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Even as new marketing channels crop up, email marketing continues to be an effective way to generate leads and convert more prospects for your business.

According to a HubSpot survey, 94% of marketers find email marketing effective for reaching their business goals.

To get the most out of your email marketing strategy, check out these best practices.

Table of Contents

• Email Marketing Best Practices
• Outbound Email Best Practices

17 Inbound Email Marketing Best Practices

1. Don’t purchase contact lists.

This first tip should come as no surprise, but given the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it bears repeating.

Email campaigns depend on a healthy open rate. If you’re contacting people whose information you bought — rather than earned from a previous interaction — you‘ll quickly see your emails’ performance drop.

The GDPR also requires each European recipient’s consent before you contact them. Purchased email lists usually do not come with that consent.

For help reaching your target audience, consider Versium Reach — a platform for B2B marketers that allows you to own data on your target audience across multiple marketing channels.

2. Avoid using ‘No-Reply’ in the sender’s email address.

Have you heard of CAN-SPAM? This long-standing legislation is a popular and important guideline for all email marketers in the U.S.

One major rule in CAN-SPAM is to never use the words “no reply,“ or a similar phrase, as your email sender’s name (for example, ”[email protected]”).

“No reply” in an email message prevents recipients from responding and even opting out of further emails, which CAN-SPAM protects their right to do so at any time.

Instead, have your automated emails come from a first name (for example, [email protected]). Your customers are much more likely to open emails if they know a human being wrote them. Plus, it keeps you compliant with email regulations.

3. Stick to fewer than three typefaces.

The less clutter you have in your email, the more conversions you’ll get.

Don’t junk up your message with more than two fonts or typefaces, as that can distract readers and ruin your email’s visual appeal.

In the email example below from recruiting SaaS company Greenhouse, the company sticks to just two fonts.

Not only does this make it easy to read, but readers can focus on the context of the email rather than get distracted by the styling.

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In addition, use web-safe fonts with sizes between 10-point and 12-point. This ensures your email will be legible on all readers and devices.

4. Optimize the email’s preview text.

If you subscribe to any newsletter, you’ve likely seen a message like this at the top of your email: “Email not displaying correctly? Click here.”

While it’s a helpful message, keeping it in the preview text of your email (also known as the preheader) can significantly impact your email’s open rate.

Firstly, because you’re telling recipients, “Hey, this email might not work.” Secondly, it doesn’t provide any insight into what the email is about.

Your preview text should supplement your subject line by adding details to capture your audience’s attention and encourage them to open.

By default, preview text pulls in the first several words of the email body and displays it next to the subject line before the person opens it.

The problem is that custom email templates often stick with conditional statements like “Can’t see images?” or “Not displaying correctly?” at the top banner, allowing it to slip right into the preview when it goes out.

As a rule of thumb, always write a custom preheader that teases what your email will offer.

Pro tip: HubSpot users can fix this problem by customizing the preview text themselves in the backend of their email marketing newsletter.

5. Include an email signature.

Even if your newsletter is technically being sent to your contacts on behalf of the company, rather than an individual, the email should include the signature of a specific person.

In a 2020 State of Business Email Marketing study, 62% of marketers said they use email signatures to increase visibility around their branding.

When you consider that every email sent on behalf of your company is another branding opportunity, it makes sense to include a signature.

Your email signature should include some sort of CTA, whether that’s a link to your website, social media, or a specific landing page.

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Another reason you should include your email signature is that it’s a touch of personalization.

People are naturally more inclined to read an email if they know it came from a human being, not just a collective marketing team. Your email signature is your ticket to their attention.

Want a quick way to make a beautiful email signature? Use HubSpot’s Email Signature Generator. We also have an Out-of-Office Email Generator to make your response to incoming messages just as delightful.

6. Clean your mailing list regularly.

Some of your email contacts might not opt out of your email campaign but will still never open your emails.

According to a HubSpot survey, over 32% of marketers say low open rates are one of their biggest challenges with their email marketing strategy.

Emailing as many people as possible is tempting, but keeping your least-engaged recipients on your mailing list can kill your open rate.

People who never open emails make your campaign look worse since you‘re not analyzing the campaign’s quality against your most loyal recipients.

Review your list of subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails over a certain period, and remove them regularly.

This gives you a more accurate email open rate and keeps your email campaign clean of people no longer interested in hearing from you.

You can also implement a workflow in which they’re gradually moved to a less frequent email list based on activity.

For instance, say you have a daily newsletter. You could implement a workflow in which subscribers who do not open your email in two consecutive weeks are moved to the weekly email.

Then, those subscribers could be moved to the monthly newsletter if they don’t open four consecutive emails. And so on.

It keeps you from bombarding your subscribers with emails they’re not interested in, all while keeping your list clean.

7. Keep the main message and call-to-action above the fold.

Above the fold refers to the information visible to the reader before they scroll down.

Even though recent research suggests that consumers scroll more than they used to — because of social media and vertical timelines — above-the-fold content still gets the most attention when considering that people don’t have long attention spans.

According to a 2022 report from Litmus, people spend an average of nine seconds looking at an email.

With this in mind, place your main message and CTA above the fold. It’s the first thing your recipients will see once they open your email, increasing your conversion rate.

You can also run an A/B test first to validate the hypothesis and see if it works for your emails.

8. Personalize the email greeting.

How often do you read emails that begin with “Dear Member?”

You might segment your email audiences by their customer type (member, subscriber, user, etc.), but it shouldn’t be the first thing recipients see in your company messages.

Personalizing the greeting of your emails with your contacts‘ first names grabs each reader’s attention. For HubSpot users, this is called a personalization token, and creating one looks like this:

Then, the address line of your email would automatically produce the contact’s first name by fetching this personalization token in the email’s HTML, like this: Hi, !

Don‘t worry; personalizing an email’s greeting line with 50 recipients‘ names doesn’t mean you’ll have to manually write and send 50 different emails from now on.

Many email marketing tools today allow you to configure the greeting of your email campaign so that it automatically sends with the name of the people on your contact list — so everyone is getting a personal version of the same message.

9. Keep your email around 500 to 650 pixels wide.

If your email template is wider than 650 pixels, your email won’t show up correctly and will require users to scroll horizontally to read the full email.

This is a pain, to say the least, and will likely affect your conversion, especially when many users read emails on mobile.

Nearly 30% of marketers say that optimizing emails for mobile is one of the most effective strategies for increasing the click-through rate (CTR), according to data from HubSpot.

Having your template fit within the standard format will make for easier readability, better conversions, and an overall better user experience.

10. A/B your subject lines and calls to action.

If you can‘t seem to increase your email’s open and click-through rates, a couple of things might be wrong: You‘re not emailing the right people (if you’re buying your contact list, see the first tip at the top of this blog post), or the content needs to be improved.

To start, focus on the latter, and conduct an A/B test. 18% of marketers have found success with increasing click-through rates when they used A/B testing.

A/B tests can be used to improve almost any of your digital marketing content.

In an email, this test splits your recipients into two groups: Group A receives the regular newsletter, while Group B receives the newsletter with a specific variation. The variation can be anything from a different subject to another CTA.

This variation tests to see if your audience would be more or less likely to take an action based on that element.

HubSpot Marketing Hub users can conduct email A/B tests on anything from the subject line to the call-to-action (CTA) inside it.

For example, you might change the color of your CTA from red to green to see if your email‘s clickthrough rate increases. If it does, the test indicates that you should change all of your emails’ CTA color to green from now on.

11. Include your logo.

Logos are essential when it comes to emails.

A 2021 study by Red Sift and Entrust found that logos positively impact email engagement as well as brand recall.

The study found that when businesses include a logo in their emails, open rates increased by 21%.

Brand recall increased by 18% after a five-second exposure when including a logo in the email. Consumer confidence in the legitimacy of an email also increased by 90%.

With this in mind, add your logo to your email design to ensure that it’s always included.

12. Name the offer in your subject line.

You can drastically increase your open rates by including an incentive in your subject line.

31% of marketers say that emails with special offers or promotions have the highest open rate, and 30.7% of marketers say these emails also have the highest click-through rate.

If you’re running a promotion, use incentive-focused subject lines like “Free shipping when you spend $25 or more” or “Receive a free iPad with a demo.”

Here’s an example of an email with an enticing subject line and warm, welcoming body copy. The subject line for this email from Elementor says, “Up to 50% off when upgrading!”

However, be careful not to overwhelm your readers with savings- or product-related emails.

Customer loyalty starts with casual industry insights — only after nurturing should you start introducing offers.

13. Allow recipients to subscribe to your newsletter.

You might be thinking, “Wait, if they received the email to begin with, shouldn’t they have already subscribed?”

Usually, yes. Therefore, adding a “Subscribe” button to your email doesn’t help those who’ve already agreed to receive your emails.

But great content is shareable content, and if your current subscribers are forwarding your emails to their friends and colleagues, you’ll want to help them subscribe, too.

Add a small but visible CTA that allows the recipient to subscribe to the newsletter if they received this email from someone else.

This email newsletter called Contentment is a great example of how to include a sign-up CTA in your email without distracting from the rest of the content:

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But remember, because your newsletter should already be driving another action, such as downloading an ebook or signing up for a webinar, make sure this “Subscribe” button doesn’t distract or confuse users, weakening your main campaign goal in the process.

14. Write compelling (but concise) subject lines.

A good subject line should contain between 30 and 50 characters, including spaces. The reason why you do this is that email providers often cut off subject lines that go beyond this length.

Your email subject line should also create a sense of urgency while giving readers some indication of what to expect once they open the email.

15. Create automated emails for opt-ins.

Be prepared for your readers to forget they opted in.

Set up an automated email flow that reminds people they opted into your email database. The auto-responder should be sent out one day, five days, and 10 days after the person subscribes.

Each automated email should also include additional content or bonus material to reward the reader for opting into the newsletter — or your readers might not feel they have enough incentive to actually stay on your list.

16. Closely tie emails to landing pages.

If you’re promoting a specific landing page in your email, the landing page should match the email in terms of headline, copy, and content.

The look and feel of your landing page should also match the email to help create consistency, which goes a long way toward earning a customer’s trust.

Also, make sure you‘re using tracking tools to see which emails and landing pages performed the best so you can keep sending what’s working.

17. Conduct a five-second test.

Send a copy of the email to a friend or colleague. Can they quickly tell what your CTA is? If so, you’re ready to hit send. If not, figure out how you can tweak your subject line. Or, if there’s a different landing page, you should link to it.

3 Outbound Email Best Practices

If you’re sending emails for lead generation — for example, in a sales position — then there are a few more outbound email best practices to employ.

Following these best practices ensures you’re effectively forming strong connections that can lead to potential business opportunities.

1. Make it personal.

Sending an outbound email isn’t too different from sending a marketing email.

You should still be personal, but even more so when you know your email is only being read by the receiver.

Start by letting them know how you know them. Have you already connected on Twitter or in a Slack group? Is this a completely cold email? Figure out where you stand so you know how best to personalize the greeting and message.

2. Include a clear CTA.

What do you want the receiver to do next? Set up a call? Book a demo? Make your CTA clear from the beginning so there isn’t any question about what the purpose of your email is.

Also, don’t close with a vague, open-ended message like, “Let me know what you think!” Instead, offer a clear statement or question, such as, “When is a good time to set up a call?” Being direct and clear helps limit the time the receiver spends figuring out what you want.

3. Follow up.

Follow up when necessary, but don’t bombard the receiver with a million follow-up emails.

Be aware of the typical response time from people in your industry or people you reach out to. Anywhere from two days to one week is a reasonable amount of time between sending your first email and sending a follow-up.

Getting Started

There are a lot of new tools at a marketer’s disposal that are getting attention these days. But email marketing has stood the test of time regarding its influence on your users.

This old, reliable, and faithful tool can ensure you get the most out of your marketing initiatives if you follow these effective email best practices.

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

On average, Facebook is home to over 3 billion daily active users — from CEOs to students to companies. And while the community is clearly there, connecting with them from a marketing standpoint isn’t always easy.

For brands, posting on Facebook alone isn’t enough anymore, especially for ones just starting out. Sure, you can invest in promotional content to drive users to your Facebook Page and website, but this requires more than an ad budget: it requires strategy.

One way to get the most out of your Facebook ad strategy is to create optimized Facebook Ads targeted at the right audience. By leveraging optimized ads, you can better allocate your PPC budget and better promote your brand.

We’ll show you how to make a great ad to achieve these goals through the best Facebook ad examples and practices we’ve seen yet.

• Do Facebook Ads Work?
• Best Facebook Ad Examples
• How do Facebook Ads work?
• Facebook Ad Placements
• Facebook Ad Formats
• Facebook Ads Best Practices
• Facebook Ad Resources

 

So, what does optimized Facebook advertising actually look like? To gain some inspiration for your next Facebook ad campaign, take a look at our list of the best Facebook ad examples from across industries.

Featured Resource: 50 Amazing Facebook Ad Examples

See these best practices in action with our collection of 50 Facebook Ad Examples from real businesses that we admire.

1. SofaLush

Video Ad

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: The video in the ad clearly demonstrates how the product works. Also, the video opens with a pressure cooker that seemingly “disappears” during the course of the video. This Easter egg prompted a lot of engagement in the comments, which further improved the ad’s performance.
• It’s relevant: It’s relevant to me because I was recently looking for new couches. This product shows an alternative to replacing my couch, on the off-chance that I might want to get more mileage out of my existing couch before making a new purchase.
• It’s valuable: The “how-to” style of the video is meant to underscore the value proposition: making your existing furniture more stylish… without a lot of hassle.
• It has a solid call to action: The ad states that there are over 150 designs to choose from and has a button that prompts me to “shop now” and see if one of them would fit my style.

2. Lume Deodorant

Photo Ad

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: The vibrant, purple hues of the text, packaging, and background guide the user to the most important information on the ad like how Lume deodorant “Stops Odor BEFORE it starts.” The smiling model may showcase where you most commonly apply deodorant — your underarms — but the text makes a bold value statement that you can actually use it all over your body. This ad makes you feel better about a topic that doesn’t always feel so good — sweating — by making you feel confident in your antiperspirant protection.
• It’s relevant: I have been recently researching skincare products to begin a new regime. With this behavior cue, Lume knows that organic deodorant is better for skin but many brands fall short of being able to block odor, and some even cause rashes. This is also aluminum-free deodorant, an increasingly desirable option amongst consumers like their target audience.
• It’s valuable: Knowing where other organic deodorants fall short, Lume positions their brand without those drawbacks, and they do it in a clever and engaging way (the song).
• It has a clear call to action: The end of the photo ad prompts the user to click “Get Offer” so they claim their starter pack — a hassle-free proposition for consumers new to their products and unsure of where to start.

3. Kay Jewelers

Video Ad

This Facebook video ad from Kay Jewelers tells a quick but moving story — something Kay Jewelers is well-known for — using just a few seconds of your time. You don‘t even need the sound on in the video above to know what’s happening and the message Kay is sending.

If you‘re advertising a product with sentimental value, like Kay Jewelers, video ads are the way to go. Just be sure your video has a clear (and happy) ending — people view videos more passively on Facebook than they would on YouTube and don’t have time to interpret your ad if it’s too long or complex.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: Even though this is a video, I have a general idea of what I will be watching, thanks to the screen capture it started with. Additionally, I can understand the gist of this ad without playing with the sound on, which is important given that most users are more likely to view videos with the sound off.
• It’s relevant: It’s relevant to me because I was recently scouring jewelry websites, specifically for necklaces like the one in the ad.
• It’s valuable: Kay shows potential customers the value of purchasing with the help of the happy reaction from the woman receiving the gift in the ad. Plus, who doesn’t love dogs?
• It has a solid call to action: This ad is set up to drive Page Likes, which is an easy, one-click way for me to get more relevant content served up to me.

4. Monday.com

Photo Ad

Monday.com is a task-management tool that caters to multiple operating systems, both desktop, and mobile. But in the photo ad above, the company used its compatibility with Mac computers to remix its own logo in the original rainbow colors of the Apple brand.

For growing businesses like Monday.com, it‘s a smart idea to pivot off the brand awareness of household names. By filling the Monday logo with Apple’s famous rainbow color-way, the ad above captures the attention of Mac users who’d recognize those vintage rainbow stripes anywhere (and could use a new task-management tool that works on their computer).

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: The rainbow colors filling the Monday logo are both eye-catching against the black background and familiar to any Mac user.
• It’s relevant: For Mac users, and those who need to organize their tasks on a regular basis, this ad is relevant to their lifestyle in more ways than one.
• It’s valuable: The ad calls attention to Monday‘s compatibility with Mac computers, making the product’s user experience more valuable to Mac users as a result.
• It has a clear call to action: The “Learn More” CTA on the bottom-right of the ad is a clear invitation to find out more about this product’s usage on Apple hardware.

5. Amazon

Event Ad

This is how an event ad from Amazon looks in the News Feed on a desktop. This ad works well on a few different levels: A sample product is clearly displayed, the ad shows an impressive (but honest) rating of that product, and you know which event Amazon is promoting right away — Black Friday.

Ecommerce companies like Amazon use event ads to boost sales at specific points during the year, and Facebook event ads make this easy. When investing in event advertising, build a list of the holidays, shows, conferences, and awareness months your business cares about. That way, you know exactly which market campaigns line up with these occurrences and when to promote them on your Facebook Business Page.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: Not only is this image larger than the right column ad display, but it also uses warm colors, white space, and directional lines, which drew my eye toward the featured product.
• It’s relevant: As a cat mom, this offer is clearly tailored to my consumer needs.
• It includes an enticing value prop: Amazon has advertised a self-cleaning litter box here, which is of tremendous value for any cat owner. Additionally, it shared the strong customer ratings below an image of the product. (Social proof, anyone?)
• It has a clear call to action: Amazon instructs me to click on its ad today, after which point the deal for the litter box will presumably disappear. “Now” is strong CTA language that compels clicks.

6. NatureBox

Photo Ad

This photo ad by NatureBox features a creative point-of-view shot that is perfect for the angle at which you‘d dive into the company’s various healthy snacks. The ad makes you imagine your next house party… I thought the peanuts spilling out onto the table was a nice touch.

In your next Facebook photo ad, play around with live-action photography and digital design in the same image. As you can see in the ad above, NatureBox was able to design a vibrant “free trial” icon right on top of an image that would’ve worked just as well on its own.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: The image shows you exactly what you’re getting, and it calls out the “free trial” CTA well.
• It’s relevant: Everyone likes to snack. In all seriousness, the person who saw this is a fan of several lifestyle subscription companies, which is what NatureBox is.
• It’s valuable: This ad is full of value. First, the “free trial” callout is the first thing your eyes go to when looking at the image. Second, it clearly mentions the healthy aspects of the goodies in its product.
• It has a clear call to action: NatureBox is asking you to try its free sample. It couldn’t be easier to know your next step.

7. Winc

Retargeting Ad

Here’s an example of a short and sweet (literally) retargeting ad from Winc (formerly known as Club W). This ad is displayed on the right column of Facebook specifically for users who browse wine-related content online. When your ad caters to people who you know would be interested, modeling the product the way Winc does above can be a home run for your brand.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: The visual is clear, simple, and appealing to all types of wine lovers wine-lovers.
• It’s relevant: This came up in my wine-obsessed colleague’s News Feed. Need I say more? Two thumbs up on relevance.
• It includes an enticing value prop: Three bottles for $19? What a steal. They also pull the viewer in with an additional value: a discount on their first order of wine.
• It has a strong call to action: The word “get” is strong call-to-action language, and it’s used twice here. A time limit on this offer would have made it even stronger.

8. Shutterfly

Multi-Product Ad

Here’s an example of a multi-product ad from Shutterfly, along with the additional images that are used in the ad. Each image has a different offer, to appeal to many different demographics in one ad.

In each image, the product being promoted is consistent in the look and feel of the Shutterfly brand — this is an important quality of ads that showcase more than one item and picture.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: This series of images leans on a consistent color palette, making it feel both cohesive and on-brand. (Including delicious-looking cupcakes doesn’t hurt either.)
• It’s relevant: The person who saw this loves taking photos of life events like graduations and creating sentimental gifts from these moments. Spot on, right?
• It’s valuable: There is a clear value for the user, 50% off each of the products being advertised. The sale details aren’t stated and it only alludes to a fastly approaching end date but this also encourages users to click through to the website in order to find this information. This ad also has an added level of value, it is showing the many different ways people can create grad cards and gifts using Shutterfly, in ways many may not be aware of.
• It has a clear call to action: I know I need to use this before February 17th when this deal expires, so I would be encouraged to take action right away.

9. MU Campus Dining

Reach Ad

This Facebook Reach ad from Mizzou Campus Dining promotes amenities at the University of Missouri, using two familiar logos and a marketplace that anyone on campus might recognize.

The ad copy beneath the image invites customers in “after the game” — a reference to campus life that helps Facebook users imagine when they might want to stop in for a sandwich.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: This image has college pride, a variety of salty and sweet treats, and a well-known logo to attract hungry college students.
• It’s relevant: This ad is likely only being shown to students on campus who are in its target audience. It also mentions the sports game that was going on at the time and plays to the student’s current needs: snacks and Subway sandwiches.
• It’s valuable: Mizzou Market is telling hungry college students that it has everything students need for the big game.
• It has a clear call to action: This ad has the option to show directions, making it extremely easy for a college student on the go to follow the walking directions to this market.

10. Boston Sports Clubs

Offer Ad

All consumers really need to see is the boxer pictured above to know what this ad by Boston Sports Clubs (BSC) is offering. The woman in the photo even looks like she’s staring at the text to her left, getting viewers to shift their attention to the promotion right away.

This Facebook Offers Ad makes it obvious what customers would be signing up for when they click the “Sign Up” CTA button below the picture. Offer ads can easily mislead viewers into pressing their CTA just to get them to click on it, but it ultimately doesn‘t convert viewers into customers. BSC’s approach above is clear and upfront about what it’s offering throughout its conversion path.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: The featured photo uses bold colors and clear typography to draw my attention to the details of the offer, and the woman exercising gives me an idea of what I could gain from purchasing the offer.
• It’s relevant: I recently moved to Boston and have been searching for gyms in my area online, so this ad is highly relevant to my recent Facebook and search activity.
• It’s valuable: Paying $5 for a monthly gym membership is a great deal. Even though the price may increase in the future, the low price definitely makes me want to click.
• It has a clear call to action: The CTA emphasizes that the discount offer is limited and should be claimed quickly using the word “hurry” and telling me when the offer expires.

11. Allbirds

Video Ad

This video ad by Allbirds, a shoe maker, uses simplicity and whitespace to its advantage. The video only lasts nine seconds, but Allbirds demonstrates the product in a way that catches your attention and resonates with the individual wearer.

There’s a lot of ad content on Facebook, and when Facebook users scroll through their News Feeds, that content starts to blend together. Sometimes your best chance at sticking out on Facebook is by using subtle movements and details — like Allbirds did, above. Let every other video on Facebook be quick and flashy, and yours will be a breath of fresh air to your audience.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: The video has a clear focus on a subject, and that subject is engaging in a movement that means something: These shoes are comfy. I subconsciously started wiggling my own toes as I saw this ad for the first time.
• It’s relevant: I’m always interested in finding new shoes — I probably search or click on something related to footwear once a week. This ad feeds that interest in a unique way.
• It’s valuable: The opening quote above the video is reason enough for me to want to learn more about why these shoes are so comfortable. Allbirds also sweetens the deal with “free shipping,” “free returns,” and a note below the video that the product is “machine washable” — all without taking the focus away from the video itself.
• It has a clear call to action: If I want these shoes, there’s a “Shop Now” CTA button to the bottom-right of the ad, waiting for me to take a closer look at them.

12. The New York Times

Photo Ad

This photo ad by The New York Times is driving traffic to a written article with an intriguing illustration. The drawing literally depicts the article’s ideal audiences — working men and women raising children. For parents who are even a little interested in understanding burnout and mental health, this image (along with the statistically backed report in the headline) clearly shows a tired mom trying to catch some rest with her children.

When publishers advertise on Facebook, they need to connect with their audience through featured images that evoke emotion — if their main product is a reading experience; the photo they choose has to complement their written content perfectly. The New York Times’ ad above is an example of photo ads done right.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: This ad is emotionally impactful — if you have not been a tired, working parent then it is you’ve seen them, and that sight can make you feel immense compassion towards them. By including a visual that makes a user care enough about the ad to read it and click through, NYT is accomplishing the goal to which every ad aspires.
• It’s relevant: Especially, in the wake of COVID with parents simultaneously balancing work and personal life within the same space, the topic is incredibly relatable. This is an article I would personally be interested in reading, and it helps that the ad appears like a native post promoting an article in my News Feed.
• It includes an enticing value prop: The ad states that you can find help if you recognize the signs of parental burnout, which can feel like being tossed a life jacket — especially to the parents reading the report. This social proof makes you more likely to click and read the article.
• It has a clear call to action: This ad is dedicated to helping parents make sense of the signs and get help for their fatigue, so by encouraging parents to ”Learn More”, the call to action makes you want to click the article to finally find answers.

13. Tortuga Music Festival

Event Ad

Successful event ads have at least two important qualities: the event‘s schedule and something to justify why people should attend. The event ad above for the Tortuga Music Festival accomplishes both of those things — it displays the date and time and the bands playing and shows you a picture of the amazing time you’ll have if you come.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual. The picture alone is worth a thousand words about how much fun this concert would be. Not only is it on the beach, it was also taken on a gorgeous day and the stage looks amazing. Also, it clearly represents what to expect during the event, and it catches the eye as someone scrolls through their News Feed. (The beautiful ocean water definitely helps.)
• It’s relevant. The person who saw this ad is a fan of Kenny Chesney and has been to his concerts before. They’re also originally from Florida, which is where this event takes place.
• It’s valuable. Since the image was taken on a beautiful day, it looks like an ideal place to be — especially to those of us viewing it from our office desks. It also clearly tells you the cost of the ticket so you know before you click. (This is also good for the advertiser: By including the price, the ad allows users to self-select based on whether they can afford the ticket. If they can‘t afford it, they won’t click through, thus saving the advertiser money on unqualified clicks.)
• It has a clear call to action. The CTA is clear: “Buy.” The advertisers also add urgent wording with the title “Time is running out!”, encouraging you to purchase your ticket now before it’s too late.

14. Adrianna Papell

Retargeting Ad

Last week, I started shopping around for a bridesmaid dress for an upcoming wedding I’ll be in. Today, the ad above appeared in my News Feed.

Retargeting ads enable you to get in front of those viewers who are already looking for what you‘re offering. This retargeting ad by Adrianna Papell doesn’t just show me what I‘m on the market for — it excites me about how beautiful our own wedding party pictures will look on my friend’s big day.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual. The image gives me a good idea of what to expect from the designer’s website, and it definitely helps that the gowns are both unique and stunning. Talk about a showstopper.
• It’s relevant. The ad called out that I was already shopping for bridesmaid dresses, and what’s more, I had previously looked at dresses on this exact website, so this ad is highly relevant to my search.
• It’s valuable. The variety of dresses in the ad’s image and in the description make this website worth a visit for someone trying to find the perfect gown out of thousands of options.
• It has a clear call to action. The CTA is “Shop Now,” which encourages me to click to purchase the beautiful dresses in the ad’s image.

15. Bustle

Boosted Post

Here‘s an example of a boosted post from Bustle, which promoted one of its articles on Facebook. Paying to “boost” a post you already posted organically to your Facebook Business Page can greatly benefit content that has mass appeal — versus a post that targets a specific segment of your audience. Bustle’s choice of a boosted post here falls into that first category.

From Amazon‘s vibrant neon sign in the photo to the high number of examples included in the article (42, to be exact), Bustle’s boosted ad is sure to pique the interest of many Amazon and Bustle followers.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: Lots of people are familiar with the Amazon Prime logo, but not in neon lights in a window display. It made me do a double-take while scrolling through Facebook.
• It’s relevant: As we’ve already learned from the earlier examples, I like shopping on Amazon and also read Bustle, so this article is a combination of those two behaviors.
• It’s valuable: “Brilliant” is a strong adjective to describe products, which makes me curious to learn more about purchasing them.
• It has a clear call to action: The ad entices me with information about useful and “brilliant” gadgets I can get delivered to my door within two days, which I’m happy to click to learn more about.

16. La Colombe Coffee Roasters

Offer Ad

This ad from La Colombe Coffee Roasters is promoting its canned Oatmilk Salted Caramel Latte with a 20% off discount. It emphasizes that the drink has all the same flavor and creaminess of a regular latte — without the dairy.

Offer ads can be a highly effective way for businesses to attract new customers, drive conversions, and generate buzz around special deals. By leveraging Facebook’s ad targeting capabilities, La Colombe is able to present their discounted offer to customers directly on their feeds.

Why This Ad Works

• It’s visual: The vibrant colors in the photo instantly caught my eye as I was scrolling through my Facebook feed. Plus, the offer is highlighted in bright red, making it stand out in the image.
• It’s relevant: I’m an avid coffee drinker and I had been searching for canned coffee brands earlier in the day.
• It’s valuable: The ad offers a 20% off discount code on the first purchase, which gives me more incentive to try out the product.

It has a clear call to action: The CTA “Shop Now” invites me to find a new canned coffee that I can use the discount on.

Facebook ads can be a great way to reach out to potential customers, but it’s important to make sure yours stands out from the rest. Creating a great ad is all about understanding your audience and what they want to see, these insights will show you how to leverage Facebook ads so that they work for you.

To invest in Facebook Ads effectively, you first need to know who your ads are directed toward. When creating a new ad on Facebook, you can create a new audience that includes many customizable characteristics. Among them are:

• Location.
• Age.
• Sex.
• Languages spoken.
• Interests and behaviors.
• Their connections to your other business-related pages on Facebook.

You can also create what’s called a Lookalike Audience, which permits Facebook to create an audience for you that best resembles a particular “source.” This source can include some or all the information listed above.

Facebook Ad Formats

After you define the audience you want your ads to reach, it’s time to choose the Facebook Ad format you think they’ll find most engaging from these eight options:

Format 1: Photo Ad

Photo Ads are still images that can help to promote a product or event you want to specifically call attention to. If you have a special promotion going on, for example, this ad format puts a crisp snapshot of your product or venue at the center of your ad.

For ads shown in a Facebook News Feed, the recommended image resolution is at least 1080 x 1080.

Format 2: Video Ad

Video Ads have a GIF or video as the centerpiece of the advertisement and can be used to demonstrate a product or event. Video Ads help you form deeper connections with your audience by aligning your brand with a type of content online users are quickly consuming more of (nearly 80% of all data consumed on mobile devices will be in video form by 2021, according to a Facebook study).

There are six types of video ads you can invest in on Facebook:

• Short Videos and GIFs
• Vertical Videos
• Instagram Stories
• Video Carousels
• Video Collections
• In-stream Videos

Format 3: Stories Ad

Stories Ads are a part of Facebook Stories, one of the newest content types rolled out by Facebook that allows users to post temporary clips and images of their day for their friends to see. This type of ad is fitted to the dimensions of a mobile device and can be played on both mobile and desktop.

As users browse their friends‘ Stories, these ads can appear in the same format inside a stream of Stories. For this reason, it’s best to create Stories Ads that reflect the same candid and entertaining look and feel that people see from their friends. Stories Ads can be placed on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram.

Format 4: Messenger Ad

A Messenger Ad appears as a direct message in a user‘s message list when they’re inside Facebook’s Messenger app. These ads allow you to interact with your audience, showing them offers you think they would like, and listening to their responses to better tailor your next message to their interests.

Let‘s say your ad’s first message is “What product might you be interested in?” The user can then select from three different responses, triggering your ad to produce a more specific product offer directly in the message thread.

Format 5: Carousel Ad

Carousel Ads contain a series of images or videos that users can rotate through, all of them helping to describe a single product, service, or event the ad is promoting. Each Carousel Ad can contain up to 10 images or videos at a time and link to their own individual web pages. Because these ads carry so much media, according to Facebook, they’re ideal for:

• Endorsing multiple products.
• Promoting multiple features of the same product.
• Telling a story or sequence of events that unfold over the course of multiple pictures or videos.
• Explaining a process to potential customers.

Format 6: Slideshow Ad

Similar to Carousel Ads, explained above, Slideshow Ads segment your ad into individual images that users view one after another. The difference between these two ad formats is that Slideshow Ads only play images (not videos), and the ad compiles these images into a slideshow that plays automatically in the form of a video. According to Facebook, Carousel Ads are ideal for:

• Creating a video-like experience for users quickly and with a small budget.
• Advertisers who want to choose from a library of pre-created images and music (a unique perk of Facebook’s Slideshow Ad).
• Simplifying an otherwise complicated concept or process for potential customers.
• Reaching people who have slower internet connections (Slideshow Ads use five times less data than video ads on Facebook).

Format 7: Collection Ad

A Collection Ad allows advertisers to bring the buying process directly into Facebook, so potential customers can move from “discovery” to “purchase” more easily when they see a product they like. This ad format features a central image or video promoting a product, with a collection of four smaller images below it that viewers can click on to learn more about the product. There are four types of Collection Ads you can invest in:

• Instant Storefront: This ad is ideal for displaying multiple products as part of the same ad campaign, and driving traffic to each product’s respective product page.
• Instant Lookbook: This ad is ideal for demonstrating or modeling a product in various contexts for your audience.
• Instant Customer Acquisition: This ad is ideal for driving traffic to, and prompting them to take a specific action on, a product’s landing page.
• Instant Storytelling: This ad is ideal for telling a story about your brand or helping your audience learn more about the business.

Format 8: Playables

Playables cater specifically to app developers. This ad format allows your audience to watch, preview, and even play an abbreviated version of your new app directly from inside the ad.

So let’s take a look at the different ad placements that you can use to best position your brand promotion.

Facebook Ad Placements

After customizing your ad’s audience, you need to consider how the ad will look on both desktop and mobile. This ensures you design your ad for easy viewing no matter where it appears on Facebook. Here are three different places you can see your Facebook Ads show up:

Placement 1: Right Column

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This type of ad is the most traditional on Facebook, it appears on the right side of a user’s Facebook News Feed. This is the first type of advertising Facebook had, and it still exists today.

Although ads in the News Feed are likely to get higher engagement metrics due to its native advertising features, right column ads shouldn’t be forgotten. We often see less expensive clicks and conversions when using these ads. In order for a right column ad to be successful, it needs to be relevant, have a value proposition, a good visual, and have a call to action.

Placement 2: Desktop News Feed

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This type of ad appears directly in a user’s News Feed when they access Facebook on a desktop computer, and it looks more like native advertising. In our experience, these ads have a higher engagement rate than right column ads, but they can also be more expensive. These ads must follow organic Facebook posts’ best practices and be both engaging and visual.

Placement 3: Mobile News Feed

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Like the desktop News Feed ad, this type of ad appears in the user’s mobile News Feed and displays like an organic post from the people and Pages they follow.

Pro tip: When picking your ad placements, think about the best position to showcase the Facebook ad format you choose, as well as, the ad template you use to add color to your marketing vision.

Facebook Ad Templates

Facebook Ads can be used to accomplish a number of different goals for your business. Here are a few real ads that you can use as templates of inspiration when creating an ad that targets the same goal:

Video Product Demo Facebook Ad Template

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Video ads appear fairly large in the user’s News Feed and offer more engaging content than static posts. And with 100 million hours of video being watched on Facebook every day, it serves as an interesting — and potentially profitable — ad type for marketers to try out.

How can you create your own video ad? First, understand Facebook video ad requirements including length and video size. We suggest keeping your video as short as possible, even though Facebook allows you to upload a much larger video. Create a video that displays your product or service, and upload it directly to the Facebook ads manager by following these instructions.

Photo Model Ad Template

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Another type of rich media advertising on Facebook is a post of an image. This is one of the most popular types of ads ever since Facebook began favoring visual content. The optimal size for News Feed photo ads is at least 1080 x 1080 pixels, otherwise, your image will get cropped. Adjust your image based on the target audience’s needs and by what will appeal to them the most.

Multi-product Ad Template

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Multi-product ads allow advertisers to showcase multiple products within one ad. Viewers can scroll through the images and click on individual links to each product. You can promote multiple of anything, not just products — like different blog posts, ebooks, or webinars. These ads can be created in Facebook Ads Manager.

Reach Ad Template

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Reach ads on Facebook are designed to grow your local awareness. They only work if your business has a physical location to which you’re trying to drive real foot traffic. If you fall into this category, locally targeted Facebook ads might be a great fit for you, as you can hyper-target on Facebook down to the mile.

If your business has an offer or event going on at your store, set up a few Facebook Reach ads that appear only to people within a short distance of your store. Have these ads appear a few days prior to the event and on mobile devices while the event is happening. You may want to reach some people the day of the event who happen to be in the area and check their Facebook accounts on their smartphones.

Special Offer Ad Template

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An offer ad is a form of Facebook advertising wherein a business can promote a discount on a product or service that can be redeemed on Facebook. The benefit of this? It eliminates one step in the buyer’s journey, which ultimately increases sales.

The offer ad has many benefits. First, it drives the user directly to the offer. The user claims it directly on Facebook, removing any added friction of needing to go to your website for the offer. You also can reach any type of audience that you want, as all the Facebook targeting options are possible.

Finally, you can include all the information needed for the user to decide if they want it or not, including the time period it is usable, the number of people who have already claimed it, and the exact amount the offer is. This will eliminate any unqualified clicks, which cost you money.

Event Ad Template

Event ads promote a specific event. The CTA on these ads usually sends users directly to the ticket purchase page, wherever that happens to be hosted.

Using this type of ad will help drive a targeted group of people to attend your event. These will show up in the News Feed of the specific audience you’ve chosen. Events are a big part of most businesses, but getting people to attend even a small event can be tricky. Promoting your event to a targeted specific audience on Facebook can help drive the right kind of attendees.

A good ad in this format will clearly show the benefit of attending the event: the price, dates, and a clear CTA to purchase a ticket.

Boosted Ad Template

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A boosted post is an organic Facebook post that was originally on the homepage of a company’s Facebook, and that later was boosted with advertising money.

This is different from the above ads because it’s not created in the Facebook Ads Manager. You can include more in the description, as there is no limit to word count on boosted posts like there is in ads. You can also have a link in the copy.

The cons? Boosted posts leave you fewer options for bidding, targeting, and pricing. You also cannot run any types of A/B tests because you‘re promoting a post that has already been created; you’re not creating one from scratch.

Retargeting Ad Template

A retargeting ad promotes an ad to a specific list of previously identified people. Have you ever seen ads follow you across the internet after visiting a certain website? Then you’ve seen a retargeting ad.

Facebook has the same capability. An advertiser can advertise to a list of leads or customers by uploading a list of email addresses it already has into Ads Manager to make a custom audience. A good retargeting ad acknowledges that the brand knows you‘re already interested in its product. (Because let’s face it… retargeting can be a little creepy.)

Now that we‘ve covered the best ad examples, main formats, placement possibilities, and standard templates, let’s dig into ad best practices that help optimize your Facebook campaign.

The key to making great Facebook ads is about understanding your audience and what they want to see. By creating a promotion that is relevant and attention-grabbing to your target audience, you’re more likely to see a return on your investment.

Despite all of the advantages that Facebook offers advertisers, seeing success with Facebook ads ultimately comes down to your strategy and how well you implement it.

1. Target your ads to a specific audience.

Audience quality is more important than size because, with Facebook advertising, the goal is engagement and/or conversions. Casting a wide net to individuals who are not your target audience will tank your relevance scores and give you bad data to work from.

The good news is that Facebook’s targeting capabilities are more robust than any other platform, including demographics, interests, location, and even behavior. That means you can get far more specific on who you want to see your ads.

For example, you don’t have to settle for “women between ages 25 and 45” when you can target “women between ages 25 and 45 who like reading and whose favorite author is Suzanne Collins.”

By getting granular, you end up excluding users who are not your target market, showing ads to only those who will find it most relevant and who are most likely to convert.

2. Make your ads relevant to your audience.

Relevance is critical for success when using Facebook advertising. Remember, you are spending money when someone views or clicks on your ad (depending on the settings you use). If you‘re showing ads that aren’t relevant to your target audience, you’re wasting your time and money and will likely not see success with any advertising.

Facebook determines ad relevance through its ad relevance diagnostics (formerly ad relevance score). Several factors are evaluated to determine the relevance of your ad, including feedback from users (such as ad hides or negative feedback), engagement (such as clicks, likes, or shares), and predicted positive actions (such as conversions or video views).

Additionally, Facebook provides diagnostics for three specific dimensions: quality ranking, engagement rate ranking, and conversion rate ranking. Ultimately, the more relevant your ad is, the more favorably Facebook will treat them.

3. Include a visual element.

Visual content is not only treated more favorably in the Facebook algorithm, but it’s also more likely to be shared and remembered than written content. The lesson for Facebook marketers? No matter what type of ad you create, your image needs to be visually appealing.

Check out this blog post for a detailed guide to image sizes for various ad units on Facebook along with some tips on posting visual content.

4. Align your ads’ visuals and copy.

Let‘s say you’re running an ad for astrological jewelry. You’re targeting people who like astrology and whose birthday is coming up.

You could use a generic “buy a bracelet with your astrology sign” copy paired with an image/video of all the jewelry.

A better strategy, however, would be to target those whose birthdays are coming up and create a more specific ad targeting that astrological sign (e.g. “All you Geminis out there will love this” paired with a video of a specific Gemini product).

Aligning copy and visuals in a way that‘s relevant to the targeted audience provides a feeling of personalization which increases the likelihood of engagement and/or conversion. You’ll also see better ad performance due to higher relevance scores.

5. Include an enticing value proposition.

A value proposition tells the reader why they should click on your ad to learn more about your product. How is your product or service different from any other? Why should the viewer click on your ad to see your website?

Your value proposition should be believable. For example, saying you have the greatest sandwiches in the world will not make people come to your business’s Page, but maybe offering 20% off will. Or, perhaps adding social proof will help — something like, “Sandwiches loved by over one million people every year! Come try yours today and get 20% off your order with this coupon.”

6. Have a clear call to action.

A beautiful and relevant ad is great, but without a CTA, your viewer might not know what to do next. Add a CTA like “Buy now and save X%,” or “Offer ends soon” and add a sense of urgency to your viewer. Your CTA should encourage people to click on your ad now.

7. Test different ad formats.

Experimenting with various ad formats in your Facebook ads allows you to optimize your campaigns by identifying the most effective formats for your audience, objectives, and budget. It can also help you increase engagement, improve creative effectiveness, and maximize the impact of your advertising efforts.

You can test different ad formats by creating multiple ad sets within your Ads Manager account. Just make sure to keep other variables, such as targeting, audience, or placement, consistent across the ad sets you’re testing.

8. Continually monitor ad performance.

Review the performance of your ads regularly and optimize them based on key metrics such as click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, engagement, or return on ad spend (ROAS). This enables you to gain valuable audience insights, prevent ad fatigue, make real-time adjustments, and drive long-term campaign success.

Use Facebook’s Ads Manager or other analytics tools to monitor the performance of your ads. Review metrics and assess how each ad is performing relative to your objectives.

Pay attention to trends, patterns, and deviations from expected results. Keep an eye for underperforming ads so you can prioritize them for optimization.

Based on what you find in your analysis, take specific actions to improve the performance of your ads. This could involve making adjustments to ad creative, testing different headlines, refining targeting parameters, or modifying your bidding strategy. Experiment with different optimization strategies to see what works best.

Facebook Ad Resources

• Facebook Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
• Facebook Business Manager: How to Use Meta Business Suite
• How to Run Facebook Ads: Step-by-Step Guide to Advertising on Facebook
• 15 of the Best Facebook Ad Examples That Actually Work (And Why)
• How to Create An Effective Facebook Ad Strategy
• The Facebook Ad Types: How to Choose the Best Ad Type for Your Goals
• A/B Testing on Facebook: How to Do It Right
• 22 Facebook Stats to Know in 2023

Engage Your Target Audience with Ads That Make an Impact

The first step to reaching potential customers or retargeting your customers to bolster brand loyalty is by visually and expertly promoting your products and services where they can see them: on their Facebook News Feed. So draw inspiration from our list of the best Facebook ads we’ve seen to keep your promotions relevant to your target and visually impactful as you test different ad formats.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness in June 2022.

“Will AI steal my job?” For the last few decades, this question has been on the lips of nearly every working person — from baristas in coffee shops to project managers in decacorn companies. The launch and impact of ChatGPT in November 2022 added fuel to the fire and has made this conversation more popular than ever.

Now that it seems that a robot or computer can do just about any job these days — writing software code, generating content outlines, and completing tax forms — how can human beings remain employed in the future?

Turns out, there are some non-technical skills that AI cannot replicate. If you’re going to be navigating the employment space in this AI era, you’ll need to develop these intangible skills. They’ll not only give you an edge over AI, but they’ll also enhance your overall work performance and career growth.

In this article, you’ll learn the skills you need to work with AI, the skills AI can’t replace, and how to boost your critical thinking skills to stay afloat in the AI era.

Table of Contents

• Skills Needed To Work With AI
• Skills AI Can’t Replace
• How To Boost Critical Thinking Skills

Skills Needed to Work With AI

If you use AI tools at work, here are some skills you need to make the most of these tools.

1. Intellectual Curiosity

Intellectual curiosity is a person’s desire and willingness to dig deeper than the surface to learn new things.

As a professional working with AI-powered tools, this soft skill helps you analyze the information the tool generates and ask the necessary questions to determine whether that information can help you achieve your goals or not.

For example, a social media manager can ask ChatGPT to whip up a social media strategy for the kind of company they work for (e.g., SaaS, tech, law firm).

However, the social media manager won’t just implement the AI-generated strategy as is.

Instead, they’ll dig deeper into the base strategy to figure out what part each component (social media platform, post format, etc.) plays and how to customize it to align with the company’s product(s), target audience, and goals.

Intellectual curiosity helps you approach your work with more creativity. Instead of sticking with what worked in the past, you’ll leave your comfort zone, think outside the box, and come up with solutions — sometimes unconventional — that are more effective than anything you’ve tried before.

2. Adaptability

No matter what your industry is or what role you occupy, the ability to adapt to change quickly is something you need, even when you’re using AI in your work.

The business world is constantly evolving, but once an AI tool is programmed, it can’t change without outside intervention. So, it’s up to you as an employee to be willing to adapt to the changes in the workplace environment and take on different responsibilities as required.

Being adaptable doesn’t only give you the opportunity to try out new strategies, but it also displays your leadership skills and showcases your ability to be resourceful, analytical, and determined. These are all qualities that hiring managers look for in a potential employee.

3. Objectivity

One of the most common misconceptions about AI is that it is an inherently objective and impartial work partner that has all the right answers. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Humans are biased in nature and are predisposed to subjective truths. The AI tools they create also inherit that bias. Google’s Chief Decision Scientist, Cassie Kozyrkov, uses the Cat vs. Not-Cat example to illustrate this pitfall.

Say an AI expert creates a machine-learning model that determines which animals in these six pictures are cats and which ones aren’t.

From image 1 to image 5, it’s pretty obvious which animals are cats (versus not cats). However, the way the ML model will categorize the sixth image depends on whether the AI expert considers a tiger to be a cat or not.

We all know the tiger belongs to the cat family, but is it actually a cat compared to the animals in images 1, 3, and 4? Is it a different type of cat? And if it is, will it be right to put it in the same category as domestic cats?

The answer depends on the subjective truth the AI expert believes in.

In her piece, “Why AI and decision-making are two sides of the same coin,” Cassie Kozyrkov writes, “AI cannot set the objective for you — that’s the human’s job and machine learning’s ‘right’ answers are usually in the eye of the beholder, so a system that is designed for one purpose may not work for a different purpose.”

If, in the example above, the AI expert programs the model to determine that the animal in image 6 isn’t a cat, they’d be right in a sense. But if you, who uses the model, think the animal is a cat, you’d be right, too.

“From the experiments our team has performed, AI works best when the result can be subjective (art, writing, idea generation, etc.) or when some error is tolerable (data classification),” says Blake Burch, the co-founder at Shipyard.

“When you need something to be 100% right, you can only rely on the AI output if you have other ways to verify the accuracy like code execution or undergoing human-in-the-loop review.”

There’s never a “right” way for AI to define categories that everyone would agree with. It’s up to you to choose what to believe and replicate.

4. Holistic Understanding

Holistic understanding is the understanding of the relationship between the components of a whole system.

In business, a holistic approach connects every department in an organization and helps them work as one team toward achieving the business’s overall goals.

If you use AI tools, it’s important to understand how your work benefits the company as a whole and figure out how to work with other teams, no matter how far removed they may seem from you.

For example, it’s easy to see how the Product and Marketing teams are related and how their work impacts each other, but it’s harder to see how the Product and Legal teams are related. Holistic understanding helps you make that connection.

As Brian Rhea from JobLens.ai puts it, “Humans are remarkably good at Holistic Understanding: our ability to connect seemingly unrelated information and experiences in order to draw a meaningful, creative insight.

All those ‘What I Learned about Marketing from Game of Thrones’ posts resonate for a reason. We are much better than AI at drawing lessons from recurring — but unrelated — patterns in life.”

Pro tip: A great way to foster holistic understanding in the workplace is to use project management and communication tools like Trello, Asana, and Slack to communicate and distribute information across teams.

5. Ability to Write Good Prompts

If there’s anything ChatGPT has taught us, it’s that knowing how to write good prompts makes all the difference in the quality of information we get from generative AI tools.

Thankfully, newer generative AI tools allow you to be *really* specific and creative with your prompts. This increases your chances of getting information that’ll be useful to you.

For example, say you’ve been tasked to explain quantum chromodynamics (hey, Young Sheldon fans!) to students in middle school and college.

Instead of racking your brain trying to turn this complex concept into something 12-year-olds can understand, you can ask ChatGPT, specifying the age or grade the students are in.

So instead of, “Explain what quantum chromodynamics is,” your prompt could be “How can I explain quantum chromodynamics to a middle school student/12-year-old child?”

And here’s what you’ll get:

Notice the parallels ChatGPT draws between gluons and magnets. That’s something a kid would understand. But if you ask ChatGPT to explain quantum chromodynamics to a college or postgraduate student, here’s what you’ll get:

Notice how the answer is longer and has more complex terms like “hadrons,” “asymptotic freedom,” and “large hadron collider.” But this won’t be a problem because you’ll be discussing with people with a higher understanding of the topic.

The point here is: If you want to make the most of AI tools, you need to know how to write great prompts. Be as specific and direct as possible, and adjust your prompts accordingly to get different results.

Skills AI Can’t Replace

AI might be really effective at some things humans used to do as part of their work, but there are some skills humans have that AI can’t replace. Here are some of them.

1. Critical Thinking

In a Q1 study of LinkedIn job listings, over 564,000 of them listed “critical thinking skills” as a requirement for a role. This goes to show just how much importance companies place on an employee’s ability to think well.

Crystal King, a professor at HubSpot Academy says, “Great inbound marketers and salespeople think critically and creatively, share thoughts and opinions, use good judgment, and make sound, educated decisions.”

And therein lies the Achilles’ heel of artificial intelligence.

Despite the superior ability of AI tools to analyze data, they cannot make well-informed judgments and decisions — a skill that’s necessary in different fields, including business, law, and medicine.

For example, a law firm can use advanced AI tools to find relevant documents in legal cases, but we still need a human judge and jury to listen to the facts of the case and adjudicate a decision.

2. Empathy

AI tools can assess a situation and respond to it. A human being, however, has to figure out the best way to communicate that response to others, especially in distressing situations.

For example, doctors may use AI to identify diseases on a scan, but they wouldn’t break the news of a cancer diagnosis to a patient via robocall.

The reason is simple: AI tools can’t genuinely understand human emotions and respond to them appropriately — at least not yet.

It’s not only the field of medicine that requires empathy, though. Customer service teams in all kinds of companies also need empathetic people.

“AI-powered customer success systems can assist with ticket routing, but nothing beats the human touch when it comes to sensitive or urgent concerns,” says Seth Besse, the CEO of Undivided.io.

“In moments of crisis, a compassionate approach and tailored support can make all the difference. Striving for excellence in customer service requires finding a balance between the efficiency of AI and the personal touch of human interaction. This approach ensures clients’ unique needs are met with care and effectiveness.”

Besse’s right. Despite the progress we’ve made with affective computing, jobs that require empathy won’t be outsourced to AI any time soon.

3. Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability to manage your emotions and understand the feelings of people around you.

Working in a team means people with different personalities and emotions surround you. And since AI doesn’t have emotions itself, it’s near impossible for it to effectively understand, let alone manage, your emotions and those of your team members.

On being emotionally aware and sensitive, Dominik Maka, the Head of SEO at LVBET, delineates, “AI‘s cool, but can it understand that sigh of relief from a client when you solve a problem they’ve been stressing over? Or that excitement in a team member‘s voice when they have a breakthrough idea? That’s the magic of empathy and emotional intelligence.

“It‘s something that’s been invaluable in my journey, especially when navigating the diverse cultures and markets. While I‘m all for AI and its wonders, there’s a warmth that we humans bring to the table. It‘s like comparing an AI-generated song to one where you can feel the artist’s soul.”

Whether it’s a team leader helping employees through a difficult project, hiring managers finding the best candidate for a role, or salespeople trying to convert leads into paying customers, emotional intelligence is a necessary ingredient to success.

In granular teams, emotional intelligence helps you keep the peace, boost innovation, and enhance productivity.

On a larger scale, it keeps a brand in tune with its customers, which, according to Kristin Harper, the CEO of Driven to Succeed, helps it “develop and charge a premium for innovative products and services, deliver more relevant advertising, and engage with customers in a way that is distinct and preferred versus their competitors.“

4. People Management

People management is the process of hiring, training, and developing employees to support the organization’s mission, increase workplace productivity, and promote professional growth.

Sure, AI can sort through resumés during the hiring process, list tasks, and assign deadlines, but it doesn’t hold up well when it comes to actually leading and motivating employees.

Successful people management takes a combination of creativity, innovation, and emotional intelligence — a talent that people develop through experience and time.

It’s that talent that helps human leaders delegate tasks to the right individuals, put processes in place to help employees through difficult projects, resolve conflicts in the workplace, and inspire a team to achieve their goals.

5. Creativity

Creativity (and innovation) is the reason we have amazing inventions like music, automobiles, smartphones, search engines, and artificial intelligence.

Sure, AI is now being used to make these products more advanced, but even that is a product of the creativity that their human inventors possess — something that AI cannot, by itself, replicate.

On the one hand, AI is programmed. And on the other, creativity is spontaneous and requires imagination and inspiration.

An obvious example is content creation — something many marketers use ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for.

Gabriel Ramuglia, the founder of IOFLOOD used GPT4 to produce SEO content articles.

Based on his experience, Ramuglia says, “While AI tools can generate many types of factual content, they struggle to reflect genuine human experience. This nuance, the intangible value of lived experiences, personal anecdotes, and wisdom from past situations, remains a blind spot in AI-generated content.”

This sentiment is echoed by Andrew Boyd, the co-founder of Forte Analytica.

While Boyd recognizes that AI can beat humans at writing content at a large scale, he recognizes that it cannot “give a personal take on a product or service that is authoritative and grounded in real-world experience.

“You can tell it to write from the perspective of someone who has done or used something, but even then it is still skin deep and tends to make sweeping generalizations. It lacks the nuance of a human since it cannot experience life as a human.”

6. Strategic Thinking

Many businesses are starting to automate a large chunk of their marketing practices — and rightly so. It is generally cost-effective and frees up time for employees to do work that matters.

However, human employees have to create the overall strategy themselves before automating any part of it.

For example, you can tell an AI-powered scheduling tool to send a Tweet (or is it Xeet?) for you at a specific time of day from Monday to Friday. However, the automation of those tweets is likely a small part of a larger strategy to distribute content, drive traffic, and generate qualified leads for the company.

The creation of that strategy is not the work of AI; it’s the work of the employees who had to apply critical thinking and their unique skills to formulate a plan that, when executed, will promote business growth.

How to Boost Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking is about being inquisitive and objective about every piece of information you come across.

It’s about analyzing information based on hard evidence, rather than personal opinions, to get a better understanding of it. This understanding is what helps you solve problems efficiently and make good decisions.

Just like programming or marketing, you can learn — and improve on your — critical thinking skills. Here are some ways to do that.

1. Take online courses.

Critical thinking is one of the most popular soft skills required in job postings across all industries. So, if you‘re trying to get a job — or you’re an employee — you can improve your critical thinking skills by taking online courses on the topic.

A course you can explore is HubSpot Academy’s Critical Thinking course. In it, you’ll learn about thinking dispositions, learning styles, and cognitive biases.

You’ll also learn how to ask better questions, be emotionally intelligent, cultivate curiosity, brainstorm productively, solve problems effectively, and make better decisions.

2. Practice active listening.

Research from the University of Missouri suggests that we only remember 25% of what we hear. How, then, can we critically analyze the information we have if said information is only one-quarter the actual amount of information there is?

That’s where active listening comes in.

As a foundational element of critical thinking, active listening compels you to listen carefully — not just hear — to what other people are telling you.

“When we are involved in really active conversations, there is a positive exchange of energy between speakers,” says Crystal King, the instructor of HubSpot’s Critical Thinking course. “The speaker feels heard, and the listener learns and understands.”

Empathy plays a huge role here as it helps you put yourself in the other person‘s shoes so you can fully understand their perspective and what they want/need. If the situation calls for it, ask questions that’ll let them know that you’re listening to them.

The trick is to intentionally listen to others without judgment. Keep your eyes and ears open, and let your body language be welcoming.

3. Ask questions.

When presented with information, whether it’s an article you stumbled upon online or a piece of data given to you at work, ask questions about it.

Start with what you already know and confirm that all the information you have is correct. If you‘re in a meeting, ask questions to ensure that you understand. If needed, ask for certain points to be repeated to make sure you don’t leave anything out.

Channel your childlike curiosity, and ask lots of open-ended questions about the information you have. What? When? Where? Who? Why? How?

Consider the source of the information. Is it trustworthy? Why did it carry this information? What goal does it hope to achieve? Is there more to this information than what this source presents?

Asking questions is a great way to verify information and avoid making wrong assumptions and/or mistakes.

4. Question your biases.

Asking questions about certain information can uncover the biases of the source.

But what about your own biases?

It‘s no secret that our likes, dislikes, beliefs, experiences, and preferences can affect the conclusions we draw in certain situations. While this isn’t always a bad thing, it is the antithesis of critical thinking.

To make a conclusion without bias, you need to take a step back and challenge the assumptions you might be making. Ask yourself:

• Am I making assumptions about this information?
• Are there any perspectives or viewpoints I’m missing?
• Are there any variables/components I haven’t factored in yet?
• Have I analyzed this information from every angle?

If you realize that your cognitive biases are involved in your decision-making, you’ll need to put them aside and evaluate the information with a fresh eye (and mind).

5. Seek out diverse opinions.

Diversity isn‘t just some criterion to be ticked off during the hiring process. It’s an integral part of a critical thinking process.

It’s normal for people who think and act alike to band together. It gets intense online because social media algorithms analyze our past interactions to serve up content that aligns with our individual beliefs.

The problem is: If everyone we surround ourselves with thinks exactly as we do, our thought process will become rigid and we’ll be increasingly less likely to change our beliefs when faced with new (more compelling) information.

Asking for the opinions of people who have different cultural/ethnic backgrounds, ages, belief systems, and experiences can help you get a fuller, more encompassing picture of a situation.

You’ll be able to see things in a different light, and that may influence the conclusion you draw from the information available to you. Not only does this prevent groupthink, but it also expands your knowledge.

Note: If you’re not sure how to get diverse opinions, start by cultivating relationships with people who are different from you. Engage in conversations with people who are younger and older than you. At work, make friends with people in different teams.

If you’re a senior staff member, go on lunch breaks or games with your junior colleagues. Being friends with different kinds of people makes it easier to ask for their opinions when you need them.

AI Won’t Replace You — If You Have The Right Skills

Despite the progress artificial intelligence has made in the past few decades, it’s not at that stage where it can replace humans at all jobs.

Having the right soft skills, such as critical thinking, emotional intelligence, intellectual curiosity, and creativity, can help you retain your job in this AI era.

This doesn‘t mean you won’t use AI in your work. You might, but instead of it taking your place, you’ll be combining your irreplicable soft (and hard) skills with the efficiency of AI tools to deliver the best work you possibly can.

Threads launched in the summer of 2023 and was almost immediately dubbed the “Twitter Killer” and was projected to be a strong competitor to the newly named X (formerly Twitter).

All the hype at the start of Meta’s newest property may have you wondering, “Should my business use Threads?”

Social media apps come and go, plus time is precious in the marketing world, so you’re probably hesitant to try expanding your brand on such a new platform.

Here are some benefits and concerns surrounding Threads to provide clarity and help you make the decision that best aligns with your business.

Pros & Cons of Instagram’s Threads

There are benefits to having a Threads account for your business. However, the platform is still very new and has some drawbacks.

Pros of Threads

Instant Following

Since Threads connects to your Instagram account, your followers from Instagram are transferred to Threads — so long as they have their accounts.

The feature makes building a large platform on the app easier because you won’t have to start from scratch.

Your verification badge, profile photo, and bio are all transferred to your account, making consistent branding between platforms simple.

Increased Awareness and Engagement

Threads is still in its infancy. As I’m writing this article, Threads has only been available for less than three months. There is typically a first-mover advantage brands benefit from when signing up for newer platforms.

Leveraging a new platform sooner rather than later will allow your business to establish strong brand recognition and following before algorithms change and brand engagement opportunities are put behind a paywall.

Chance to Reach a Younger Audience

If you‘re looking to attract a Gen-Z audience, Threads will help you toward your goal.

Right now, there isn’t much information to cite regarding the platform’s user demographic, but 40.1% of Gen-Zers who downloaded the app did so because it looks fun, according to Statista.

Around 38% said they downloaded it to try a new platform, and 1 in 5 said they were looking for an alternative to X.

There is little data about how many Gen Z social media users are on Threads, but they are there and have an interest in the app.

Since Threads is relatively new, you can build a longstanding relationship with Gen Z on the platform before future changes make engagement more difficult.

Cons of Threads

Can’t Delete Threads

Well, you can delete Threads, but not without deleting your Instagram account — so you wouldn‘t be able to delete Threads without seriously harming your brand’s social media presence.

This is especially troublesome if you rely on eCommerce tools like Instagram Shopping.

Lack of Some Discoverability Features

Threads recently rolled out a keyword search feature, allowing users to find posts featuring the words in their queries.

However, Instagram Threads still does not support hashtags, so they can’t be used to help you find your target audience or for your audience to find your brand.

Threads also doesn’t have a Discovery page like Instagram, which would show content from accounts you may not follow but would be interested in.

The absence of crucial discovery features could make growing your audience or tapping into new ones difficult.

Fortunately, Threads is constantly rolling out new updates to make the platform more user-friendly and functional for consumers and brands.

Can’t Track Impressions or Engagement

Unlike Instagram, X, Facebook, or other social media sites, Threads does have any tools to track KPIs like engagement rate, impressions, watch times, etc.

While you can see post likes, replies, and comments, tracking your brand’s performance and ROI on the platform is difficult.

As a result, you may have issues figuring out what kind of content resonates the most with your followers.

App Seems to be Losing Steam

Within a day of its launch, Threads gained 30 million users, making it the fastest-growing platform in history — surpassing ChatGPT. A month later, Threads user count dipped by 82% from launch.

Our recent Glimpse survey regarding Threads and X found that 62% of X users have used the app for at least an hour since July 2023. Only 21% said the same about Threads.

Furthermore, as of August 1, Threads’ average time spent on the app fell to just 2.9 minutes daily. Unfortunately, data shows Threads’ daily active user count continues to fall by about 1% per day.

Should your brand be on Threads?

So, should your brand leverage Threads? My answer — why not?

Yes, the platform struggles to keep momentum and still needs certain discoverability and data-tracking features.

However, its integration with Instagram still provides plenty of opportunities for your brand to expand on social media, build community, and boost awareness.

Threads is especially beneficial if you already have an Instagram account.

As I said, the app immediately imports your followers, profile photo, verification badge, and bio to your Threads account — giving you a head start in growing your platform.

If you want the limited chance to be among the first brands to build a strong community on an upcoming platform, then Threads could be right for you.

However, if building community on social media is not a priority, the app doesn’t have to be a priority right now.

User-generated content (UGC) has become increasingly important over the past few years. 

In fact, in a recent HubSpot survey of 500+ marketers who sell content via social shopping features, 92% say user-generated content increases brand awareness of their products.

And, as Emplifi’s Chief Strategy Officer Kyle Wong told me, “User-generated content is a 24/7, 365-day marketing channel and opportunity.”

Here, we’ll dive into 10 examples of impressive UGC campaigns to inspire your own campaigns. Plus, hear Wong’s five tips for taking your UGC strategy to the next level.

Keep reading, or skip to:

Examples of user-generated campaigns

Kyle Wong’s 5 tips for creating your own UGC campaign 

10 Examples of Excellent User Generated Campaigns

1. Sephora

Cosmetics powerhouse Sephora describes its on-site Beauty Insider Community as “your one-stop destination to share beauty advice, inspiration, news, and recommendations with real people in real time.”

In addition to text threads and groups that users can interact with, Sephora’s Community Gallery features UGC from real customers in an aesthetically-pleasing, interactive design.

Sephora sources this content from social media and direct uploads, and UGC is made shoppable so site visitors can easily explore products featured in pictures from community members.

The gallery automatically updates as new UGC is approved, demonstrating Sephora’s dedication to its customers while driving conversion and product discovery.

2. Farrow & Ball

Manufacturer Farrow & Ball is known for its bold wallpapers, paints, and creative product names — as well as a knack for inspiring its customers. With several active displays of UGC across the brand’s blog posts, product pages, and other site pages, Farrow & Ball celebrates its talented community while showcasing ideas for up-and-coming interior designers and everyday shoppers alike. A dedicated community gallery also allows visitors to filter UGC by color, room, style, and product type.

Farrow & Ball boasts an impressive, engaged community of 1.6 million followers on Instagram, and UGC makes up the majority of the brand’s posts.

3. The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas is one of the most Instagrammed hotels in the world, and doesn’t pass up the chance to proudly showcase its guests’ impressive photos.

The Cosmopolitan features dazzling UGC on category pages for its different offerings, from restaurant shots to casino moments. Blending influencer content with UGC on the hotel’s Instagram has ultimately driven over 250 million impressions, engaging followers and contributing to site traffic.

4. Article

Article is an online-only furniture brand known for creating chic, Scandinavian-inspired modern pieces. Selling directly to customers, Article lacks conventional showrooms that allow customers to visualize products in real life.

That’s where UGC comes in: Article gives its customers a plethora of authentic images showing how people style the brand’s furniture in their spaces.

Article displays real customer photos and furniture pairing recommendations on product pages to increase time on site and lower bounce rates, in addition to a shoppable inspiration gallery of UGC.

5. Vitamix

Vitamix offers its customers a wide selection of juicers, blenders, and other food processors, and takes a creative approach to engaging its culinary community. In addition to sharing recipes and UGC on Instagram, Vitamix ran a “Smoothie of the Year” contest asking fans to vote for nutrient-dense “nourish” smoothies or Instagram-worthy “flourish” smoothies.

The two opposing teams were led by nutrition influencers, and Vitamix spotlights nourish and flourish UGC carousels on the contest’s landing page.

6. Crocs

Iconic brand Crocs is one of the biggest names in footwear, catering to shoppers of all ages and giving customers the opportunity to customize their looks with diverse Jibbitz shoe gems.

To celebrate its global community and showcase how they style their Crocs, the brand invites customers to share UGC on social media with the trendy hashtag #MyCrocsEra.

As a brand with an already established userbase, Crocs skillfully adds an element of community to its on-site and social content strategy, boosting customer retention and purchase confidence.

7. Revel Nail

Revel Nail increases their conversion rate and reduces product page abandonment while adding a splash of fun to its marketing strategy with colorful, gorgeous UGC across the brand’s digital channels.

In addition to displaying customer photos on product pages, social media, and an on-site photo gallery, Revel Nail features shoppable TikTok videos from customers showing how they create stunning nail designs with the brand’s products.

8. Jones Soda

Beverage brand Jones Soda boasts one of the most unique approaches to UGC, allowing fans to submit UGC via Instagram or direct upload for the chance to have their photo featured on a physical bottle label. Site visitors can vote on submissions through an interactive UGC gallery.

In 2021, Jones Soda took this opportunity to a new level with its Reels Label campaign, encouraging social users to share Instagram Reels to potentially be printed on soda bottles and viewable via augmented reality (AR) with the brand’s app.

9. Northumbria University

Universities and other educational institutions may not come to mind when you think about user-generated content. However, Northumbria University in England embraces its students and faculty through various creative, on-site displays of UGC.

For one, Northumbria promotes an #IAmNorthumbria community gallery, which illustrates university life through community photos. Additionally, Northumbria’s Newcastle Business School even spotlights UGC from real students on course and masters pages to give site visitors a look at a day-in-the-life of students.

10. NAVY Hair Care

Last but certainly not least, NAVY Hair Care is a spectacular leader when it comes to sharing and celebrating the authentic experiences of its customers — through visual UGC, detailed ratings and reviews, and more.

Founded in 2018 on social-forward values, NAVY Hair Care drove a 264% increase in repeat-visit rate and website engagement upon championing UGC on social and website pages. Combining customer visuals with reviews adds an additional level of social proof for the brand, showing customers what it’s really like to use their products.

How to Run Your Own User-Generated Content Campaign, According to Emplifi’s Chief Strategy Officer

When I spoke with Kyle Wong, he began by highlighting the importance of user-generated content for small and big businesses alike. 

As he puts it, “Every company has three branches of marketing: Earned, paid, and owned. And one aspect of earned media is PR, but the other part is from your customers, which has traditionally been mostly word-of-mouth marketing.” 

Wong adds, “The biggest shift that’s happened over the past couple of years is word-of-mouth marketing from your happy customers has become infinitely more scalable.”

He continues, “So when investing in a strategy around user-generated content, it’s important to understand the basics, which is this: We are investing in a strategy to essentially help capture more positive word-of-mouth marketing from our customers.”

Your customers are already providing positive feedback of your products — whether that’s through customer support phone calls, product review pages, or via social channels. A user-generated campaign, then, is critical for simply amplifying the messages already being shared by your customers. 

Let’s launch into Wong’s five steps for creating a strong campaign now. 

1. Create a repository for your customers’ positive stories — and offer diverse options for customers’ to leave reviews. 

There are plenty of customer stories already being shared about your brand. These stories might be in a written format, photo format, video format, or audio format. And there are innumerable places to find these stories: Review sites, customer support messages, social media channels, email, post-product reviews, and more. 

Wong told me: “If people are posting good stories about your brand, the first question you need to ask is: ‘What are we going to do with it? Are we going to do nothing, or leverage it to grow our business?’ Step one is collecting that content, and encouraging more of it.” 

You’ll want to figure out a process for collecting and storing positive stories for your marketing team to leverage in future UGC campaigns.

As Wong puts it, “I don’t think a lot of brands have a good repository for all of that content. There needs to be a central library for those customer stories. Our platform does a lot of that, but even if you don’t use us, there should be a central library somewhere.”

Additionally, Wong encourages business owners to create as many opportunities for positive feedback as possible. For instance, you might:

• Create feedback forms
• Have a positive story section of your website
• Create testimonial pages
• Ensure you’re active on all major social channels

This makes it easy for customers to share their positive reviews where, when, and how they’d prefer. 

As you design your promotion for a UGC campaign, consider the types of “entries” that you’ll accept. Pictures, videos, or testimonials are all powerful content types that can be easily converted for advertising purposes.

2. Figure out where the right place(s) are to amplify this content. 

Now you have a repository — great. What’s next? 

You’ll want to figure out how you’re going to amplify these messages. One major opportunity to share UGC is via social media channels. At the bare minimum, you might retweet or repost someone else’s content. You could also share the post to your Instagram Stories, and have a dedicated UGC Stories collection saved on your profile. 

But you can also create a landing page to showcase customers’ content, or create a section on your product pages or homepage. These sections will allow your site visitors to see how other consumers are using your products, which is undeniably helpful as they consider purchasing your product.

There are major benefits to featuring user-generated content on your website. Wong told me, “We’ve found that user-generated content performs better than traditional stock imagery when it comes to conversion rates. There’s a couple of reasons for this. One is, of course, the authenticity element.”

“But two,” He adds, “Is that it’s virtually impossible to replicate the variety of the content that you get from your community because you get the product used in so many different variations, different forms, and different places. Sure, a photographer could get you the same quantity of images — but they couldn’t come up with the same variety of images as your customers can.” 

Simply put, variety helps sell your product. Once I see the different ways customers are already using your solution, I am more likely to understand how it can solve a problem in my life, as well. 

3. Have a call-to-action for your customers. 

Wong suggests having a call-to-action for your customers when they post user-generated content.

For instance, you might create a specific hashtag for the campaign, or ensure they tag you so the content is affiliated with your brand. Alternatively, maybe you ask them to fill out a form for a chance to be featured in your campaign. 

CTAs allow you to display all user-generated content in one place. A hashtag, for instance, allows users’ to see all related posts when they click on the hashtag. 

Wong points out that there’s a major advantage to this: As more people see your brand sharing user-generated content, they naturally begin to share more, as well. 

He says, “I’ve seen that happen across every single company we work with. The more a company features their customers — whether it’s on the website or through social — the more everybody else begins to share more about that company.”

He adds, “A lot of the brands who have grown quickly, especially in the SMB space, are typically strong on social and strong with their community efforts.” 

4. Use UGC content to inform product lines or marketing positioning. 

It’s important to call-out the bigger ramifications of listening to your customers’ positive reviews. 

Positive reviews can inform your product strategy just as much as negative ones. 

Wong told me, “User-generated content is a strong vantage point on what people are doing with your brand, and what they’re already happy about. And I’ve found it can be a source of inspiration for many business owners. The ‘user’ in user-generated campaigns can help you with rebranding, product lines, market positioning, and more.”

Ultimately, you’ll want to leverage your user-generated campaigns to make decisions when it comes to how you build and market your product moving forward. 

5. Straighten out any legal issues.

If you’re conducting a giveaway as part of your campaign, you’d be wise to consult legal counsel on two important issues: the rights you’ll hold over any content submitted to your promotion, and any restrictions that govern giveaways.

First, you need to inform participants about what will happen to the content they create following submission in clear, easy-to-understand language.

But also, if your state or municipality (or the mediums through which you run the contest) control how, when, and under what circumstances giveaways can occur, you’ll want to be sure your promotion is in compliance before running afoul of the law.

Given the breadth of the different industries highlighted above, it’s clear that any brand can follow a similar model to promote customer engagement and generate favorable publicity.

There’s a reason why Google’s advertising revenue stood at a staggering $224.47 billion in 2022 or why Meta generated over $113 billion in ads.

Millions of businesses worldwide invest billions in paid ads each year to put themselves in front of as many people as possible. And they’re doing it because online advertising, when done right, delivers outstanding results.

On the other hand, if you’re not careful, it can feel like flushing your $$ down the digital drain. And it’s even more important today, considering the ever-evolving online advertising landscape, all thanks to new platforms, ad types, and targeting capabilities popping up all the time.

To help you out, we’ve put together this comprehensive online advertising guide for business. Throughout this post, we’ve covered everything you need to know about online advertising.

If you’re only interested in learning about a certain type of online advertising, you can use the table of contents below to navigate to each section.

How to Advertise Online

Of all online interactions, 93% start with a search engine.

Whether you’re on the lookout for the best Indian restaurant in your neighborhood or looking for a specific SaaS tool, you’re likely going to turn to a search engine to find what you need.

And the same goes for your audience.

With search engines like Google, Bing, and many others being a core part of almost everyone’s daily routine, it’s important to ensure you’re running paid ads to catch their attention on these platforms.

And let’s not overlook how much time people spend on social media platforms.

According to Data Reportal’s Digital 2023 report, the average time people spend on social media stands at 2 hours 31 minutes daily. This means you should also incorporate social media into your online advertising strategy.

There are plenty of ways to advertise your business strategically. Think about who you’re trying to reach when you start.

Ask yourself questions like:

• What target demographic am I advertising to?
• How can I place my product or service offering in front of my target?

The answer is to see where your target demographic spends the most time online. Research their most frequented social media channels and the keywords they look up the most.

If you want to run pay-per-click (PPC) ads on social media, it’s important to note that most social media platforms offer business pages the ability to pay a fee to promote posts/ads within the interface.

Or, if you are looking to advertise on a search engine for targeted keywords, Google Ads or Sixads can guide you through the process of payment and execution.

Benefits of Online Advertising

There are three key ways that digital advertising can help you improve the performance of your organic marketing efforts.

With digital ads, organic performance can benefit from:

1. An increase in brand awareness by displaying your content to individuals within and outside of your networks.
2. A better understanding of your audiences by leveraging the targeting and analytics of the ads platforms.
3. The creation of higher-performing content by understanding what ad content helps you achieve your business goals and what doesn’t.

The goal of any advertising strategy should be to get a positive return on your investment, which comes down to whether you’re getting more revenue out of the ad campaign than the cost you’re putting in.

How Paid Advertising Works

How can you determine what your ad spend should be to get the most return on your investment? To start answering that question, we’ll need to understand the bidding system used by the ad networks.

What’s a bid?

A bid is the maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay for the desired action on your ad. If it sounds like an auction, that’s because it is an auction.

Ad networks have a limited amount of ad space, and to determine whether or not your ads are shown to your target audience, they run an auction to see how much each advertiser is willing to pay for ad space.

Just like in an auction, the highest bidder wins. Let’s say you bid $10 for a click on your ad, and the next highest bidder only pays $5 for a click.

Each ad network will only make you pay the lowest amount possible to win the bid. In this example, you might be willing to pay $10. However, in reality, you’ll only have to pay $5.01 to win the bid.

Winning this “auction,” in addition to the overall quality of your ads, will determine how your ads are displayed on the different ad networks.

Here’s another example of how the ad auction works from WordStream.

How much should I spend?

At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, I get how the auction system works. But how do I figure out how much I should actually spend to see a return on my investment?”

My advice is to work backward from your revenue to determine what your maximum bid should be.

Use this equation:

Lifetime Value (LTV) x Average Lead-to-Customer Rate x Average Conversion Rate

Your LTV is how much a customer is worth to you throughout their relationship with your business. The average lead-to-customer rate is the rate at which your leads become paying customers.

Your conversion rate is the rate at which new contacts convert on your content offers by filling out a form.

When combined, these metrics show you how much you should spend on your paid ads to break even.

Let’s say you want to use digital ads to promote your new content offer. You will need to know what your maximum ad spend should be to see a positive return on your investment.

Assume that you know the following about your business:

• Lifetime value: $500.
• Average lead-to-customer rate: 10%.
• Average conversion rate: 20%.

Plug these numbers into the equation above to determine your maximum ad spend: $500 x 0.10 x 0.20 = $10. This means you can spend a maximum of $10 per click on your ad to break even.

Your goal should be to spend less than $10 to see a positive return on your investment.

Types of Online Advertising

Now that we know more about how to advertise online, let’s dive into the different types of online advertising.

Social Media Advertising

Every month, there are nearly 2.96 billion active users on Facebook, 2 billion on Instagram, and 556 million on X worldwide.

Whether it’s to chat with friends, stay connected to people across the globe, or for business and/or networking purposes, consumers are on social media for a multitude of reasons — and marketers know it.

Because of the sheer number of active users on these platforms, advertising spending invested in social media channels is at an all-time high. The global digital advertising spend is projected to exceed $243.7 billion by 2027.

Advertising on social media comes with many advantages. You can:

• Reach very specific target audiences with the help of targeting features and different audiences across all of the social media platforms.
• Leverage a variety of ad formats to advertise in a way that aligns with your business goals.
• Invest in the specific advertising efforts that drive leads and sales for your business.

Let’s look at eight popular social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. We’ll cover the audiences and ad types available on each one.

1. Facebook

Facebook is, hands down, the most widely used social media network, leveraged by 64% of marketers. HubSpot Blog’s 2023 Marketing Strategy & Trends Report indicates that Facebook offers the highest ROI.

I’d also like to shed light on the fact that almost 2.96 billion people worldwide use Facebook. Just think about it — that’s more than 35% of the world’s population.

With so many people using Facebook and the platform taking the throne as the highest-ROI social media platform, you’re almost guaranteed to reach an audience that’s relevant to any type of business.

That’s where one of the most powerful features of advertising on Facebook comes in: audience targeting. The targeting capabilities on Facebook are unmatched by any other social media network.

There are three types of audiences that you can target on Facebook:

1. Core audiences — an audience based on criteria like age, interests, and geography.
2. Custom audiences — get back in touch with people who have previously engaged with your business.
3. Lookalike audiences — reach new people whose interests are similar to those of your best customers.

Facebook’s advanced targeting can target your ads to the most relevant audience — and even tap into new audiences you’d otherwise never reach with organic content alone.

Advertising on Facebook includes a range of ad types, including:

• Photo ads.
• Video ads.
• Story ads.
• Lead ads.
• Poll ads.
• Carousel ads.
• Instant experience ads.

Photo ads are great for sharing collections of image content. Monday.com’s Facebook photo ad is a great example:

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Video ads are great for product explainer videos and branding, and you can use a simple video ad maker to create eye-catching and engaging videos.

Kay Jewelers’ Facebook video ad is one of my favorites — as it tells a quick yet moving story of a woman smiling and being super-happy after receiving a gift in the ad.

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Story ads allow you to combine photo and short-form video content. Similarly, there are different ad types, which you can dive deep into through the Facebook advertising course on HubSpot Academy.

Personally, my favorite way to advertise on Facebook is with lead ads because they give you the best of both worlds: sharing visual content and generating leads simultaneously. Facebook Lead Ads allow you to capture lead information without directing people out of the Facebook platform.

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No matter your business’s size or industry, you can use lead ads to find potential customers who are likely interested in your products or services.

With lead ads, you provide a helpful piece of content that encourages viewers to sign up for a newsletter, receive a price estimate, or request additional business information. In return, when the viewer fills out the form, the business receives a new lead.

Another way to advertise on Facebook is through Facebook Messenger.

Facebook Messenger is a separate messaging app that comes with its own advertising opportunities. Facebook Messenger is the go-to messaging app in countries including the US, Canada, and Australia.

Other messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat are the more popular choice in countries throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

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Billions of messages are exchanged between people and businesses monthly on Facebook Messenger. Ads play a big part in initiating conversations on Facebook Messenger.

You can use Facebook Messenger as part of your advertising strategy in a few different ways.

• Facebook Messenger call-to-action in ads: Start conversations with ads on Facebook that include a call-to-action (CTA) to send a message.
• Facebook Messenger Story Ads: Run story ads on Messenger Stories.
• Facebook Messenger Ads: Use messenger ads to deliver content directly into users’ Facebook Messenger chats.

All of these ad types come together to encourage your audience to kick off conversations with your business. They can be used to contact a sales team, request more information on a product, or even share other content like blog posts or ebooks.

My favorite way to advertise on Facebook Messenger is retargeting. Retargeting ads in Facebook Messenger are a great way to start targeted conversations and send personalized offers and content.

Sponsored messages allow you to advertise to people who have already interacted with your business in Messenger. This is a great way to re-engage your audience in a personalized way.

Here’s an interesting example:

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As you can see, this ad is visible in the user’s feed. When they click on the CTA (“Learn More”), rather than being redirected to any website or dedicated landing page, they are redirected to Facebook Messenger.

2. Instagram

You can also advertise on Instagram through the Facebook Ads Manager. Instagram has over 2 billion monthly users globally. The majority of users are between the ages of 18 and 34.

There are three ways that you can advertise on Instagram:

• Promote posts and stories directly from your Instagram professional account.
• Create ads from your Facebook Page and promote them on both Facebook and Instagram.
• Create ad campaigns in the Facebook Ads Manager to access full targeting capabilities.

I recommend taking the third option and creating custom campaigns for your audience on Instagram.

Instagram has similar ad types to Facebook, including:

• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Story ads
• Carousel ads
• Reel ads

By far, the most interesting ad types right now are in-feed and explore.

Ads that appear while scrolling your feed are called in-feed ads. The ads that you see in the “Explore” section while exploring your interests and discovering new content creators are Explore ads.

Ads in Instagram Explore are a great opportunity to put your brand in front of people looking for new creators or content.

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Here’s an example of explore ad by Harvard:

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3. LinkedIn

The LinkedIn platform has over 900 million monthly active users worldwide.

Users on the platform are largely working professionals, which makes LinkedIn a great place for B2B (business-to-business) advertising.

LinkedIn is the go-to platform for working professionals, which provides B2B advertisers with a large audience pool to reach.

Plus, the advantage of advertising on LinkedIn is its unique targeting capabilities. On LinkedIn, you’ll have access to unique targeting criteria that are unavailable on other platforms.

You can target users on LinkedIn by unique demographics, including job title, job function, and industry.

Maybe you only want to advertise to potential customers at the director level who work in customer service within the recruiting industry. LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities make that possible.

Plus, with the option to include lead gen forms in your LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn can be a lead generation machine. This will allow you to reach a very specific audience and drive leads without directing them outside of the LinkedIn platform.

The most interesting ad type of LinkedIn is Message Ads. Message Ads allow you to send direct messages to your prospects to spark immediate action.

How to use LinkedIn Message Ads:

• Deliver a targeted message with a single CTA.
• Drive stronger engagement and response than traditional emails.
• Measure the impact of your messages.

But a word of warning: Don’t send too many Message Ads to the same people, or it will come off like spam. And make sure the messages sound authentic — if you were writing a LinkedIn message to a friend, what would you write in it?

If your Message Ads are too stiff, they’ll come off as spammy, too. Remember: This channel is a one-to-one conversation.

Direct messages are sacred spaces — if you’re going to advertise there, you need to be extra careful about taking the time to make your Message Ads feel personal and relevant to your end users.

Make sure you’re delivering value to them in a way that feels authentic.

4. X (Formerly Twitter)

Digital advertising is less common on X (formerly Twitter) because organic reach is still a significant driver of a brand’s performance on X.

This is very unique to X — but even so, ads can still deliver strong results depending on what your goals are. X has over 556 million monthly users globally.

The majority of users are between 35–65 years old.

Advertisers have discovered a few niches that have high engagement on X: B2B and ecommerce. Many B2B companies are using X as a digital marketing tool, and X users are known to spend a lot of money online.

This makes advertising specifically to these audiences a great strategy.

Climate Group, an international climate non-profit, ran an X advertising campaign to educate business owners on climate-friendly innovations.

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As visible in the screenshot, this ad garnered impressive engagement — with 7,446 likes, 355 reposts, eight bookmarks, and 29 quotes (as of 2023).

X breaks down its ads into five goals:

• Awareness. Promote your messages and maximize your reach.
• X engagement. Promote your messages and get more reposts, likes, and replies.
• Follows. Promote your account and grow your X following.
• Website clicks. Promote your website and get more traffic.
• App downloads. Promote your app and get more downloads.

All of these can work together to help you grow your audience on the platform and convert users into customers.

5. Pinterest

Pinterest is a unique social media platform with 445 million users who are highly engaged and predominantly female.

Some people say that Pinterest is the only platform where users actually want to see ads from brands they love because Pinterest is all about visuals.

Here’s how to advertise on Pinterest in four steps:

• Pick a pin. Promote your best pins so they appear in the most relevant places.
• Decide who sees it. Set up targeting so the right people see your ads.
• Pay for results. Choose to pay for engagement or visits to your site.
• Track what’s working. Once your campaign starts, see how it’s doing and make adjustments as necessary.

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Pinterest is great for businesses relying on photography to sell their products and who have a female target buyer persona.

6. YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine, second only to Google, with over 2.5 billion monthly active users.

Ads on YouTube appear before and during other YouTube videos or as a stand-alone promoted video that’s displayed after performing a search.

Since you can target demographic information and interests, you can serve your videos to specific, relevant audiences already watching videos from similar brands or on related topics.

Despite that, not many brands can keep their target audience engaged and stop them from hitting the “skip ad” button.

But that’s not the case with Nissan. Nissan, a Japanese multinational automobile manufacturer, changed the game by keeping their viewers engaged for over four hours without reaching for the “skip ad” button.

They launched a YouTube ad that was very different from the traditional ones. This four-hour-long ad featured a custom Lofi playlist that serves as the soundtrack to an animated character’s road trip.

One of the reasons this ad worked so well is that people love lo-fi music. It’s a genre people love listening to while studying, working, or trying to relax.

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Learn more about Nissan’s secret here.

7. Snapchat

Snapchat’s 635 million users are predominantly made up of people between the ages of 18–24.

Snapchat offers a few ad types, including story ads, sponsored tiles in Snapchat Discover, and augmented reality (AR) lenses.

Snapchat’s ad types feel pretty similar to the advertising options on Instagram.

What makes Snapchat unique is the augmented reality lenses. AR lenses are sponsored by a business to create interactive moments that users can use and share with their friends.

It might be hard to believe, but in this example from Domino’s — even though you see the pizza, it’s not really there — that’s the AR lens at work.

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8. TikTok

One of the newer — and most popular — players in the social media advertising world is TikTok. TikTok is all about creating short, creative, and funny videos.

TikTok has exploded in the past few years and has reached 1.05 million monthly users.

Advertising options are mainly geared toward driving awareness.

Promoting TikTok videos allows brands to build awareness with a young target audience. Most posts you’ll see on TikTok aim to get laughs.

From a brand perspective, you’ll want to create funny videos that align with other content on the platform. Think of things like dance challenges and memes. This type of content is the most effective.

That said, let’s move on to paid search advertising.

Paid Search Advertising

People searching online are looking for something specific and will click on the first result they believe will be the most helpful to them.

You might be thinking: “I already appear in organic results on search engines. Why should I pay to advertise too?”

Well, there are three key reasons:

• On average, digitally prepared businesses anticipate four times better revenue than less prepared ones.
• Advertising on search engines protects you from the competition who may be advertising on your branded terms.
• Search ads appear first in the search engine results pages (SERPs) above the organic results.

Paid search advertising allows advertisers to capture the attention of their audience in a more targeted way than with organic search alone.

Search ads allow you to anticipate the wants, needs, and desires of your potential customers and serve ads to them that are highly contextual.

Over time, the analytics of your search ads can help you analyze and improve those ads to reach even more people.

But how does Google know how to deliver the right ad to the right person? That’s where keywords come into play.

Keywords

A keyword is one word or phrase that someone uses to describe what they need in search.

Advertising on search platforms takes the targeting capabilities available on social media platforms, like demographics and location, and layers it with the addition of keywords.

When a Google user types a query into the search field, Google returns a range of results that match the searcher’s intent.

Keywords align with what a searcher wants and will satisfy their query. You select keywords based on which queries you want to display your ad alongside.

Keyword research is just as important for paid ads as it is for organic search.

That’s because Google matches your ad with search queries based on the keywords you selected.

Each ad group you create within your campaign will target a small set of keywords, and Google will display your ad based on those selections.

Let’s say Mary is moving to a different house and is looking for a home mover. So she goes into Google and types “who are the best movers.”

By searching “best movers,” she’s going to see results for advertisers that targeted keywords like “moving companies” and “top-rated movers.”

Search engines also consider your intent when choosing the types of ads to display.

In the example above, search ads were the most helpful resource. But what if you’re looking for a location-based business, like a coffee shop?

In Google Maps, you might see “Promoted Pins” like these, shown in purple on the map and in the search results on the left. Promoted Pins are a great way for businesses to attract customers to their business based on

What if you’re looking to make a purchase? Well, Google might show you a different kind of post to match your intent, such as Shopping Post Ads.

In this example below, Google shows you shopping post ads for the keyword “buy snowboard.”

Since my query includes the word “buy,” Google knows that I’m interested in making a purchase, so I am shown ads for products I might be interested in.

So, how do you select your keywords?

Keywords typically fall under two categories: brand and non-brand.

A brand keyword is a word or phrase that includes a brand’s name or variations of a brand’s name. For example, some of HubSpot’s brand keywords include HubSpot, HubSpot Free CRM, and HubSpot Marketing Hub.

These are all variations of the HubSpot brand and the tools that we offer.

Non-brand keywords are all other relevant keywords that don’t include a brand’s name or variations of a brand’s name.

Some of HubSpot’s non-brand keywords include “inbound marketing,” “sales software,” and “customer relationship management.”

While these keywords are not part of HubSpot’s brand name, they are relevant terms that allow HubSpot to reach audiences interested in eventually making a purchase.

Brand and non-brand keywords play a role in your digital advertising strategy. Brand keywords help you protect your brand from your competitor’s ads.

If you don’t run ad campaigns for brand keywords, you’ll leave your business vulnerable to losing website traffic to the competition who is bidding on your brand keywords.

Non-brand keywords still have a role to play, too. Non-brand keywords allow you to reach new audiences unfamiliar with your brand.

Match Type

When it comes to when your ad is displayed, you don’t just want to pick a certain group of keywords and have the ad shown only when those keywords are entered into the search engine.

This is where match type comes in. Since there’s an infinite number of ways that people can actually search for one term, Google gives you three match types to choose from: exact match, phrase match, and broad match.

You can even use a broad match modifier and exclude negative keywords to optimize where your ads are delivered.

Let’s take a look at each match type:

• Exact match: A keyword set to exact match will only display your ad if the search term includes that exact keyword or a very close variation. Exact match keywords are surrounded in [brackets].
• Phrase match: A keyword set to phrase match will display your ad if the search term contains the same order of the words, but it can also contain additional words. Phrase match keywords are surrounded by “quotes.”
• Broad match: A keyword set to broad match displays your ad when the search term contains any or some combination or variations of the words in your keyword, in any order. Broad match keywords don’t include any symbols.
• Broad match modifier: The broad match modifier allows you to select keywords that must be included in the search query for your ad to be displayed. Keywords with a broad match modifier use a +plus sign.
• Negative keywords: Excludes your ads from being shown on searches with that term. Negative keywords include a -minus sign.

Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo

There are a few advertising platforms out there for search, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But Google is by far the most used search engine out there.

Google processes more than 90,000 search queries each second. With Google leading the search engine market and accounting for 85.53% of the search engine market share, it makes sense for businesses to run Google Ads campaigns.

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But this doesn’t mean you should entirely rule out advertising on these other platforms.

In some cases, you can achieve impressive results with a smaller ad spend on Bing and Yahoo than you could on Google since there is less competition from advertisers.

My recommendation is to dig into your organic traffic to identify if Bing or Yahoo make up a significant amount of traffic for any given keywords or topics.

This might indicate that advertising for those keywords on Bing or Yahoo could be profitable.

Regardless of where you advertise, the good news is that advertising on all of these platforms more or less work and look the same. So knowing how to advertise on one will make advertising on the others easier.

Native Advertising

Publishers like BuzzFeed and The Dodo produce content that snowballs in popularity on social media almost daily.

And they make money by helping other brands do it, too. Brands will pay these publishers to craft posts and videos that follow the publishers’ formula for virality.

They also pay publishers to distribute this sponsored content to their massive audience through social media and their website.

This is native advertising.

Check out this example from Walmart. The retail giant partnered with BuzzFeed to create this advertisement about Walmart Essentials.

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When you pay for a publisher’s native advertising services, you’ll be able to leverage their editorial expertise and audience reach to help your brand tell captivating stories to a bigger and better viewership.

And each publisher is going to support different ad formats and creative types.

During the creative process, you’ll collaborate with publishers to craft sponsored content that covers one of their main topics and looks like a regular piece of content on the publisher’s website.

This way, even though your post is technically promotional, it won’t disrupt their audience’s browsing experience. They’ll enjoy reading your post and won’t feel like you or the publisher are advertising to them.

This exposes your work to a huge, engaged viewership and attracts new followers to your brand.

Native advertising creates a symbiotic relationship between publishers and brands. Publishers who do sponsored content right reap the benefits of another revenue stream and gain more audience trust if they promote a native ad from a trustworthy brand.

For brands, collaborating with prominent publishers can unleash unprecedented amounts of creativity to help them win over the publishers’ audience and boost engagement — as the click-through rate on native ads far exceeds traditional.

For example, T Brand Studio, the New York Times native ad business, crafted sponsored posts that captured as much engagement as some of nytimes.com’s highest-performing articles.

To find the optimal native advertising opportunities for your brand, try using StackAdapt or Nativo.

Display Advertising

Display ads are a controversial topic in the digital marketing community.

For almost 25 years, advertisers have abused them by tricking internet users into clicking misleading ads — some malicious display ads have even infected people’s computers with viruses.

It’s easy to see why people have developed banner blindness and can’t stop downloading ad blockers: display ads have the reputation of being intrusive, distracting, and irrelevant.

On the other side of the spectrum, though, display advertising technology has advanced to the point where ad networks can leverage data and machine learning to offer advertisers more effective targeting strategies and consumers more relevant ads.

Ad networks like Google Display Network and Facebook’s Audience Network are the leaders in the banner ad renaissance.

They can display your ads to the right target audience at the right place and time.

And if you want more control of your advertising, they’ll let you decide where to place your ads. Below, we’ll cover each ad network’s features and targeting capabilities.

1. Google Display Network

When you use Google’s Display Network, you can design visually appealing ads and place them on over two million websites and apps, YouTube, and Gmail.

You can also build new audiences by targeting people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service and remarket website visitors just by importing a list of their contact information.

If you don’t want to build out your ideal audience or deal with bidding, you can let Google Ads do it for you. Its automated targeting and bidding features can identify your highest-converting audience for the best return on investment.

Display ads can be most effective when retargeting an audience that’s already familiar with your brand.

Here’s an example of a display ad on Yahoo News:

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2. Facebook’s Audience Network

With Facebook’s Audience Network, brands can expand their Facebook ad campaigns and use the same targeting data they use on the platform to advertise on a huge collection of websites and apps.

Brands can place native ads, banner ads, full-screen ads, in-stream video ads, and rewarded video ads (for example, “Watch this video ad to get more tokens!”) on the network’s websites and apps that their Facebook audience frequently visits.

This type of advertising can be particularly effective for mobile games, like in the example below from 5agame, who was able to attribute 80% of their revenue through their rewarded video.

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If you want to continue leveling up your ads training, check out HubSpot Academy’s free course on the Digital Advertising Training Course.

Getting Started

In today’s digital work, having the right online advertising strategy is essential for every business.

Now that you know about all of the digital ad types that are available, the next step is to learn how to leverage the right ads for your business to achieve your goals.

Start building a strategy today, so you can increase your revenue tomorrow.

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

Can AI write a better subject line than an actual person? Probably. Brands like JOANN have had a 10% increase in email open rates, all thanks to AI.

Unless you’re an expert email marketer, coming up with brilliant subject lines every time can be tough. This is especially true if you’re sending personalized emails multiple times per week.

Plus, you may need to write several subject lines and run split tests to find the best. This is time-consuming!

This post will explore how AI works with email subject lines and why you should get inspiration from AI when writing email subject lines. You’ll also learn about some of the best AI email subject line generators.

How AI Works With Email Subject Lines

Many AI technologies are still in their infancy. They look good on paper but haven’t reached their potential. That said, there are other AI content generators that have advanced rapidly to become game-changers.

It’s this second group that is driving the AI explosion we’re seeing today. Two technologies, in particular, have driven AI progress:

1. Natural language processing (NLP)
2. Natural language generation (NLG)

NLP is when a machine “reads” text. It turns that text into code a machine system can then interpret. NLG is when a machine uses that code to generate its own words.

These technologies are found in AI-powered marketing tools like Acrolinx, which uses NLP to assess your content and recommend improvements. One other major use case enabled by NLP and NLG is, you guessed it, writing email subject lines.

Besides saving time, another benefit of AI tools is that developers train them on email engagement using a large amount of data.

These data are based on email best practices, enabling the AI tools to create bias-free subject lines that could cause high open rates.

As Parry Malm puts it, “When humans make choices, they inject their own experience, thoughts and beliefs.” This can cause bias and make us opt for subject lines that may not be the best.

But AI is free of bias, and it’s trained using clean data. “AI output is based on pattern matching, which is invisible to the human eye and devoid of cognitive biases that lead to poor decisions,” Parry adds.

Now, let’s explore some of the best AI tools for generating email subject lines.

4 AI Tools for Generating Email Subject Lines

I tried most of the AI email subject line generators and barely found those that made the cut. Some of the output didn’t follow best practices, as the subject lines were long.

Below are four of what I consider the best AI email subject line generators in 2023.

1. HubSpot AI Email Writer

Get started with HubSpot AI Email Writer

HubSpot’s AI Email Writer enables you to automate email copywriting for sales outreach, email marketing, and more. It is versatile, allowing you to generate email copy for diverse audience segments by prompting it to write in different tones.

You can select from email marketing templates and use the slash and highlight commands to come up with emails that suit your needs. 

Furthermore, HubSpot’s AI Email Writer conveniently integrates with the HubSpot CRM to to automatically log conversations and contacts.

Pricing: Free.

2. Persado

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Best for: Enterprise companies

Persado is an AI platform that allows users to personalize communications at scale and inspire an audience to engage and act.

The brand has $66 million in funding and offers AI email subject line writing, in addition to automatic social media and language generation for enterprise marketing.

One reviewer, who is a senior email marketing and analytics specialist, says:

“We’ve seen a strong increase in open rates with Persado, and we’ve been able to learn about our audience. Persado categorizes subject lines by emotion, provides insights on the language that motivates your audience, and removes the pain of writing high-volume subject lines.”

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request.

3. Phrasee

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Best for: Mid-size and enterprise companies

Phrasee uses AI to create email subject lines, write email copy, and generate email CTAs. You feed it email data, and it analyzes the data to learn what works.

It generates optimized subject lines that can perform better than human-generated ones. And it uses what it learns from your emails to stay consistent with your brand.

In one case study, Phrasee helped Virgin Holidays increase their open rates by 2%. That may not sound like much, but it was worth millions of new revenue. The tool also streamlined a process that used to take weeks — today, it takes seconds.

Pricing: Phrasee’s pricing starts at $500 per month, billed annually. To access enterprise features, you’d have to contact Phrasee’s sales team for a quote.

4. ChatGPT

Best For: Individuals and companies seeking a free AI tool

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a free AI tool that provides the best responses based on the quality of your prompts.

When using ChatGPT, it’s a good idea to not just tell it to create a subject line. Include the email you want to send and ask it to create subject lines for that email.

Here are two examples of prompts you can use to get subject lines:

• “Create 10 subject lines based on the email below. Each subject line should include a potential percentage of its chance of getting opened. Here’s the email…”
• “Write 10 email subject lines for the email below. Each subject line should end in a question and have one emoji that shows curiosity.”
• “Write 10 email subject lines for the email below. Each subject line should contain seven words or fewer and end with a question mark.”

Pro Tip: To get the most from ChatGPT, you have to be ultra-specific with your prompts.

Leveraging AI Email Subject Line Generators

One of the beautiful elements of AI is that it operates with little human involvement. At HubSpot, we see value in this.

That’s why we’re developing HubSpot AI — a content assistant and ChatSpot for generating email subject lines and even creating emails from scratch.

Get Started with HubSpot’s Content Assistant

It’s hoped that tools like this will ensure we don’t stay married to our creative ideas.

See, humans aren’t that great at writing and split-testing emails, creating social media content, writing headlines, and picking the best subject lines based on the data.

Heck, we sometimes do these wrong. Here, AI is better equipped than us for this task. It excels at analyzing vast volumes of data and extracts insights from that data.

For instance, Phrasee routinely uses 100,000+ emails as a dataset. That’s a lot!

So, often, AI can write email subject lines better (and faster) than humans. That’s good news because it improves your marketing.

Instead of drowning in data and having little time or budget to maximize performance, marketers can use AI to automate and augment their processes. They both improve performance and free you up to do higher-value tasks.

In a lot of cases, this is a win-win scenario. Marketers get better results and do more of what benefits their brand most (which also is the most interesting stuff anyway).

This is why marketers need to experiment with AI. Understand the tools out there and know what they can do for you.

AI in marketing right now has a “first-mover advantage.” Let’s say I start using a tool like Phrasee to write my email subject lines.

I improve my performance almost immediately. I reinvest hours each week into building better campaigns in every area of our marketing.

And, I collect more and more data on what subject lines work best, improving performance even more. It’s a virtuous cycle. A flywheel that spins faster and faster the longer you stick with it.

In other words, the advantages of using AI correctly compound over time. It’s hard to catch competitors with a sizable head start. Someday, that may change.

But right now, marketing AI is skyrocketing. Brands using it possess an outsized advantage over those that don’t.

The Possibilities of AI

No matter what type of marketing you do, one thing is clear: You need to explore AI’s possibilities. These tools can help you write the best email headline and improve the copy within.

As a marketer, I make crucial daily decisions that can impact the company I work for. Using my best judgment, I track important metrics like traffic, leads, and customers — and I provide a marketing report to back up my decisions.

While the above metrics are crucial to my marketing funnel and flywheel, a marketing report helps me further explore my findings and properly analyze the data to make the best decisions I can for my team and company.

Marketing reports aren‘t just vital for my work, they’re key to any marketer looking to do what‘s right for their organization. In this article, we’ll explore what a marketing report is and how to build one, and we’ll spotlight some examples.

Marketing Reporting

Marketing Reporting Examples

How to Create a Marketing Report

Create Your Marketing Report Today

Marketing reports vary depending on what data you’re reviewing and the purpose of each report. They can assess where your traffic and leads are coming from, what content they interacted with, if and when they converted, and how long it took to become a customer.

Take our free, 20-minute HubSpot Academy course on marketing reporting to measure success and optimize your efforts.

To reiterate: Marketing reports inform decisions.

You wouldn’t run a marketing report to review data performance or check on an ongoing goal — for these purposes, you’d glance at your marketing dashboards.

Look at it this way. Compiling a marketing report for knowledge’s sake is synonymous with scheduling a meeting to review a project. Who wants to attend a 30-minute session to review what could’ve been shared via email? Not me.

The same goes for marketing reporting. Reports should help you decide or come to an important conclusion — similar to how a meeting would help your team deliberate about a project or choose between project resources.

In short, marketing reporting is a precious process if used and crafted correctly.

Marketing Reporting Examples

There are hundreds of reports that you can run to dig into your marketing efforts. At this point, however, you’re likely asking, “Where should I start?“ and ”What are those basic marketing reports I can run to get more comfortable with all the data I’ve been tracking?”.

We’ve pulled together these five marketing reporting examples to get started.

You will need some marketing software (like HubSpot Marketing Hub) to do this. You should also ensure your software allows you to export the data from your software and manipulate it in Excel using pivot tables and other functions.

This free guide and video will teach you how to create an Excel graph, make pivot tables, and use VLOOKUPS and IF functions.

Since we use HubSpot for our reporting needs, I’ll show you how to compile these reports using the Marketing Hub tool. (The data below is sample data only and does not represent actual HubSpot marketing data.)

1. Multi-Touch Revenue Marketing Report

As a marketer, you’re a big part of your company’s growth. But unless you can directly tie your impact to revenue, you’ll be forever underappreciated and under-resourced. Multi-touch revenue attribution connects closed gain to every marketing interaction — from the first page view to the final nurturing email.

That way, marketers get the credit they deserve, and marketing execs make more innovative investments rooted in business value instead of vanity metrics. As a bonus, multi-touch revenue attribution can help you stay aligned with your sales team.

HubSpot customers can create multi-touch attribution reports quickly; HubSpot’s attribution tool is built for real people, not data scientists. (It also connects every customer interaction to revenue automatically.)

Navigate to your dashboard and click Add Report > Attribution Report. Select from the set of pre-baked best-practice templates, or create your own custom report.

How to Analyze Revenue Reporting

To analyze revenue reporting, determine what’s working and double down on it. Look at the revenue results from different channels and see where you most succeeded. Use this information to decide what marketing efforts to invest in moving forward.

For example, if you notice that your Facebook campaigns drove a ton of revenue, run more Facebook campaigns!

Multi-touch attribution reports should be run monthly to understand the broader business impact of your marketing channels. While revenue is necessary, you should dig into some of your other metrics for a more complete picture.

2. Channel-Specific Traffic Marketing Report

Understanding where your traffic comes from will help you make strategic decisions as you invest in different marketing channels. You should invest more resources if you see strong performance from one source.

On the other hand, you can invest in some of the weaker channels to get them on pace with some of your other channels. Whatever you decide, source data will help you figure that out.

HubSpot customers can use the Traffic Analytics report (under Reports > Analytics tools in your navigation) to break down traffic by source.

Want to get an even deeper understanding of your traffic patterns? Break down your traffic by geography. (Example: Which sources bring in the most traffic in Brazil?) You can also examine subsets of your website (like your blog vs. your product pages).

How to Analyze Channel-Specific Traffic

Take a look at what channels are performing well. Based on your goals, that could mean looking at the visitor data or focusing on the visit-to-lead and lead-to-customer conversion rates. Here are a couple of different ways to think about your data:

• Suppose you get a lot of traffic from a particular channel, but the channel is not necessarily helping your visitors move down the funnel. In that case, it may mean investing more in other channels or optimizing that underperforming channel for conversion.
• Think about how you can invest resources in your most robust channels. Did you run a campaign that helped the channel perform well? Was there a piece of content you created that set it off? Consider how you can replicate your past success.
• If you have yet to work on a particular channel, it could be an excellent time to test it. Think about how you can incorporate multiple channels into the same campaign.

Pulling this data weekly will allow you to stay up-to-date on how the channels perform. If a channel takes a turn for the worse, you’ll have enough time to remedy the situation before it gets out of control or you waste resources.

Pulling the report daily may be a bit overboard since some channels take multiple days to be effective, and pulling it monthly would prevent you from responding with agility — so weekly data is ideal.

3. Blog Posts by Conversion Marketing Report

Blogs have become a marketer’s best friend. There’s a direct correlation between how often a company blogs and how many leads it generates (not just the amount of traffic it drives). So, you must monitor how well your blog is helping you grow that critical metric.

Reporting on your blog leads is a quick way to see how many leads you generate daily, weekly, or monthly — and by what channel.

This report is a great way to understand the channels most vital for your blog, where you should spend more promotion time, and how well your content performs over time.

If you’re using HubSpot, creating a blog leads report is accessible. Navigate to Add Report from any of your dashboards, and choose Top blog posts by contact conversion. This report shows the posts most often seen by contacts immediately before filling out a form on your website.

How to Analyze Blog Posts by Conversion

Look at how many leads you’re generating from your blog over time. If you see spikes in leads, you know to dig into your content to see if specific topics are more successful at generating leads than others.

The more you can run these reports to determine what works and what doesn’t, the better off your marketing and blogging will be.

This data type should be pulled monthly to ensure you write the most relevant content over time.

4. New Contacts by Persona Marketing Report

Every marketer needs to be well-versed in their buyer personas — but you need to do more than just understand them. It‘s essential to track how many new contacts you’re adding to your database based on each persona.

This will help you determine how accurate your buyer personas are and how successful your marketing is in targeting and reaching them.

To report on this in HubSpot, plot your contacts by Create date, showing the date you added a new contact to your database. Then, break down your report by persona.

How to Analyze New Contacts by Persona

Did you run a marketing campaign around a particular topic? Did you focus on promoting your content through specific channels? What did you do that led to an increase or decrease in persona acquisition?

Digging into this report can help you allocate resources more wisely to grow different business segments.

Pulling this report monthly can give you insight into how your campaigns affect new contacts by persona — and might even shed light on an imbalance in resources dedicated to specific personas.

5. Lifecycle Stage Funnel Marketing Report

Another way to segment your contact database is to look at their appearance by lifecycle stage. This will give you a sense of how many leads, subscribers, customers, and opportunities you have in your database in a certain period.

This data will help you understand if you need to generate more leads or focus more on closing your current leads. It will also give you a general understanding of the quality of your contact database.

As a HubSpot customer, create a funnel report by clicking Add Report from any dashboard then choosing the Funnels category. Pick which stages to include, select your visualization, and you’re off and running.

How to Analyze a Lifecycle Stage Funnel

This report will give you an overview of how your leads progress through the buying process. Use this report to see what areas of your funnel you must address for greater efficiency.

For example, update and optimize your nurturing program if your report shows that you’re generating leads but not converting any to MQLs. Pulling monthly funnel reports can help you stay on top of the efficiency of your marketing process.

6. Email Marketing Report

When I want to assess my email marketing campaign, I take a look at the following KPIs:

• Number of emails sent
• Click rate
• Unique open rate
• Overall campaign performance

These metrics allow me to analyze the effectiveness of my campaigns by showing me what kind of content performs best in email channels.

7. Social Media Marketing Report

To track the performance of your social media channels, your social marketing report needs to include target audience demographics, likes, followers, engagement, reach, impressions, and your top-performing posts.

Knowing your target audience demographics helps you to better understand the kind of content that would be helpful to them.

For example, if your target audience demographics consist of first-time business owners who are new to marketing, you’ll want to create social media content media content best suited to beginners.

Likes, comments, and overall engagement help you fine-tune your social media campaign by showing you which content your current audience prefers.

Furthermore, you‘ll need to track these metrics for each of your organization’s social media accounts, such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and more.

8. SEO Marketing Report

I always include the following in my SEO marketing reports:

• Keyword rankings
• Organic sessions
• Organic landing pages
• Organic conversions

These metrics show how well certain keywords are working to rank your content in SERPs, so you and your team will know which words to rank keep ranking for and if there are any changes in SERP algorithms you need to be aware of.

9. E-commerce Marketing Report

E-commerce marketing occurs over various marketing channels, including social media and Google Analytics. Key metrics you must track are:

• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate
• Transactions
• Pages per session
• Average order value
• Revenue

How to Create a Marketing Report

As I said, you can run many different marketing reports.

This section won’t focus on what specific data to put into your marketing report — that will depend on what type you decide to run. Remember, that process is a bit different if you’re building a marketing dashboard.

Let’s discuss how to build marketing reports that inform your decisions and benefit your audience, whether your team, CEO, or customers.

Featured Tool: Marketing Reporting Templates [Download for Free]

Most of your marketing reports will contain a few of the same elements:

• Title: What is your marketing report analyzing? Whether you’re running a report on campaign performance, quarterly blog performance, or monthly leads, be sure to title your report so the intent is clear. I found this to be especially important if I share my report with people outside of marketing.
• Reporting period: Your marketing report should reflect a certain time period. This period can be a few days, months, or even years. I notice analyzing my data within a time period allows me to compare performance to past periods.
• Summary: Your report summary should reflect the key points of your report, including your wins, losses, and goals for the next reporting period. It’s basically the TL;DR of your report.

Next, let’s dive into the report specifics. Valuable, insightful marketing reports recognize two distinct components: purpose and audience.

What’s the purpose of your marketing report?

A marketing report should help you make a decision. Choosing the content of your marketing report (i.e., the data you’re analyzing) is simple; however, it’s how you will use this data to make a decision or draw a more difficult conclusion.

This is true for two reasons:

1. Marketing reporting is often performed to review data, which is simply a waste of time.
2. Data points can be used to draw multiple conclusions or make numerous decisions, so you should know precisely how to use the data before removing it.

You should determine the goal of your marketing report before you pull any data. Once you make this impending decision, list all the data that might be relevant. From there, you’ll better understand what reports to run and how to use said data.

Who’s the audience for your marketing report?

Marketing reports are precious because they can inform so many different decisions — decisions made by a wide variety of people across your organization.

Whether you’re delivering a marketing report to your team lead, department manager, or CEO, your marketing report must be tailored to whoever may be reading and using it.

Here are a few ways to do this:

• Ask your audience what they need. If you know the decisions your audience needs to make, you’ll know what data to pull and analyze. I often find knowing this information helps me avoid running reports my audience doesn’t care about.
• Speak in their language. Marketing involves a lot of acronyms and jargon. When giving reports, I sometimes notice my team members understand what I’m saying, but my executive team and co-workers outside marketing may not be fluent. So, believe me when I say consider your audience when writing your marketing report and choose words and descriptions they’ll understand.

• Don’t mix audiences. Creating separate accounts for separate audiences is best if you create a marketing report for a mixed audience. For example, I wouldn’t make the same report to give my CEO and Marketing co-workers; I’d likely break this into two reports with different data and jargon. This will allow my audience to focus on the data and analysis that’s most relevant to them.

Marketing reporting can take up much of your time (and waste some, too). Here are some best practices to help you work smarter, not harder.

1. Schedule your marketing reports.

Whether you create a recurring reminder on your calendar or set your reports to run automatically, schedule your marketing reports beforehand. This will take the guesswork out of when to run your reports and when to send them to the relevant audiences.

Schedule daily, weekly, or monthly reports and send them directly to your team’s inboxes with the HubSpot Marketing Hub Reporting add-on.

2. Collect feedback from your audience.

As you send out your marketing reports, ask for feedback from your audience. Whether you ask an open-ended question like, “How did this report help you?” or provide a short Google Form, gathering feedback from those using your reports can help you improve them in the future.

3. Create marketing report templates.

If your marketing report will be designed the same way each time you send it out, consider turning it into a template. This will save you time and energy building each template and provide a reliable, predictable report design for your audience to read.

These free monthly marketing templates make your monthly reporting faster and easier.

4. Put your most valuable data first.

Long marketing reports are acceptable as long as all the data you include is valuable and helpful for whatever decision you or your team need to make. However, you should place the most impactful data first so your audience can stop reading once they decide.

Nobody wants to read an entire report only to utilize the final page.

5. Visualize your data as much as possible.

When possible, include visual data in your marketing reports. Not only does this help your reports pack a more significant punch with your coworkers and executives, but it trims down the time and effort needed to digest your data.

To do this, include charts from Excel or screenshots from your reporting tools (like HubSpot Marketing Hub). You can also use heat maps if you’re reporting on website performance.

Create Your Marketing Report Today

Marketing reporting is a vital part of your marketing efforts and the growth of your business. By understanding how efficient and effective your marketing is, you can better allocate time, resources, and money — and make well-informed decisions.

Start with these marketing reporting examples and expand your reporting as you utilize more data.

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

World events and economic conditions impact how each generation behaves as consumers and business owners.

A decade ago, millennial consumers were constantly making headlines for “killing” certain products. From a business standpoint, millennial entrepreneurs in the 2010s saw notable success marked by increased access to venture capital and early adoption of social media to acquire customers.

Now, as interest rates are higher, venture capital funds are harder to come by, and privacy laws have made paid customer acquisition on social media more challenging, Gen Z entrepreneurs are following a different playbook when it comes to building their businesses.

Per The Business of Fashion, Gen Z businesses are differentiating themselves from their millennial counterparts by creating super-niche products. This route requires less capital and calls for slower, more sustainable growth.

To better understand the ins and outs of Gen Z entrepreneurship, we’re doing a deep dive into a uniquely Gen Z business: Chamberlain Coffee.

Founded by popular YouTube creator Emma Chamberlain in 2020, Chamberlain Coffee has become a cult favorite among young coffee drinkers. The brand launched offering whole bean coffee and has expanded to sell cold brew packets, matcha, chai, ready-to-drink coffees, and branded merch including a milk frother and mugs.

What Makes Chamberlain Coffee Uniquely Gen Z

So what makes Chamberlain Coffee distinctly Gen Z compared to other beverage brands?

Natural Connection to Chamberlain’s Content

Not all brands founded by popular creators succeed, but Chamberlain Coffee is off to a strong start.

As a creator, Chamberlain got her start sharing videos of her daily life which frequently included her drinking cold brew coffee, so the launch of Chamberlain Coffee felt like a natural extension of her personal brand.

Her love of cold brew aligns with her generation’s coffee consumption habits — Gen Z is more likely to opt for iced coffee than older generations. Chamberlain Coffee’s at-home cold brew options make sense for the brand’s target audience.

A Clear Omnichannel Strategy

The 2010s saw many emerging brands opt for an exclusively direct-to-consumer model backed by high VC dollars. Chamberlain Coffee, like other Gen Z-led brands, has opted for a deliberate omnichannel in the company’s early stages.

While the brand was initially only available through the company website, it can now be found at retailers including Sprouts, Target, and Walmart which allows for greater accessibility and various points of customer acquisition.

Partnerships and Collaborations

Chamberlain Coffee has also leaned into partnerships and collaborations with other brands to drive name recognition. Last year, the brand teamed up with Swoon to launch a specialty line of matcha lemonade drinks.

This fall, Chamberlain Coffee partnered with ready-to-eat cookie dough brand Deux to create co-branded coffee donut holes and took over a Los Angeles coffee shop to generate excitement about the launch.

The brand has even tapped into the beauty space, collaborating with IGK to create matcha dry shampoo.

Chamberlain Coffee sits at the intersection of Gen Z business and the creator economy, and its continued business trajectory will be fascinating to watch.

Good news: Spotify is a go-to destination for podcasts, with 32.5 million listeners per month.

Even better news: Spotify for Podcasters makes it easy to start a podcast and reach those listeners — no fancy equipment or advanced skills required. And, once you’ve started your show, you can find different ways to promote and market your podcasts to maximize your reach.

Here, we’ll cover everything you need to know about podcasting on Spotify, and how to upload your next episode to the platform, and hear from seasoned podcasters about their thoughts on the platform.

Table of Contents

• What is Spotify Podcasts?
  • How RSS Feeds Work on Spotify
• How to Meet Spotify’s Podcast Requirements
• How to Start a Podcast on Spotify
• Switch to Spotify for Podcasters
• Spotify for Podcasters: Expert Insight

Using it gives you access to multiple features for growing your show, engaging with audiences, and monetizing your content. Some stand-out features include:

• In-depth show and episode analytics
• Monetization tools
• In-app or platform recording and editing
• Q&A or polls to share with audiences to build engagement
• “Video episodes” for a unique watching experience for fans

You can either use Spotify for Podcasts as your hosting platform or upload your episodes to Spotify with an RSS feed from your existing host.

How RSS Feeds Work on Spotify

An RSS feed is a unique ID card for your podcast. You can think of it as a house address, and, like a house address, there is only one RSS feed per podcast.

Every host gives you a code that you can copy and paste into different directories to share your episodes on other platforms, like from Apple Podcasts (host) to Spotify. RSS feeds update automatically, so you won’t have to share your link with other distributors more than once.

How to Meet Spotify’s Podcast Requirements

The first step to starting a podcast on Spotify is making sure you meet its podcast requirements. Here’s a quick rundown.

Your podcast should have:

• A title along with relevant details (i.e., category and primary language).
• Cover art in a 1:1 ratio and PNG, JPEG, or TIFF format. The higher the resolution, the better.
• A high bitrate MP3 format (128 kbps+) or MP4 with AAC-LC.
• Episodes that do not exceed 12 hours.

Once you meet the conditions in this checklist, you’re officially ready to upload your podcast to Spotify. Check out the steps below.

1. Create a Spotify for Podcasters account.

Unsurprisingly, you’ll need a Spotify for Podcasters account to upload your podcast to the platform. You can use this form to sign up and select either “I want to start a podcast” or “I have a podcast.”

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If you click the first option, log in with your existing Spotify account or create a new one. If you select the second option, select your current podcast host from the list and claim your show by adding your RSS feed and entering a verification code you get over email.

If you already have a podcast but want to switch to Spotify, follow the steps outlined here.

2. Add information about your podcast.

Once you set up your account, you’ll add information about your podcast, including:

• Podcast name
• Description
• Cover art
• Category
• Language
• Content type (clean or explicit)

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3. Upload your files.

If you already have a podcast, you can upload existing audio or video episodes or create and edit an episode within the Spotify for Podcasters platform.

To upload an episode ready to be published, click Quick Upload and upload an audio or video file. If creating from scratch, click Create an episode.

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When creating an episode within the platform, you’ll land on a dashboard that lets you record or upload audio, add files you’ve previously uploaded to your library, and edit and add effects.

The drag-and-drop builder is an easy way to build all of your episodes, and you can preview it as many times as you’d like during your editing process.

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4. Add episode information.

Once you’re ready to publish, add an episode title, description, and publishing timeline. You can also note if the episode is part of a series, the type of episode, and whether the content is clean or explicit.

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5. Share your podcast on other directories.

Once published, your podcast will be available to Spotify users globally. You’ll need to use your RSS feed link to share it on other platforms. On podcasters.spotify.com:

Click Settings, then Podcast Availability, then click RSS Distribution to get your unique link to paste in the designated distribution spot on other directories.

Switch to Spotify for Podcasts Hosting

If you already have a podcast host but want to switch to Spotify for Podcasts, the process is relatively easy and you won’t lose your existing episodes or profiles on other platforms. It’s a three step process:

1. Go to Spotify for Podcasters switching page and use the search field to enter your unique RSS link or your podcast name.

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1. Sign up for a Spotify for Podcasters account or import your podcast into an existing account.
2. Redirect your RSS feed so it points to your new Spotify URL. The exact process for this final step varies by hosting provider, so it’s a best practice to follow their unique steps.

Once you’ve migrated successfully, you can use the platform for all it offers and upload audio or video or create a new episode with its built-in features.

Spotify for Podcasters: Expert Insight

I know that there are multiple podcast hosting platforms available, but I wanted to know what Spotify for Podcasts’ current users think, so I spoke to some experts.

Troy Sandidge, host of iDigress Podcast, says “Spotify for Podcasts provides a plethora of creative tools and features to share your podcast episodes.”

Sandidge says the platform is especially useful for minority-led podcasters: “They [Spotify for Podcasters] have programs like the “Making Space” initiative that literally helps podcasters find free places where they can record episodes. That is by far such a phenomenal way to make things more accessible for those who may not have the same financial ability to start, but this provides an equity pathway for more creatives to proceed.”

Al and Leanne Elliot, hosts of Truth, Lies, and Workplace Culture, also use the platform: “We’ve had Spotify as part of our Podcast Distribution mix since the beginning of Truth Lies & Work podcast, and although it’s no ‘silver bullet’ for podcast reach, we’ve seen huge advantages to using it.”

They say, “[Spotify for Podcasts] continues to unveil new features that help podcast creators and encourage listeners to swap to the platform from more established apps. This proactive approach suggests a bright future for podcast distribution.”

Some of the benefits they call out are the analytics (they say it offers sharper insight compared to platforms like Apple Podcasts), the development team’s openness to receiving feedback and ideas, and a simplified monetization process for integrating paid placements or ads.

Sandidge says, “From programs to community research and more, they [Spotify for Podcasters] are working to provide a fully streamlined turnkey solution coupled with training and opportunities to help creatives elevate and grow.”

However, as with all tools, there are always potential pitfalls. The Elliots call out a few:

• The podcast category is a relatively new addition, so gaining visibility in search results can take some time. But the advanced algorithm means there’s a good chance your listeners will find you in some way.
• Spotify isn’t always clear about how new features work. The Elliots say the Q&A panel is a unique feature, but they haven’t figured out where the responses appear.

Back to You

In five easy steps, you can share your podcast on one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. Once your podcast goes live, remember to share it far and wide. Make this a regular practice with each episode to boost your listenership.