Blog

Personality tests are a great way to explore different aspects of who you are, and uncover layers you perhaps hadn’t recognized about yourself before.

Being truly self-aware is hard — while they might not be always 100% accurate, personality tests work well as a starting point for self-discovery by providing results you might not have concluded on your own. These insights are invaluable for personal and professional growth.

When you’ve got some downtime and want to explore aspects of who you are, why you make certain decisions, who you work well with, or get some guidance on potential career paths, take a look at the best free online personality tests we’ve compiled. 

Free Myers-Brigg Personality Tests

Myers-Briggs is a widely respected and popular personality assessment tool — first used in the 1940s, the test was developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. Initially inspired by Jung’s personality theory, the Myers-Briggs test conveniently separates people into 16 categories of personalities, providing each person with a four-letter acronym.

The following four tests are broad-stroke indicators of who you are, using inspiration from Myers-Briggs. Among other things, the tests cover your communication styles, your strengths and weaknesses, your desires and ambitions, how you see the world, and how people perceive you.

If you’ve never taken a test based off Carl Gustav Jung’s psychological traits, or Myers-Briggs’ 16 categories of personalities, I’d suggest you take at least one of these. You’ll be surprised by the accuracy of some of the statements, and more importantly, you could gain insight into how your behavior is perceived by others, helping you improve both professional and personal relationships.

1. 16 Personalities

16 Personalities covers five broad personality aspects: mind, energy, nature, tactics and identity. The test is based on Carl Gustav Jung’s study of psychological traits (e.g. extroversion vs. introversion) and the Myers-Briggs test, two popular personality theories meant to determine an extensive overview of who you are.

Among other things, the test will cover how you communicate and relate to others — both professionally and personally — what you value and strive for, and how you make decisions. 16 Personalities has been taken over 126 million times, and is available in 30 languages.

Pros: Once you’ve gotten your results, you’ll find extensive information on your personality type including strengths and weaknesses, relationships, friendships, parenthood, and workplace habits. The test is incredibly accurate and can tell you how your personality type plays out in specific situations. 

Cons: With seven bubbles varying from “Agree” to “Disagree”, it can be difficult and time-consuming to figure out where exactly you fall on each question. A “Strongly agree,” “Agree”, “Neutral”,”Disagree”, and “Strongly disagree” chart might’ve been easier to answer. 

Best for: Learning how your personality type influences many different areas of your life, as well as how it impacts your relationships. 

2. Personality Perfect

Similar to 16 Personalities, Personality Perfect is also based on Jung’s and Myers-Briggs’ personality theories, and uses four broad categories — extraversion vs. introversion, sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling, and judging and perceiving — to compile a four-letter abbreviation of your personality type (e.g. “INFP”).

The test provides a broad overview of how you connect with others, how you behave, and, perhaps most surprising, how you’re likely seen by others.

Pros: Once you know your four-letter personality abbreviation, you can apply that label to various situations, like work and love, and determine how others’ perceive your behaviors in those settings. 

Cons: Tests that are based on Jung’s personality theories are typically considered rough tendencies, and not strict classifications — and many researchers say Myers-Briggs tests are unscientific due to the different results you might get if you take the test twice. 

Best for: Learning how others perceive you or how they might misinterpret your behaviors, and finding out what you value most. 

3. Human Metrics

If you’ve ever wondered which famous personalities share your personality type, you’re in luck — Human Metrics shows you that information, along with your four-letter personality type (again, based off Jung and Myers-Briggs theories).

With this test, you’ll get information about which career paths are most suitable for your personality type. If you’re having trouble choosing a career path or doubting the one you’ve chosen, maybe this test can help you figure it out.

Pros: This specific test allows you to see all 64 questions on one screen, which makes it easier to scroll back and change an answer if you’d like to. 

Cons: Many of these responses can feel situation-dependent. “You feel involved when watching TV soaps”, for instance, could depend on the show you’re watching, how you’re feeling that day (relaxed? overwhelmed?) and simply might not be a strong predictor of who you are as a person. 

Best for: Determining a career path that is most well-suited for your personality. 

4. TestColor

Test Color, a test validated by a team of clinical psychologists, psychoanalysts and mathematicians, asks you just two questions: “Click on the colors you like most,” and “Click on the colors you like least.”

Test Color tells you about your emotional intelligence, your creativity and imagination, your social skills, and your work style, including organization and management styles. I found it to be surprisingly accurate: in two questions, it nailed how I communicate with others and how I act in group settings.

Pros: It’s incredibly quick and easy — taking roughly 5 minutes to complete. 

Cons: The results are relatively vague and general, and the test doesn’t divide your personality into categories depending on situation. (For instance, it doesn’t tell you the difference between your personality in work settings and romantic situations.) 

Best for: Finding out the ratio of extraverted to introverted you are, plus getting short descriptions of the qualities that most characterize your personality. 

Free Disc Personality Tests

The DISC assessment determines where you lie on four DISC factors: dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance. DISC is one of the most popular and authoritative career assessments out there, and many companies encourage their employees to take it.

Undoubtedly, personality affects our career ambitions, as well as how we perform in different workplace environments. If you’re particularly extraverted, maybe you’ve chosen a career path that enables you to work daily with large groups of people. If you have certain communication styles that rely on passivity and emotion, perhaps your boss’s direct statements sometimes offend you.

Arming yourself with a sense of self-awareness could help you find your optimal career path, foster better work relationships, and mitigate work conflict more effectively. Here are four career-focused tests to help you achieve higher work satisfaction.

1. Crystal

Crystal provides a free DISC assessment, which tells you (among other things) how your personality fits into your work environment, who you work well with, who you might have conflict with, how you perceive other’s behaviors, and how other’s perceive yours.

The test helps you understand how your own personality biases you towards certain colleagues (i.e. your personality might take another coworker’s comments offensively, while the coworker just believes in being direct), which could strengthen your work relationships.

Best of all, Crystal also offers an accurate personality test, enabling you to build an extensive personality profile on one website. Plus, when you input your company, Crystal lets you see your colleague’s personality profiles — undeniably critical information when you’re looking to empathize with a coworker.

Pros: Can be a useful tool for identifying areas to focus on for professional development and coaching. 

Cons: There has been no correlational study to show that test results match real-world job performance. 

Best for: Learning how your personality biases you towards colleagues’ behavior, and gaining a deeper understanding of your coworkers’ personalities. 

2. 123Test

123Test offers a DISC personality test you can take in five minutes, so there’s really no excuses. You’ll get a score to find out which DISC factors predict your behaviors towards other people.

The test offers critical information for understanding why you might get along better with one employee, and have more conflict with another. It identifies how you perceive other people’s actions (i.e. “You’re sensitive to her blunt nature, even though she believes she’s just being straightforward”), which can help you improve work relationships.

Pros: It’s incredibly quick and straightforward, and will give you a general sense for how you could misinterpret colleagues’ behaviors. 

Cons: With a few simple images (like the example, below), this test is less advanced than others in the list, and could provide different results every time you take it depending on your mood. 

Best for: Analyzing and improving your relationships with coworkers. 

3. Truity Career Personality Profiler 

This test, based on the Holland Code and Big Five theories, will analyze your interests and personality traits and tell you careers (and college majors) that are a good match for you. It also lets you know about specific tasks and projects you’d love, what motivates you, and provides advice to help you maximize your strengths. 

Even if you’re happy with your current career track, the test provides suggestions for specific skills you could learn to get ahead in your career.

Pros: If you’re early in your career (or a college student), this is a good test for uncovering your interests and discovering potential career paths. Best of all, it lets you know which projects or tasks you’d enjoy — allowing you to mix-and-match and determine the ideal career based on your personal interests. 

Cons: It can be difficult to know what you’d enjoy doing if you’ve never done it. For instance, as a college student, I might not know how to answer whether or not I’d enjoy designing a magazine cover, if I’ve never experienced design work. 

Best for: Figuring out an ideal career path, and learning which skills are required to excel in that career. 

4. Interpersonal Skills assessment

Having well-developed interpersonal skills is critical to forming deep and meaningful personal and professional relationships. Interpersonal Skills assesses your listening skills, verbal communication skills, ability to work in teams, and emotional intelligence.

Better yet, the test identifies areas of weakness and provides tactical advice on how to improve those skills.

Pros: After you’ve completed the test, Interpersonal Skills provides you with helpful resources to level-up your communication or listening skills. Resources include “An Introduction to Communication Skills” and “Advanced Communication Skills” ($13 each). And even without the resources, this is a quick and easy test for evaluating areas for improvement in your own communication style. 

Cons: To evaluate your listening skills, you might need to ask other people how they perceive you. Maybe you think you’re a good listener, but others disagree — if that’s the case, it can be difficult to accurately self-analyze your own skills for this test (or any others). 

Best for: Improving your communication and listening skills.

5. Sokanu

Major companies including General Assembly, NYU, and Redfin use Sokanu, a career assessment tool that tests you on your personality, background, interests, and goals to determine an ideal career path.

After you take the test, it provides you multiple matches, which you can sort through to explore different careers and workplaces before choosing an ideal match.

Pros: The test provides you with multiple options for careers that could fulfill you — which I appreciate, since it can be stressful to get to the end of a test and find out there’s only job that would make you happy.  Plus, Sokanu offers a library filled with over 1,000 careers, and explains what type of people thrive in them — and why.

Cons: If you don’t know much about what interests you professionally, it can be a difficult test to take. Question one, for instance, is “Would you like to… Advise organizations on how to meet their business goals?” As a high school student, I wouldn’t have any idea how to answer that question. 

Best for: Determining a few different career paths that could make you happy — and then having the opportunity to pick-and-choose from there. 

Free Emotional Intelligence Tests

Psychology Today defines emotional intelligence as, “the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others.” Arguably, having emotional intelligence is the most important factor in dealing with conflict and communicating with others.

It’s undeniable that emotional intelligence is important — in fact, research has shown success is 80-90% attributable to emotional intelligence (EI), and only 10-20% to your IQ.

In the workplace, whether you’re around coworkers in the midst of a stressful project, or dealing with a tough performance review from your boss, it’s critical you know how to both identify and handle your own emotions; it’s equally important you know how to read other people’s emotions, and manage them appropriately.

So let’s dive in. Below are four emotional intelligence tests to help you recognize your level of emotional intelligence, and also how to improve it.

1. Berkeley Emotional Intelligence

This test, designed by Berkeley, shows you 20 pictures and asks you to recognize the facial expression on each person’s face. It’s easy, quick, and fun, and an informative way to learn how well you read other people’s emotions — which is a critical skill for assessing and mitigating conflict.

Pros: It’s fun and easy, and correctly identifying people’s facial expressions is a scientifically-proven way to evaluate someone’s emotional intelligence (EI). 

Cons: 20 questions is a relatively short test to determine emotional intelligence, so the test is a good starting point, but might not offer a comprehensive view of your EI. 

Best for: Figuring out how well you analyze and interpret other people’s emotions — a vital component of strong emotional intelligence.

2. VeryWellMind

If you don’t have the time for anything more in-depth, this test only asks you 10 quick questions before delivering your results.

It’s admittedly not medical or scientific by any means, but does offer other articles depending on your score. If you score low, for example, VeryWellMind.com includes a link to another one of their articles, “Emotions and Types of Emotional Responses.”

Pros: Takes only a few minutes to complete, and the questions are straightforward and easy to answer. 

Cons: It’s easy and fun, but isn’t necessarily as accurate or scientific as the others in this list. 

Best for: A speedy gut-check on how emotionally intelligent you are, with resources to further your understanding. 

3. Empathy Quotient

Unlike the tests above, this one is designed to clinically assess you — the test was developed by Simon Baron-Cohen at the Autism Research Center at the University of Cambridge, and uses the same emotional measurements mental health professionals use to diagnose social impairment.

It’s a 60-item questionnaire and is suitable to measure “temperamental empathy” in adults.

Pros: It uses the same measurements that mental health professionals use to diagnose social impairments — meaning it’s accurate and scientifically-backed, and should provide you with a deeper understanding of your own empathy (and areas for improvement). 

Cons: The test requires you to have a certain level of self-awareness and understand how others’ perceive you. For instance, one statement is, “I am very blunt, which some people take to be rudeness, even though this is unintentional” — it might be difficult for someone to know whether their bluntness comes across as rudeness. 

Best for: A more in-depth test to accurately analyze how emotionally intelligent you are. 

Excel is an incredibly powerful software – if you know how to leverage it. With so many functions and formula options, there’s something new to learn every day.

The INDEX/MATCH formula can help you find data points quickly without having to manually search for them and risk making mistakes.

Let’s dive into how that formula works and review some helpful use cases.

Understanding INDEX and MATCH Functions Individually

Before you can understand how to use the INDEX and match formula, it’s valuable to know how each function works on its own. That will offer some clarity on how both work together once combined.

The INDEX function returns a value or the reference to a value within a table or range based on the rows and columns you specify. Think of this function as a GPS – it helps you find data within a document but first, you need to narrow down the search area using rows and columns.

The MATCH function identifies a specific item in a range of cells then returns the relative position of that item in the range or the exact match.

For instance, say the range A1:A4 contains the values 15, 28, 49, 90. You want to know how the number “49” is relative to all values within the range. You would write the formula =MATCH(49,A1:A4,0) and it would return the number 3 because it’s the third number in the range. The 0 in the formula represents “exact match.”

Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way, let’s get into how to combine the formula and use it for multiple criteria.

How to Use the INDEX and MATCH Formula with Multiple Criteria

The formula for the INDEX/MATCH formula is as follows:

Here’s how each function works together: Match finds a value and gives you its location. It then feeds that information to the INDEX function, which turns that information into a result.

To see it in action, let’s use an example.

This Excel sheet features a marketing budget for two categories: Events and company swag gifts. There are four purposes: Public relations (PR), celebration, team outing, and rebranding. The sheet also includes the defined budget and the actual expense for each category.

This is where the INDEX and MATCH formula comes in handy when using it for multiple criteria. You can quickly find the answer(s) you’re looking for and limit mistakes that would happen when searching manually.

Say you want to know the variance for an event that had a purpose of celebration with a budget of 10,000 – here’s how you’d do it.

First, take note of the row numbers and columns. The answer you’re looking for will go in I8. Here’s how the formula will look:

Let’s break down how you get there.

1. Create a separate section to write out your criteria.

The first step in this process is by listing out your criteria and the figure you’re looking for somewhere in your sheet. You’ll need this section later to create your formula.

2. Start with the INDEX.

The formula starts with your GPS, which is the INDEX function. You’re looking for the variance, so you select rows E4 through E9, as that is where the answer will be.

3. Add your ranges.

The more columns you have, the more ranges you’ll need to add to narrow down your results.

As a reminder, you’re looking for the variance for an event that had a $10,000 budget and had a purpose of celebration. This means that you’ll have to tell Excel which rows hold the

Starting with the “event,” criteria, you find it first in I4., with its range located in column A between rows 4 and 9.

Follow the same process for “celebration” – it’s in I5 and its range is B4 and B9. Lastly, the “$10,000” is in I6, with a range of C4 through C9.

The last step here is to add 0, which means you’re looking for an exact match.

That’s how you end up with this final formula:

4. Run the formula.

Because this is an array formula, you must press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to get the right results, unless you are using Excel 365.

There you have it!

When it comes to spending your advertising budget, you may be unsure how to get the most bang for your buck. After all, there are so many different advertising and marketing options out there. How do you know which will best suit your business, reach your desired audience, and give you the biggest return on your investment?

Even with all of the changes Facebook has undergone in the past few months, it’s still a great place to advertise your business. Ads are affordable and you have the ability to target your “ideal” customers. With approximately 1.93 billion people using this social media platform each day, you’re bound to reach the audience you’re looking for.

Like any marketing or advertising platform, you’ll want to go into this endeavor with a solid plan or strategy. Without one, you might as well be tossing flyers off a bridge and hoping for the best.

Facebook Ad Strategy 2022

If you’re new to advertising on Facebook, this landscape may look like a frightening new frontier where no business has gone before… but it’s not. There are more than 3 million businesses actively advertising on Facebook.

“Wait… then isn’t it oversaturated? Shouldn’t I advertise somewhere else?” There are so many advertisers on Facebook because it works. It’s an excellent way to reach your desired audience and inspire them to take action (ideally, purchasing your product).

Now, what you do need to know is that not all of those 3 million advertisers are successful. Many have failed to understand who their ideal customer is and how to target the people they want to sell to.  

As a result, the question isn’t whether you should advertise on Facebook. The question is, how do you advertise properly so the ROI is worth your time and money.

What to Know Before you Set Up your Facebook Ad

We get that you’re excited, but some pre-planning will help make your campaign much more successful.

First, you need to understand who your customer is.

• Who are they?
• What does their family situation look like?
• How much do they make?
• Where do they live? (Both geographically and whether or not they own or rent).
• Where do they work?
• How do they spend their free time?  

Once you understand who they are, you’ll want to take it one step further and understand how they think.

What keeps them up at night? How is their emotional state and what needs are they looking to have fulfilled? How do they identify themselves? The way they see themselves is often more important than how you see them (even if your view is more realistic).

Next, you’ll want to walk through the average customer journey. What steps do they take as they:

• Recognize that they have a problem
• Identify what that problem is
• Discover potential solutions
• Become aware of you as an option
• Choose to purchase your product

For each customer, this journey may be slightly different. However, they generally fall into 3 categories:

1. Awareness Phase (top of the funnel)
2. Consideration Phase (middle of the funnel)
3. Decision Phase (bottom of the funnel)

Why does this matter to you as an advertiser? Because you will tweak your content, offers, verbiage, and Call to Action based on whatever stage of the customer journey your potential buyer is in.

Finally, you’ll want to break your audience up into segments based on where they are situated in the customer journey. This will allow you to make the right offers to the right people at the right time.

Here are a few examples of potential audience segments:

• Any new customers in the “prospects stage” are entering your funnel as warm leads because they are interested in your product.
• Lukewarm leads visited your website but didn’t engage, you may wish to use Retargeting to remind them that you are there, waiting in the wings, with the solution to their problems.
• Engaged blog readers like your blog and keep coming back for more. They’re more likely to share your content on Facebook or make a purchase.
• Landing Page visitors came to a specific landing page and are therefore probably interested in that particular product.
• Shopping cart abandoners were so close to making a purchase… but something stopped them. They may just need a gentle push to finish their purchase.
• Return customers love your brand. They’ve already purchased from you in the past and come back time and time again for more. These customers can serve as brand advocates, singing your praises and recommending your product to their friends.  

As you learn more about your own audience, you may uncover different segments that will require different messaging.

Now, consider how your Facebook strategy will differ based on who you are advertising to and where they are in their journey (and in your funnel). Consider these possibilities.

• When you are looking to attract prospects, you may create ads around your brand or content that will help them understand their problem (and position you as an expert).
• As your goal shifts and you want to CONVERT the prospects, you will utilize contests and giveaways, free trial offers, and lead ads.
• When it’s time to CLOSE the prospects, you’ll incorporate lead nurturing campaigns, discount offers, sales campaigns, and limited-time offers to encourage them to buy.
• Once prospects become customers, it’s time to DELIGHT them with premium offers, referral programs, upsell campaigns, and helpful information about their purchases.

There’s one more step before we dive into Facebook Ad Strategy. It’s called a Facebook pixel and if you want to track your conversion (which you definitely do), you need to install it. The Facebook pixel is a string of tracking dots that you take from Facebook and embed in your website. It then tracks what visitors do when they get to your site. This allows you to better hone your advertisements based on actual user behavior.

Not super techy but still trying to handle your own website? Facebook has step-by-step instructions to help you install a Facebook pixel on your website.

Facebook Ad Strategies

Now that you’ve set up the foundation for strong Facebook Ads, we can take a look at different strategies you might employ with your advertising.

Depending on what audience segments you choose to target, these may not all fit the bill. Make sure to keep all of the audience research you did, in mind as you look through these options.

1. Combine Facebook Ads with Content Marketing

Many companies make the mistake of targeting warm leads with ads designed to turn them into paying customers. You know better. You know that a warm lead is not ready to buy from you yet. Instead of turning them off with straight sales offers, provide them with useful content that answers their questions, and solves their pain points. This needs to be short, interesting, and valuable. Be patient. Eventually, you will convert these warm leads into customers.

How do you do this?

1. Create content.
2. Share content on Facebook.
3. Ask your team members (and maybe a handful of friends) to like and share the post.
4. Boost your Facebook post so you can reach a wider audience.

2. Use Giveaways and Contests

Facebook contests needn’t focus on sales all the time. You can instead offer a potential high-value prize to create increased brand awareness that will pay off in the long run by bringing new leads into your conversion funnel. Before committing to a contest or giveaway strategy, review Facebook’s policies to ensure you aren’t violating any of their rules.

3. Use Lead Ads to Build Up your Marketing List

A large Facebook following is great, however, Facebook “owns” your contacts. If they decide to change their algorithm or shut down, you will lose access to those people.

Creating a lead magnet such as a free e-book or course and then running a lead ad, will help you build your marketing list. Consumers can enter their email address directly into Facebook (no added steps or friction during which you may lose them) in exchange for their free gift. You can then add their email to your marketing list and include them in your email marketing campaigns moving forward.

4. Incorporate Video Ads

If you’ve been running ads for a while and aren’t seeing the returns you’d hoped for, or you’re brand new to Facebook ads and want to try a few different options and see what works best for your situation, video ads may be just what you’re looking for.

Not only do people love videos, but they also have the lowest effective cost per click (eCPC) compared to other ad types. Need to sweeten the deal even more? Adobe found that “shoppers who view video are 1.81 times more likely to purchase than non-video viewers.”

5. Create Facebook and Google Ads

While many marketers see these platforms as one-or-the-other, Facebook and Google can actually complement each other quite nicely.

Once again, your strategy must depend on your campaign goals and the audience segment you’d like to target. For example, someone searching for a specific product, say a new computer, is likely ready to make a purchase and is simply researching their options. Using the right keywords and creating Google ads around them may be better than targeting warm leads on Facebook with increased brand awareness.

6. Utilize Facebook Mobile Ads

Before we go any further, is your website or landing page optimized for mobile viewing? This means that users will have a positive viewing experience no matter what device they use. If your site is not set up for this, you aren’t ready for mobile ads. Despite the fact that 94% of Facebook’s advertising revenues were generated via mobile, you will be throwing money out the proverbial window if you send potential customers to a site that causes them frustration.

When utilizing Facebook for your business, remember to connect your social media platform to your HubSpot account for convenient scheduling and easy-to-read reports.

Over to You

When it comes time to devise your Facebook ad strategy, the most important thing you can do is understand your audience better. All of the fancy strategies and new tricks won’t help if you don’t know who you are selling to and how close they are to making a purchase.

Spend some time getting to know your ideal customer, learning who they are, what they do, and what they want. Once you understand where your potential customers are in their buying journey, you can better usher them towards purchasing your product.

Facebook may have changed, but the value of understanding your customers never will.

Choosing the best organizational structure for your company, division, or team is a lot like picking out a new car.

At the most basic level, you’re always looking for something road-worthy — something that can take you (and your passengers) from point A to point B without a hitch.

But beyond that, there are a lot of options to consider. Automatic or manual? Four-wheel drive or two? Built-in GPS? Leather interior? Flux capacitor? (Only if you’re going back in time, of course.)

In the world of organizational structures, the options you have to choose from include things like chain of command (long or short?), span of control (wide or narrow?), and centralization (centralized or decentralized decision-making?), just to name a few.

What’s the point of an organizational structure? As a business leader, do you even need one? As I said, org structures help you define at least three key elements of how your business is going to run.

As your company gets bigger, an organizational structure can also be helpful for new employees as they learn who manages what processes at your company.

Then, if you need to pivot or shift your leadership, you can visualize how the work flows would work by adjusting your organizational structure diagrams.

To put it simply, this chart is like a map that simply explains how your company works and how its roles are organized.

Here’s what each of those elements means to an organization:

Chain of Command

Your chain of command is how tasks are delegated and work is approved. An org structure allows you to define how many “rungs of the ladder” a particular department or business line should have. In other words, who tells whom to do what? And how are issues, requests, and proposals communicated up and down that ladder?

Span of Control

Your span of control can represent two things: who falls under a manager’s, well, management … and which tasks fall under a department’s responsibility.

Centralization

Centralization describes where decisions are ultimately made. Once you’ve established your chain of command, you’ll need to consider which people and departments have a say in each decision. A business can lean toward centralized, where final decisions are made by just one or two entities; or decentralized, where final decisions are made within the team or department in charge of carrying out that decision.

You might not need an org structure right away, but the more products you develop and people you hire, the harder it’ll be to lead your company without this crucial diagram.

(To dive deeper into what all of these different organizational structure components are, check out my earlier post, “The 6 Building Blocks of Organizational Structure.”)

In this post, we’ll explore how you can combine those components to form different types of organizational structures. We’ll also highlight the benefits and drawbacks of different structure types so you can evaluate which is the best option for your company, division, or team. Let’s dive in.

Mechanistic vs. Organic Organizational Structures

Organizational structures fall on a spectrum, with “mechanistic” at one end and
“organic” at the other.

Take a look at the diagram below. As you’ll probably be able to tell, the mechanistic structure represents the traditional, top-down approach to organizational structure, whereas the organic structure represents a more collaborative, flexible approach.

Here’s a breakdown of both ends of the structural spectrum, their advantages and disadvantages, and which types of businesses are suited for them.

Mechanistic Structure

Mechanistic structures, also called bureaucratic structures, are known for having narrow spans of control, as well as high centralization, specialization, and formalization. They’re also quite rigid in what specific departments are designed and permitted to do for the company.

This organizational structure is much more formal than organic structure, using specific standards and practices to govern every decision the business makes. And while this model does hold staff more accountable for their work, it can become a hindrance to the creativity and agility the organization needs to keep up with random changes in its market.

As daunting and inflexible as mechanistic structure sounds, the chain of command, whether long or short, is always clear under this model. As a company grows, it needs to make sure everyone (and every team) knows what’s expected of them. Teams collaborating with other teams as needed might help get a business off the ground in its early stages, but sustaining that growth — with more people and projects to keep track of — will eventually require some policymaking. In other words, keep mechanistic structure in your back pocket … you never know when you’ll need it.

Organic Structure

Organic structures (also known as “flat” structures) are known for their wide spans of control, decentralization, low specialization, and loose departmentalization. What’s that all mean? This model might have multiple teams answering to one person and taking on projects based on their importance and what the team is capable of — rather than what the team is designed to do.

As you can probably tell, this organizational structure is much less formal than mechanistic, and takes a bit of an ad-hoc approach to business needs. This can sometimes make the chain of command, whether long or short, difficult to decipher. And as a result, leaders might give certain projects the green light more quickly but cause confusion in a project’s division of labor.

Nonetheless, the flexibility that an organic structure allows for can be extremely helpful to a business that’s navigating a fast-moving industry, or simply trying to stabilize itself after a rough quarter. It also empowers employees to try new things and develop as professionals, making the organization’s workforce more powerful in the long run. Bottom line? Startups are often perfect for organic structure, since they’re simply trying to gain brand recognition and get their wheels off the ground.

Now, let’s uncover more specific types of organizational structures, most of which fall on the more traditional, mechanistic side of the spectrum.

Depending on the size of a business and its goals, the organizational structure of the team will vary. Each type has its advantages and disadvantages; however, there is a universal benefit to establishing a clear organizational structure. It helps employees understand their role within a company, which enables them to manage expectations and goals.

 

A business needs to have an organizational structure in place to be successful. There are several types of organizational structures commonly used by companies, nine of which we expand upon below.

1. Functional Organizational Structure

One of the most common types of organizational structures, the functional structure departmentalizes an organization based on common job functions.

An organization with a functional org structure, for instance, would group all of the marketers together in one department, group all of the salespeople together in a separate department, and group all of the customer service people together in a third department.

Download this Template

The functional structure allows for a high degree of specialization for employees, and is easily scalable should the organization grow. Also this structure is mechanistic in nature — which has the potential to inhibit an employee’s growth — putting staff in skill-based departments can still allow them to delve deep into their field and find out what they’re good at.

Disadvantages

Functional structure also has the potential to create barriers between different functions — and it can be inefficient if the organization has a variety of different products or target markets. The barriers created between departments can also limit peoples’ knowledge of and communication with other departments, especially those that depend on other departments to succeed.

Advantages

Functional organization increases efficiency, provides stability, and boosts accountability. It allows departments — with employees who share similar skills and knowledge — to focus on their specialized tasks within their respective fields. Because the roles and responsibilities of this organizational structure example rarely change, department employees can consistently work on similar assignments and hone their skills.

The fixed structure of functional organization also operates through management. It provides employees with a chain of command. It guides communication between the team and keeps the team accountable.

2. Product-Based Divisional Structure

A divisional organizational structure is comprised of multiple, smaller functional structures (i.e. each division within a divisional structure can have its own marketing team, its own sales team, and so on). In this case — a product-based divisional structure — each division within the organization is dedicated to a particular product line.

Download this Template

This type of structure is ideal for organizations with multiple products and can help shorten product development cycles. This allows small businesses to go to market with new offerings fast.

Disadvantages

It can be difficult to scale under a product-based divisional structure, and the organization could end up with duplicate resources as different divisions strive to develop new offerings.

Advantages

Companies and their employees can experience the benefits of the product-based divisional structure. If one division performs poorly, this does not automatically translate across the organization. Because of their separation, divisions may flourish (or fail) concurrently. This system allows companies to mitigate risk.

3. Market-Based Divisional Structure

Another variety of the divisional organizational structure is the market-based structure, wherein the divisions of an organization are based around markets, industries, or customer types.

Download this Template

The market-based structure is ideal for an organization that has products or services that are unique to specific market segments, and is particularly effective if that organization has advanced knowledge of those segments. This organizational structure also keeps the business constantly aware of demand changes among its different audience segments.

Disadvantages

Too much autonomy within each market-based team can lead to divisions developing systems that are incompatible with one another. Divisions might also end up inadvertently duplicating activities that other divisions are already handling.

Advantages

Because this organizational structure focuses on specific market segments, it provides each division with autonomy. The divisions work separately, which allows employees to work independently and enables them to focus on the needs of their particular industry.

4. Geographical Divisional Structure

The geographical organizational structure establishes its divisions based on — you guessed it — geography. More specifically, the divisions of a geographical structure can include territories, regions, or districts.

Download this Template

This type of structure is best-suited to organizations that need to be near sources of supply and/or customers (e.g. for deliveries or for on-site support). It also brings together many forms of business expertise, allowing each geographical division to make decisions from more diverse points of view.

Disadvantages

The main downside of a geographical org structure: It can be easy for decision- making to become decentralized, as geographic divisions (which can be hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from corporate headquarters) often have a great deal of autonomy. And when you have more than one marketing department — one for each region — you run the risk of creating campaigns that compete with (and weaken) other divisions across your digital channels.

Advantages

Geographical divisions allow companies the advantage of catering to a specific customer. Based on the differences in language, culture, and customs one would find across the world, companies cannot necessarily expect the same operations to work in different locations. Not only does it allow organizations to tailor their approach based on geography, but it allows the division to react quickly and efficiently to any geographical market changes.

5. Process-Based Structure

Process-based organizational structures are designed around the end-to-end flow of different processes, such as “Research & Development,” “Customer Acquisition,” and “Order Fulfillment.” Unlike a strictly functional structure, a process-based structure considers not only the activities employees perform, but also how those different activities interact with one another.

In order to fully understand the diagram below, you need to look at it from left to right: The customer acquisition process can’t start until you have a fully developed product to sell. By the same token, the order fulfillment process can’t start until customers have been acquired and there are product orders to fill.

Download the Template

Process-based organizational structure is ideal for improving the speed and efficiency of a business, and is best-suited for those in rapidly changing industries, as it is easily adaptable.

Disadvantages

Similar to a few other structures on this list, process-based structure can erect barriers between the different process groups. This leads to problems communicating and handing off work to other teams and employees.

Advantages

As mentioned, one of the most significant benefits of the process-based structure is that it increases efficiency and speed. If Department B cannot start its processes until Department A finishes, this compels Department A to work promptly and proficiently. This organizational model also promotes intradepartmental (within the department) and interdepartmental (across multiple departments) teamwork.

6. Matrix Structure

Unlike the other structures we’ve looked at so far, a matrix organizational structure doesn’t follow the traditional, hierarchical model. Instead, all employees (represented by the green boxes) have dual reporting relationships. Typically, there is a functional reporting line (shown in blue) as well as a product- based reporting line (shown in yellow).

When looking at a matrix structure org chart, solid lines represent strong, direct-reporting relationships, whereas dotted lines indicate that the relationship is secondary, or not as strong. In our example below, it’s clear that functional reporting takes precedence over product-based reporting.

Download the Template

The main appeal of the matrix structure is that it can provide both flexibility and more balanced decision-making (as there are two chains of command instead of just one). Having a single project overseen by more than one business line also creates opportunities for these business lines to share resources and communicate more openly with each other — things they might not otherwise be able to do regularly.

Disadvantages

The primary pitfall of the matrix organizational structure? Complexity. The more layers of approval employees have to go through, the more confused they can be about who they’re supposed to answer to. This confusion can ultimately cause frustration over who has authority over which decisions and products — and who’s responsible for those decisions when things go wrong.

Advantages

An advantage of a matrix structure is that it promotes collaboration and communication. This open line of communication ultimately allows businesses to share resources and allows employees to develop new skills from working with different departments.

7. Circular Structure

While it might appear drastically different from the other organizational structures highlighted in this section, the circular structure still relies on hierarchy, with higher-level employees occupying the inner rings of the circle and lower-level employees occupying the outer rings.

That being said, the leaders or executives in a circular organization aren’t seen as sitting atop the organization, sending directives down the chain of command. Instead, they’re at the center of the organization, spreading their vision outward.

Download the Template

From an ideological perspective, a circular structure is meant to promote communication and the free flow of information between different parts of the organization. Whereas a traditional structure shows different departments or divisions as occupying individual, semi-autonomous branches, the circular structure depicts all divisions as being part of the same whole.

Disadvantages

From a practical perspective, the circular structure can be confusing, especially for new employees. Unlike with a more traditional, top-down structure, a circular structure can make it difficult for employees to figure out who they report to and how they’re meant to fit into the organization.

Advantages

Most examples of organizational structure have a top-down hierarchy. Alternatively, this type of structure follows an outward flow and contributes to information flowing freely across the business. Its benefits include keeping all employees aligned with the processes and goals of the company and encouraging employees to collaborate between departments.

8. Flat Structure

While a more traditional organizational structure might look more like a pyramid — with multiple tiers of supervisors, managers and directors between staff and leadership, the flat structure limits the levels of management so all staff are only a few steps away from leadership. It also might not always take the form or a pyramid, or any shape for that matter. As we mentioned earlier, It’s also a form of the “Organic Structure” we noted above.

This structure is probably one of the most detailed, It’s also thought that employees can be more productive in an environment where there’s less hierarchy-related pressures. This structure might also make staff feel like the managers they do have are more like equals or team members rather than intimidating superiors.

Disadvantages

If there’s a time when teams in a flat organization disagree on something, such as a project, it can be hard to get aligned and back on track without executive decisions from a leader or manager. Because of how complicated the structure’s design is, it can be tricky to determine which manager an employee should go to if they need approval or an executive decision for something. So if you do choose to have a flat organization, you should have a clearly marked tier of management or path that employers can refer to when they run into these scenarios.

Advantages

The elimination of middle management employees defines the flat structure type. Its advantages are instantaneous. First, it reduces the expenses of the company. Second, it allows staff to build direct relationships with upper management. And lastly, it shortens the decision-making process.

9. Network Structure

A network structure is often created when one company works with another to share resources — or if your company has multiple locations with different functions and leadership. You might also use this structure to explain your company workflows if much of your staffing or services is outsourced to freelancers or multiple other businesses.

The structure looks nearly the same as the Divisional Structure, shown above. However, instead of offices, it might list outsourced services or satellite locations outside of the office.

If your company doesn’t do everything under one roof, this is a great way to show employees or stakeholders how outsourcing of off-site processes work. For example, if an employee needs help from a web developer for a blogging project and the company’s web developers are outsourced, the could look at this type of chart and know which office or which person to contact outside of their own work location.

Disadvantages

The shape of the chart can vary based on how many companies or locations you’re working with. If it’s not kept simple and clear, there may be a lot of confusion if multiple offices or freelancers do similar things. If you do outsource or have multiple office locations, make sure your org chart clearly states where each specific role and job function lies so someone can easily understand your basic company processes.

Advantages

The outsourcing nature of the network structure provides companies with the advantages of lower costs, more focus, and increased flexibility. Outsourcing allows organizations to save money, as they don’t have to bear the expense of setting up a department for the same purpose. It also gives companies the flexibility to change their processes and the ability to focus on their core functions.

Why is having an organizational structure important?

Imagine a business that has no organizational structure. Instantly, questions arise about the systems and processes. Who makes the decisions? How are employees held accountable? What are the company’s goals? These questions are practically impossible to answer without a functional organizational structure.

Organizational structure is necessary for running a successful business because it improves workflow and efficiency, promotes communication, identifies company needs, and aligns employees with company goals. It directly affects how a business operates daily. When a company establishes a structure that works, the combined efforts of its employees, in conjunction with its systems and processes, allow the company to make better decisions for its future.

Navigating Organizational Structures

Organizational structures are central to a successful team. Employees can move comfortably, confidently, and efficiently when given a clear definition of their role within an organization.

Structure types will vary from business to business, so it’s important to remember that these structures are not one size fits all. Every type may not suit your organization, but chances are, one of them will. Use this post to determine which organizational structure works for you, and then it’s time for the real work to begin.

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

As we collectively enter into year three of the pandemic, the great resignation, and the “candidate’s market”, having a stand-out marketing resume is more important than ever.

It’s ironic, but despite knowing how to sell products and services, so many marketers have a hard time selling themselves. It can often be difficult to turn the spotlight inward, but this is a skill all marketers need to perfect if they want to grow in their careers.

In this article, we’ll show you both new-aged and tried-and-true methods for building the perfect resume. You’ll find resume templates and examples that have worked for our team here at HubSpot and folks in successful careers at other companies.

How to Write a Marketing Resume

If you’re a marketer whose resume could use a little polish, don’t worry. With just a few resources and some actionable tips from hiring managers themselves, we’ll help you create a truly impressive marketing resume that’s sure to stand out to recruiters.

1. Start with a template.

To make things easy and increase your effectiveness, don’t start from scratch. Resume templates give you a starting place for layout and formatting as well as inspiration for what to include.

Featured Resource: 12 Free Resume Templates

Download 12 free designed, formatted, and customizable resume templates here. Take a look at them, and then use the advice below to customize your resume and make it rise above the rest in the stack.

Alternatively, there are resume builder tools out there that can help as well.

2. Know your target audience.

You never start a marketing campaign without knowing who you want to reach. That’s because once you know your target audience, it’s easier for the other decisions to fall into place.

The same logic applies to your resume. If you know who will read it and what’s important to them, you can shape your message accordingly. To do this, you need to think about the type of job and company you’re hoping to work for.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Is the job purely in inbound marketing, or will it require both traditional and digital work?
• Will you be a specialist or a generalist?
• Who is the employer — an agency with a buzzing digital marketing team in place already, or a small company looking to leverage the power of social media to grow their sales? Or maybe it’s a marketing department within a large and established corporation?

Once you’ve outlined what’s most important to the company and job you’re applying for, you can carefully target your resume to them. You’ll know what skills or traits to highlight, what keywords to use, and which parts of your background will be most interesting to the hiring manager. (For clues about which skills different marketing roles typically require, read this blog post on marketing job descriptions. You can borrow phrasing from those for your own resume.)

3. Define your unique value proposition.

You have a unique blend of skills, characteristics, and experiences that make you different from every marketer. To create a truly effective resume, you need to define exactly what this unique blend is — we’ll call this your value proposition.

To develop your own value proposition, think about what separates you from other marketers. Is it your in-depth knowledge of marketing analytics? Your ability to write irresistible headlines? Perhaps it’s your talent for creating compelling videos? Or maybe you have an impressive record of using social media to drive sales growth? Whatever it is, you can use it to set your resume apart from the crowd.

To a large extent, your value proposition depends on the type of positions and companies you’re targeting. Large and small companies often look for completely different skill sets, as do companies in different industries. So as you think about what makes you uniquely valuable, and how that aligns with the jobs you’re applying to.

4. Describe impact, not features.

One of the oldest copywriting tricks in the book is FAB (features, advantages, benefits).

By selling benefits over features, you’re better able to resonate with your audience because you’re actually painting a picture of what life will be like with the product or service.

The same goes for your resume.

When writing your resume copy, summarizing your experience, or formulating your objective, don’t simply rely on what you’ve done. Instead of creating a list of duties (features) under each role, outline your accomplishments (benefits). These provide a clearer picture of who they’re hiring if they choose you.

For example, instead of “Monitored SEO campaigns,” the following makes a much stronger statement: “Increased organic traffic by 56% in one quarter.”

As a result, the hiring manager is challenged to wonder, “What would life look like if we benefited from this impact?”

5. Determine your messaging strategy.

It’s crucial to determine your messaging strategy — before you write a single word of your resume. That’s what you do when you’re running a marketing campaign, isn’t it? Here are some of the things to think about:

• What is the best structure for your resume in order to highlight your value proposition?
• Which keywords will your ideal employer be looking for?
• How can you give real-world examples of your value proposition in action? (Think about campaigns you’ve run, social media successes, ideas you developed, etc.)
• What is the best layout and design to reinforce your message?

All these decisions should be made before you start writing, and they should all be made with your target audience in mind. That way you can be sure that when potential employers read your resume, it will immediately strike a chord.

If you want an example of great messaging in a resume, check out the example below. Look at the progression of roles and key accomplishments in those roles — it tells the applicant’s career story while also making them look exceptionally qualified.

6. Don’t overcomplicate things.

Just like the marketing adage says, “A confused mind says no.”

The best way to convey an idea is… simply. Even when the topic is complex.

With this in mind, consider what message you want to send and keep the copy clear and concise to support it.

Use the layout of your resume to help in this endeavor, and don’t be afraid to trim any unnecessary bits.

7. Make sure your resume gets seen.

If you don’t already have a connection at the company you’re applying to, you’ll most likely need to apply through a computer system. This process is what makes it so critical to upload it in a format that allows all recipients to read it as intended, like a PDF. That way, none of the original formatting or spacing is lost in translation, making it really difficult to read from a recruiter’s perspective. Although they’ll still have access to your resume, confusing formatting might distract them from the content.

Once you send in your resume, the computer service will scan it for relevant keywords that have been programmed in advance by the recruiter. Then, the system will either “pass” or “fail” you, depending on how many keywords and phrases are included in your resume that match what the recruiter’s looking for.

Don’t worry: Even if you “fail,” it doesn’t mean your resume won’t ever get seen by a real human. But it doesn’t look great, either — so try to foresee which keywords the recruiter will be looking for by making a note of all of the skills you have that are relevant to the job description.

Keywords to include might be the names of the social media sites you use, analytics or CRM systems you know, and software programs or SAAS systems you’re familiar with. Make sure you’ve included these terms as seamlessly as possible throughout your resume (where relevant), and add any outliers at the very bottom under a “Technical Skills” or “Digital Marketing Skills” section.

Sure, computers may be used in the initial screening process, but it’s humans — with real feelings, pet peeves, hobbies, relationships, experiences, and backgrounds — who are ultimately reading and evaluating our resumes.

They’re also the ones who get annoyed when we don’t put our employment record in chronological order; who just don’t feel like reading paragraph-long job descriptions; and who get excited when you went to the same college as them. So to get a sense of what really matters on a marketing resume, I asked some hiring experts what they actually care about when they scan resumes, and here’s the inside scoop on the tips they shared with me. (By the way, don’t miss out on what they said about cover letters at the end.)

1. Keep it brief.

Limit your resumes to one page if you can. It takes hiring managers six seconds to decide whether they like your resume or not. If they do, they’ll keep reading. If they don’t… well, it’s on to the next. So, chances are, they won’t even get to page two.

In some cases, bleeding onto another page is OK, especially if you have a lot of really relevant experience. But if you have to do that, just don’t exceed two pages. Remember, recruiters can always look at your LinkedIn profile for the full story. (Because you’ve completed your profile on LinkedIn, right?)

2. Use simple formatting.

Formatting speaks to the way candidates collect their thoughts and organize their ideas. As HubSpot’s VP of Sales Productivity and Enablement Andrew Quinn explains it, “A candidate’s resume is their ad to me. How are they structuring this ad so I get a clear picture of what they’re capable of?”

There’s a fine line, though. You have to strike a balance between making your resume stand out and keeping the formatting consistent.

Below is an example resume with great formatting that’s easy to read. If you like the format and want to use it as your own, you can find it among our free downloadable resume templates here.

If you’re a creative, you might be asking, “What about graphic-heavy resumes?” Here’s the general consensus on infographic resumes: Don’t make an infographic resume. Every hiring manager I spoke with advised sticking to the classic resume form instead of infographics or other formats.

Simply put, infographics are hard to understand. Creativity is encouraged when applying for design roles, but use your portfolio to let that skill shine. Plus, you’ll have a lot more wiggle room to show off your talents outside of a static medium like a PDF version of your resume.

Below is an example of a creative format that’s still easy to read and understand. It was made using the Apple desktop app iWork Pages, which can be exported as a PDF so none of that beautiful formatting gets messed up in translation.

3. Pay attention to the quality of your writing.

Hiring managers throw away resumes with spelling errors — but writing quality goes beyond just simple spelling mistakes. Writing and presenting data in meaningful ways is a critical skill for any position, from blogging to engineering.

Are the details you want hiring managers to know about you easy to consume? Do you use concise sentences to convey your performance and accomplishments? Are your verb tenses consistent (except for current positions)? Is your language overflowing with buzzwords, or does it sound natural? Are you making sure to use first-person without using “I” or “my”? (See #11 in this blog post to understand why that’s not okay.)

“Formatting, spelling, syntax, and structure are all evidence of attention to detail,” Quinn told me. “This is important for any job, but especially if you’re applying to a job where attention to detail matters.” If you’re applying for a writing position, this is even more important.

4. Include your location.

When it comes to location, hiring managers want to know if you’ll need to relocate. If you already live near the company’s office, great! If you would need to relocate, then there are more options both you and the hiring team will need to think through. Hiring managers can’t legally ask you directly where you live — but omitting your location may raise eyebrows. Even P.O. boxes could be concerning.

If you do need to relocate, you should still include your current, out-of-town city and state on your resume, but be prepared to answer relocation status questions in an interview. If the company doesn’t offer relocation packages or remote options, will you be able to afford to take the job and move anyway?

If not, you’re better off applying for roles in your area, roles that mention relocation assistance on the application, or roles that are remote-friendly.

5. Highlight your education intentionally.

Which is more important: Where you went to school, or what you studied?

It depends on the job you’re applying for and the level of the role within the company.

In most cases, your degree should make sense for the role. Hiring managers are looking for the tie-in; what’s relevant about what a candidate’s done in school. That doesn’t mean only marketing majors can apply to marketing jobs — marketing teams might hire someone who came out of creative studies like liberal arts, graphic design, or writing. An engineering team, on the other hand, probably won’t hire someone without a computer science degree.

It also depends on how successful you were at the school you attended. While there are some hiring managers who only give interviews to graduates of top-tier schools, most say it helps to go to a top-tier school, but it’s certainly not a deal-breaker if you went to a less popular school or a community college. A community college graduate with a 4.0 GPA could be more attractive than an Ivy League graduate with a 2.0.

Speaking of GPA — when to take it off your resume is subjective. If your GPA was below a 3.0, consider removing it altogether. If it’s higher than that, Quinn says, “The benchmark is five to seven years after graduation, which is when candidates tend to have a solid track record of employment. If you did well in school but had lackluster job prospects following graduation because of, say, a bad economy, you could definitely leave it on longer.”

It goes both ways, he explained: “If you had great jobs and accomplishments following graduation but didn’t have a good GPA, consider removing your GPA earlier.”

Three to five years after college or graduate school graduation, you can move your “Education” section to the bottom of your resume — unless you connected with someone through an alumni network or if you know an executive there who also went to your school.

The same thing applies if you haven’t completed your degree. Basha Coleman, Historical Optimization Marketing Manager at HubSpot adds, “Not every job requires a degree these days. Relevant work experience and transferrable skills are just as valuable. Focus on highlighting your experience so the hiring team can see your expertise.”

Want to take your marketing education to the next level and make your resume even more appealing to potential employers? Become a certified inbound marketing professional with HubSpot’s free marketing certification.

6. Be consistent with company names and job titles.

Hiring managers will look at where you’ve worked before (do they recognize the company names or know anyone who works there?) and your titles at those companies.

“If you’re applying for a sales position at a software company like HubSpot, we’re looking for experience selling software,” David Fernandez, former Recruiting Team Lead at HubSpot, told me. “If you’re applying for a services position, we’re looking for customer-facing experience.”

Yes, people tweak their titles at previous companies to more closely match the positions they’re applying for. If you do this, your “new” title should be close enough to what you really did that if someone were to call and check a reference, they wouldn’t be dumbfounded. Maybe “Clerk to the Surgical Waiting Room” becomes “Customer Service Clerk.” Also, make sure to change your titles on LinkedIn, too — hiring managers will check for consistency on LinkedIn, Fernandez said.

7. Include enough bullet points in each section.

Each position you’ve had should be accompanied by no more than five to six bullet points. Remember, these hiring managers are scanning your resumes really quickly, so you want to make it easy for them to find and digest the relevant information by consolidating the most important points and putting them first. Paragraphs are a big no-no.

Luckily, you work in a profession where everything can be measured and analyzed, which means it’s relatively easy to tell an impressive story of success. Think about all the ways your work can be quantified through hard data and then fill your resume with action-packed bullet points that convey the value you’ve added.

Focus on accomplishments first before responsibilities and duties. If you had a senior management role, include the number of people you managed. If you built a program from the ground up, call that out.

Also, include goals and metrics that hiring managers can use to compare you against other candidates, and make sure those metrics make sense so you don’t confuse the hiring manager. Run the metrics by a family member. I’m serious. If they make sense to them, then they’re all set. If not, then you weren’t clear enough and you need to tweak the language.

Examples might be increasing social media engagement, improving SEO ROI, driving increased web traffic, reducing bounce rates, boosting landing page conversions, etc. Once you have a list of your results, choose the best four or five and turn these into bullet points like these:

• Drove 37% improvement in newsletter clickthrough rates by rewriting sales copy.
• Grew ecommerce sales 23% in just 6 months by redesigning and A/B testing all landing pages.

8. Don’t forget to add your dates of employment.

Job hopping isn’t the red flag it once was. These days, switching jobs is not only necessary for career growth but it’s often cited as one of the fastest ways to grow financially, too.

So don’t be afraid to list several back-to-back stints at different companies in a short period of time. As long as you’ve included your achievements in each role, you’re golden.

If you took longer than six months off of work, explain the gap on your resume. If it’s something like teaching or the Peace Corps that you can describe like a job, then you can insert it into your resume just as you would any other position:

If it’s something like traveling abroad or taking time off for family or personal reasons, you can simply add it in italics of parenthesis. You could also list this period as a “sabbatical”. Hiring managers just want to see a rational explanation — that you were doing something productive with your time.

9. Consider adding interests and hobbies.

Character is something hiring teams are constantly on the look out for in the candidates they interview and hire. Although character is easily picked up on in person, it’s not impossible to get an impression of a person’s character from their resume.

To showcase character in a one-way document, Editor in Chief of LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions Blog, Tequia Burt, encourages candidates to be confident in their ability to do the work they’re applying for. She adds, “Take pride in what you do. Don’t focus on how others will perceive you. Show them how you perceive yourself.”

Burt continues, “Be real. Be yourself. Be the best at what you do and let that shine through in your resume.” The perfect way to do this is by sharing interest and hobbies.

10. Let your personality and character shine.

Whether you should include interests and hobbies on your resume depends on the company culture and the job. If you’re applying for a creative role, hobbies like photography and painting could be interesting to an employer. If you’re hiring for an accounting role, then a hobby like skydiving wouldn’t be good to include — hiring managers might categorize you as a risk-taker, and do they really want a risk-taker managing their money?

“Think about the conclusions someone could draw from your hobbies relative to the role you’re hiring for,” Quinn advises. “Do they enhance or detract from the image you’re trying to convey? If you know the culture embraces unique individuals that have a broad background and set of interests, then it could be useful information. But conservative organizations probably don’t care what you do in your free time — in fact, they could interpret outside hobbies as distractions.”

Companies with cultures like HubSpot’s want their employees to have some personality and invest in outside interests. So if you’re applying to join that kind of culture, an “Interests” or “Hobbies” section could benefit you.

Before including or omitting this section on your resume, gain some intelligence about the company’s environment and culture. (And check out HubSpot’s culture code if you haven’t already.)

Spend Less Time on These…

Personal Statements/Objectives

In fact, we recommend skipping these altogether. Frankly, they’re irrelevant. I’ve spoken with HubSpot recruiters about numerous times where candidates put the name of another local company on there — huge mistake.

Instead, replace it with a “Skills” or “Key Skills” section at the top of your resume, in column format, that highlights the top six to nine skills applicable to the role you’re applying for. Be sure to change these skills for each job and use the job description as a guideline.

Don’t plagiarize the job description by any means, but you can pull out key phrases. For example, in the example below, one of the listed skills is “Deep understanding of the consumer lifecycle.” That’s because the job description asked for exactly that: a deep understanding of the consumer lifecycle and customer journey.

Pro Tip: Although you should leave this section off your resume, you should have something in the ‘Summary’ section of your LinkedIn profile. Focus this section on specific skills and achievements. It’s a good place to put a link to your portfolio, blog, SlideShare presentations, or examples of work you’ve created like open-source code.

Use that space to talk about specific achievements from previous roles, awards you’ve won, or projects you’ve worked on. The information and skills on here should be applicable to where you’re headed in your career, not irrelevant past skills. (When I first heard this tip, I immediately took “emergency medicine” off of mine.)

Cover Letters

Cover letters vary in importance, depending on the industry or company to which you are applying. Many companies that require you to write a cover letter will read it, but they’ll focus mostly on your resume.

With this in mind, it’s best practice to draft a cover letter just in case. And you don’t need to create one from scratch for each role. Coleman suggests creating a cover letter template. “This can be the base of your cover letter, but it still gives you enough room to customize. That way, you don’t feel as overwhelmed when you realize the job description requires a cover letter.”

Here’s the cover letter template she created as a new marketer applying to roles in her first few years after college:

Marketing Resume Examples

So here are some examples of marketer resumes done well:

1. Natalie Gullatt

Natalie Gullatt takes a more traditional approach with her resume, abandoning fancy frills in favor of hard-hitting copy. She expertly conveys her marketing impact with metrics (e.g. “decrease[d] costs by 61%” and “generated a $746k revenue pipeline”) so that anyone considering her for the role can ask themselves: “What if she could do that for us too?”

2. Andrea Fitzgerald

Andrea Fitzgerald uses her page space effectively with listable items on the left and experience on the right. This makes the rest of the resume easier to skim so hiring managers can quickly find the information important to them.

She also summarizes her achievements in bite-sized sentences. This combined with the vertical format gives a lot of room to fully list out the depth of experience Fitzgerald has.

3. Jess Johnson

Jess Johnson applied to HubSpot with this resume, tailored to the job and company branding. By taking this unique approach, her goal was to stand out from other applicants. While her resume wasn’t the only factor in her landing the job, I imagine it gained a bit of attention. After all, a hiring manager is looking for applicants they can picture in the position.

4. Sarah Casdorph

There’s an old saying out there for keeping resumes to one page, but for marketers with extensive experience, the one page isn’t always possible without compromising readability and design. At the same time, anything on the second page is at risk of being ignored.

Sarah Casdorph solves for this, putting top skills on the front page and pulling out “notable impacts” for each position. Not only is her two-pager easily navigable, but there’s a clear trail of achievement.

It’s Just Like Marketing

As a marketer, you have a talent for communication and a solid understanding of what makes people buy. The good news is that by applying this knowledge to your own resume, you can easily stand out from the crowd.

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

Everyone wants their business to grow. This seems pretty intuitive considering effective and successful growth means your business is experiencing boosts in revenue, brand awareness, brand loyalty, and more — and we know this to be true by looking at the most successful and well-known companies today (e.g. Apple, Amazon, etc.).

The question is: What do these highly-successful companies do to ensure they put themselves in a position for strong and consistent growth?

Of course, there are a number of answers to this question based on who you ask. However, the one we’re going to focus on in this blog post is market penetration. So, what is market penetration?

How to Calculate Market Penetration

If you’re using market penetration as a measurement, use the following formula to discover how much a product or service is used by customers compared to its total estimated market. In other words, take the current sale volume for your product or service and divide it by the total sale volume of all similar products available in the market.

(Number of Customers / Target Market Size) x 100 = Market Penetration Rate

Frequently monitoring your market penetration is important in order to identify any increases or decreases in penetration. If you’re wondering how often to calculate market penetration, a good rule of thumb is to calculate it after every marketing and sales campaign you run. This will highlight any changes in penetration — and, as a result, you’ll also have a better idea of the success of your campaign(s).

Next, let’s dive a little deeper into what market penetration is and why it’s such an effective growth strategy.

Understanding Market Penetration

A company can use market penetration at the industry level to review the potential for specific products or services or on a smaller scale as a way to gauge the market share of a product or service. It offers insight into how the market and your customers view your product or service.

What is high market penetration?

When it comes to market penetration, you want yours to be high. There are many benefits to high market penetration.

For instance, think about Nike. The company is a market leader in athletic shoes. When you go to the sneakers section of a store like Foot Locker or Dick’s Sporting Goods, Nike consistently takes up a large portion of the space.

That’s because retailers like Foot Locker and Dick’s know Nike delivers in sales. They also know their customers expect a wide selection of Nike products in their stores. Nike’s popularity and brand name warrant better shelving space and visibility, too. This is all a result of Nike’s high market penetration.

Similar to Nike, when you have a high market penetration…

• You’re an industry leader.
• You sell products or services that are already established within the industry.
• You have a widely-recognized brand.
• You have good visibility in the market.
• You have strong brand equity.
• You likely make your product for less than you would be able to if you were a less-established business due to the scale of your operation.
• You have a high sales volume which means you have leverage among suppliers and sellers.

High market penetration offers a marketing advantage and more potential for continued growth and success as a business. Needless to say, high market penetration is the goal — but, how do you achieve it? Well, market development is a good place to start.

To increase market penetration, focus on market development first. Let’s look at an example.

Example of Market Development Increasing Market Penetration

A successful leggings brand, Booty by Brabants, has made waves in recent years in the athletic-wear industry. The brand has established itself as a seller of high-quality and unique leggings for women of all sizes.

By reviewing their market penetration, BBB was able to identify a small, existing market they could tap into — kids’ leggings. They determined that selling kids’ leggings could help them broaden their target audience and customer base for little added cost and effort.

Although BBB Kids leggings aren’t a major source of revenue for the company, they’re complementary to its existing product line and bring in new customers. BBB was able to identify an existing market they hadn’t taken advantage of yet and determine clear steps to successfully enter that market. As a result, they expanded their product line, customer base, and market penetration.

Now, let’s look at the most effective ways to get started on your market penetration strategy.

As you begin working on your market penetration strategy, you may hear the words: Ansoff Matrix.

The Ansoff Matrix is a tool with four growth strategies listed for businesses to consider.

Image Source

As you move to the upper-right quadrant of this matrix, the growth strategies become riskier for businesses. We’ve included information about the Ansoff Matrix in this article because it further proves and highlights the fact that market penetration is a highly-valuable and achievable way to effectively grow a business, even for the risk-averse.

At this point, you might be wondering about the specific strategies under the umbrella of market penetration that you can deploy at your company — let’s talk about some of those next.

Market Penetration Strategies

Here are some examples of effective market penetration strategies that you may choose to focus on and/or implement at your company.

1. Change your pricing.

Lower or raise the cost of one of your products.

2. Revamp your marketing.

Rework your marketing plan and/or roadmap.

3. Identify the need for a new product and launch it.

Survey and analyze your customers and target audience to identify the need for a new product (or feature). Then, create that product and sell it.

4. Update or change your product (or a specific feature of your product).

Resolve the challenges of your customers and buyer personas more effectively by updating or changing a product or feature.

5. Grow business in new territories and offer franchise opportunities.

Identify new territories in which you can expand and grow your business. Ask yourself: Which new areas can we open our stores or prospect? You might also begin offering franchise opportunities to expand your brick-and-mortar business.

6. Identify a business partner to work with.

Partner or merge with another business in a mutually beneficial way (e.g. run a co-marketing campaign).

7. Purchase a small business or competitor in your industry.

If you have the resources, consider acquiring a small business or competitor in your industry to broaden your base of customers and your offerings/ capabilities. (HubSpot did this a while ago.)

8. Offer a promotional program to boost loyalty.

Give customers an opportunity to sign up for a loyalty program that provides them with perks in return for giving you their contact information (e.g. discounts, birthday gifts, inside information, etc.).

9. Develop a new marketing campaign.

Create and launch a marketing campaign or initiative to promote your product line in a unique and new way that your customers haven’t seen before. Analyze your campaign’s success so you can refer to it in the future.

10. Boost sales rep activity.

Encourage sales reps to increase the number of interactions they have with qualified prospects (e.g. focus on social selling and meeting prospects where they are).

Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning

STP marketing stands for segmentation, targeting, and positioning. This is a three-step model that helps you to examine your products or services and how you communicate them to your market. Step one is to divide your market into segments. Step two is to target each segment with tailored marketing campaigns. Step three is to position your business and marketing in a way that will appeal the most to each segment.

What’s an example of a successful market penetration strategy?

There are several examples of companies using market penetration to grow their business. For the sake of this piece, let’s look at Dunkin’.

Dunkin’ (formerly, Dunkin’ Donuts) was started in Quincy, MA back in the 1940s. Since then, Dunkin’ has become a globally-recognized brand. Dunkin’ has since grown substantially and opened stores in 46 countries — yet, the company’s most-loyal customers remain in New England. In fact, there are 12,500 Dunkin’s worldwide (9,000 of which are in the U.S.) In terms of market penetration, Dunkin’ continues to tap into their large and loyal market by opening and maintaining that large portion of their stores in New England.

Check out the following map for example — Boston is a small city, and you can walk between almost all 10 of these Dunkin’ locations in just minutes.

Image Source

Dunkin’ knows where their customers are and that those customers want a Dunkin’ store every… well, city block.

Not only has Dunkin’ successfully penetrated their market by opening and maintaining so many stores in New England, but they’ve also increased market penetration by making specific changes to their branding and menu.

Most notably, they changed their name from Dunkin’ Donuts to Dunkin’. The company does 60% of their business in coffee and other drinks, so the “Donuts” aspect of their original name was arguably a bit misleading. The CEO of Dunkin’ said this move was important because the new name, “… speaks to the breadth of our offerings.”

The brand name change also gives a signal to customers that there are a number of other menu items available, aside from donuts. In fact, the name change was paired with many menu additions, including healthier options as well as offerings for non-dairy and vegan customers including their Beyond Sausage and almond milk.

All of these changes broadened Dunkin’s customer base and target audience by accommodating more people within the market they were already penetrating.

Invest in Market Penetration to Grow Better

We just covered several reasons why market penetration is so beneficial to your business’s long-term success. And as you’ve learned throughout this blog post, it’s a highly effective growth strategy that’s typically low-risk.

There are many market penetration strategies to choose from, plan, and implement at your company, so pick the best option for your goals and get started.

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

Online sales are reaching all-time highs as buyers become more comfortable with digital transactions — in 2021, for example, consumers spent a collective $14 billion online across Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

For businesses, the shift to online-first purchasing offers substantive potential, but also underpins prospective problems: As the number of digital product offerings ramps up, competition for customer conversions is also on the rise.

The result? A battlefield for brand experience. If companies can create a lasting positive impression among potential customers, they can drive sales and set the stage for long-term loyalty. But what exactly is brand experience? What does effective design require and what does it look like in practice? Most importantly, how do brands create experience strategies that deliver reliable results over time?

While brand experience is similar to user experience, it encompasses a broader perception of your brand at large. Where user experience speaks to the takeaways — positive or negative — of a user when they interact with your website or social media profiles, brand experience refers to the impression of your brand as a whole. Not surprisingly, positive user experiences inform better brand experiences (and vice versa) but the two are distinct concepts.

It’s also important to understand that brand experience is subjective. While it’s possible to create experiences that produce reactions along a generalized spectrum, individual users will have different reactions to your efforts. In practice, this means that no matter how carefully you curate brand experience efforts, there will always be customers who come away with a negative reaction. As a result, the goal isn’t to create a universal experience but rather to create one that resonates positively with the largest number of target customers.

Breaking Down Brand Experience Design

Just 39% of business decision-makers say their brand effectively resonates with prospective buyers. This is a problem: If customers don’t connect your brand with positive thoughts, feelings, and reactions, they’re less likely to remember your products and services when it comes time to make a purchase.

Worth noting? Neutrality isn’t enough. While negative impressions of your brand can drive customers away from your site, neutral impressions are just as problematic — even if consumers see your brand listed in search engine results or advertised online, the absence of a positive brand impression means they won’t seek you out over companies that offer better connective messaging.

So what does effective brand experience design look like? Four components are critical:

Perception

Perception forms a key part of the experience. This includes audio, visual, and tactical interactions that allow customers to connect a specific sense to advertising campaigns. In much the same way that particular smells can bring back memories of childhood experiences, brands that successfully merge senses with marketing can create connections that drive sales.

Participation

It’s also more likely that customers will walk away with a positive brand experience if they’re able to participate in some way rather than simply watch. This might include the ability to submit suggestions online or interact in real-time online question forums, or it could feature the use of physical installations that allow consumers to touch your product or provide direct feedback.

Personalization

Generic marketing campaigns can produce steady returns, but personalization can help encourage connection across different customer segments. By leveraging both user-provided data (with their consent) along with social media interactions and other engagement data, it’s possible to create more personalized efforts that help create connections between consumer needs and current product offerings.

Prioritization

Brand experience can’t be all things to all people. Attempts to capture every consumer in every circumstance actually undermine experience-driven efforts — as a result, it’s worth selecting specific brand metrics such as positive social mentions or repeat purchases to prioritize.

Creating a Brand Experience Strategy

So how do you build an effective brand experience strategy?

First up is identifying areas where your current experience isn’t meeting customer expectations. Social media interactions and customer service calls can help pinpoint potential problems — if consistent concerns around brand interaction or reaction arise, this can help frame the foundation of brand experience strategy.

Next is targeting an area for improvement. While there may be more than one aspect of brand experience that could use a refresh or redesign, attempting to do everything at once can spread strategy efforts too thin and deliver less-than-ideal results. For example, you might choose to increase positive social mentions across specific channels such as Facebook or Instagram. While the eventual goal could be a larger social impact from initial contact to eventual conversion, easily-accessible social platforms provide an ideal starting point.

Effective measurement follows to ensure efforts are bearing fruit. In the case of our social media example above, this means tracking user views, reactions, and responses to social media posts along with the sentiment — positive, negative, or neutral — that goes along with them. This is also the time to explore and innovate by testing multiple strategies to see which one sticks. From video campaigns to personalized storytelling to marketing efforts all designed to elicit specific emotions, it’s worth finding that resonates with your customer base and then fine-tuning your efforts to deliver ideal outcomes.

It’s one thing to talk about brand experience building, but it’s another to see it in action. Here’s a look at five brand experiences efforts that offer effective in-practice examples.

1. Red Bull

In 2012, the company went all-in on its tagline “Red Bull gives you wings by sending skydiver Alex Baumgartner 24 miles above the Earth’s surface to pull off the highest skydive ever recorded and become the first person to break the sound barrier during freefall.

While his record was broken two years later by an executive from Google, it doesn’t change the fact that Red Bull did something no one had ever done before and created a unique brand experience that aligned with its core marketing message.

2. Lean Cuisine

While healthy eating has taken off in recent years, messaging around this effort is often the opposite. With a focus on weight loss instead of overall health, many brands find themselves reinforcing harmful stereotypes that equate weight loss with personal worth.

Lean Cuisine’s #WeighThis campaign looked to change the narrative by placing “scales” around New York’s Grand Central Station that encouraged women to “weigh in”.

The catch? These scales were actually boards that let women write down how they would prefer to be measured — such as by their own persistence, accomplishments or efforts.

Even better? Lean Cuisine marketers were smart enough to stay out of the way. There were no samples on offer, no surveys to fill out; women simply saw the scales and interacted with them, in turn boosting Lean Cuisine’s overall brand experience.

3. Dove

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty took a similar approach to Lean Cuisine but opted for the use of viral video that highlighted beauty of all types — beauty that goes beyond photoshoots and photoshop. The campaign earned praise for both its authenticity and efforts to help boost self-esteem among young girls.

By choosing emotional experience over a simple sales effort, Dove was able to better connect with its target customer base and boost overall customer loyalty.

4. Cadbury India

Cadbury India opted for consumer suggestions in creating their new chocolate bar flavor. Customers were encouraged to visit the company’s dedicated chocolate bar platform that let them select ingredients and create a recipe. Cadbury then tried all suggested recipes and selected the best of those submitted.

By prioritizing interaction over simple reaction, Cadbury facilitated consumer connection and encouraged customers to view chocolate bar making as a collaborative effort rather than a corporate endeavor, in turn creating a community-based brand experience.

5. WestJet

Canadian commercial airline WestJet has been running its “Christmas Miracle” campaign since 2013. It’s 2021 version sees the company asking people what they miss the most during the holidays — not surprisingly, many mention absent family members. WestJet staff then provide plane tickets to help loved ones reconnect, and the end of the video features a tearful reunion in progress.

Overall, it’s a feel-good experience designed to bring out emotions already close to the surface for many customers and in turn, boost the overall brand experience.

Building a Better Brand Experience

The right brand experience makes all the difference when it comes to cultivating long-term customer relationships. By understanding where current efforts don’t deliver, prioritizing areas for improvement and tracking engagement metrics over time, it’s possible to build a brand experience that boosts customer connection and encourages long-term loyalty.

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

With how accessible the internet is today, would you believe me if I told you the number of people who go online every day is still increasing?

It is. In fact, “constant” internet usage among adults increased by 5% in just the last three years, according to Pew Research. And although we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed along with it — meaning offline marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.

Enter digital marketing — in other words, any form of marketing that exists online.

At HubSpot, we talk a lot about inbound marketing as a really effective way to attract, engage, and delight customers online. But we still get a lot of questions from people all around the world about digital marketing. So, we decided to answer them. Click the links below to jump to each question, or keep reading to see how digital marketing is carried out today.

• What is digital marketing?
• Why is digital marketing important?
• Types of Digital Marketing
• What does a digital marketer do?
• Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which is it?
• Does digital marketing work for all businesses?
• How to Do Digital Marketing
• Digital Marketing Examples

So, how do you define digital marketing today?

A seasoned inbound marketer might say inbound marketing and digital marketing are virtually the same thing, but there are some minor differences. And conversations with marketers and business owners in the U.S., U.K., Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, I’ve learned a lot about how those small differences are being observed across the world.

How does a business define digital marketing?

At this stage, digital marketing is vital for your business and brand awareness. It seems like every other brand has a website. And if they don’t, they at least have a social media presence or digital ad strategy. Digital content and marketing is so common that consumers now expect and rely on it as a way to learn about brands. Because digital marketing has so many options and strategies associated with it, you can get creative and experiment with a variety of marketing tactics on a budget.

Digital marketing is defined by the use of numerous digital tactics and channels to connect with customers where they spend much of their time: online. The best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each digital marketing campaign supports their overarching goals. And depending on the goals of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a larger campaign through the free and paid channels at their disposal.

A content marketer, for example, can create a series of blog posts that generate leads from a new ebook the business recently created. The company’s social media marketer might then help promote these blog posts through paid and organic posts on the business’s social media accounts. Perhaps the email marketer creates an email campaign to send those who download the ebook more information on the company. We’ll talk more about these specific digital marketers in a minute.

There are a few major benefits of digital marketing: 

1. You can focus your efforts on only the prospects most likely to purchase your product or service.

2. It’s more cost-effective than outbound marketing methods.

3. Digital marketing evens the playing field within your industry and allows you to compete with bigger brands.

4. Digital marketing is measurable.

5. It’s easier to adapt and change a digital marketing strategy.

6. Digital marketing can improve your conversion rate and the quality of your leads.

7. You can engage audiences at every stage with digital marketing.

Let’s dive into them now.

1. You can focus your efforts on only the prospects most likely to purchase your product or service.

If you place an advertisement on TV, in a magazine, or on a billboard, you have limited control over who sees the ad. Of course, you can measure certain demographics — including the magazine’s typical readership, or the demographic of a certain neighborhood — but it’s still largely a shot in the dark.

Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows you to identify and target a highly-specific audience, and send that audience personalized, high-converting marketing messages.

For instance, you might take advantage of social media’s targeting features to show social media ads to a certain audience based on variables such as age, gender, location, interests, networks, or behaviors. Alternatively, you might use PPC or SEO strategies to serve ads to users who’ve shown interest in your product or service, or who’ve searched for specific keywords that relate to your industry.

Ultimately, digital marketing enables you to conduct the research necessary to identify your buyer persona, and lets you refine your marketing strategy over time to ensure you’re reaching prospects most likely to buy. Best of all, digital marketing helps you market to sub-groups within your larger target audience. If you sell multiple products or services to different buyer personas, this is especially helpful.

2. It’s more cost-effective than outbound marketing methods.

Digital marketing enables you to track campaigns on a daily basis and decrease the amount of money you’re spending on a certain channel if it isn’t demonstrating high ROI. The same can’t be said for traditional forms of advertising. It doesn’t matter how your billboard performs — it still costs the same, whether or not it converts for you.

Plus, with digital marketing, you have complete control over where you choose to spend your money. Perhaps rather than paying for PPC campaigns, you choose to spend money on design software to create high-converting Instagram content. A digital marketing strategy allows you to continuously pivot, ensuring you’re never wasting money on channels that don’t perform well.

By and large, digital marketing is a more cost-effective solution, and provides you unique opportunities to ensure you’re getting the most bang for your buck.

For instance, if you work for a small business with a limited budget, you might try investing in social media, blogging, or SEO – three strategies that can give you high ROI even with minimal spend.

3. Digital marketing evens the playing field within your industry and allows you to compete with bigger brands.

If you work for a small business, it’s likely difficult for you to compete with the major brands in your industry, many of which have millions of dollars to invest in television commercials or nationwide campaigns. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to outrank the big players through strategic digital marketing initiatives.

For instance, you might identify certain long-tail keywords that relate to your product or service, and create high-quality content to help you rank on search engines for those keywords. Search engines don’t care which brand is biggest — instead, search engines will prioritize content that resonates best with the target audience.

4. Digital marketing is measurable.

Digital marketing can give you a comprehensive, start-to-finish view of all the metrics that might matter to your company — including impressions, shares, views, clicks, and time on page. This is one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing. While traditional advertising can be useful for certain goals, its biggest limitation is measurability.

Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you’ve ever put an advertisement in a newspaper, you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There’s no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.

On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.

Here are some examples:

Website Traffic

With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your website’s homepage in real time by using digital analytics software, available in marketing platforms like HubSpot.

You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.

This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage.

With offline marketing, it’s very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people’s behavior before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.

Content Performance and Lead Generation

Imagine you’ve created a product brochure and posted it through people’s letterboxes — that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash.

Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it’s hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you’re also generating qualified leads when people download it.

Attribution Modeling

An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all of your sales back to a customer’s first digital touchpoint with your business.

We call this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to make more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention, and what parts of your sales cycle need refining.

Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important — according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer’s journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it’s likely to reflect positively on your business’s bottom line.

5. It’s easier to adapt and change a digital marketing strategy.

A lot of work goes into developing a marketing strategy. Generally, you will follow through with that strategy until completion, allow it to take effect, and then judge its results. However, things do not always go according to plan. You may realize halfway through that a calculation was off, an assumption was incorrect, or an audience did not react how they were expected to. Being able to pivot or adjust the strategy along the way is highly beneficial because it prevents you from having to start over completely.

Being able to change your strategy easily is a great benefit of digital marketing. Adapting a digital marketing strategy is a lot easier than other more traditional forms of marketing, like mailers or billboard advertising. For instance, if an online ad isn’t delivering as expected, you can quickly adjust it or pause it to yield better results.

6. Digital marketing can improve your conversion rate and the quality of your leads.

As digital marketing makes it simpler to measure your marketing efforts, this makes improving your conversion rate simpler as well. Being able to measure the effectiveness of each tactic helps you develop better strategies. Continuously refining your methods improves your conversion rate. Investing in online marketing ensures that everything is optimized for the highest amount of conversions.

Additionally, all leads do not offer the same value for your business. Digital marketing provides an opportunity for you to target a specific audience that will yield higher quality leads that are more likely to become customers. Connecting your business with the most valuable leads will directly improve your conversion rate.

7. You can engage audiences at every stage with digital marketing.

It’s essential to begin engaging your audience as early as possible. Making a connection at the first stage of the buyer’s journey helps push the lead through the customer funnel. Using digital marketing allows you to accomplish that from start to finish and at every point in between.

Online channels allow you to follow the entire buying journey of your customers. Understanding and analyzing how customers are moving and operating is important for converting leads. Digital marketing allows you to track them through that process. And, even if they don’t convert in the early stages, it at least helps ensure they have made a connection with your business.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most common digital marketing tactics and the channels involved in each one.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is the process of optimizing your website to “rank” higher in search engine results pages, thereby increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic your website receives. The channels that benefit from SEO include websites, blogs, and infographics.

There are a number of ways to approach SEO in order to generate qualified traffic to your website. These include:

• On page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the content that exists “on the page” when looking at a website. By researching keywords for their search volume and intent (or meaning), you can answer questions for readers and rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) those questions produce.
• Off page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the activity that takes place “off the page” when looking to optimize your website. “What activity not on my own website could affect my ranking?” You might ask. The answer is inbound links, also known as backlinks. The number of publishers that link to you, and the relative “authority” of those publishers, affect how highly you rank for the keywords you care about. By networking with other publishers, writing guest posts on these websites (and linking back to your website), and generating external attention, you can earn the backlinks you need to move your website up on all the right SERPs.
• Technical SEO: This type of SEO focuses on the backend of your website, and how your pages are coded. Image compression, structured data, and CSS file optimization are all forms of technical SEO that can increase your website’s loading speed — an important ranking factor in the eyes of search engines like Google.

For a real-life example on how to successfully implement SEO into your digital marketing strategy, check out our case study on Canva here:

2. Content Marketing

This term denotes the creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers.

Want to learn and apply content marketing to your business? Check out HubSpot Academy’s free content marketing training resource page.

The channels that can play a part in your content marketing strategy include:

• Blog posts: Writing and publishing articles on a company blog helps you demonstrate your industry expertise and generates organic search traffic for your business. This ultimately gives you more opportunities to convert website visitors into leads for your sales team.
• Ebooks and whitepapers: Ebooks, whitepapers, and similar long-form content helps further educate website visitors. It also allows you to exchange content for a reader’s contact information, generating leads for your company and moving people through the buyer’s journey.
• Infographics: Sometimes, readers want you to show, not tell. Infographics are a form of visual content that helps website visitors visualize a concept you want to help them learn.
• Audio or visual content: Television and radio are popular channels for digital marketing. Creating content that can be shared online as a video or heard on the radio by listeners can greatly broaden your potential audience.

Stumped? Download 150+ content creation templates by clicking below: 

3. Social Media Marketing

This practice promotes your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business.

If you’re new to social platforms, you can use tools like HubSpot to connect channels like LinkedIn and Facebook in one place. This way, you can easily schedule content for multiple channels at once, and monitor analytics from the platform as well.

On top of connecting social accounts for posting purposes, you can also integrate your social media inboxes into HubSpot, so you can get your direct messages in one place.

The channels you can use in social media marketing include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Snapchat
• Pinterest

Many marketers will use these social media platforms to create a viral campaign. Partnering with a popular content creator or taking part in a trend that’s currently resonating with a wide audience is a strategy of viral marketing. The purpose is to create something shareworthy in the hopes that it will organically spread across a social media channel.

Don’t know how to get started with social media marketing? Download our free social media content calendar to get your social strategy up and running.

4. Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google Ads, which allows you to pay for top slots on Google’s search engine results pages at a price “per click” of the links you place. Other channels where you can use PPC include:

• Paid ads on Facebook: Here, users can pay to customize a video, image post, or slideshow, which Facebook will publish to the news feeds of people who match your business’s audience.
• Twitter Ads campaigns: Here, users can pay to place a series of posts or profile badges to the news feeds of a specific audience, all dedicated to accomplish a specific goal for your business. This goal can be website traffic, more Twitter followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads.
• Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: Here, users can pay to send messages directly to specific LinkedIn users based on their industry and background.

PPC can be hard to grasp at first, so we’ve created a beginner-friendly guide to get you started. Download it below: 

5. Affiliate Marketing

This is a type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website. Affiliate marketing channels include:

• Hosting video ads through the YouTube Partner Program.
• Posting affiliate links from your social media accounts.

This is part of the relatively new wave of
influencer marketing. Creating a campaign with the use of influencers can be a highly effective form of affiliate marketing. Finding the right content creators can take your digital campaign to the next level.

6. Native Advertising

Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. BuzzFeed-sponsored posts are a good example, but many people also consider social media advertising to be “native” — Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising, for example.

7. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to the software that serves to automate your basic marketing operations. Many marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks they would otherwise do manually, such as:

• Email newsletters: Email automation doesn’t just allow you to automatically send emails to your subscribers. It can also help you shrink and expand your contact list as needed so your newsletters are only going to the people who want to see them in their inboxes.
• Social media post scheduling: If you want to grow your organization’s presence on a social network, you need to post frequently. This makes manual posting a bit of an unruly process. Social media scheduling tools push your content to your social media channels for you, so you can spend more time focusing on content strategy.
• Lead-nurturing workflows: Generating leads, and converting those leads into customers, can be a long process.You can automate that process by sending leads specific emails and content once they fit certain criteria, such as when they download and open an ebook.
• Campaign tracking and reporting:Marketing campaigns can include a ton of different people, emails, content, webpages, phone calls, and more. Marketing automation can help you sort everything you work on by the campaign it’s serving, and then track the performance of that campaign based on the progress all of these components make over time.

8. Email Marketing

Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people toward the business’s website. The types of emails you might send in an email marketing campaign include:

• Blog subscription newsletters.
• Follow-up emails to website visitors who downloaded something.
• Customer welcome emails.
• Holiday promotions to loyalty program members.
• Tips or similar series emails for customer nurturing.

Learn more about email marketing with our free guide: 

9. Online PR

Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It’s much like traditional PR, but in the online space. The channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:

• Reporter outreach via social media: Talking to journalists on Twitter, for example, is a great way to develop a relationship with the press that produces earned media opportunities for your company.
• Engaging online reviews of your company: When someone reviews your company online, whether that review is good or bad, your instinct might be not to touch it. On the contrary, engaging company reviews helps you humanize your brand and deliver powerful messaging that protects your reputation.
• Engaging comments on your personal website or blog: Similar to the way you’d respond to reviews of your company, responding to the people who are reading your content is the best way to generate productive conversation around your industry.

If you don’t have a dedicated PR team, it can be hard to get started. Luckily, we’ve got you covered. Download our free PR kit below: 

10. Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing refers to a marketing methodology wherein you attract, engage, and delight customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. You can use every digital marketing tactic listed above, throughout an inbound marketing strategy, to create a customer experience that works with the customer, not against them. Here are some classic examples of inbound marketing versus traditional marketing:

• Blogging vs. pop-up ads
• Video marketing vs. commercial advertising
• Email contact lists vs. email spam

11. Sponsored Content

With sponsored content, you as a brand pay another company or entity to create and promote content that discusses your brand or service in some way.

One popular type of sponsored content is influencer marketing. With this type of sponsored content, a brand sponsors an influencer in its industry to publish posts or videos related to the company on social media.

Another type of sponsored content could be a blog post or article that is written to highlight a topic, service, or brand.

12. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

When a potential lead is searching for a product or business that is related to yours, it’s a great opportunity for a promotion. Paid advertising and SEO are two great strategies for promoting your business to capitalize on those future leads. Search engine marketing is another way to increase website traffic by placing paid ads on search engines. The two most popular SEM services are Bing Ads and Google Ads. These paid ads fit seamlessly on the top of search engine results pages, giving instant visibility. This is also an example of effective native advertising.

13. Instant Messaging Marketing

Marketing your products through messaging platforms is a fast way to reach potential leads, even for those who haven’t offered up their cell phone number. It’s a simple way to let your audience know about flash sales, new products, or updates about their orders. If your customers have questions or need more information, it’s also a convenient way for them to connect to customer service. You can choose to send messages directly to a mobile phone by text or through messages on platforms like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

The digital marketer usually focuses on a different key performance indicator (KPI) for each channel so they can properly measure the company’s performance across each one. A digital marketer who’s in charge of SEO, for example, measures their website’s “organic traffic.” In small companies, one generalist might own many of the digital marketing tactics described above at the same time. In larger companies, these tactics have multiple specialists that each focus on just one or two of the brand’s digital channels.

Here are some examples of these specialists:

SEO Manager

Main KPIs: Organic traffic

In short, SEO managers get the business to rank on Google. Using a variety of approaches to search engine optimization, this person might work directly with content creators to ensure the content they produce performs well on Google — even if the company also posts this content on social media.

Content Marketing Specialist

Main KPIs: Time on page, overall blog traffic, YouTube channel subscribers

Content marketing specialists are the digital content creators. They frequently keep track of the company’s blogging calendar, and come up with a content strategy that includes video as well. These professionals often work with people in other departments to ensure the products and campaigns the business launches are supported with promotional content on each digital channel.

Social Media Manager

Main KPIs: Follows, Impressions, Shares

The role of a social media manager is easy to infer from the title, but which social networks they manage for the company depends on the industry. Above all, social media managers establish a posting schedule for the company’s written and visual content. This employee might also work with the content marketing specialist to develop a strategy for which content to post on which social network.

(Note: Per the KPIs above, “impressions” refers to the number of times a business’s posts appear on the newsfeed of a user.)

Marketing Automation Coordinator

Main KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through rate, lead-generation (conversion) rate

The marketing automation coordinator helps choose and manage the software that allows the whole marketing team to understand their customers’ behavior and measure the growth of their business. Because many of the marketing operations described above might be executed separately from one another, it’s important for there to be someone who can group these digital activities into individual campaigns and track each campaign’s performance.

Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which Is It?

Inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, engage, and delight customers online. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply an umbrella term to describe online marketing tactics of any kind, regardless of whether they’re considered inbound or outbound.

Digital marketing is often compared to inbound marketing, but it doesn’t differentiate between ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ methods. It’s more of an umbrella term for all marketing that involves digital communication, while inbound marketing is more of a strategy.

Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message in front of as many people as possible in the online space — regardless of whether it’s relevant or welcomed. For example, the garish banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren’t necessarily ready to receive it.

On the other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their target customers onto their websites by providing assets that are helpful to them. One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for.

Does digital marketing work for all businesses?

Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. Regardless of what your company sells, digital marketing still involves building out buyer personas to identify your audience’s needs, and creating valuable online content. However, that’s not to say all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way.

B2B Digital Marketing

If your company is business-to-business (B2B), your digital marketing efforts are likely to be centered around online lead generation, with the end goal being for someone to speak to a salesperson. For that reason, the role of your marketing strategy is to attract and convert the highest quality leads for your salespeople via your website and supporting digital channels.

Beyond your website, you’ll probably choose to focus your efforts on business-focused channels like LinkedIn where your demographic is spending their time online.

B2C Digital Marketing

If your company is business-to-consumer (B2C), depending on the price point of your products, it’s likely that the goal of your digital marketing efforts is to attract people to your website and have them become customers without ever needing to speak to a salesperson.

For that reason, you’re probably less likely to focus on ‘leads’ in their traditional sense, and more likely to focus on building an accelerated buyer’s journey, from the moment someone lands on your website, to the moment that they make a purchase. This will often mean your product features in your content higher up in the marketing funnel than it might for a B2B business, and you might need to use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).

For B2C companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can often be more valuable than business-focused platforms like LinkedIn.

What types of digital content should I create?

The kind of content you create depends on your audience’s needs at different stages in the buyer’s journey. You should start by creating buyer personas (use these free templates, or try makemypersona.com) to identify what your audience’s goals and challenges are in relation to your business. On a basic level, your online content should aim to help them meet these goals, and overcome their challenges.

Then, you’ll need to think about when they’re most likely to be ready to consume this content in relation to what stage they’re at in their buyer’s journey. We call this content mapping.

With content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:

1. The characteristics of the person who will be consuming it (that’s where buyer personas come in).
2. How close that person is to making a purchase (i.e., their lifecycle stage).

In terms of the format of your content, there are a lot of different things to try. Here are some options we’d recommend using at each stage of the buyer’s journey:

Awareness Stage

• Blog posts. Great for increasing your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy.
• Infographics. Very shareable, meaning they increase your chances of being found via social media when others share your content. (Check out these free infographic templates to get you started.)
• Short videos. Again, these are very shareable and can help your brand get found by new audiences by hosting them on platforms like YouTube.

Consideration Stage

• Ebooks. Great for lead generation as they’re generally more comprehensive than a blog post or infographic, meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact information to receive it.
• Research reports. Again, this is a high value content piece which is great for lead generation. Research reports and new data for your industry can also work for the awareness stage though, as they’re often picked-up by the media or industry press.
• Webinars. As they’re a more detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or short video.

Decision Stage

• Case studies. Having detailed case studies on your website can be an effective form of content for those who are ready to make a purchasing decision, as it helps you positively influence their decision.
• Testimonials. If case studies aren’t a good fit for your business, having short testimonials around your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think of testimonials a little more loosely. If you’re a clothing brand, these might take the form of photos of how other people styled a shirt or dress, pulled from a branded hashtag where people can contribute.

1. Define your goals.

When you’re first getting started with digital marketing, it’s critical you start by identifying and defining your goals, since you’ll craft your strategy differently depending on those goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might want to pay more attention to reaching new audiences via social media.

Alternatively, perhaps you want to increase sales on a specific product — if that’s the case, it’s more important you focus on SEO and optimizing content to get potential buyers on your website in the first place. Additionally, if sales is your goal, you might test out PPC campaigns to drive traffic through paid ads.

Whatever the case, it’s easiest to shape a digital marketing strategy after you’ve determined your company’s biggest goals.

2. Identify your target audience.

We’ve mentioned this before, but one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is the opportunity to target specific audiences – however, you can’t take advantage of that benefit if you haven’t first identified your target audience.

Of course, it’s important to note, your target audience might vary depending on the channel or goal(s) you have for a specific product or campaign.

For instance, perhaps you’ve noticed most of your Instagram audience is younger and prefers funny memes and quick videos — but your LinkedIn audience tends to be older professionals who are looking for more tactical advice. You’ll want to vary your content to appeal to these different target audiences.

If you’re starting from scratch, feel free to take a look at How to Find Your Target Audience.

3. Establish a budget for each digital channel.

As with anything, the budget you determine really depends on what elements of digital marketing you’re looking to add to your strategy.

If you’re focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation for a preexisting website, the good news is you don’t need very much budget at all. With inbound marketing, the main focus is on creating high quality content that your audience will want to consume, which unless you’re planning to outsource the work, the only investment you’ll need is your time.

You can get started by hosting a website and creating content using HubSpot’s CMS. For those on a tight budget, you can get started using WordPress hosted on WP Engine, using a simple them from StudioPress, and building your site without code using the Elementor Website Builder for WordPress.

With outbound techniques like online advertising and purchasing email lists, there is undoubtedly some expense. What it costs comes down to what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the advertising.

For example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you’ll bid against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google’s search results for keywords associated with your business. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely expensive, which is why it’s a good idea to focus building your organic reach, too.

4. Strike a good balance between paid and free digital strategies.

A digital marketing strategy likely needs both paid and free aspects to truly be effective.

For instance, if you spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to identify the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, then you’re likely to see strong results within the first six months despite minimal ad spend.

However, if paid advertising is part of your digital strategy, then the results might come even quicker.

Ultimately, it’s recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free’) reach using content, SEO, and social media for more long-term, sustainable success.

When in doubt, try both, and iterate on your process as you learn which channels — paid or free – perform best for your brand.

5. Create engaging content.

Once you know your audience and you have a budget, it’s time to start creating content for the various channels you’re going to use. This content can be social media posts, blog posts, PPC ads, sponsored content, email marketing newsletters, and more.

Of course, any content you create should be interesting and engaging to your audience because the point of marketing content is to increase brand awareness and improve lead generation.

6. Optimize your digital assets for mobile.

Another key component of digital marketing is mobile marketing. In fact, smartphone usage as a whole accounts for 69% of time spent consuming digital media in the U.S., while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up less than half — and the U.S. still isn’t mobile’s biggest fan compared to other countries.

This means it’s essential to optimize your digital ads, web pages, social media images, and other digital assets for mobile devices. If your company has a mobile app that enables users to engage with your brand or shop your products, your app falls under the digital marketing umbrella, too.

Those engaging with your company online via mobile devices need to have the same positive experience as they would on desktop. This means implementing a mobile-friendly or responsive website design to make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices. It might also mean reducing the length of your lead generation forms to create a hassle-free experience for people downloading your content on-the-go. As for your social media images, it’s important to always have a mobile user in mind when creating them, as image dimensions are smaller on mobile devices and text can be cut-off.

There are lots of ways you can optimize your digital marketing assets for mobile users, and when implementing any digital marketing strategy, it’s hugely important to consider how the experience will translate on mobile devices. By ensuring this is always front-of-mind, you’ll be creating digital experiences that work for your audience, and consequently achieve the results you’re hoping for.

7. Conduct keyword research.

Digital marketing is all about reaching targeted audiences through personalized content — all of which can’t happen without effective keyword research.

Conducting keyword research is critical for optimizing your website and content for SEO and ensuring people can find your business through search engines. Additionally, social media keyword research can be helpful for marketing your products or services on various social channels, as well.

Even if you don’t have a full-time SEO strategist, you’ll still want to conduct keyword research. Try creating a list of high-performing keywords that relate to your products or services, and consider long-tail variations for added opportunities.

8. Iterate based on the analytics you measure.

Finally, to create an effective digital marketing strategy for the long-term, it’s vital your team learn how to pivot based on analytics.

For instance, perhaps after a couple of months you find your audience isn’t as interested in your content on Instagram anymore — but they love what you’re creating on Twitter. Sure, this might be an opportunity to re-examine your Instagram strategy as a whole, but it might also be a sign that your audience prefers a different channel to consume branded content.

Alternatively, perhaps you find an older web page isn’t getting the traffic it used to. You might consider updating the page or getting rid of it entirely to ensure visitors are finding the freshest, most relevant content for their needs.

Digital marketing provides businesses with incredibly flexible opportunities for continuous growth — but it’s up to you to take advantage of them.

I’m ready to try digital marketing. Now what?

If you’re already doing digital marketing, it’s likely that you’re at least reaching some segments of your audience online. No doubt you can think of some areas of your strategy that could use a little improvement, though.

That’s why we created a step-by-step guide to help you build a digital marketing strategy that’s truly effective, whether you’re a complete beginner or have a little more experience.

Next, let’s look at some examples of digital marketing that will be sure to inspire you.

1. Lego’s Rebuild the World Campaign

Image Source

This is a great example of a digital marketing campaign because it says something about the brand. In this campaign, Lego takes a stance on important global issues as a way to connect with its audience.

In this day and age, it’s becoming increasingly important for companies to discuss global issues and show alignment with their customers in that way. The major play with this campaign is to help share the brand’s story and messaging.

Given that 89% of customers shop from brands that share their values, this was a good move for the toy brand.

2. Dove’s Reverse Selfie Campaign

Image Source

As we continue to learn how social media is affecting children, especially young girls, Dove decided to send a message. The Reverse Selfie campaign shows the reverse of what a teen girl did to prepare for a selfie and photoshop the picture. The purpose is to increase awareness of how social media can negatively impact self-esteem.

This is an excellent example of what marketing content can look like when you know your audience intimately. By knowing its audience of real women, many of them parents, Dove was able to bring light to an often overlooked consequence of the growth of social media.

3. Jennifer Lopez’s #InTheMorningChallenge

Image Source

In this social media campaign, Jennifer Lopez created a dance challenge to promote her new song. With this challenge, fans would do the same dance in their pajamas and in dress up clothes.

This was a successful social media campaign as the video had over 13 million views and over 5,000 posts.

Using social media is a great way to engage your audience and get them to participate with your brand one on one.

4. Always’ #DayoftheGirl Campaign

Image Source

This is another digital campaign that focuses on emotional marketing. With this campaign, Always asked their own employees what tips they would give to girls. The women offer their valuable insight in a way meant to inspire everyone for International Day of the Girl, an international holiday that occurs annually in October.

Again, this isn’t a campaign where the product is mentioned much, but that isn’t the point. The point of this digital campaign was to inspire its audience. With that message, they could reach even more people, increase brand awareness, and show their audience that the brand aligns with their values.

Integrate Digital Marketing Into Your Strategy

Any opportunity where you can connect to your audience is an opportunity to convert a lead or acquire a customer. Digital marketing creates so many more of those opportunities by allowing you to reach prospective buyers through a wide variety of channels. Whether it’s social media platforms, websites, text messages, or any online medium, it’s an invaluable way to promote your business, service, or product.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in September 2019, but was updated for comprehensiveness.

Most jobs require specific skills to succeed, like knowing how to use social media scheduling tools if you’re going to work as a content creator.

However, most jobs require skills that aren’t always listed on a job application because you’re expected to have them no matter what, like communicating with your coworkers.

These skills, often called employability skills, are critical even if they’re not listed on a job application. Let’s go over what they are, how they apply to day-to-day activities, and how to improve upon them so you can succeed in every position you have.

 

As foundational skills, employability skills can be transferable to any position you hold, regardless of job type. For example, you need to communicate well regardless of your position level, whether you’re the C-Suite executive or newly-hired marketing intern.

Employability skills aren’t always listed as required skills on job applications because they are expected as a baseline, but employers and interviewers will still look for them during interviews and expect you to use them on the job.

Developing Employability Skills

You can develop employability skills without specific training through experiences at school, work, hobbies, and extracurricular activities. For example, you can develop public speaking skills from presentations given in class and collaboration skills from playing on a sports team in your free time.

Employability Skills Examples

Let’s go over some examples of employability skills.

• Communication: In all positions, you’ll need to communicate with your teammates and customers and be able to explain yourself clearly, both verbally and in writing.
• Collaboration: Employers want you to collaborate because teamwork is often a means by which a company can meet its goals. Collaboration also means being able to work well with others.
• Critical Thinking: This is your ability to analyze and understand the information in your workplace and act on it. This is a critical employability skill because you’ll always need to think logically about problems and situations that arise at work and come to a solution.
• Self-management: Employers want you to self-manage and meet deadlines and goals without significant guidance unless necessary. While there’s nothing wrong with asking for help, employers want to train you and have you be able to take on your everyday tasks.
• Adaptability: Adaptability is a critical employability skill because things can change quickly at work, and adjusting as necessary can be the difference between continuing business success or falling behind.
• Reliability: Employers want to know that they can trust you in all aspects of work, that you’re punctual and complete assignments, show up on time and that you can be consistent in your overall performance without strict guidance.
• Organization/Planning: Being organized and able to plan means you can adequately understand how to complete your assignments in a structured and timely manner. You can create schedules and stick to them to meet targets and deadlines.
• Leadership: Employers appreciate leadership skills because they want you to take charge when necessary, whether over your job performance or during team activities, or because you’re at a leadership level and manage other people.
• Willingness to learn: Being willing to learn is required for all jobs as you’re always expected to learn on the job, be open to learning on the job, and take on new tasks.
• Tech Savvy: A baseline ability to use technology in day-to-day job duties, anything from knowing how to send an email, conduct a query online, or use tools like Google Suite. Technological skills move out of essential employability skills when they are things like using different coding languages.

Improve Employability Skills

As mentioned above, employability skills aren’t taught. They come along with different experiences like working on a job and participating in hobbies. Working on improving your skills can typically be done in activities you may already be involved in. For example:

• If you want to improve your organization skills, you can organize events in your community.
• If you want to become a stronger leader, you can ask to shadow current leaders at your workplace to learn from their style or step up to the plate to lead new workplace activities.
• If you want to improve your technical skills, you can start leveraging different tools in your day-to-day life.
• If you want to be better at self-management, you can ask for more responsibility at work to help you learn about time management and organization.

When working to improve your employability skills, it may be helpful to plan out your progress in a checklist.

Employability Skills Checklist

An employability skills checklist will help you create an improvement plan to follow. You can select a specific skill you want to work on and outline the steps you’ll take to improve, a desired timeframe for the process, and resources that will help you get to your end goal.

Download This Template Here

Over To You

Developing employability skills isn’t a significant challenge, as we often develop them over time through life experiences. Use our checklist to take stock of the ones you have, and create plans to further develop those you think are lacking.

On social media platforms, the more exposure you can get, the better. Like many others, Instagram has a search and explore page to help users discover new content.

Most brands already leverage timeline posts and Stories to reach their core audience. However, not enough leverage all the opportunities these features offer.

Let’s dive into what those are and what you can gain from using them.

How Instagram’s Search and Explore Feature Works

To start, there are five main search categories on Instagram:

• Top – This includes top posts related to your search term, regardless of the type of post.
• Accounts – This lists the accounts that match your search term.
• Audio – This features songs and artists on the platform with the same name as your search term.
• Tags – This shows the hashtags related to your search term along with post volume.
• Places – This refers to the locations around the world that include your search term.

What’s interesting about the “Tags” tab is that it breaks down hashtag results even further in three categories: top, recent, and Reels.

You can also use Instagram’s search feature on the web app. However, it doesn’t have as much functionality. For instance, on the web app, you’ll only see results from the “Top” tab, unless you add the “@” or pound hashtag “#” to narrow down your results.

Now onto the Explore tab.

Similar to other social platforms, Instagram’s Explore tab works by showing you content based on the people you follow and the posts you’ve engaged with.

My Explore page is full of cat videos, food recipes, and natural hair care. Recently, I’ve been more interested in home decor, so that’s starting to feature more prominently on my Explore page.

The key difference between the Search and Explore features is that one is highly personalized whereas the other is not.

How to Get Featured in Instagram’s Search and Explore Posts

So, you want to expand your reach and get more engagement on your posts? Here are some steps you can take to help you meet those goals.

1. Add hashtags to your posts.

When you add a hashtag to your post, it allows users with similar interests to find your post more easily.

When adding hashtags, you want to use a mix of popular and niche tags. Why? Well, if you only use popular hashtags, your post may get lost in the hundreds of thousands of posts.

However, if you only use really niche hashtags, you may not expand your reach by much. As such, use a balance of both.

On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags in a post. While we don’t recommend using them all, focus on having a mix of five to 10 relevant hashtags, going from general to specific.

The best part is you don’t have to do any guesswork on which ones to use.

For instance, say you’re a coffee brand and post a cappuccino. Instagram already tells you how many posts are linked to this hashtag, making it easy to select the relevant ones.

Don’t forget that you can also add hashtags to your Stories by clicking on the emoji icon and selecting the hashtag feature.

As you type your keyword, relevant hashtags will appear. Pro-tip: To avoid ruining your Stories post with a ton of hashtags, you can do one of two things: Make them very small or use the color feature to identify a color in the image and use it to blend the hashtags into the image.

2. Add a location tag to your posts.

Another way to improve your search discoverability is to add a location tag to your post.

Start by clicking on the emoji on the top right corner.

Then, select the location feature in the list of options.

Type in your desired location. This can be a physical location like “Pasion Del Cielo Coffee” or a fictional one like “Coffee Time” that adds personality to the post.

The last step involves placing your clickable location tag somewhere on your Stories post.

3. Add relevant keywords to your Instagram profile.

If you want users to easily find you, make sure your profile reflects the terms they would use to find you. It could be in your username, page name, or bio – if it’s somewhere in there, users can find you.

For instance, if you’re a coffee shop located in Miami, Florida, your profile should include both “coffee” and “Miami” to help users find you.

4. Write descriptive captions.

Captions are another way for users to find you in search. That means that short, vague captions aren’t going to cut it.

Instead, opt for a descriptive caption that is relevant to the image you shared. That way, when users type in the search term, your post has a better chance of showing up.

5. Up your content quality.

When it comes to search, you want to be in the “Top” tab.

It shows the most popular posts, with the most engagement – likes, comments, and shares. The way creators get there is by having high-quality content that captures users’ attention.

And when we say, we’re not just talking about visual quality – although that’s very important too. The content itself should be interesting and resonate with your audience. You meet these two requirements and you have a good chance of outperforming similar posts.

How to Search on Instagram

Before we dive into the steps to search on Instagram, let’s cover the main reasons why you’d want to.

The first is to scope out influencers and potential partners. Say you want to work with an influencer for a campaign but haven’t yet identified someone.

With the search feature, you can search for influencers with content that align with your brand and industry. You can use hashtags and keywords to find them. They’re also likely to show up on your Explore page.

Another reason you may want to conduct a search is to learn more about your audience. Perhaps you want to put a face to your buyer persona – you could visit some users’ profiles to get a sense of who they are, their interests, and how they might connect with your brand.

Lastly, it’s valuable to learn how certain hashtags are used and if they align with the content you’ll be posting.

For instance, you might think the word “cappuccino” might generate only coffee-related content. However, many posts for this hashtag are about beauty products, from eyeshadows to lipsticks.

Knowing this, you can make sure you use the most accurate hashtags for your posts.

Instagram Hashtag Search

1. Start on your Explore tab and type your term in the search bar.

Pro-tip: If you want to go straight to the posts tied to that parent term, you can add the pound symbol directly in front of your keyword.

2. Navigate to the “Tags” tab and sift through the relevant hashtags to find the one you want.

3. Scroll through the Top, Recent, and Reels tabs related to your keyword.

Instagram Location Search

1. Start on your Explore tab and type your term in the search bar.

2. Navigate to the “Places” tab and sift through the list of related locations.

3. Scroll through the results.

Optimizing your Instagram for search will help your brand expand its reach and boost your social media performance.