ask a question, and invite comments.

5. Leverage strategic partnerships.

One of the biggest frustrations for most marketers delving into Instagram is that they don’t know how to build a following. After all, without a large number of followers, how can it possibly be an effective marketing channel?

There’s one tactic in particular that we used to quickly grow our Instagram following to 10,000 in just a couple of weeks: partnering with other Instagram accounts.

Are we talking about co-marketing or influencer marketing? Both because they lead to the same result: Expanding your reach.

In addition, both require you to:

• Conduct research to see if their audience aligns with yours.
• Review your business goals and determine the KPIs for the partnership.
• Collaborate on a content strategy.

For example. HubSpot recently teamed up with @ntwrkto celebrate Women’s History Month and promote the Grow Better mission.

Image Source

Now that Instagram allows the same post to be shared by two profiles, brands can co-market easily on the platform. Followers from both accounts will view the post, increasing each one’s reach and engagement.

6. Foster a community of highly engaged followers.

Engagement on Instagram comes in many forms, including followers sharing your content, liking and commenting, tagging their friends, and clicking on your calls to action. In this section, we’ll go over some of our tactics for fostering a community.

Post When Your Followers Will Actually See Your Content

Have you ever posted something to social media that you think will do really well, only to be met with crickets? Low likes, low shares, and the only comments you landed were from spambots.

While it’s easy to assume you miscalculated the potential of the post, it could just be that you posted the update at the wrong time.

The easiest way to know when your followers will be active on the app is to head over to your insights dashboard. If you have a business account (you should), you can learn valuable insights about your audience’s demographics and behavior on the app, including location, age, gender, and activity.

From there, you can schedule your posts based on your audience’s most active days and times.

Invite the Engagement

A lot of brands will start Instagram accounts and become frustrated when people aren’t engaging with their content.

It seems so obvious and simple, but sometimes actually asking for your audience to engage makes all the difference. You can either include the action you want your followers to take as part of the image itself, or include it in the caption.

Take a look at this example from clothing brand Grass Fields.

Image Source

In their post, they share design images and ask their followers to name their favorites in the comments. Not only do they get real-time feedback on their product, but they also get great engagement on the post.

7. Post regularly.

When a user is scrolling on the app, you are competing for their attention along with millions of other brands.

Because of this, visibility is key. With so many ways to share content, from Reels to Stories to Lives, there are a lot of opportunities to reach your audience – each demanding a different level of effort and preparation.

This is good news for brands, especially small ones. While it’s recommended that you share on the platform every day, you can choose how you share based on your bandwidth and which methods are offering the beinstst ROI.

For instance, an in-feed post likely requires more work than a Story since it will live on your profile.

With a Story, you can quickly engage your audience through a quick poll, a question, a reshared post knowing that it will disappear after 24 hours.

A good rule of thumb: Publish an in-feed post three to four times a week and share on Stories every day.

8. Review your data and optimize your approach.

If you’re already following all the tips we’ve outlined above and you’re still struggling to get meaningful traction on the app, the answer could be in your data.

Too often, brands get stuck in one approach and don’t review their data to see if it’s actually working.

Your Instagram Insights dashboard offers a wealth of information on how each post performed, including impressions, accounts reached, content interactions, and profile activity.

For instance, say you’ve been posting images for the past month, then you post one video and it outperforms 60% of your previous posts. That’s an indication that your audience may respond better to video content. It’s worth experimenting with more videos.

If you don’t analyze your performance and look for optimization opportunities, there’s a good chance you’ll reach a plateau with no idea how to get out of it.

9. Share your Instagram profile on other channels.

As you work to grow your following on Instagram, you can also drive traffic to your profile externally.

One way to entice users to follow your page on that platform is by hosting a giveaway or sharing exclusive content.

In addition, don’t be afraid to promote your Instagram on other social platforms. For instance, your website could include a section with your Instagram feed along with a call-to-action to follow your page. You can also include a link to your Instagram profile in your email marketing campaigns.

Wherever you have an online presence, be sure to share the link to your profile so that your audience knows where to find you.

10. Convert your followers into subscribers.

As you know, email marketing is crucial to a thriving business.

Instagram has been an important driver of email subscribers for Foundr, converting around 15,000–30,000 followers into subscribers each month, depending on our promotions.

If you’re familiar with Instagram’s limitations, you may be wondering how this is possible. After all, Instagram doesn’t allow links in photo descriptions.

That’s where a well-crafted bio comes into play.

Many businesses find it difficult to get followers to click the links in their bios because the tendency is to overload bios with … well, junk. Break that pattern by writing your bio like you’d write a Tweet: short, useful, and packed with intention.

Here’s what we’ve chosen as our bio:

In your bio, you can include a URL that takes users to a link tree or a direct link to your subscription landing page.

Once you’ve put the systems into place, start driving followers to your bio by including calls-to-action in your content.

11. Optimize your bio.

When it comes to Instagram, many overlook the bios and focus on having great content. But your bio is a key point of discoverability so it’s essential you give it some love too.

Say someone is looking for something specific on the platform, with an optimized bio, you’ll make sure your profile shows up in the search results. This means including a business category, a short description of your brand, and a few keywords related to your brand or industry.

How many followers do you need to build a brand on Instagram?

The beauty of social media is that there’s no minimum requirement to get started. This means that you don’t need any followers to get started building your brand.

In fact, that’s how most brands start. Unless you’re launching a sub-brand or using your personal brand to promote your new brand, you will have to organically grow your followers by using the strategies outlined above.

The key to success is consistency. Nothing will work if you do it for a month and give up. By remaining consistent, you increase your chances of reaching your audience and building a community.

Best Way to Build a Brand on Instagram

Instagram is a social platform with tremendous potential for businesses in almost any industry.

All it takes is a robust strategy, high-quality content, and the ability to pivot when needed.

It won’t happen overnight, but as long as you stay consistent, you’ll start to see your following grow and your community building.

This can have a significant impact on your reach, brand awareness, and ultimately the revenue of your company.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in Dec 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.