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Every year, as soon as Halloween is behind us, it seems like the floodgates open. Without warning, there are holiday marketing campaigns everywhere, with countless businesses rushing to cash in on a spending frenzy. There are holiday emails, social media posts, and TV ads — oh, my.

It might seem like holiday marketing is out of control. But some brands do it very, very well.

How? Well, these brands create campaigns that actually delight customers instead of adding to holiday noise. They evoke emotions and promote sharing, sometimes even connecting people with their loved ones, or partnering with a charitable organization.

Great holiday marketing campaigns come in many different shapes and sizes. Check out our favorites below, and use these ideas to fuel your own holiday marketing ideas.

What To Expect This Holiday Season

Before we get into the examples, let’s talk about what this holiday season will bring for marketers.

A June 2021 survey by Google and Boston Consulting Group revealed that this year, online shopping will play an important role in consumers’ buying journeys.

In 2020, there was a sharp shift toward e-commerce due to the COVID-19 crisis. However, in 2021, over 80% of consumers are seeking out in-person shopping experiences.

With this new balance, brands have to create marketing campaigns that cater to the omnichannel shopper – building offline and online touchpoints.

When it comes to social media, Sprout Social estimates that retailers across all business sizes will receive about 18% more messages per month.

To prepare, brands should develop a strategy to account for the increase in communication, such as:

• Making FAQs readily available to your followers, whether it’s on your Instagram Highlights, pinned on your TikTok page, in your profile link tree.
• Having a system in place for social media managers to field requests and concerns.

The holiday season is also a perfect time to engage your audience through gifts. With Sendoso, you can nurture your audience with custom e-gifts, company swag, handwritten notes, and more. The platform automates prints, delivers, and fulfills orders for you so you can focus on the results.

Another great tool to nurture your customers in the holiday season is Rybbon. The digital rewards management system allows you to automate your rewards program with a user-friendly dashboard, advanced workflows, reporting tools, and more.

Now, let’s get to some examples of great holiday campaigns from recent years.

1. Apple: Make Someone’s Holiday

This commercial gives all the feels.

It starts out in a very relatable way, showing a family traveling during the holiday to visit family.

The magic of the commercial is that throughout their entire journey, the iPad seems to be the one thing helping to maintain the peace.

And just when you think that’s the point of the commercial, it takes a bittersweet turn as the product is used to create a gift for a loved one.

Why it works: Apple often creates feature-heavy commercials, highlighting function over all else. In this ad, they prioritize emotional appeal and use the product as a vehicle to tell the story.

2. Coca-Cola Canada: Give Something Only You Can Give

In a recent holiday commercial, Coca-Cola brings us the story of a dad doing everything possible to deliver his daughter’s letter to Santa.

The dad enjoys a Coke while deciding what to do with the letter. We can sense that he’s not sure whether he’ll get there in time.

We see him sail through a sea, hike through a forest, ride across a desert, and climb a snowy mountain as he searches for Santa. Finally, he gets there, but Santa’s closed for Christmas. Just when we think the situation’s hopeless, Santa saves the day by cruising in on a Coca-Cola-branded truck and taking the dad home.

His little girl’s wish? For him to be home for Christmas. (This ad will definitely make you cry.)

While we’re always tempted to give expensive gifts, the best thing that you can give to your loved ones is your presence and time.

This installment is just one of the latest in the Coca-Cola company’s legendary holiday marketing campaigns — I mean, who doesn’t love the annual debut of the Coke-drinking polar bears?

3. Microsoft: Find Your Joy

The year 2020 was difficult for many of us. We spent more time on Zoom than ever before, and we heavily relied on technology to distract us from the COVID-19 pandemic. But that doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t celebrate the holidays and make the most out of it with our loved ones and pets.

Microsoft’s holiday commercial takes a fun spin on this theme. The commercial begins with a puppy named Rufus. Rufus longs to play and approaches each member of the family, but everyone, from the mother to the grandpa, is enjoying a Microsoft product and doesn’t pay attention.

Rufus grabs his best bud, a puppy from next door. Together, they go on an imaginary adventure involving the games and activities their humans had been enjoying. The ad not only showcases Microsoft’s offerings, but reminds us to cherish our loved ones (and to pay attention to our pets!).

4. Macy’s: In Dad’s Shoes

Macy’s campaign offers a new spin on what might be considered an overdone gift: socks.

“In Dad’s Shoes” takes a little girl through a “Freaky Friday“-like adventure, where she finds herself literally walking in her dad’s shoes for a day. Even though we see her as the daughter, everyone else, from neighbors to passerby, greets her as if she’s her dad.

Throughout the ad, she realizes how much work her dad does and how many places he frequents throughout the course of the day. He spends a lot of time walking. That’s how she gets an idea for what she’ll get him: socks. We all know that you can’t get anywhere without a good pair of socks.

We love that Macy’s showcases a simple gift borne out of empathy. This ad tells us that gifting doesn’t have to be complicated, expensive, or over-the-top.

5. Airbnb: Airbnb Hosts Ring Our Opening Bell

This is a great example of an ad that doesn’t explicitly allude to the holidays, but rather emphasizes the value of community and gratitude.

Airbnb celebrates the season by thanking its four million hosts for opening their homes to strangers all over the world. The video shows various hosts from different countries ringing the bell and opening the door. We go from the United States to Japan, from Kenya to New Zealand, from Brazil to Spain. (We love that each of these countries were listed in their original languages!)

This campaign demonstrates that you don’t need string lights or artificial trees to create an amazing campaign that embodies the holiday spirit. You can uplift your company’s values, celebrate your wins, and appreciate those who’ve played a role in your success.

6. Amazon: The Show Must Go On

If you lived through the 2020 pandemic (which you most likely did if you’re reading this), then you know how much it derailed any and all plans. Being quarantined keeps us from achieving things, it turns out. Unless it requires alone time.

In this ad, Amazon effectively punches us in the gut with the story of a ballerina who was chosen to play the lead in her dance school’s winter show. The girl is thrilled to be chosen, but as the months pass and the pandemic gains traction, the event is canceled. Ballet classes are moved online. The girl’s initial thrill fades, a feeling we can all relate to.

Her little sister remedies the situation by putting together a DIY event next to their apartment building. All of the tenants look down on her as she dances. The event is socially distant, and the girl gets to dance the ballet she’d been practicing for since the beginning of the year.

What we love most is Amazon’s tasteful product placement. Rather than showing everyone ordering all supplies from Amazon, the ad showcases the purchase of a single product: a flashlight. The flashlight is the critical piece that allowed the tenants to watch the show from their balconies.

7. Woodie’s: #WereAllHomemakers

This one made us cry. Woodie’s, an Irish home improvement store, reminds us of what the holidays are about through the story of Mrs. Higgins, an elderly woman who’s beloved in her neighborhood.

Throughout the ad, we see multiple people greet her. Neighbors and passersby are fond of her. Even the rowdy teens who loiter in front of her house love her. She has one problem: the door that leads to her yard is missing a hinge. In the United Kingdom, homes typically have a fence with a gate. Every time she leaves and comes home, she struggles opening and closing that door, as one corner drags across the ground.

 

When Mrs. Higgins comes home on one particularly snowy day, she finds that her door opens smoothly. The picture focuses on the new hinge that had been installed.

Who fixed it? It turns out it was one of the teenagers who loitered in front of her home. With this advertisement, Woodie’s not only subverted expectations but also effectively communicated what’s so wonderful about the holidays.

8. Hinge: See What We’re Thankful For

This holiday season, what are you thankful for? Recently, dating app Hinge sent around an email posing the same question to its members, using the opportunity to talk about its recent rebrand and subsequent growth — something for which Hinge itself has enormous gratitude, according to the email.

The timing for this sort of marketing is impeccable. The holidays are notorious for the sentimentality they invoke among the masses, and the desire to spend them with “someone special.”

Hinge used this email to harness the holiday spirit and redirect attention to an app that helps people find meaningful relationships, instead of, well, shorter-term alternatives.

[Click here to see the full email]

9. Lagavulin: Nick Offerman’s Yule Log

This one is an oldie but a goodie. Actor, writer, and humorist Nick Offerman loves his whisky. He’s sung about it before, and during a previous holiday season, he joined his favorite whisky brand, Lagavulin, to film a 45-minute video of — wait for it — Offerman sitting in a leather chair next to a crackling fire, drinking whisky and looking calmly at the camera. Where do we sign up for that gig?

“This is smart branding on Lagavulin’s part,” Kristina Monllos wrote for AdWeek. “Creating an extended ad that can serve as a conversation starter — should consumers swap the traditional Yule Log video for Offerman’s at parties — will also get everyone talking about the brand.”

Since the video was initially released, a new 10-hour version of it became available. Consider it our gift to you.

10. BarkPost: Yappy Thanksgiving Eve

Holidays are traditionally a time to be spent with family. For many of us, that includes our dogs.

BarkPost is no stranger to marketing campaigns that help “dog ruvers” include their furry friends into day-to-day life. In November, the pet-friendly brand showed how to do that at Thanksgiving, with a clever email that included holiday-themed cartoons and videos, feeding safety tips, and other holiday survival techniques — which, of course, involve your dog.

Plus, check out that adorable call to action at the bottom of the email: “Stop getting cute dogs in your email. Unsubscribe.” I mean, who would want to unsubscribe from that?

11. reMarkable: Keep Your Goals for the New Year

You may not have heard of reMarkable, but no matter: this company is the definition of cool and simple. Their single offering is a tablet that acts as a “digital notebook.” When you jot anything down, the reMarkable tablet automatically turns your writing into typed notes. Pretty cool, huh?

In its New Year email ad, reMarkable embodied the simplicity of its product by creating an equally simple campaign. In the email, they entice you to splurge with a $50 discount. Everyone knows that New Year is a time to make plans, set goals, and get your things in order.

reMarkable presents its product as the way to do that. They want to help you save time, which will help you spend more time with your loved ones and pets in the upcoming year. And who likes transferring notes from a notebook to a tablet?

Image Source

12. Kool-Aid: All I Really Want for Christmas feat. Lil John

In a music video-style ad, rapper Lil John quietly sits down to drink a glass of Kool-Aid as the Kool-Aid man smashes through his wall.

At that moment, the bass drops as a festive music video begins, showing Lil John rapping in front of a family Christmas gathering. The video goes on to show Lil John, the Kool-Aid Man, and Santa dancing along with shots of holiday food, presents, and Lil John’s Christmas list.

By launching a full-fledged music video with a prominent rapper, Kool-Aid both entertains prospects and demonstrates how “Kool” their brand is. Along with being humorous and entertaining, this ad also reminds you that you can still drink Kool-Aid during a time of the year where you’re mostly thinking about hot beverages.

13. Resy: Where to Spend New Year’s Eve

Don’t want to cook for New Year’s Eve? We don’t want to, either—mostly because washing dishes is a chore.

That’s what Resy bets on in a recent New Year email campaign. In a short but effective email, the company invites its subscribers to the best places to dine in the San Francisco Bay Area for the New Year. (If you’re not in San Francisco, you have the option to look for local eateries near you, also curated.) Like OpenTable, Resy allows you to make effortless reservations for you and your loved ones.

We love that this simple email keeps the focus on what we can do to celebrate New Year’s Eve. And what better way to do that than through delicious, local food that we don’t have to cook ourselves?

Image Source

14. Erste Group Bank: #EdgarsChristmas #believeinlove #believeinchristmas

You might not recognize this company, but you’d definitely recognize their holiday ad from 2018. Remember the cute porcupine who couldn’t get any friends because his spikes were, well, spiky? The short film has more than fifty million views on YouTube and touched millions of people’s hearts on other social media platforms.

Erste Group Bank did it again during their 2020 holiday campaign. This time, they made it just a little bit more clear what they offer: loans that can help you purchase something that may feel out of reach, but that may help bring your family together.

The ad begins with a granddaughter handing her grandfather his hearing aids. Throughout the video, the grandfather seems unhappy. We later find out that it’s because he’s been wanting to play music, but has no way to because he doesn’t own a piano.

The granddaughter purchases a piano for him. In the end, the grandfather gets to play a song he’d written for his mother. The entire family joins in, and they play the song together.

15. Sonos + Spotify: #PlaylistPotluck

One great way to celebrate the holiday season is with an event. And with events typically come music. Spotify is aware of that tradition, which is why it created #PlaylistPotluck.

It started with a partnership with Sonos. The brands got together to turn playlists into something like a potluck in which everyone contributes something to bring the event together (the tagline of the campaign is “One home. One host. Everyone brings a dish.”) Only, instead of contributing food or drink, everyone contributes a tune to a collaborative playlist.

Oh, look. That feature is available with Spotify!

The idea is delightfully interactive. Instead of using traditional invitations, guests RSVP to the potluck by adding songs to the collaborative playlist. And the cherry on top? Both brands also partnered with the PBS series “Mind of a Chef” for a televised holiday special, in which various celebrity chefs will be using the feature for their own meals.

What we love about this campaign is the fact that it incorporates several different elements and media formats to make it cohesive — a speaker system, a music-streaming app, and a televised special. Plus, if you participate, you’re entered for a chance to win your very own dinner party, hosted by a world-renowned chef. Bon appetit — and rock on.

16. Google: Santa Tracker

While Google’s Santa Tracker has been around for a few years now — and we recommend checking out the back story here — its features have evolved over time. Now there are interactive mini-games such as “Santa Selfie,” “Wrap Battle,” and “Build & Bolt.” Additionally, you can watch delightful short films such as “A Day at the Museum,” so you can see what Santa’s day-to-day looks like.

It’s hard to narrow down what makes the Santa Tracker so delightful, but if we had to summarize it, we’d say this — it combines the holiday wonder of a belief in Santa with real-life technology. What a wonderful way to teach kids about the web, while also allowing them to be kids. (Although, we adults certainly appreciate it, too.)

Google even introduced a B2B element of the Santa Tracker by sharing the code with developers and releasing other elements of the tool as open source. Why make all of that information public? To inspire developers to create their “own magical experiences based on all the interesting and exciting components that came together to make Santa Tracker,” writes Google’s Developer Programs Engineer Sam Thorogood.

Up until Christmas Eve each year, visitors can have a peek at the “North Pole,” to see what Santa’s elves are up to as the holiday approaches.

17. Disney: From Our Family to Yours

Culture, history, and holiday cheer come together in this holiday advertisement from Disney. The media giant takes advantage of their long-standing name to take us back to 1940, when a young girl gets her first Mickey Mouse plush toy.

As the video goes on, we see the little girl grow older until she becomes a grandma. She hands down the plush toy to her granddaughter, who doesn’t appreciate it as much as she becomes a young adult.

The granddaughter realizes how much it means to her grandma and restores the toy back to its former glory. We definitely did not cry when the grandma opened her holiday gift and saw her old toy fixed and restored.

We expected something quite touching from Disney, and this one did not disappoint. We especially love how Filipino culture has been showcased to three million viewers and counting.

18. Black Owned Everything: Jingles and Things (with “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey”)

Black Owned Everything, an Instagram curator of Black-owned businesses and brands, creates the perfect gift guide in Jingles and Things.

Done in partnership with Netflix and the musical “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey,” Jingles and Things curates the very best gifts for the holiday season, including items ranging from fragrance to dishware to dolls. There’s truly something for everyone here—and the best part is that we can support Black businesses while completing our holiday shopping.

Zerina Akers, the owner and head curator of Black Owned Everything, introduces us to the shop by explaining that it’s not just a marketplace but an inclusive platform.

There’s nothing more that encapsulates the holiday spirit than inclusivity, community, and belonging, and we love that Jingles and Things uplifts that theme.

19. Heathrow Airport: The Heathrow Bears Return

This adorable holiday commercial from Heathrow Airport shows the journey of two grandparent teddy bears as they decide to pack up, leave their sunny home, and go visit their teddy-bear grandchildren for Christmas.

At the end, you see the bears reunite with their family in London’s Heathrow Airport.

For many, these bears are both nostalgic and relatable. They remind you of the bears you might have played with as a child and the average grandparents.

When you see the teddy bears join their family, you might also remember the happiness you felt when your grandparents came and brought you gifts or hugs during the holidays.

This commercial is a sequel to a similar ad Heathrow Airport launched a year before, titled “Coming Home for Christmas.” This ad follows the bears riding and exiting the plane to meet up with their family at a Heathrow Airport Gate:

This series of commercials has all the great aspects of an ad campaign because it’s relatable, nostalgic, and incredibly heartwarming.

20. Walkers: All Mariah Carey Wants for Christmas

While the holiday season is a time for caring and sharing, Walkers shows musician Mariah Carey doing the exact opposite.

After filming a music video for her famous song, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Mariah Carey gets angry with an elf for taking her Walkers chips. To fend him off, she sings a high note which makes him block his ears and let go of the chips.

This is a hilarious commercial because it shows that the only thing you might not want to share on Christmas is Walkers products. It also shows how even stars, like Carey, enjoy the brand.

Go Forth and Be Merry

Out of all the things that we appreciate about these campaigns, there might be one thing we like the most — the fact that they put the fun back into holidays. This season, don’t let the stress get to you. Have a laugh or a cry with these examples, and please, be merry.

From our family to yours, happy holidays.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in December 2015 and was updated in January 2021 for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

When searching for a soul mate, you look for someone that’s smart, funny, caring, but above all — consistent. Because if you’re going to invest your life in a person, you want someone you can trust, right?

Falling in love with a brand isn’t all that different. Brands pull us in with witty slogans and timely discounts, but that’s not the only reason we stick around. Think about it, inbound marketing is all about content and communication that people love. The key to being your leads’ and customers’ soul mate, then, is providing brand consistency they can count on.

But how? What’s at the heart of brand consistency is your message, and marketing plays a huge role in that. In this post, we’ll dive into what branding consistency is, its importance, benefits, and share 15 businesses that have done a stellar job showing it.

The Importance of Branding Consistency

Branding consistency sets the stage for a business to gain and maintain credibility and trust. You have to position your brand and its content in a way that appeals to its target audience and carry that same messaging over time. After all, your customers are putting their trust in you, and like any relationship, you want the foundation to be dependable and consistent.

So, not only is this concept important in business strategy, but the benefits speak for themselves.

Benefits of Brand Consistency

Maintain customer expectations.

When creating marketing content, your team can share collateral that delivers the same visual cues from logo, color, and tone that won’t negatively impact customer perception. This standardization of branding let’s them know exactly what to expect every time they come across your business.

Align separate business units.

In creating a uniform brand identity, business teams create varying forms of content across departments that still ring true to clearly specified brand guidelines. While each team won’t be working on the same projects directly — the brand’s story will still shine through.

Establish a more visible, uniform identity.

Brands that are consistently presented are 3 to 4 times more likely to experience brand awareness and visibility. Just think about the iconic Nike swoosh, or Adidas’ signature stripes, these consistent visuals let customers know what brand a product comes from in the blink of an eye.

Now that we’ve gone through the importance and benefits of branding consistency, let’s look at some brands that have used it successfully.

Branding Consistency: 15 Brand Examples

1. GymIt

Fitness centers can be intimidating to the average person. GymIt gets it, and takes the intimidation out of the equation by talking to its clientele like real people. The Boston-based gym calls itself “hassle-free” and keeps working out simple.

One of the brand’s slogans is “Get In, Work Out” — clean, to-the-point, and clever. To prove that GymIt doesn’t cater to protein-shake, bodybuilder types, its marketing doesn’t take itself too seriously, either. Below are some snapshots of GymIt’s playful copy across social media, merchandise, and unintimidating website.

2. Dropbox

The cloud-based file sharing platform, Dropbox, is great at consistent design and personalization across channels.

You won’t find any Dropbox communication or platforms without its signature open, blue box logo nearby. This style is behind all of the brand’s designs, whether it’s a sleek homepage or a creative error page. Dropbox’s email marketing aligns with that fun, artsy messaging. See the screenshot below of some colorful collateral found across.

3. charity:water

This organization donates 100% of its donations to building water wells in Africa where women and children use yellow jerry cans to carry water back to their villages. charity:water’s logo is a stylized jerry can and not only keeps the branding present across channels, but keeps the issue the charity is helping solve top of mind, as well.

While many traditional nonprofits stick to old-school marketing tactics, charity:water recognizes that in order to inspire people to support a cause, you need to have inspired marketing. The organization’s birthday campaign has attracted supporters in fashion which charity:water uses to show how nonprofits can be trendy — using jerry cans in annual Charity Ball runways. This brand consistency makes it a leader in reinventing nonprofit marketing.

4. Naked Pizza

Naked Pizza — a revealing name for an honest brand. This business offers healthier pizza than the average chain by using only all-natural ingredients and a crust packed with grains and probiotics. Naked Pizza’s promise of all-natural is enforced by its refreshing style and tone seen across its marketing assets.

Like GymIt, Naked Pizza suggests it doesn’t take itself too seriously and that pizza can be guilt-free and fun. The brand is lovably sarcastic and keeps its design clean and appealing while communicating its delicious message.

5. Wells Fargo

You don’t have to use conversational tones or playful designs to be a lovable brand. Wells Fargo, a leading bank worldwide, keeps its messaging traditional and old-school — in a good way!

The brand is committed to its core values, including ethics and putting customers first, and they communicate this consistently through font, colors, layout, and keeping its logo ever-present across channels. Its slogan “Together we’ll go far” inspires copy that is rooted in family and building relationships.

6. World Wildlife Fund

This organization fights for a great cause with great marketing. The WWF’s style and imagery create a mood across channels that forces you to reflect for a moment on how we treat our wildlife and ecosystems.

Below are three examples of how the brand communicates that same strong message in creative, thought-provoking ways. Its logo, print ad, and interactive piece all have a darkness to them through suggestive messaging or tone because of how serious the issue is.

7. Warby Parker

Warby Parker “creates boutique-quality, classically crafted eyewear at a revolutionary price point.” The brand communicates this boutiquey vibe through all its promotions and marketing assets.

For example, Warby Parker offers a luxurious touch to prospective customers by sending five pairs of glasses to try on for free (top left). Attention to style is also evident across channels: its website (bottom left) is clean and easy to navigate. Even its annual report (bottom right) feels “classically crafted.” The brand calls its style “vintage,” and its Citizen’s Circus event at SXSW was dripping with vintage touches from signage to tents.

8. Lush

The international handmade cosmetics company, Lush, believes in “making effective products from fresh organic fruits and vegetables,” and in “happy people making happy soap.” Lush stores, products, packaging, and employees (top right) all tell that story.

Lush’s commitment to natural, organic ingredients is totally aligned with how it displays its products (bottom left); Lush’s soaps, powders, and shampoos sit in their raw form in-store until the cashier wraps the product up once it’s purchased. Foregoing packaging oozes a natural vibe. Products that require packaging, like face masks (top left), don’t hide the ingredients and encourage customers to recycle after use. All packaging also has a sticker on it with the face and name of the employee who packed it. Every piece of marketing collateral at Lush has a personal, no-frills approach.

9. Boloco

Boston-based burrito company, Boloco, pays attention to consistency in detail in its online and offline marketing. The brand’s slogan is ‘inspired burritos’ and its menus, flyers, napkins, events, website, and other collateral all have a playful, hand-made touch that suggests the business is fueled by more than tortillas and guacamole. Boloco partnered with Life is Good by making a yummy Life is Good burrito with 50 cents of each purchase donated to the company’s charity, Life is Good Playmakers; this partnership fits with Boloco’s inspired brand perfectly.

Boloco keeps branding present by using a playful signature font. No matter the marketing channel, we go loco for Boloco’s consistency.

10. Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts promotes its brand throughout the city and under its own roof with such finesse in execution, that the brand’s presence is always incredibly recognizable, yet still subtle. All MFA Boston marketing assets are easy to connect to the source.

The brand has a two-tone color palette on all collateral, with red being the MFA’s signature color. Below are examples of its use of color, as well as its consistently minimalist design on an employee’s apron, outdoor banners, website, and brochure. With a museum full of colorful exhibitions and impressive canvases, the MFA keeps its own branding simple but strong.

11. Intercom

Intercom is a web-based customer service platform. “Treating customers with respect will always be good for business,” the brand says. “And we believe that making customers jump through hoops to try to get help is incredibly disrespectful.” Looking at Intercom’s various forms of communication and marketing tactics, it’s visually apparent how much it doesn’t want its customers to “jump through hoops.”

The brand presents information in a clear, comprehensive way by using imagery instead of written explanations. After all, a picture says a thousand words. Intercom introduces its company with photos other content with simple graphic design. Enticing me with visuals definitely takes hoops out of the equation.

12. Innocent Drinks

Innocent Drinks is a playful smoothie and juice brand from England that keeps its innocent reputation strong with marketing that will make you feel like a kid again. The meta description reads: “hello, we’re innocent and we’re here to make it easy for people to do themselves some good (whilst making it taste nice too).” How cute is that?

Below are examples of more lovable approaches to branding like its Facebook game (top left), product images (bottom left), and inventive website navigation for the brand’s annual event, Fruitstock. Innocent Drinks stays true to its personality in its tone and creative execution.

13. Zendesk

Zendesk is a cloud-based customer service software system that has built a charming brand through sleek, bright design. The “zen” in this company’s branding can be seen through its mellow yellow and natural color palette.

It’s important to communicate a consistent brand image to the world, but Zendesk recognizes that consistency comes from within as well. Its office carries the theme to keep the feeling strong within company walls. The brand’s signature green is used consistently across channels and compliments the brand’s identity.

14. Lululemon Athletica

Sportswear brands often promise that their products will make you a better athlete, but the process and hard work it takes to get there is sometimes forgotten. Lululemon Athletica, a yoga and sportswear brand, keeps the act of working out alive across its assets. The brand hosts free yoga classes in its stores, as well as public outdoor classes.

Its confirmation email (top left) for joining its mailing list is a large image of a woman doing yoga, and the brand’s Twitter profile (top right) displays yoga mats waiting to be rolled out. The brand designs yoga clothing and gear, so why skip to the gratification of doing it when you can cultivate a feeling around the process?

15. ZocDoc

ZocDoc is an online service for finding and booking appointments with physicians in your area. The brand aims to improve access to healthcare, and it communicates the ease of the process with cartoon mascots across all of its marketing communication channels.

After all, cartoons make us feel like kids again, and boy, were things easy when we were kids. See ZocDoc’s charming collateral on the website’s personal account page.

Build Better Branding Consistency

Now that’s soul mate material, right? A lot of these brands use playful, creative, and conversational tones, while others prefer more serious, thought-provoking approaches. Whatever the tone, be sure to keep it consistent across all channels to give your customers a brand they can count on.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in March 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

In 2022, 51% of B2C marketers plan to increase their marketing budget.

The question is where is that budget going? Will marketers reinvest in the same strategies or try new trends?

To understand what trends B2C marketers are leveraging in 2022, we surveyed 1,067 global marketing professionals working in B2B and B2C companies. 

From influencer marketing to virtual events, there are so many efforts brands can focus on. Let’s see what our latest research says about what worked well for B2C marketers this year and where they plan to invest in 2022.

1. Short-form video will be a priority.

Short-form video took off in early 2020 and shows no signs of slowing down.

Back then, TikTok was the number one place to go for short-form content. Today, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are also competing for users’ attention.

This is good news for brands, as the short-form video trend content offered the second-highest ROI for B2C marketers in 2021, behind influencer marketing.

Despite coming in second for ROI, it’s the trend marketers plan to invest in the most in 2022. Roughly 33% of B2C marketers already invest in short-form content, while one-third of those who haven’t will do so for the first time in 2022.

Why now? Well, short-form video is such a key feature in social media today. And according to the data, social media takes the lead in marketing investments for businesses.

That’s likely because three key goals B2C brands will have when running marketing campaigns in 2022, will be increasing brand awareness (49%), advertising products (44%). and increasing revenue (43%). 

View image as a file.

With social media, you can accomplish at least two out of three. Brand awareness was always the main benefit of using social media but things have evolved.

Today, with so many platforms offering in-app shopping experiences and advanced ad formats, brands can meet more of their marketing goals.

2. Influencer marketing will still be a key lead/revenue driver.

For most B2C marketers, the power of influencers is clear.

In 2022, 61% of B2C marketers surveyed in the study plan to leverage it in 2022. In fact, it’s the third-highest trend they plan to prioritize, behind short-form video content and inbound marketing.

This is because in 2021, it offered B2C brands the best returns. When asked to select their top ROI driver from a list of 27 tactics and strategies, 11% of B2C marketers chose influencer marketing. 

View image as a file.

What might be different in the future is the type of influencer brands focus on. Historically, brands have focused on the biggest and most popular influencers to partner with.

However, some data suggest that micro-influencers with under 100K followers may be more effective.

While the verdict is still out on that, one thing is clear: Influencer marketing isn’t going anywhere.

3. Audio content will take a front seat.

Data suggests that video is the leader when it comes to content marketing. However, audio is slowly creeping up into the mix.

According to the survey, only 19.1% of B2C marketers use podcasts or other audio content in their marketing. Of those who do use it, 37.4% find it to be one of their most effective trends.

Even though adoption was seemingly low in 2021, the data suggests that more B2C marketers will add audio content to their marketing efforts in the new year.

Roughly 43% of B2C marketers plan to increase their investment in podcasts in 2022 while 38.4 plan to keep it the same. Another interesting fun fact is that this particular piece of data is virtually the same for B2B marketers.

This suggests that across all industries, brands recognize the power of audio content.

4. Social responsibility will be more important.

Now more than ever, consumers want and expect brands to be more transparent and take a stand on social media.

In fact, a 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer survey revealed that many consumers see trust as a leading factor in their purchasing decisions.

In the past two years, particularly in the height of the COVID-19 crisis and calls for social justice, consumers have started holding brands more accountable. In 2022, brands will be addressing that demand.

Currently, only a third of B2C marketers surveyed find social responsibility to be an effective marketing trend. Despite that fact, 45% plan to increase their investment in 2022.

5. Brands will continue to apply inbound marketing strategies.

Inbound marketing is all about meeting consumers where they are. Instead of marketing efforts that push messaging out to consumers, this focuses on attracting them toward you.

Behind short-form video, inbound marketing is the top trend marketers will invest in next year.

In fact, over 80% of marketers plan to keep the same budget or add more for this strategy.

This is done by following the “Attract, Delight, Engage” model that leverages content marketing, SEO, marketing automation, social media, and more to nurture consumers at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

There you have it – some of the top trends B2C marketers will invest in 2022. Between publishing regular video/audio content on social media and developing a strong inbound marketing strategy, marketers have a busy year ahead.

To keep up with the latest trends in marketing, stay tuned for more upcoming marketing strategy research posts, download the 2021 HubSpot Not Another State of Marketing report to learn what marketing professionals focused on this year. 

If  I could go out to dinner with any brand, I think I’d have to choose Trader Joe’s.

Now, I know that may sound weird, but stay with me. Nike, as you know, would be too energetic, which would embarrass me — let’s play it cool here, okay, Nike?

Apple, on the other hand, would be both sophisticated and a little pretentious, which would make me nervous.

And Timberland is just too outdoorsy and gritty. We wouldn’t have much in common.

By comparison, Trader Joe’s is unique, earthy, and a little playful. We could discuss its fantastic seasonal selections, like its Pumpkin Alfredo Sauce or Butternut Mac & Cheese Bites, and I would thank TJ (because we’re at the nickname level by now) for its generous cheese prices.

While we all know I can’t actually go out to dinner with Trader Joe’s (or any brand, for that matter), I’m willing to bet you’re able to picture what it would be like to hang out with your own favorite brand — or how a dinner with Peloton might differ from a dinner with Netflix.

That’s the power of brand personality. It helps you relate to certain brands that mirror the characteristics you value most. And it also inspires you to connect with certain brands that demonstrate characteristics you hope to develop.

Here, let’s explore why brand personality matters. Plus, how to create your own brand personality, examples of powerful brand personalities, and tricks of the trade from HubSpot’s Brand Strategy team.

What is brand personality?

Simply put, a brand’s personality is the set of human characteristics you attribute to that brand. Or, put another way — it’s how you’d describe a brand if it were a person.

A brand’s personality shines through in brand messaging, images, and overarching marketing campaigns.

Additionally, consistency is key. If your brand’s personality differs on your company website compared to your social channels, it will be more difficult for consumers to learn who your brand is, and what it stands for.

As Ben Harmanus, EMEA’s Head of Brand Marketing, puts it, “A brand’s personality is a set of human traits that define a brand. These traits set one brand apart from others, and make it unique.” 

Harmanus adds, “These characteristics should be chosen wisely, since they help build an emotional connection to a specific target group.”

Harmanus told me, “Brand personality is the essential foundation for brand identity and brand marketing — and has a huge impact on the sales process.”

To understand how brand personality infiltrates a brand’s marketing materials, let’s take a look at a few examples.

Brand Personality Examples

1. Nike 

Nike’s marketing materials – from its slogan “Just Do It”, to its mission statement “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world — embody excitement, passion, and energy.

You know who Nike as-a-person would be: A passionate sports fan, an avid athlete, and someone who is innovative and forward-focused. Nike as-a-person is interested in the newest and best when it comes to wellness and fitness.

Consider how this plays out in Nike’s marketing strategy. The caption of a recent Nike Instagram post begins, “No more waiting…”

The images and videos across Nike’s website and social pages are colorful and fast-paced, with Olympic athletes running and Serena Williams swinging a racquet.

And if you watch a Nike ad on TV, you’ll be shown the same personality — someone who is excited, active, and ready-to-go.

2. Chanel 

If you’re looking for a brand personality that exemplifies sophistication, look no further than Chanel.

For starters, take a look at the brand’s mission statement: “To be the Ultimate House of Luxury, defining style and creating desire, now and forever.”

Additionally, let’s consider their Instagram page – the Chanel team uses soft blues, light yellows, and plenty of black space to draw attention to one focal point.

Their minimalist, vintage theme effectively suggests a sophisticated brand personality.

You know who Chanel is — Chanel as-a-person is someone who cares deeply for fashion, is highly polished and never says the wrong thing, and is both refined and worldly.

3. REI 

There aren’t many brands as polar opposite to Chanel as REI, so let’s dive into their personality next.

REI is rugged, outdoorsy, and tough.

Their website’s homepage currently reads, “Celebrate the power in you”, and the About Us page says, “At Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) we believe a life outdoors is a life well-lived! We believe that it’s in the wild, untamed and natural places that we find our best selves, so our purpose is to awaken a lifelong love of the outdoors, for all.”

REI as-a-person is your “Earthy-crunchy” friend who enjoys camping, hiking, swimming — you name it, as long as it takes place outdoors. Because of their love for outdoors, REI is also dedicated and focused on the environment, and solely purchases sustainable products.

4. Volvo 

Volvo as-a-person is reliable, sturdy, and dependable. Volvo prides itself on “their years of leadership in automotive safety”, and is disciplined, responsible, and principled.

Take a look at the following Volvo commercial, which highlights the safety of the cars above all else:

Additionally, if you take a look at Volvo’s About Us page, you’ll read statements like, “For nearly a century we have been making life easier, better and safer with cutting-edge technology”, and “Volvo Cars is a brand for people who care about the world we live in and the people around us” — all of which suggests a personality of dependability.

While other car dealerships might focus on a car’s fancy features, Volvo stays committed to one key value: Safety.

Dimensions of Brand Personality

In The Journal of Marketing Research, Jennifer Aaker outlines five dimensions of brand personality: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.

These five pillars can be jumping-off points when identifying your own brand’s personality.

However, there will be unique personality traits that fall under each broader dimension, and the more specific you can be when identifying which traits belong to your brand, the more authentic and unique your brand’s personality will become.  

Let’s explore some specific personality traits that fall under each dimension, now:

Traits that relate to sincerity:

• Wholesomeness
• Trustworthiness
• Honesty
• Authenticity
• Cheerfulness

Traits that relate to excitement:

• Passion
• Adventurousness
• Enthusiasm
• Boldness
• Imagination
• Daring

Traits that relate to competence:

• Intelligence
• Dependability
• Success
• Principled
• Conscientious

Traits that relate to sophistication:

• Elegance
• Composure
• Worldliness
• Confidence
• Tact

Traits that relate to ruggedness:

• Toughness
• Athletic
• Sturdy
• Outdoorsy
• Reliable

How to Create a Brand Personality        

Now that we’ve explored some examples and traits of brand personalities, you might be wondering how you can create your own brand personality.

Ultimately, you’ll want to do this as early as possible. A brand personality can help guide your marketing team’s decisions and ensure your entire team remains consistent across channels — and consistency is key for brand recognition and long-term customer loyalty.

Whether you’re creating a personality for the first time or interested in re-vamping your existing brand personality, we’ve got you covered. Keep reading to learn the six steps you’ll need to take to create a strong, lasting brand personality.

1. Figure out your values.

Like any real human being, values can shape who your brand is, the decisions your brand makes, and how your brand acts.

So you’ll want to start by outlining your core values. What matters most to your brand? (Hint, hint: It should be whatever matters most to your target audience.)

Once you’ve identified your brand’s values, write them out in a value statement. Your value statement will be the foundation of your brand’s personality.

For instance, consider Life is Good’s mission statement: “To spread the power of optimism.” I’m willing to bet Life is Good’s mission statement helps drive all marketing decisions — for instance, as a marketer for Life is Good, I’d want to ensure my Instagram captions or ad copy were positive and hopeful.

2. Use your audience as inspiration — since they already are who your brand should be.

REI’s brand personality works because its target market is an audience of outdoors enthusiasts. The brand’s personality would be entirely ineffective, on the other hand, if the brand was targeting office employees.

This is why it’s vital you consider, first and foremost, your audience’s preferences, behaviors, and expectations.

You’ll want to conduct qualitative and quantitative research on your target audience to ensure you have a strong understanding of your buyer persona. 

To begin understanding your buyer persona, you’ll want to ask questions like these:

• Does my audience care more about luxury, or affordability?
• Are they driven by emotions, or logic?
• When purchasing products, what matters most to them? Sustainability? Safety? Entertainment?
• What does my audience do in their free time?
• What do they care about?
• What do they like? What do they dislike?

The deeper you understand your audience, the easier it will be to construct your brand’s personality. Your brand should reflect and reinforce who your buyer persona is — or who they want to be.

Chanel’s brand personality, for instance, resonates so strongly with its audience because it reflects traits that matter to its audience, including luxury and sophistication. If Chanel was targeting an audience that cared more about affordability, then it wouldn’t succeed.

3. Ask yourself questions as if your brand were a human.

Once you’ve constructed a loose outline for your brand’s personality, you can refine it by asking yourself (and your team) questions as if your brand already were a person.

This might sound silly, but consider asking yourself:

• How does my brand act when they go to a party?
• What does my brand talk to its friends about?
• What excites my brand? What scares my brand?
• Why does my brand behave X way? What drives it?

It’s critical you’re able to describe, in great detail, who your brand is. This information doesn’t have to be public-facing — in fact, it most likely won’t be. Instead, this information will be used on the back-end so your marketing team can create materials that resonate with your audience and begin building strong brand loyalty. If done effectively, your audience will begin connecting to your brand without realizing why they feel as emotionally compelled as they do.

4. Create a brand style guide for your team.

Over time, your team will change. New people will join, others will leave. If you don’t have strong guardrails that outline who your brand is … and who it isn’t … you risk diluting the brand personality over time.

To combat this, ensure you create a brand style guide that outlines how the brand personality will display itself through your marketing materials. For instance, what font demonstrates your brand’s personality? What about colors? Language, voice, tone? Visuals?

The more specific you can be with your brand style guide, the more likely you are to see consistency across channels. Additionally, you’ll want to take the time to outline who your brand isn’t. These guardrails will ensure your brand doesn’t sound and act different on your social channels compared to your website.

As HubSpot’s Global Head of Brand Marketing Amy Marino puts it, “A brand personality can inform everything from how you write marketing copy to how you design your website to where your brand shows up in real life.”

Marino adds, “Developing a brand personality is an important element that can guide your company’s brand marketing … and ensure prospects and customers feel elements of continuity across every brand interaction.”

5. Iterate.

Over time, as you conduct market research, you’ll want to remain open to iterating on your personality if it no longer serves your audience or meets your audience’s needs.

For instance, perhaps in market research you find audiences feel your brand is a little too aggressive. To fix this, you might soften your brand’s personality and use more calming language across your channels.

With these tips in-mind, you’re now well on your way to developing a strong, unique brand personality that works best for your brand. 

Ultimately, your brand’s personality has a direct impact on how emotionally invested your consumers are in your business — and how willing they are to stick around for the long-haul. 

If your business has a blog, sending out an email newsletter is essential. Not only is it a simple way to distribute your content, but it can also help you better understand what type of content is resonating with your target audience so you can optimize your content strategy.

Beyond content distribution, an email newsletter can also help generate paying customers for your business. 31% of B2B marketers report that email newsletters are the best way to turn leads to customers, and 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers once converted.

So, you’re cranking out content on your WordPress site, and you know you can grow your business through an email newsletter … Wouldn’t it be great if you could send this newsletter directly within WordPress?

With plugins, you can. Some of the most popular WordPress plugins available are for email marketing. With an email plugin, you can generate leads, segment your contacts, and nurture them into customers, all within WordPress.

To ensure you’re able to use WordPress for all your content distribution and email marketing needs, we’ve made this list of the best WordPress email plugins.

1. HubSpot WordPress Plugin

Sure, the HubSpot WordPress Plugin includes forms and pop-ups, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. On top of the ability to develop forms and pop-ups with a simple drag-and-drop interface, HubSpot collects submissions from any form you have on your WordPress site and automatically adds those leads into your CRM, so you can begin nurturing them into loyal customers immediately.

The plugin includes a live chat tool, so you can begin engaging with site visitors, and even generate leads off of those conversations. You can also deploy bots to answer simple questions that your visitors have, ensuring that you’re supporting your website visitors even when your team is offline.

Once someone submits their information on one of your pop-ups, you can automate a simple kickback email to get in touch with that lead and deliver the content you promised them. You can also upgrade to a paid version of Marketing Hub to begin emailing those contacts right away.

Best for: We recommend the HubSpot WordPress Plugin for anyone. Between forms, pop-ups, live chat, and a fully integrated CRM, there’s no better free email subscription plugin available for WordPress.

2. MailPoet

MailPoet is one of the most popular free newsletter plugins for WordPress. To manage your subscribers, you can easily import an existing list from your CRM or another marketing automation tool, or create forms and add them to your site using widgets. Plus, the drag-and-drop email editor lets you quickly create responsive emails that look great on any device or email service.

MailPoet is free for anyone with less than 1,000 subscribers but becomes more powerful upon upgrading. Premium users can see exactly which subscribers have opened an email and what links people are clicking on within your email, among a number of other advanced features.

Best for: Those who want a popular, free, and versatile email newsletter plugin for WordPress should try MailPoet and experiment with its subscriber management, email builder, and automation tools. Those with smaller lists can leverage premium features for free as well.

3. Newsletter

Newsletter is an email marketing tool built specifically for WordPress, and everything you need to get started is included. The plugin allows you to add a subscription form or pop-up to your site, compose emails in a drag-and-drop builder, segment your leads using multi-list targeting, and send newsletters to distribute your blog content.

Additionally, the tool has built-in reporting, so you can see exactly how your emails are performing. You can even automate newsletters to go out on a regular cadence to ensure you are consistently engaging with your subscribers. Newsletter also integrates with other tools, such as Mailgun and Spark Post, so you can optimize your email strategy based on your needs.

Best for: The Newsletter plugin is best for WordPress bloggers looking to automate their newsletters and track performance. It’s another popular, well-received option that’s worth trying out for free.

4. Sendinblue

Sendinblue offers cloud-based digital marketing tools to over 50,000 growing companies around the world, and its WordPress plugin brings the power of the platform directly into WordPress.

With the Sendinblue WordPress plugin, you can create forms to capture leads, manage lists of subscribers, create and send email marketing campaigns, and measure your success over time using the included reports. The plugin features a drag-and-drop email editor, and you’re able to personalize components of your email to increase engagement with subscribers. The free version lets you send up to 300 emails per day.

The Sendinblue WordPress plugin also includes transactional email. Using the wp_mail function, you’ll be able to send transactional emails using Sendinblue’s SMTP. This feature is great for sending order confirmations or updating your customers on important changes to their accounts.

Best for: WordPress business owners in need of a simple but inclusive email marketing plugin will enjoy Sendinblue for its tools, support, and integration with its other advanced marketing tools. You can get decent mileage from the plugin for free before reaching your send limit.

5. Sumo

Sumo has over 60,000 active installations within WordPress — and for good reason. Beyond just pop-ups, welcome emails, and automated drip campaigns, they also have a number of other features to help you grow your business.

The plugin features a “share” button that you can add anywhere on your site, which allows your site visitors to easily share your content on social. The plugin also integrates directly with WooCommerce so you can create discounts and unique offers to increase your order value, and minimize the number of abandoned carts you have.

On top of all the plugin’s features, Sumo offers free customer support, and even one-on-one onboarding for all customers (free and paid) to ensure you’re getting the most out of the plugin.

Best for: Sumo works great for ecommerce websites and WooCommerce that run regular email campaigns. New businesses will appreciate the generous free version, which allows up to 10,000 emails per month and unlimited subscribers.

6. Email Subscribers & Newsletters

Email Subscribers & Newsletters is a plugin that lets you easily notify your subscribers when you have new blog content available. With it, you can add a subscription box to your site and get notified every time someone signs up for your newsletter. You can then notify your subscribers whenever a new post is published, or create a custom newsletter to share your content.

Email Subscribers & Newsletters is also serious about the health of your email lists. They offer double opt-in functionality so you can ensure that you’re only reaching out to people interested in what your website has to offer. You have the option to add captchas to your subscription box to prevent bots from ruining your email lists. The tool offers list cleanup and spam testing services too.

Best for: Email Subscribers & Newsletters is best for bloggers who want a simple plugin to notify readers when a new blog post is published, along with some simple metrics and a custom newsletter option.

7. Subscribe2

Subscribe2 lets you send either simple notifications to your blog subscribers whenever you post new content, or a recurring digest of posts. Through the plugin, you can also exclude specific categories of posts from being included in your emails, or even exclude posts on an individual basis.

The tool lets you create simple plain text emails, or create custom HTML emails. You can also upgrade to its paid service (MailOptin) to send emails to your contact lists in Mailchimp, AWeber, or other email service providers.

Best for: Subscribe2 is another WordPress email plugin that’s ideal for bloggers who want to send email alerts to subscribers, or to compile their most recent blog posts into a digest.

8. SendPress

SendPress is a simple, easy-to-use email newsletter plugin. With it, you can import contacts and content from your WordPress site directly into the plugin, making it easy to create a blog notification email.

SendPress features several styling and editing options so you can send professional emails without any coding skills. They also have a service called AutoCron, which will check your site on a regular schedule to make sure your scheduled emails are being sent.

Note that for features like advanced analytics, bounce handling, and campaign tracking through third-party software like Google Analytics, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid version.

Best for: SendPress provides a simple email automation subscription for small WordPress sites that want to grow their audiences.

9. OptinMonster

The widely popular and powerful OptinMonster plugin, as the name suggests, helps you grow your WordPress email list and get more subscribers through a variety of pop-ups and static forms. The tool comes with a drag-and-drop editor that lets you build your form from scratch, or select from a pre-built template.

What sets OptinMonster apart from other plugins is its targeting options. Using exit intent technology, OptinMonster will deploy a pop-up based on when a user is getting ready to leave a page. The plugin also has page-level targeting options, so you can tailor your content offers to a visitor’s location and behavior on your site. You can then use this information to tailor your email campaigns using any one of OptinMonster’s many integrated email service providers.

Best for: Marketers who want to implement popups in their marketing strategies (especially for exit intents), and implement advanced tracking on their forms and email campaigns to drive conversions.

10. Thrive Leads

Like OptinMonster, Thrive Leads is focused on growing your subscriber list, and growing it fast. This tool includes a long list of pop-up types, including full-screen overlays and even multiple-choice forms. It also includes the targeting options that you’d expect out of an email subscription plugin.

Additionally, Thrive Leads offers A/B Testing so you can see whether a different design, or an entirely different content offer performs better — allowing you to greatly increase your conversion rates.

Best for: Thrive Leads is a comprehensive tool to help online businesses grow subscribers, increase conversions, and target the right visitors at the right time. If that’s you, try it out. Also note that Thrive Leads is more of a form tool than anything else — email is just one part, and the plugin works best when integrated with another email tool.

11. WP Subscribe

WP Subscribe is built by MyThemeShop, a company that builds WordPress themes and plugins that are fast, reliable, look great on any site, and are SEO-friendly. WP Subscribe checks off all those boxes. They have optimized the code on the plugin to ensure that it loads fast, and doesn’t slow down your site.

With WP subscribe, you can add your subscription form anywhere on your site, and feel rest-assured that it will be fully responsive to whatever screen size your site visitor is viewing your site on. The plugin is also compatible with several popular email service providers, such as AWeber and MailChimp, so you can begin leveraging your email lists immediately.

Best for: Use WP Subscribe to build custom forms and grow your email list — for anything else, you’ll need to integrate with another email automation tool.

12. Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms has over one million installations on WordPress, making it one of the most popular form plugins available. Ninja has all the features you’d expect in your email subscription form builder, plus a few extra features that make it stand out. Namely, its acclaimed builder tool lets anyone make professional-looking forms without touching any code.

The plugin features several different anti-spam options, including Google’s reCAPTCHA, to ensure the validity of your form submissions. They also let you collect payments via integrations with PayPal Express, Stripe, and Elavon. The plugin integrates with a long list of the most popular mailing list tools, so you can start emailing your new leads right away.

Best for: WordPress users who need a reliable form builder tool to grow their email subscriber list should put Ninja Forms on the list — it’s one of the leading options available, and it’s flexible enough that you can use it for other cases beyond email signups.

13. Email Template Customizer for WooCommerce

The Email Template Customizer for WooCommerce plugin extends the functionality of the WooCommerce plugin by allowing you to customize the email template. Build out emails with a library of useful elements specific to WooCommerce, like order, billing, and shipping details.

Everything is drag-and-drop, and the plugin can be used by anyone who already knows WooCommerce. Thanks to the tool, sending transactional emails, order confirmations, and shipping confirmations. With the paid version, you can also recommend products in emails, give coupons, and send target emails based on orders that match certain criteria.

Best for: WooCommerce site owners should try Email Template Customizer for WooCommerce as a solution to build custom emails to customers.

14. WP Mail SMTP by WPForms

The developers behind the popular WPForms plugin have also created an email-specific plugin, WP Mail SMTP. This plugin aims to solve email deliverability issues by configuring WordPress to follow SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), the standard for sending emails, instead of PHPMailer, the WordPress default.

With over 2 million downloads to date, WP Mail SMTP has helped improve deliverability for many WordPress sites. It helps authenticate your emails to email clients, avoiding the spam folder or a failed delivery. The plugin works by reconfiguring the wp_mail() function to integrate with a credited SMTP provider.

If that sounds like gibberish, don’t worry — the plugin walks you through the process and provides documentation in case you’re stuck.

Best for: WordPress marketers who are experiencing email deliverability issues may consider trying this plugin.

Upgrade your WordPress emails.

It’s important to choose the plugin that works best for you. Whether you need a plugin that is highly customizable, or one that simply drives submissions so you can get your email newsletter off the ground, the options here provide a great starting point for you to explore as you consider how you can start building out your subscribers list.

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

Artificial Intelligence is one of the most talked-about topics in the world of technology. One search for “artificial intelligence” on Twitter and you’ll be introduced to articles on how AI is shaping the future of healthcare, productivity, art, and food. Beyond the Twittersphere, searches for the term AI have doubled over the past six years according to data from Ahrefs.

All of this digital activity must mean that everyone is ready to adopt AI into how we manage and operate our businesses, right? Right?

what most describe as “artificial intelligence” is really just an if statement

— excelhumor.xlsx (@ExcelHumor) October 25, 2021

It’s well worth noting that while AI is poised to augment our future in a big way, there is still a lot of work to be done. Many companies use AI as nothing more than a Marketing message; a siren, knowing that for some people the allure of artificial intelligence outweighs its actual output, allowing them to get away with empty promises. 

For as many good jokes as this opens the door for, there are still many companies fully capable of providing high-quality AI software. Of course, all of this leads us to a natural question: When will everyday businesses and professionals use AI software to enhance their work?

Fortunately, this is something that NetLine has greater visibility into. 

The Challenge

• Better understand the AI software market beyond its current buyers, especially the big names like Apple, Amazon, and major car manufacturers.
• What kind of obstacles stand in the way of AI software solutions providers further permeating the market?

The Goal

• Identify and understand how leading IT decision-makers use or intend to use AI software and whether they intend to increase their investment any further within the next 12 months and beyond.
• Such observations should exclusively be captured via first-party interactions with IT buyers as they voluntarily registered and consumed related content. 

How This Data Was Captured

By tapping into dramatic scale beyond the limitations of their own content, our customer leveraged NetLine’s Intent Discovery product to secure first-party sourced intent-rich data squarely aimed at accelerating sales outcomes. Empowered by NetLine’s entire universe content, the client put to good use all 13,000+ assets, billions of data points, and the 35,925,120 different ways of filtering buyers actively performing research.

Unlike traditional intent data, Buyer-Level Intent Discovery helps you better understand the challenges, priorities, and purchase timeline of your ideal targets. Nothing is hidden behind obfuscated datasets and/or black box proprietary scores. 

Perhaps most importantly, Intent Discovery acts as an always-on monitor of all B2B content consumption behavior as professionals are actively researching content specific to their challenges. Monitoring activity is then mined on a real-time basis, and intercepted once a buyer has met or exceeded each element required to define intent—capturing custom, intent-rich, customer-specific insights directly from the prospect.

The Questions

To answer the questions, we engaged nearly 2,000 senior-level IT decision-makers to assess their desire to invest in AI software and what their priorities are with this technology.

Here’s a sampling of some of the insights we uncovered from their responses.

What are Your Top AI Software Priorities You Are Allocating Resources Towards?

Perhaps the best way to summarize the needs of B2B professionals when it comes to how they’d like to deploy AI software comes down to two things: The mundane and the complex.

As you can see in the responses above, this is what the data tells us; if AI software can knock out the simple, monotonous tasks people spend a large portion of their time (which it can), while also supporting some pie-in-the-sky type analysis, (yep) then there’s a market just waiting to be tapped.

Of course, if it were that easy, we’d already see a wider-permeation of the market. What other challenges face this market? More on that in the next section.

Some of the other notable insights include the following:

• Automating Routine Tasks (28.79%) and Managing risk, fraud, and cybersecurity threats (27.63%) drew the most votes from all respondents.

• Incredibly, only 2.7% of all respondents prioritized the responsible and ethical use of AI—meaning that nearly two-thirds (61.9%) of all responding industries didn’t even consider this option a priority. Given what AI can do in the wrong hands or when left unsupervised, the apparent lack of concern in regards to ethics is shocking.

• The Healthcare/Medical industry was 124.4% more likely to say Automating Routine Tasks with AI was more important to their profession compared to the Telecommunications field
• 14.57% of Finance industry respondents said that Operationalizing AI was the top priority they had with any AI software, the largest percentage of any industry for this priority

What’s the Timeframe for Additional Investment for AI Software?

It’s one thing to talk about AI in theory and how you might use it. It’s an entirely different, and ultimately more compelling, thing to see when and even if you’ll put your money where your mouth is.

As we mentioned in the intro, AI has primarily been a luxury employed by large companies thanks to its price tag. According to Analytics Insight, AI tools can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $1 million dollars, essentially putting it out of range for any business not employing thousands of people. Even with this knowledge, the responses paint a much more encouraging picture of what future implementation might look like.

Let’s find out where the market current sits:

31.92% of all respondents have an AI-related investment event occurring within the next 12 months.

• 5.85% of respondents said they were looking to make an additional investment within the next 3 months, meaning that respondents were 1034.45% more likely to say they were more inclined to wait Over 1 year to invest compared to Under 3 months.
• Respondents were 213% more likely to say that any additional AI investment would come after 2022 (beyond 12 months)

While a third of the market is preparing to make additional, if not initial, forays into the world of AI software in the coming year, the remaining two-thirds are biding their time. There are a number of ways to interpret this, including not having the potential budget, not having the staff or business to support it, or perhaps they’re simply not ready to take on the commitment of what AI entails. 

With how strange 2020 was with the way 2021 has unfolded, it’s not terribly surprising that professionals are looking to defer until 2022 at the earliest. Still, if there’s one thing AI vendors should take from this Intent Discovery Trends Report, it’s that nearly 6% of a $62 billion market is ready to make a move in the next quarter. 

The Results

For businesses in the AI software space or even for those flirting with the idea of adding AI to your arsenal, you now have a superior and more accurate understanding of where your potential clients/peers are in their unique buying journey. 

For example, through Intent Discovery, we found that:

• 100% of Utility/Energy respondents said that Managing risk, fraud and cybersecurity threats was their sole priority when it comes to AI software utilization.
• Compared to their peers, the Automotive field looks to be quite bullish on AI software, with 11.11% of their employees saying they expected additional investment to be made within the next 6 months or less—with an additional 25.93% believing that moves will be made within 12 months.
• Professionals within the Transportation industry are 754% more likely to be making an AI investment decision in under three months vs. their peers across other industries, there’s a clear trend across the world of travel that AI software businesses need to be aware of.

Buyer-Level Intent Discovery removes the guesswork that comes with every lead and instead provides context to what each prospect needs and what your buying audience craves. Insights like these are more valuable than gold, as they set the table for more productive and more fruitful interactions, relationships, and, hopefully, sales.

How Your Business Can Better Understand the Intent of Your Audience

In today’s hyper-competitive vendor market, it is more important than ever to understand the real-time pain points and in-market tendencies of your future buyers.

NetLine’s Intent Discovery product helps businesses accelerate its sales cycle by capturing first-party intent data by intercepting and engaging the buyer with customized validation questions. With this one-of-a-kind product, B2B Marketers can gain first-party insights for immediate activation and seamless remarketing/sales acceleration. 

For more information on how you can move beyond account-level insights and start your buyer-level intent discovery journey, contact us, or visit our website.

If you feel like the app TikTok came out of nowhere, you’re not wrong.

Since launching in early 2018, TikTok’s been covered by seemingly every major news publication and racked up millions of downloads globally.

Despite TikTok’s major early success, the app still feels like a bit of a mystery, especially to marketers. In fact, until recently, its parent company, ByteDance, hasn’t disclosed many metrics at all.

In TikTok’s first year, all we really knew was that an odd-ball video app was going viral, topping global app store charts, and gaining a huge fanbase from Gen-Z.

 

But now, shortly after TikTok’s first birthday, we know a lot more about it as sites like Digiday, AdWeek, and our own Marketing Blog regularly cover it.

Even if you still aren’t quite sure what TikTok is, you’ve probably seen a video meme on social media that was created and published in the app first. Here’s one for example of a TikTok post which went viral on Twitter:

Now THIS is a tiktok I could watch all day pic.twitter.com/u1dBkH2OAa

— 🌸 Alexandra Daniels 🌸 (@alexdanielsxo)
July 11, 2019

When making decisions about your social strategy, you’re probably more interested in numbers than virality as proof of an app’s staying power.

As someone who’s gotten sucked into the app, blogged multiple times about it, hearted hundreds of posts, and even made a few embarrassingly mature videos of my own, I’m fairly certain that this platform will stick around for quite some time. But, luckily, with mounting data on TikTok, you don’t just have to take my word for it.

To help you make informed decisions about your strategy and whether TikTok is right for your brand, I’ve compiled a list of 28 interesting stats and facts to know before venturing on to the app.

29 TikTok Stats to Know in 2021

Userbase, Downloads, and Growth

Within TikTok’s first year, it reportedly reached 500 million monthly active users. Wondering if this was just a fluke or a viral trend that will simmer down? Think again. According to TikTok and its company heads, the audience might be larger and more promising than we think.

• In September 2021, TikTok celebrated reaching 1 billion monthly active users. (TikTok)
• Musical.ly, a lip-syncing app which ByteDance purchased and merged with TikTok, reportedly had 100 million monthly active users when it was purchased by TikTok in 2018. (The Verge)
• Douyin, TikTok’s original standalone app in China, had 300 million users at the time Musical.ly merged with TikTok. (The Verge)
• In 2020, TikTok was the most downloaded app globally (850 million downloads), followed by WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. (Apptopia)
• TikTok is the Top Free App in the Entertainment section of the Apple App Store. (Apple App Store)

Demographics

While TikTok’s user base is dominated by Gen-Z in the United States, many millennials have adopted it around the world.

And, although it might feel like TikTok is huge in the U.S., the app’s biggest audience actually comes from China, where the platform is called Douyin.

Here’s a breakdown of TikTok’s major demographic stats.

• 35% of TikTok’s global audience is between the ages of 19 and 29, and 28% is under 18. (Business of Apps)
• As of December 2020, TikTok has 69.5 million monthly active users in the United States. (Statista)
• As of April 2021, 48% of U.S. adults between 18-29 use TikTok, compared to 20% of adults between 30-49 and 14% among 50-64 year olds. (Pew Research Center)
• One-quarter of Americans between 12 and 34 have used TikTok compared to 3% of adults aged 35+. (MarketingCharts)
• 51% of global TikTok users are male and 49% are female. (Hootsuite)
• TikTok is now available in more than 200 countries. (Oberlo)
• Over 22.2 million of TikTok’s monthly active users are in Indonesia. (Statista)

User Behavior

TikTok is a fast-paced app. The second you log in, you see a video at the top of a feed that’s algorithmically curated around your interests. If you enjoy the video you’re watching, you can follow, comment, and like the content directly from the video post. If you’re not loving what you see, you can keep swiping in an upward motion to immediately see more odd videos.

From my own experience, I’ve found that TikTok can easily cause you to spend more time than expected watching an endless stream of often comedic videos. Since these videos are usually between 15 seconds and one minute, it makes the app ideal for people who need quick entertainment on their morning commute or when they’re bored at home.

Because of TikTok’s quick pace and entertainment factor, the stats below aren’t that surprising:

• The average user spends 89 minutes per day on the app, according to a leaked deck from TikTok. (Music Business Worldwide)
• As of September 2021, there are 14.43 million daily active users using the TikTok Android App and the average user spends 12.3 hours per month using it. (Statista, HootSuite)
• TikTok is one of the most downloaded apps in the Google Play Store. (Statista)
• Younger users aged 4-15 spend an average of 80 minutes per day on the app. (Qustodio)
• According to a leaked TikTok deck, the average user opens the app 19 times per day. (Music Business Worldwide)
• There are 30.8 million global DAU on the TikTok iOS app as of September 2021. (Statista)
• TikTok users on Android now spend more time watching content on the app than they do on YouTube. (App Annie)

Viral Trends and Influencers on TikTok

Like YouTube, Vine, Instagram, as well as other past and present video apps, TikTok has opened doors for influencers, comedians, meme creators, and even some brands. While it’s still a bit too early to see how successful its influencers and trends will be in the long run, here are a few interesting tidbits:

• The most followed creator on TikTok is dancer Charli D’amelio with 123.5 million followers. Following close behind is Khabane Lame with 115 million. (Wikipedia)
• One of the earliest branded hashtag challenges was Guess’ #InMyDenim challenge. According to TikTok, videos marked with this hashtag have received a grand total of 38.8 million views. (TikTok)
• Rapper Lil Nas X credits the success of his song “Old Town Road” to TikTok. The song was propelled to #1 on the Billboard Top 100 in 2019 after the artist uploaded it to TikTok. (BuzzFeed News)

Here’s a compilation of TikTok’s #CowboyChallenge where people wearing normal clothing cut to themselves in cowboy costumes to the song “Old Town Road.”

Business, Revenue, and Competition

The launch of TikTok not only put its parent company, ByteDance, on the map, but it also resulted in competition from apps like Facebook, which launched a very similar app called Lasso shortly after TikTok went viral. While TikTok and ByteDance are less transparent about revenue and other major details, here’s what we know:

• TikTok now offers five advertising tiers aimed at big brands. One of which, a branded hashtag challenge, reportedly costs $150,000 per day. (TikTok Pitch Deck Notes First Reported by Digiday)
• TikTok generated an estimated 1.9 billion in revenue in 2020. (Business of Apps)
• In October 2020, TikTok made $115 million on in-app purchases from users. (Sensor Tower)
• TikTok has a 4.9-star rating in the Apple App Store and 4.4 in the Google Play Store. (Apple App Store, Google Play Store)
• Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company is valued at $75 million, making it the world’s most valuable startup. (CBInsights)

The Mysteries of TikTok

Although TikTok is a top social platform and is ramping up its options for advertisers, it’s still rather new. When a company or startup is new, it’s not uncommon for leadership to hide early numbers, even when a brand is successful. In fact, we’ve seen this with other major companies like Snapchat and Netflix.

Despite the launch of TikTok For Business in mid 2020, there’s still a lot more to learn as TikTok’s global teams and ByteDance continue to remain hush-hush about major metrics. In the coming years, as TikTok continues to draw in more advertisers, it wouldn’t be surprising if we started to see more transparent information about the app and its user base. 

Where to Find TikTok Stats

In the meantime, If you want to learn more about TikTok, you can read up on its short history and early success in this post, or click here to find a how-to guide for using the app. In addition, you can discover important TikTok facts app on various websites: 

• Statista
• Business of Apps
• Global Web Index
• Pew Research Center
• eMarketer

Want to see what other businesses are doing on TikTok? Check out this roundup of brands on TikTok.

There are a lot of acronyms in the business world to keep straight. SEO, CRM, SERP, CDN, and CMS are just a few important ones.

CMS is particularly important, considering that more than 68 million websites are built with one. So what is it?

CMS stands for content management system. It also may be the solution you’re looking for to quickly make a website with limited technical knowledge and resources.

In this post, we’ll define what a CMS is and how it works. Then we’ll look at how you can use a CMS to handle the infrastructure of your site so you can focus on creating exciting, delightful content that results in more conversions and leads.

We’ll wrap up by looking at some of the most popular CMS platforms on the market. Let’s get started.

With a CMS, you can create, manage, modify, and publish content in a user-friendly interface. You can customize the design and functionality of your site by downloading or purchasing templates and extensions, rather than coding. You can have multiple users working in the back-end of the same tool — and much more.

You might be wondering how one piece of software does all of this. To answer that question, let’s take a closer look at how a CMS works.

How a CMS Works

To understand how a CMS works, you first have to understand what it’s like to build a site from scratch.

You’d start with HTML to add text, images, navigation bars, and other building blocks of a site. Then you’d add CSS to style those elements to match the unique look and feel of your brand.

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You’d finish up by writing some JavaScript to add more advanced functionality to your site, like slide-in CTAs. Then you’d have to upload this HTML file to your server to be filed away in your database.

Whenever you want to make changes — even simple ones like updating content — you have to download files from the server, open them, and change the HTML code by hand. Then you’ll have to make sure you didn’t break any links or something else before uploading the files back to the server.

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Sounds complicated, yes? For developers and other advanced users with experience in website development, building a site from scratch might be ideal. But for those who don’t have the coding skills or time and resources to build a site from scratch and maintain it, they can use a CMS. Let’s talk about how.

How to Use a CMS

A CMS is made up of two core parts: a content management application (CMA) and content delivery application (CDA). Combined, these applications essentially handle all the code, database queries, and infrastructure in the back end so you can focus on the front end of your site.

Rather than start with a blank HTML page, for example, you’ll open up the content editor and be able bold text, add links and CTAs, and insert images and tables by dragging and dropping some modules or clicking a few buttons rather than writing out HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. 

Here’s a look at how easy it is to create a blog post using WordPress, for example.

To make other changes on your site, like changing the permalink structure or installing extensions, just navigate to the appropriate section in your admin panel. This is the CMA in action: all these changes are made in an intuitive interface that hides the code from you, the end user.

When you’re done making changes, the CDA will take the content you entered into the CMA, assemble the code, display it to your front-end visitors, and store it. That means when you want to publish a new blog post, for example, you just have to hit the Publish button instead of manually uploading a page to your server.

Now that we understand what a CMS is, how it works, and how to use it, let’s explore the benefits of using one over building a site from scratch or using another website building tool.

Why Use a CMS?

We’ve already alluded to some benefits of using a CMS, but let’s look at some specific ways it can impact your set-up process, team’s productivity, and visibility online.

1. No Coding Knowledge Required

By enabling non-developers and other users to build websites without coding, CMS systems have helped revolutionize web design. Gone are the days of relying on web developers and designers to establish an online presence for your business.

You can create and manage content, customize the design of your site, and install extensions to add functionality to your site — all without coding. (It’s important to note that most platforms do allow you to add custom code for more granular control over your site, too.)

As a result, users with limited technical resources and time can still build a powerful website for their business.

2. Easy Collaboration

Multiple users can access and work in the back end of a CMS at the same time. That means on any given day, your marketers can be producing content, your IT professionals implementing security protocols, and your developers adding custom code to your theme. In fact, they could all be working on the same landing page.

In short, a CMS can help improve workflows and productivity across your team.

3. User Roles and Permissions

A CMS allows you to collaborate in the most efficient and safe way possible thanks to built-in (and often customizable) user roles and permissions. That means content writers, for example, can have all the permissions they need to write, publish, and manage content — but won’t be able to delete plugins or otherwise significantly alter the site’s functionality. 

Here’s a look at the User Role Editor in WordPress. 

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Without a CMS, you’d have to code some pretty complicated conditions and checks to create user roles and permissions in JavaScript.

4. SEO Features and Extensions

CMS platforms offer built-in features as well as add-ons to help you optimize your site for search engines.

Using built-in or third party tools, you can:

• Customize page titles and meta descriptions
• Choose SEO-friendly URL structures
• Create XML sitemaps
• Add image alt text
• Create 301 Redirects
• Include breadcrumb navigation
• Optimize page load times

Implementing these best practices will help improve your chances of ranking on Google and other major search engines.

5. Security Features and Extensions

CMS platforms also offer built-in features and add-ons to help you secure your site. Some even offer a dedicated security team. CMS Hub, for example, provides a dedicated 24/7 security team, an enterprise-class web application firewall, SSL, custom CDN, SSO memberships, and and other out-of-the-box features.

6. Predesigned Templates

Most CMS platforms come with a selection of predesigned templates you can use to quickly customize the appearance of your site. They can also affect the behavior of your site.

Choosing a responsive template, for example, will ensure your site looks good on any device, without requiring you to write a bunch of code. Not only do templates save you design time before launching your site, they can also make a website redesign much faster and simpler down the road.

Webflow is just one CMS that offers hundreds of responsive templates. 

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7. Simple Updates

As discussed above, a CMS enables you to make changes on your site faster and easier — from major updates, like a website redesign, to minor updates, like changing the image on your home page. Rather than hiring a freelance developer or trying to edit the code yourself, you can go into the dashboard of your CMS to update and edit the content of your website. This allows you to keep your content dynamic and relevant.

8. Blogging Functionality

Blogging offers a range of benefits, particularly to businesses. It can help drive traffic to your website, convert traffic into leads, establish authority in a particular industry, generate backlinks, and achieve other long-term results. But building a blog from scratch is difficult, even for experienced developers.

A major advantage of using a CMS is that most provide built-in blogging functionality (or extensions) so it’s easy to start creating and publishing blog content and reaping the benefits. 

9. Content Scheduling

Scheduling content is essential to any editorial strategy. When building a site from scratch, you can schedule content — but it will require a combination of coding and tools like GitHub.

With a CMS, scheduling content is as easy as clicking a button. Most platforms allow you to schedule more than just blog posts, too. With CMS Hub for example, you can schedule blog posts as well as website pages, landing pages, and emails.

Here’s a look at the scheduling tab within HubSpot’s blog editor.

10. Easy Access

With a CMS platform, you can access and edit your site on virtually any device with an internet connection. That’s much easier than the alternative of building a site from scratch, which requires you to be on a device connected to the server or connect remotely.

Plus, most CMS systems have a single dashboard or control panel where you can access your site’s content, theme, plugins, settings, and more — all in one place. 

If your site is growing, you may need to upgrade to a CMS to meet your needs. You can start your search by checking out a few of the best CMS systems below.

Let’s unpack eight popular CMS platform examples to discover which might be the best fit for your website needs.

1. CMS Hub

Ideal for: Any-sized businesses

Price: $25 – $1,200 per month

Why Use CMS Hub: With CMS Hub, you can build websites that are secure, powerful, and optimized for search engines.

Using this all-on-one connected platform, you can create personalized content for visitors based on data from your HubSpot CRM, create custom templates and styles, run A/B tests on multi-language content, safely redesign and relaunch web pages, view performance analytics, and much more.

By combining ease of use and flexibility, this proprietary CMS is ideal for businesses with diverse teams of marketers, developers, and IT professionals that are looking to grow over time.

Learn more about CMS Hub’s customization options, multi-lingual support, reporting dashboards, and more.

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2. WordPress

Ideal for: Small businesses and freelancers

Price: Estimated between $30 to $3,000

Why Use WordPress: WordPress is a self-hosted platform that powers millions of sites. You can easily and quickly build a WordPress site using the Gutenberg editor and then customize it with any of the thousands of plugins and themes available in the official WordPress directory or other third-party sites.

Want to add forms and live chat to your site? Want a theme that comes with a built-in visual builder and split testing? Leveraging WordPress plugins and themes like these, you can create a unique experience specific to your brand.

3. Joomla

Ideal for: Global companies

Price: Estimated between $700 to $6,500

Why Use Joomla: Site owners looking for more functionality built right into the platform may try a WordPress alternative like Joomla.

Like WordPress, Joomla is an open-source CMS. What sets Joomla apart is its built-in multilingual support and advanced user and content management options, which make it ideal for membership, community, and social networking sites. UIDAI, for example, is a multilingual website powered by Joomla. 

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4. Drupal

Ideal for: Corporatations and government agencies

Price: Estimated between $5,000 to $20,000

Why Use Drupal: Drupal is a highly flexible CMS favored by large corporations and government agencies like NASA. While you will need web development experience to fully leverage the power of this platform, you won’t have to start from scratch.

In addition to its out-of-the-box features, you can choose among 47,000 modules available in its directory and thousands of free themes in its theme repository to build a complex site that handles large volumes of data and heavy traffic, like Rush University Medical Center’s website. 

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5. Magento

Ideal for: Ecommerce businesses

Price: Estimated at $15,000 and up

Why Use Magento: The self-hosted version of Magento, known as Magento OpenSource, is like the Drupal of the ecommerce world. It’s highly flexible and secure, but difficult to learn and take advantage of all its built-in functionality and extensions.

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With Magento, you can manage multiple stores, use several worldwide shipping providers, and transact in different countries, languages, and currencies — all within the same dashboard.

So, if you have the time and resources to invest in set-up and maintenance, you’ll be able to build an online store with a huge product inventory and global reach.

6. Webflow

Ideal for: Web designers and agencies

Price: $15 – $235 per month

Why Use Webflow: Webflow is a “visual” content management system designed to fill a market gap for web designers who want to focus on creating and customizing sites without worrying about hosting, security, or performance.

With Webflow, you can start with one of the hundreds of pre-built templates or start from scratch using the Webflow Designer shown below.

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You can also extend the functionality of your site through third-party integrations or embedding HTML code. Since it requires at least some knowledge of HTML, CSS, and web design, Webflow is best suited for freelancer designers or agencies.

7. Ghost

Ideal for: Bloggers

Price: $9 – $2,400 per month

Why Use Ghost: If you’re looking for a more simple and lightweight CMS dedicated to blogging, Ghost is a great option. Ghost is a headless CMS, which means that its body (the content repository) is separated from its head (the presentation layer).

Basically, this allows you to create and manage content and then deliver that content via their Node.js APIs (or another front-end tool you prefer) to any platform and channel, from smartwatches to virtuality reality headsets.

With an intuitive editor and built-in SEO tools, Ghost appeals to bloggers and beginners who want a basic site that’s simple to create and manage.

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8. Sitecore

Ideal for: Enterprise companies

Price: Must contact company for pricing info

Why Use Sitecore: Sitecore is an enterprise-level headless CMS that enables you to create and deliver personalized websites, emails, social media posts, and mobile experiences.

You can use its WYSIWYG editor with drag-and-drop functionality, session- and device-based personalization rules, and multilingual tools to scale your content creation and deliver content that’s optimized to your users’ interests, language, and device. And thanks to Sitecore’s headless architecture, you can provide these relevant customer experiences across multiple channels, including web, social, voice, point of sale, and more.

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This CMS powers more than 120,000 websites in industries ranging from sports to banking to travel and more. Some of its biggest brands are American Express, ASOS, L’Oréal, and Volvo Cars.

Use a CMS to Build Your Site 

Using a content management system to build and manage your site can help you grow over time. Not only will a CMS store all of your web content in one place, it will also support collaboration across teams, allow for quick and easy updates, and offer templates and extensions to customize your site.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2010 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Since 86% of consumers rely on the internet to find local businesses, having a website is a no-brainer regardless of your business type.

Although building a website is great for business, you’ll want to avoid making common mistakes that will stop you from getting the most out of your investment. All of these mistakes are easy to identify for free using a handy tool called Website Grader.

In this post, I’ll show you the most common website mistakes we’ve seen here at HubSpot and exactly how to fix them if they apply to you.

1. Lengthy Page Title

A page title, like the one in the Google search result below, tells visitors what a page is about.

Search engines and browsers may cut off your page title if it’s too long. From a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, a concise page title yields the best reader experience. If your page title is too long, it will dilute the importance of each term in the title. This might even prevent you from ranking well on the search engine results page (SERP).

It’s best practice to keep your page title under 70 characters so that the reader can see the entire title and make a decision to click through to the post.

Website Fix #1: Use a Headline Analyzer Tool to Write Concise Headlines

Use a tool like Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer to draft a concise and keyword-rich description of your page. It’s a great idea to test several variations of a headline before choosing the best one. Amanda Sellers, manager of the historical optimization team at HubSpot, recommends a score of 70 or above from the Headline Analyzer tool for most headlines.

2. Long Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are essential for drawing in visitors from search. The meta description is the text under a page title in search results. Like page titles, meta descriptions will get cut off and replaced by “…” if they are too long.

Website Fix #2: Use a Word Counter to Check Your Characters

You can use tools like WordCounter and SERPsimulator to count the number of characters in our meta description so you don’t go over the limit.

SERPsimulation, for example, shows you what your title tag and meta description would look like on the search engine result page.

3. Keyword Stuffing

We’ve seen many people make the mistake of stuffing their page title with keywords or targeting unrealistic keywords. For example, it’s often a futile effort if a new website in the online marketing space is trying to rank for a keyword like “inbound marketing.”

Sometimes websites target keywords that would attract a ton of traffic but fail to convert.

From a user’s standpoint, using too many keywords in your content creates a bad user experience and makes it hard to read your website. As for search engines, Google Search Central mentions that keyword stuffing can harm your site’s rankings.

Website Fix #3: Conduct Proper Keyword Research

Start by creating a list of all the relevant terms used to describe your business. Then, you can break these terms up into content or topic buckets. For example, here at HubSpot, we have topic buckets like “inbound marketing,” “blogging,” and “social media marketing.”

The next step would be to fill these broad topic buckets with keyword phrases your potential customers might use when searching for that type of content.

If you already get a bit of traffic from Google, you can dig into your Google Analytics instance to find the keywords people use to get to your website.

Aside from Google Analytics, you can also use SEO and keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush for more keyword ideas.

4. Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is when two or more pages on your website are targeting the same keyword.

The problem with keyword cannibalization is that your web pages targeting the same keyword would be competing against each other on the search engine results page. This could result in a low click-through rate and cause a decrease in the value of each page.

Each page on your website is a new opportunity to get found online. You don’t want to waste all these opportunities by reusing the keywords.

Website Fix #4: Try the Pillar Cluster Model

With tools like Moz Keyword Explorer and SEOScout Cannibalization Checker, you can easily identify pages competing for the same keywords on your website.

Once you’ve identified these pages, you can try the pillar cluster model to reorganize your website. The pillar cluster model involves grouping related blog posts into specific topic areas instead of long-tail keywords.

With this model, the individual blog posts link back to the pillar page and share hyperlinks.

5. No Image Alt Text

Search engines do not “read” images. Instead, they scan primarily for text. Fortunately, with the alt tag, you can associate text with an image.

Considering that around 33% of Google’s search results now show an image pack — a snippet display of horizontal rows of image links appearing in any organic position — you’d be losing out on a ton of traffic if you don’t add alt text to your website images.

Alt text also helps you make your content accessible to users and improves the user experience in addition to helping you gain more traffic.

Website Fix #5: Add Alt Texts to All Your Images

Assign ALT text to pictures whenever possible by adding something like this to your HTML:

alt=”David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox batting from home plate at Fenway Park”

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When writing alt text, use proper sentence structure and be as specific as possible when describing the image.

6. Too little (or Too Much) Text

Search engines read text better than anything else. So, it’s important to have text on your web page. Knowing this, some people cram as much text as possible into a page. As a result, search engines then struggle to extract the relevant text.

Website Fix #6: Focus the Page on One Topic

Make sure your page is readable and contains the keywords you are targeting. However, don’t add unimportant text just to hit a specific word count.

7. Not Using Analytics

Even after you’ve created engaging content on your website, optimized, and converted traffic into leads, your work is not done! You still need to track your website’s analytics.

Web analytics are essential because they help you better understand your visitors and how they interact with your site. Without proper tracking, you won’t be able to tell what pages on your website get the most/least traffic, which devices visitors are using to access your site, and so on.

Without access to these vital metrics, you’d be left in the dark when making decisions that affect your website.

Website Fix #7: Track Metrics That Matter

It’s going to be a waste of time to track all the analytics on your website. Instead, focus on the metrics that align with your business objectives. For starters, you should track and analyze website metrics like unique page views, bounce rates, number of returning visitors, and traffic sources.

You can then analyze the data you collect to make informed business decisions that’d drive your business’ growth.

Web analytics tools like HubSpot’s Marketing & Analytics Dashboard and Google Analytics can help you track all the metrics you need.

8. Slow Load Times

Nobody enjoys waiting in a queue, especially not when they have other options to choose from. You can say the same of your website visitors. They’re not going to wait around if your website takes forever to load when they could hop on the next website that loads almost instantly.

If your website loads slowly, it could be because your hosting is insufficient, you have large images across your site, you have too many redirects, or you’ve installed too many unnecessary plugins.

Website Fix #8: Increase Your Website Loading Speed

You can use simple tools like Pingdom Website Speed Test, GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights to check your website’s speed.

To improve your website’s speed, follow these best practices:

• Choose a web hosting platform that’s designed for speed
• Compress your images
• Embed videos instead of uploading them directly to the site
• Reduce redirects
• Enable cache browsing
• Leverage a content delivery network (CDN)
• Uninstall any unnecessary plugins

9. Unresponsive Website

Mobile devices account for over 54.8% of global website traffic. Since most people use their handheld devices to access the internet, it’s in your best interest to make your website responsive on mobile screens.

Unfortunately, many website owners make the mistake of only optimizing their websites for desktop devices, thereby leaving out the larger chunk of their audience and traffic.

Website Fix #9: Optimize Your Website For Mobile

You should avoid including content that is only accessible on desktop. Avoid large header sections so that mobile users get to the content quickly. You should also ensure the font size is not too small to read.

Google Search Console has a neat feature that lets you test how mobile-friendly your website is. Here’s the test result for HubSpot’s website.

10. Poor Internal Linking

Links are essential for improving website authority on search engines. However, many website owners make the mistake of either using too many or too few links.

If there are too many links on a page, it can become distracting. And too few links could make the article or web page look less authoritative.

Another poor linking mistake is when you don’t use anchor text for internal links. You’ve likely come across websites with a “Click here” or some other generic text. Did you click it? Likely not.

Website Fix #10: Create an Internal Link Structure

With a tool like SEMrush, you can run a site audit to identify internal linking opportunities across your website.

You could also create a link structure that helps you naturally include internal links to existing content whenever you’re creating new blog posts or web pages.

However, as much as you want to build internal links between your web pages, don’t go around linking to everything just for the sake of it. Instead, emphasize link quality over quantity. Finally, use relevant keywords in the anchor text for your internal links to help the search engine infer a relationship between the posts.

11. Poor Website Security

You probably wouldn’t sleep well at night knowing your home is vulnerable to a break-in. Like you, online shoppers (or website visitors in general) also feel edgy whenever they try to navigate or shop on an insecure website.

The recent rise in personal data breaches and website hacks also makes it necessary for your website to be secure.

Now, web browsers like Chrome and Firefox show a warning, as seen in the photo below, to alert users whenever they visit an insecure website.

Website Fix #11: Enable an SSL Certificate

You can protect your customers and gain their trust by installing a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate on your website. SSL is a security protocol that creates an encrypted link between your web server and your visitor’s browser.

To know if your site is protected, check its URL to see if it starts with “HTTP” or “HTTPS.” If it’s “HTTPS,” your site is secure. If not, you need to purchase an SSL certificate from your domain provider or a site like Let’s Encrypt.

12. Lengthy Website Forms

Website forms are crucial for converting traffic into leads, but the leads will only convert if your form is done right.

Most website forms today require a lot of work from visitors to fill out. These forms might ask for unnecessary information and have several “required” fields that look pushy, leaving visitors confused or frustrated.

Website Fix #12: Ask For Only the Essential Details

Limit the content of your forms to only the information you need. For example, use only 3-5 fields in each form. Also, reduce the number of required fields, and add help text in the field’s default.

This form from Hubspot’s Marketing Grader shows how simple a form can be to optimize conversions.

13. No Calls To Action

Another common website mistake people make is not including a CTA on their website. You’ve probably spent lots of time and effort directing people to your website. But what happens once they arrive on your website? Do you want them to buy a product? Sign up for a newsletter? Share what they’ve read?

Whatever you want them to do, you have to ask them for it.

Website Fix #13: Add Specific Calls to Action

If you are selling a product, make purchase buttons stand out and guide visitors on the next step to take. If you want them to sign up for a newsletter or something similar, create a sign-up form available as soon as possible before they leave your website.

It’s also good practice to place your calls to action above the fold.

14. No Search Box

A search box is a simple feature many websites lack today. Without a search box, it’s more difficult for visitors to find the specific web pages they’re looking for on your website.

The absence of a search box causes a poor user experience and reduces users’ time on your website.

Website Fix #14: Create a Search Box

If your website has multiple pages, you should include a search box. Then, as your website gets larger, visitors can use the search box to find what they’re looking for within seconds.

To add a search box on a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, simply place the widget where you’d like your users to see it. The home page is a great place for a search box.

15. Contact Info is Hard to Find

This is a mistake that’s especially costly for ecommerce websites. If potential customers find it difficult to get in touch with you, they might lose trust in your product or service.

Website Fix #15: Make it Easy to Find Your Contact Information

Make it easy for visitors to reach out to you by including your contact information like email and phone number on different pages on your website.

You can also link to social media accounts to give visitors a way to engage with your business. If you’re stuck, you can find helpful templates, information, and inspiration from HubSpot’s guide to contact forms.

16. Using Stock Images Throughout Your Website

Stock photos make it hard to differentiate your website from many other sites that use the same free images. These stock photos also don’t feel original and may create a poor experience for your visitors.

Website Fix #16: Use Original Images or Graphics

Whenever possible, take and use original photos that showcase your products or your work culture. If it’s too expensive to take new images consistently, you can use a design solution like Canva to create engaging graphics that leave a more lasting impression.

Fix Your Website the Right Way

Despite your best intentions, you could be making some mistakes on your website that cause you to lose leads, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. Now that you know these common website mistakes, test out these simple solutions to optimize your site for traffic and conversions. Examine this list of mistakes against your website and see what changes you can make to improve how well your website works for your business.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in June 2010 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.